Neatness
The observant among us will have noted that 2023 ended on a Sunday. For those who believe Sunday marks the end of the week, this seems like a logical day to end the year. But why do we find these types of phenomena satisfying? Is it slightly obsessive or should we strive for this symmetry in our daily lives? The bigger question might be: is it even possible to produce neatness in our messy world?
In this week’s episode, we discuss neatness. We debate which day is the first day of the week, and discuss the universal three-act structure, epicycles, special relativity, Kolmogorov complexity, prime numbers, crosswords, emergent complexity and the metric system. Finally, we share our best and worst attempts to impose neatness on the world around us.
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
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Transcript
a Sunday, which I noticed, obviously, looking at the calendar, and I thought, that's pleasing, that's neat. It's not halfway through the week, it's not landing on a Wednesday, which is just massively untidy. It's just stupid when that happens. It's madness, right? So I thought, that's why, I didn't think that was interesting, because it's not, but I thought, why did I find that neat? I thought that was interesting. And I wondered, am I alone? Are there other people that have this sort of, I wondered, is it slightly obsessive, or is it slightly weird, to think that was neat? Should I care about it? No. Should I strive for symmetry and perfection in all things I do and create? No. And Nick, you had an anecdote as well about neatness, that was kind of fun. Yeah,
Speaker C:the fact that my kids will always make sure that the TV volume is a multiple of five, which really gets my goat, because 23 is about right, but they always want it to be 25 or 20.
Speaker A:It's like, you're not allowed to have a volume of 23. Which actually, it's both highly sensible, their approach, and it's not only them. Who are the other TV... I have that urge, I resist it,
Speaker C:it's silly. My daughter. Same thing. Peter, so you're a recovering multiple of five guy. I'm a
Speaker A:recovering large divisions guy. Yeah. Recalibration needed somewhere in the Nick household, I feel.
Speaker C:I feel trepidatious. Well, can I also tell you just, and I know we probably don't want to go into a great deal of detail about TV remotes, but the absurd thing is the sound actually goes through an amp. So I use proper speakers. It's not the TV speakers, it's proper speakers. And the amp is just a dial that you can randomly set to anything. So like 23 is going to be totally different. Yeah, exactly. Like, okay, fine, set it to 25. I'll just turn it down on the amp. They don't care about that. If the numbers are 25, then that's okay. Okay. Yeah, I'm interested to see
Speaker A:the journey we take in this next 30 minutes or so. So what's the question again, Peter? Neatness, what's that all about? What is it? Should I care? And also just a small interstitial point. Yeah. You said 30 minutes or so. Good point. I'd like that to be like 30 minutes precisely. Yeah. I think it's our duty to be bang on 30 minutes because it will just be nicer. Which is better. Yeah, no, go on wanting that. That's fine. Yeah. So there was a definition we need first. Is that right? We need to define the parameters, especially of what we mean by neatness. Is that a good way to start?
Speaker C:So I think there's lots of questions. Do you want to do that? No, I think we should start by tackling the really substantive thing, which is what day of the week is the start of the week? Peter liked it because it ended on a Sunday. Yeah. Yeah. There's an implicit assumption there. That Sunday is the last day of the week. Now that's absurd. There's an actual objectively right answer here. And it's the week starts on Sunday. And I'll explain my logic. But I just wondered if anyone agrees or disagrees with that. Obviously, I agree with Peter. I disagree. You're a last day Sundayer. I am a last day Sundayer. Okay, what do you feel on this, Chris? Chris, you're probably the most religious one of us all. Are you with the same people? What do you
Speaker A:think about? Yeah, the religious week definitely starts on a Sunday. Yeah. 100%. So what's the logic? But the secular week starts on a Monday. But hang on, isn't Sunday... When does your week
Speaker C:start? Isn't when God created the earth? Oh, well, then everything, everything else. Yeah, he rested on the Sunday, the last one. It wasn't Sunday the last day. And I exactly know about this. Oh, and I think, isn't there some disagreement about when that is then? Is Sabbath, do we think that's the Saturday? What do the sources say? Well, it is, isn't it? Is it? No, Sabbath is a Saturday. Yes. So Sunday, which is the day where people go to church and generally don't do very much. That's when he actually created the firmament. Yeah, the Christian day of rest isn't on the
Speaker A:Sabbath. Right. I mean, really, we're talking Sabbath. It's really Friday evening, right?
Speaker C:Hang on. I've realised I know nothing about Sabbaths and stuff. Can you just fill us in? Like, what?
Speaker A:How does it work? When the sun sets on a Friday, the Sabbath begins, and Jewish people... We have to assume for the moment that God is Jewish. And from that, everything else goes, which the Sabbath, as Chris says, starts on Friday in the Old Testament. I feel I'm losing control of this already. It finishes on Sunday morning.
Speaker C:Am I right in thinking this is connected to the creation story? Yes. So the creation of everything. Very much. And so which day was the first day when God created, you know, said that,
Speaker A:let there be light? That was Sunday. It must be Sunday afternoon. It would have been Sunday afternoon, wouldn't it? Well, it couldn't have been the middle of the night on Sunday. I think it would have been early dawn. I'd call it dawn. Let's call it dawn because before that, there
Speaker C:is no day. I mean, there is there. It's just sunny all the time. There is no dawn. I think we're getting bogged down in this. No, no, no. Okay. So it's interesting. So but is your logic then, I mean, the fact that the week starts on a Sunday, is it entirely to do with the sort of biblical scholarship or is there some other reason? The religious week definitely starts
Speaker A:on Sunday. And the secular week starts on Monday and that's all there is to it. Right. Can I tell you why it should start on a Sunday? You can, but wait, I want to know. I doubt Chris Lear wakes up on a Sunday morning, goes, ah, here we go, the beginning of the week, let's go. That's my challenge to you. When is the Chris Lear start of the week? It's not a difficult question. Well, don't look at me, I can't answer it. I could give you either answer. Yeah, I feel like it's like a new week starts on Monday morning. It's sort of how I feel on an everyday.
Speaker C:So the objectively right answer is actually Sunday. That's the start of the week. And I'll we often talk about the three act structure, don't we? Which is, you know, universal, really, to almost all stories. And you have the exposition and set up an inciting incident in Act One. You then have the development and the confrontation in Act Two. And finally, the resolution, the climax, Act Three. Right. So let us apply this to the week. What is the confrontation? It's work, isn't it? It's work. Work is the confrontation, right? Because you start from that and everything else follows because Act One has to be, we can't start with Monday because that's already Act Two. So you have to start with a bit of the weekend. And so you have to have Sunday, which is the set up. And I've got a bit of other argument as well. But you end with Saturday, right? And you start with Sunday. But let me just put this to you. What was the third act? Saturday. No, but how you framed it. That's resolution, climax, right? That's like the bit at the end when it's the happy ending is Saturday. And no, because listen, I'll tell you why Sunday is the start of the week. Because I call it the antiques roadshow effect, is that feeling that Sunday isn't really properly the weekend. It's infected by Monday. And if you agree with that, then I think you have to conclude that, you know, the week, really, Sunday is when work starts impinging. It's when the first drums of work. That's a pretty subjective explanation.
Speaker B:Well, look, I think it's right. You could equally have the confrontation being the exhaustion of being trying to climb up Wednesday. Wednesday being like up to the peak and then it's downhill.
Speaker C:Yeah, I agree. But Wednesday is peak Act Two. That's what I'm saying. But you can't have the week. You're jumping into the story too early if you say the week starts on Monday. It's like starting with the two towers. It doesn't work. No. Sunday is like the Fellowship of the Ring.
Speaker A:No, but you've got your three act model. You've misunderstood it, right? And you haven't properly included time for the denouement in your Act Three. And if a Sunday is nothing else other than a denouement, that word, that's what it is. So you've missed that. But listen, for an episode
Speaker C:that is on neatness, this feels a little bit too scruffy. Okay, I don't know where people want to go, but I have no idea. I have got, I know how long a year should be. Okay. So Peter's absolutely right. It's wrong, completely wrong that the days of the week are different every year. That's mad. It's mad that the first of January is a different day each year. Right. And it's not even a simple thing. Like I know it normally moves by a day, but then you've got leap years, which buggers that up and everything else. So a year should be 364 days long. Okay. You're going to say, but the sun and the earth and the solar system disagree with you, Nick. But I have a proposal for that, which is, so we've got a lot of days now, all of our days are kind of named after Norse gods, right? So along the lines of that, I propose the Norn days, the Norn days, named after the Norns. And there are two, like in a normal year, you'll have one extra day, which is called school day. And that, and a school is apparently the Norn of becoming. So this is a day where you reflect on what is going to happen that year. You only have that once a year. So it's, you know, it makes sense to have it at the end. Then you, in a leap year, you also get author day, which is what has been. And that's an opportunity to reflect on the last four years and think about, you know, how well it's gone. And then the next day, you're back to school day and you can think about the coming year. So that anyway, that's my proposal to fix this ridiculous problem of having 365 and a
Speaker A:bit days a year. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. Cool. Right. Great. Your months now divide neatly into.
Speaker C:No, everything else is the same, right? But it's just that the days of the week run from Monday to December the 30th, which is a Sunday. And then you have this extra day, which is sort of in between that Sunday and then the Monday, which kicks off the year. It doesn't, it's not in the days of the week. It's outside that system. You can have a giant feast. All of that. Yeah, I think so.
Speaker A:Yeah. I like it, but I don't think it's massively neat. Okay. And I think this is a problem that you mathematicians have in trying to impose your rules on the universe. You know, that you're all these neat freaks. And I'm pointing at each and every one of you, trying to impose these neat, obsessive rules on what is a messy universe. Anyway, that's just my take. Oh, well, can I go on? Can I pick you up on that a little bit? Because the neatness of mathematics is a kind of interesting feature. And I think you're right. It's that mathematicians and scientists, I don't know about impose neatness on the universe, but they like to find uniqueness. I think humans are notorious for seeing patterns, even when they don't exist. But there are some things where the universe is neatness. Here's an interesting example. It was assumed, and it's a reasonable assumption, that the earth sits in the middle of everything and all the planetary bodies go round. It's a perfectly reasonable assumption. And then people thought, well, obviously the planetary bodies are on spheres, because a sphere is like a perfect shape. And then people did some careful observation and found that if you assumed this spherical objects and everything moving, some things didn't quite work. And in particular, occasionally Mars would sort of seem to go backwards. And there's a thing called epicycles invented. And epicycles were spheres on spheres, because everything had to be a circle. So you couldn't mess with the sphere, because it's beautiful and perfect. And then you had the epicycles, and they were a bit distressing. They're a bit like Nick's Norn Day, which is a bit upsetting, because it sort of messes with this thing. And you're like, oh, you have to stuff something in, because the world isn't quite matching. But then eventually sort of Newton came along, and he came up with the gravitational thing. And it's all beautiful again, because it's lovely ellipses, and it's all, and it's all, there's one nice little equation, and the epicycles have gone away. And hey, presto, the universe turns out to be neat and tidy again. It was neat all along. Yeah,
Speaker C:that was it, the underlying neatness, and we were missing out on it. Yeah, the neat people who Fraser is disparaging, they were right. And I bet Fraser, he's probably pre-Copernican Fraser, is sitting there, probably a monk or something, going, ha, you and your Occam's razor, look at all these epicycles. It turns out it's really complicated. And then of course, you know, no, it turns out the neat people who were trying to make a neat theory, well, they did, and it's better.
Speaker A:It's like clearly way better. Well, I mean, that's assuming that, you know, science stops now, right? And, you know, you know. No, the only assumption in the word better is that it was worse previously, not that it stops now. Okay. It doesn't mean it's finished. It means it's, it means that last year's was worse. Yeah, fair enough. Better, the future might be better still. And it might be less neat. In fact, modern physics, I think, well, I can't understand a word of it. It looks like an absolute mess to me. I'm dying for Einstein to come along and say, oh, look, E equals MC squared. And then everyone goes, oh, yeah, I don't understand it. But at least I can remember it. It's nice. Well, I know we probably don't want to talk about relativity
Speaker C:theory in much detail. But when I first, when I first kind of actually really learned about what special relativity was, it was the same sensation. I had the same sensation of like, hang on, this is actually neater. And it doesn't fit. People think it's complicated, but actually, like if special relativity isn't true, then the universe needs to have a kind of almost like a grid in it. So in other words, like if you're moving, if you're an object moving in space, pre relativity, the idea is that you could objectively say that you're moving. If you imagine a universe where you're moving versus one where you're static, the one where you're moving, it sort of says it's different in some way to the one where you're static. Whereas we kind of instinctively feel, fuck off. We instinctively feel that like, actually, they're the same. Like if you can't tell if you're moving, it should be the same. And special relativity rescues that. And it says, actually, it doesn't matter. It doesn't like objectively, you're not moving or static. It's all relative to other objects. That's neater. Right. Listen, Fraser, what do
Speaker A:you think about special relativity? Pretty much along the lines of what you said, actually. So thank goodness we're on the same page now. I'm just saying it's the same thing, actually. No, but listen, you need to stop talking about that because I've forgotten what the question was. One. Two, I want to bring Peter in, maybe to reintroduce the question because I've forgotten. And three, I want to bring us back to reality, you know, not all this like weird superstition you have and these about, you know, E equals MC squared and relativity and so on. So what was the question again, Peter? Neatness. What is it? And should I worry about? Right. So I've got a better way of framing this. OK. Well, you just asked what the question is and you're going to say you've got a better question. I've got a more succinct way. Well, that sounds like we're making progress. Yeah. No, I like the question. I've got a different way of framing it. Another way of understanding it. But yeah. How neat are you, Chris? Right. In terms of your physical life and your house and habits and so on. And we're going to do this on a on a Fraser scale of one to ten, right? So one is not at all neat. Scruffy git, ten, massively neat. And obviously we're all going to sort of, you know, check in on this and see where we are. Right. So I don't want to pick on Chris. OK, go for it. Two. I've forgotten which end of the scale was which. This is a neatness scale. Which one was the neat end? Was it ten? Incredibly tidy isn't a ten. OK, so you're a scruffy. You're disorganised, maybe or not. I'm messy. OK. And tell us in which ways you're messy. The ways that you just described. Because if you were to ask me, yeah, if you'd asked me, like, how I organise computer code or something like that, I might have a different answer. There
Speaker C:are some things where I'm neat. I'm sorry, but look at his shirt. That is not, that man is not a two. Yeah. I think anyone who's got a shirt that is ironed, right? So for the benefit of listeners, Chris is wearing a nicely ironed shirt. And it's a shirt for a start. It's a shirt. That's not the behaviour of a two. None of us can boast that. So I'd say he's an eight. I think he's an eight. Don't get so down on yourself. I think he thinks being neat is uncool. It's not.
Speaker A:Only. But yeah, you remind me of one of my sons in that he looks, or maybe you are like my son in that he looks normal and he looks fairly neat. But he's got this dark side of him which is masking this chaos. Yeah. Anyway, so the debate rages on two or seven for Chris. Anyway, I don't know. Peter? Hang on.
Speaker B:So Peter's doing a complex calculation on his computer. Right. Well, I think I'm actually pretty neat. Yeah. Okay, so organised, right? Organised. But I think superficially, if you came into our house and looked at it, it'd be, my God, what a mess. Yeah. Because, but everything, everything has a bike everywhere. Everything sort of has a place and it's in the right place. Unless, well, well, unless Ada's around. But we can find things straight away. Yeah. Okay. So what was the number? What was your number? I think I'd be, say, six, seven. But I might look like a two. Right. To a casual observer who wasn't, who wasn't, he wasn't cognizant of the rules. Yeah, yeah. The rule set that's behind everything.
Speaker A:Okay. Nick, as in so many things, I think you and I are not dissimilar because. Well,
Speaker C:actually, I think I'm a five. I have a, I do have a neatness drive. Yeah. Right. But it's, we have to organise our lives because of our chaos. I think that's it, right? The problem is that, yeah, I'm being pulled. Like part of me does want to impose neatness on things and tidy things up and be organised. But, you know, as I think we've discussed before, the reason that I have systems for doing that is because it doesn't happen naturally. Like I'm not, I'm just not naturally. So, you know, when I'm cooking, mess will happen everywhere. And then a part of me will wake up and go, let's sort this out. And I'll then spend five minutes tidying up the chopping boards, putting the onion peels in the thing and wiping down the surfaces. And then I've reset it for the chaos to appear again. Whereas some people cook, you know, they take a knife, they do the chopping, they put the knife in the dishwasher, they put the onion peels away and they move on to the next thing. Whereas I'm constantly battling this kind of, you know, the tide of
Speaker A:chaos. What about you? I think, and I'm not, I think I'm not influenced by your answers, but I do think, you know, I'm a two and a nine. So I'm definitely a two in the, it's just my, my sort of, you know, physical environment at home tends to be a disaster. As is my sort of organisation mentally and so on. And I have to impose strict rules in parts of my life to keep control of that chaos. So for example, in the kitchen, where I've got very organised shelves and they're quite neat, actually. And I do think there is something in each of us is saying, well, actually, in one way, I'm like this and another way, I'm like that or they don't stand alone, they're related. Where does this move us? What is neatness then?
Speaker B:Yeah, well, yeah. So it sounds like some people have got neatness as acting as a proxy for simplicity. Okay, go on. So Chris, with his wishing all physics could be explained by a nice simple equation, seems to be a key driver for neatness. But it, but I don't think it's quite that simple. Because special relativity is neat, is like tidy. It's more intuitive than what we had before, which was just, which would require Araby cycles and epicycles to explain it. But special relativity is neat. But you can't write it down in a single line, like E equals MC squared, there's a bit more to it. Right, I suppose so. There's more to formalise it.
Speaker C: Because, like, if I give you: Speaker A:like a couple of lines of code, right? So what's particularly nice there is that, because I was just thinking about Pi, which is a notorious scruff bag, which is notoriously scruffy, but the computer programme to produce Pi would be really short. Because Pi can be generated, because despite being really scruffy, it's quite it's, it's weirdly beautifully neat, because it's the, because it can be generated. Same with E. Yeah, it's interesting that I think in them in them in the
Speaker C:world of, of maths, that the things that people have almost like the problems that people have got most, or have occupied people of the classic problems, are ones that involve something which deserves a kind of pattern, you know, like, so, you know, for a long time, people were kind of obsessed with the idea of finding a rational definition of Pi, you know, trying to trying to define Pi as the ratio of two numbers. And it is the ratio of circumference to the, well, it is, but it's not the ratio of two integers. So but someone has to strive for neatness. Yeah, well, they had to prove that Pi was irrational, because it, it just felt like it ought not to be because it's like, it's so, it's such a basic idea. And I mean, I know that I think the Greeks didn't accept, well, Pythagoras didn't accept that Pi could be irrational. I don't even think they believed in irrational numbers. And it was a similar idea that kind of urged to say, well, there must be a neat way of doing this. And prime numbers are the same, like they've got a pattern. But it's, well, they must have a pattern because the way they're generated is, you know, precisely and mechanically defined. But you know, you'll have like, a load of prime numbers in a row, and then nothing, and then you get two next to each other, and then another load of nothing. And so whatever the pattern is, it's the fact that it's complicated and hard to express neatly,
Speaker A:really exercises people. So that leads on to the sort of the secondary question we have to this, which is that does it matter? Okay, which we might want to explore that. Also, I thought it might be interesting to explore this in ways that are not massively mathematical, right? And just talk about
Speaker C:in sort of non-mathematical terms. Yeah, I think we should just talk about what neatness, like in
Speaker A:real life, what do we mean? Although I do like the way that you all kind of left me slightly blank and panicky for a moment. All my research is mainly maths. But actually, I've got one example. Yeah, feel free to disregard what I've said, though. Go for it, Chris. Because I do that all the time. So prime numbers. Well, I've got one example for you. And this is an example, because what interests me is why I find certain things neat. So this is a bit like, it's a bit like the multiples of five on the remote control. If I was, and I do crosswords, and I know this is a bit like maths, but bear with me. I do crosswords. If I was to pick up the times and look at the back of the paper, and look at the crossword, and it wasn't symmetrical, I'd be horrified. It would just, it would, it would be, it would be outrageous. Jarring. To see a non-symmetrical crossword, which is, which is ridiculous. It's completely arbitrary. Yeah, there it is. It's like, crossword people just know that they ought to be symmetrical. What's what symmetry is? It's not really, it's not significant. But it's a little piece of tidiness, which has been, which has been imposed on the thing, and which we now have come to not only expect, but be a bit appalled if it's not there. But also that makes me think of this question of does it matter? In one sense? Well, it does. And there's the evidence, right? So I guess the question is, does it matter? Objectively, because subjectively, it definitely matters. And there's almost a judgment in that, in that, in that's loaded in the question. This is an aesthetic opinion, without a doubt. This is not an objective fact.
Speaker C:But I think, I mean, look, if you if you accept that something like Kolmogorov complexity is kind of governing our sense of neatness, then, you know, it makes it like a symmetrical object, if you like, is half as big as, you know, an asymmetrical object. It's got mirror symmetry, you just need to know one half of it, and you've got both nailed. So like, cognitively, that's going to take up less space, it requires less effort to remember a symmetrical object, or to even to sort of, you know, perceive and, and understand a symmetrical object. So it feels totally right to me that something like that is going on, you know, that our aversion to things that don't have patterns is because they're bloody hard work, whereas something that's generated by a pattern, you know, a repeated wallpaper pattern or something where it's the same thing, but repeated hundreds of times, much easier, you've only got to appreciate one tiny bit of it. And then you've got the whole thing. It feels right to me, like, but, but I mean, how does that with things like Peter, you've got, you're probably a guy who's got loads of tools and stuff. How do you, what's your tool shed like? It's a mess, I haven't really got a proper
Speaker B:workshop. But had I had a proper workshop, first thing one would build would be a workbench with a tools, a tool, a tool wall where you can pin them up. I've got one of those. Yeah, I mean, it makes, it makes your life so much easier to have that and to use it properly. So when you're, you know, zeroth rule of any, of any engineering or DIY is put your tools away when you're finished.
Speaker C:Surely you've got to get your tools out first. That's the minus one rule is get your tools out.
Speaker B:But the pre one rule, you always put your tools away. Yeah, I mean, I think this and so this is,
Speaker C:we're touching on like, what are the costs and benefits here of now that takes some effort to maintain? Yes, it does. So, so I mean, you know, that you've got to keep fighting the entropy. And but obviously, as a benefit, like the retrieval, the storage is more effortful, but the retrieval, the ease of retrieval makes that worth it. Makes it worth it. And I guess what we would all consider excessive neatness is probably something where the cost of maintenance
Speaker B:is not justified. Yeah. Yeah. So if you had a bicycle workshop that you kept at a sort of surgical level of cleanliness, why bother? That would be too much. Yeah.
Speaker A: .: Speaker C:That just goes to show the metric system is stupid.
Speaker A:Did you know that at the time or in when you were researching for this, you thought, I know,
Speaker C:it's printed on the... He had to look everywhere for that precise amount. He needed exactly that
Speaker A:amount for the cake. It's printed on the thing. I mean, the fact that the amount of milk is exactly the same. But if you think of it as if you think of it as four pints, it makes perfect sense. If you think of it as whatever it is in litres, it is really untidy. And it does bother me. How long is a... It's similar on the same sort of topic. How long is a cricket... The wicket. Thing-a-me. Yeah, the wicket. What do they call it? The wicket. Yeah, the wicket, that. Well, it's one chain or something. Yeah. That's how long it is. But if you say...
Speaker C:You don't mean the wicket. You mean the pitch. No, what I mean is the pitch.
Speaker A:Oh, well, hold on. I mean the pitch. You mean the entirety? No, no.
Speaker C:Do you mean the small bit in the middle? Yeah. That's the wicket. Okay. No, you don't mean... You mean the sort of rectangular bit where you bowl.
Speaker A:He means the fucking wicket. That's called the wicket. Yes.
Speaker C:Between the two sets of stumps. What's the distance? That's called the wicket. That's cool. Okay.
Speaker A:Wow. Do you want to know what that's called? I'm learning.
Speaker C:Do you know what that's called? So I think... Yeah. Is there a way to... I think there is. I think... I suspect there are people who do sort of really feel that an argument against the metric system is that there are too many decimal places. I know... We know that, obviously, if we'd started with metric, we would have two litre bottles of milk instead of two point blah, blah, blah. And I... Yeah. But I... Yeah. And I feel... We don't. We've still got four pints in the supermarket.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah. Because we know that... We know that's the right amount of milk.
Speaker C:Right, right. So the thing... The question is, is a pint, like, objectively better? And obviously it is. No, no, it isn't.
Speaker A:It is now.
Speaker C:No, a pint of beer is the exact right amount. See, you're right in line with Orwell. Like, 500 millilitres is too small. Exactly. I... So... So... So... But anyway, I mean, I suspect that isn't related to Neenah's, but it is... I think it's a fair observation that the same amount of milk will be upsetting if it's 2.2 whatever litres, but completely cromulent if it's four pints, you know?
Speaker A:It just occurred to me, because sometimes we're talking about completeness when we think we're talking about neatness, it seems to me, but it just occurred to me, is the definition of messy not neat, right? Is there a positive messy? Should we think of messiness in a more positive way other than the other, right? And is there a satisfaction and a neatness in messiness?
Speaker C:Well, there is this idea of kind of emergent complexity where you can have sort of simple rules that themselves generate complexity. So, you know, there's kind of the game of life, which John Conway invented, which is basically a grid where every iteration you update the grid. Yeah, but every kind of iteration of the grid you update based on what squares are filled in. And it's really simple rules. There's like three rules. And people have created computers in life. They've created self-replicating machines in this thing. You can get all of this complexity. And you might, let's imagine that you'd evolved in the game of life. You might look at all that complexity and go, oh, man, look at the incredible array of things that we have in this universe, right, of all these little different machines that do cool stuff. And they're all so different. And then a life, a scientist in that world might discover, oh, actually, there's only like three rules which turn out to generate all of this. So I think you can have that mess, right. But if there is underneath it, a hidden deep pattern generating it all, I think it would be fair to call that kind of neat messiness. But the existence of that pattern is crucial. Like if there is a pattern, no matter how far removed or how invisible it is, if there is something generating it. And so just sort of a question I had, which I think might have partly answered, which is if we get upset by mess, why do we feel relaxed in nature, which is notoriously messy? Like why are trees relaxing? Because they're really complicated. They've got loads of leaves in random places. And like fields are messy and rock faces are kind of all fractal and complicated. Except they're not, except they are. I think the answer might be that we actually we perceive that as a kind of as a kind of neat mess. Like actually, there's a kind of simple generator which produces that tree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Anyway, it's just a hypothesis, just throwing it out.
Speaker A:There's something, can I talk about something which possibly is sort of flip side of that in a way, which is that if you make something like a poem, or a piece of art, or a picture or something that's incredibly sort of mathematically neat and tidy, and it doesn't appeal to most people, if your poem's got an incredibly tidy meter, and everything rhymes in a really sort of perfect way. But it's got to have something more and art has to have something in it to be aesthetically pleasing. It's got to have something in it, which is not just symmetry. If you just draw something symmetrical, it's going to look sterile.
Speaker C:I suppose you might say there's got to be sufficient complexity that the answer, if you like, to the piece of art is not obvious. Like it's got to challenge you to understand it in some way, but that it is possible to get to an understanding. So like complete chaos is also not pleasing.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker C:If it's too neat, or if it's too chaotic, it's not pleasing and somewhere in between feels...
Speaker A:But I think, I know Fraser doesn't want maths, but mathematicians are the most obsessed with tidiness of any type of mindset, I would have thought. And as you, like, that within something like maths, you need tidiness. People are just bothered by things which sort of stick out as being not part of the pattern. Everything has to be in a pattern and it's got to be perfect, if you like, pure. And that's an incredibly abstract mode of thinking and most of our life isn't like that. But we still apply that in little way to things like milk bottles. Or I do. Yeah, evidently. Okay. All right. Nice. Okay. I like that. I've got a question. Okay. There's only one rule in this question, which you're not allowed to talk about maths. That's the first thing. All right. Okay. So you've got two questions. You can choose one.
Speaker C:You just used the number two. That's maths. Are you going to choose both? You're going to choose both. I don't know yet. Okay, go on.
Speaker A:Fraser's going to choose neither. I'm just putting it out there. 100%. Fraser's going to choose neither. Yeah. I don't like to be constrained by these rules. Hit us with it. What's the best neatness that you have ever imposed on a situation? And also, what's the best messiness that you have ever imposed on a situation? One or the other or both? Okay. And you're not, as I say, your challenge is you're not allowed to talk about maths.
Speaker B:So I've got one. Yeah, about neatness. And I know that Chris is a massive fan of this, is my socks. I'm a fan of this. I often think of you when I'm having my socks.
Speaker A:This podcast should always be about Peter's socks.
Speaker B:Peter's socks. You need to rename it. Yeah. In short, I don't have socks per se. I have a foot covering system. So often when I replace all of my socks in one go. Is that annually? No, the socks I've got have lasted incredibly well, but I buy a large number of the same. Every 364 days. And then when they kind of get worn out to the point where, you know, they generally wear evenly.
Speaker A:Ah, that's what I was going to say. Yeah, go on.
Speaker B:Because I'm not like, I don't have a favourite pair I wear.
Speaker C:Do you actually cycle through them?
Speaker A:Yeah, they kind of naturally cycle.
Speaker C:No, but I don't mean do you randomly pick one? I mean, do you have them lined up and then you put the old one at the end of the queue?
Speaker B:They get randomly sampled from the drawer. And then once they once they kind of worn out or starting to, I will sample other kinds of socks until I settle on a kind of sock that I like. And then I replace the whole fleet with new socks. Fleet. Utilise your socks. Yeah. The feet fleet. Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah. I think it's a no, but also key in this is that your socks are the same, right? And not only are they the same, is your socks have nothing identifiable about them, so they can't have a wrong pair, right? Yeah.
Speaker B:I'm breaking the rule here. This was a pair of socks that were candidates for a replacement, but I've still got them.
Speaker C:Good, thank God. They live to cover your feet another day. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:I mean, we should just stop the podcast there really.
Speaker C:I mean, it's yeah, brilliant. Yes. Yeah. I can't really compete with that, but I but I do have. Nobody can compete. But I've got a you know how you you most people have a kind of box of stuff that is not classified, not elsewhere classified. Yeah. Like a miscellaneous box of stuff. Yeah. I had one. It's always a crate, really, of kind of things that don't really belong anywhere, but I don't want to throw out like, you know, a souvenir I got from somewhere and or an interesting stone, that kind of thing where they don't belong. So what I did was create a little museum at home in my bunker, which I can use to exhibit these objects on a rotating basis. And and this means that because it highlights the fact that they're all different, but they're not just all jumbled up, you know. So, for example, I've got like I've got five particularly interesting stones that I found that stand up by themselves. So they look like little sculptures. And I have those in a little line. Mini meneers. Yeah. And they're all different and they're weird shapes, but they put them in a little line on my shelf. Hey, presto, suddenly they look beautiful. Stones that stand up by themselves at exhibitions. Exactly. It draws in visitors. You should see my trip advisor reviews. Yeah.
Speaker A:So wait, just to clarify, Nick, what you're saying is you've got five pieces of rock.
Speaker C:That stand up by themselves.
Speaker A:But I'm trying to picture a piece of rock that does not stand up by itself.
Speaker C:Well, I suppose I mean that they're more they're in portrait, you know, alignment. So they're taller than they are wide. And so you would expect them to fall over. You would expect them to fall over. They've got a stability mode. Yeah. But if you had if you had a piece of rock that didn't stand up by itself, it would be a perpetual motion machine. You just keep falling over. Falling through the earth or something.
Speaker A:It would be awesome. Also, what I like about your answer is it is it reveals the truth of your final point, really, which is, you know, is that imposing neatness on on messiness or is it imposing messiness on neatness? Yeah. Or I don't know.
Speaker C:Taking joy in the tension.
Speaker A:No, quite. I'll go next, which is I'm sort of the well, you know, so if you're not sure, we should have you, Chris, next. So I've got nothing. I've got absolutely nothing. OK, I might have a coding example.
Speaker C:What? You must have a coding example where you had to fix someone's code. No, no. I was going to say, because it's boring and it's probably maths.
Speaker A:I was going to say, because it's you, I would let you do the maths thing. I thought you might have anything to say. Yeah, I've really got nothing to say. Yeah, I mean, I just I've got nothing. Nothing like the socks or the stones. My life is so boring. Can't compete with that. Yeah, like the best I could do is that would be something like organising the tins in colour order or something like that. Yeah, I like it. I mean, you know, that's the style, isn't it? A bit, a little bit. OK, well, I've got one for each. So the order that I impose on the world is this podcast. Yeah. And so that is part of what I feel my job is with this, which is trying to impose some sort of pattern and order on what we discuss here. Yeah, exactly. And I don't think that's a very good answer, but that's one thing I do. OK, well, you're not doing a great job. Yeah, no, I think it's a sort of perpetual failure. But it made me realise as you were talking, Peter, that maybe I'm the anti-Peter because I've got an anti-Peter sock system, right? Which is I sometimes think if I was on my own in the world, I'd just live like, well, I wouldn't think I'd live very long and I would just sort of be a bit of a disorganised tramp type person.
Speaker C:And that's not the situation now, just to clarify. It's not.
Speaker A:Because my poor wife, she looks after me. Yeah, your carer. Yeah, my carer. She does call herself my carer actually sometimes. So I don't do any of the washing of clothes in our house. And my wife was getting fed up with a system that she had, which was sort of she would put clothes somewhere and they would just sit there. OK, and she would get annoyed because it would get mixed up with dirty stuff, clean stuff. And I would still wander around looking a bit useless. OK, so I said to her, I've got a brilliant system that's going to stop you moaning at me, which is there's this big basket. Put everything in there. OK, and then I will take it out and let me distribute it where it needs to be distributed so I can take a wardrobe and so on. OK, predictably, this still went on to a disaster where I have now got this basket of just clothes, just everything jumbled in there.
Speaker C:Just get another basket, put things from the first basket into the second basket.
Speaker A:Yeah, but and so my wife started moaning about that. And I was saying, well, why? Why is this your problem anymore? Because you just got this basket where you can't see anything and it's removed. It's in a corner. OK, but it doesn't satisfy her that it's like that. But anyway, it just means that I still can never find anything. And I've just got socks. I pull something out. It might be a jumper. It might be a sock. Yeah, you've just moved the entropy around. You haven't reduced it really. Well, I've made it even worse. I've compacted it as well. Put it all in one place. Yeah, so it's amazing that I look as well-dressed as I do. That brings us to the end of the podcast. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill, Nick Hare, and Chris Lear of Aleph. Until next time, bye-bye.
