Summer Classification
Peter, Nick and Fraser discuss what summer is, and how we know when it's started.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're celebrating the recent summer solstice. So tell me Peter are we in the middle of summer or has summer just started?
Speaker B:Well I suppose it really depends on how you classify it which is what we're here to try and work out but I remember it reminds me of being at school and my brief army career that the summer always started the 1st of May irrespective of the weather and always ended sometime at the end of September and that meant several things it meant that you had to roll your sleeves up and no matter how cold it was and it meant that the summer the heating turned off no matter how how cold it was and then at the end of the summer the heating went back on no matter how warm it was even sort of if it's still August temperatures in September so it was but it was it's kind of a necessary way of parceling time up because these were big central heating systems that had to be turned on and off once otherwise it would get too complicated. So I think that's that's really what I think that's hints at why we parcel time up as we do.
Speaker A:Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. So has summer just started or are we in the middle of it?
Speaker B:Well I'm trying to evade your question because it certainly doesn't feel terribly summery it's quite sort of cool and humid today. That's still not an answer. I would say that we are climatically not in summer but we are in a calendar sense we are in summer. Maybe meteorologically we're not in summer but
Speaker A:climatically we are. But I don't, okay I know what I think which is we're right in the middle of summer that's what I think so look here we go let's do this another way provocatively and contentiously and controversially I'm going to say to you we are in the middle of summer right now. If you like. No, no, no, no, no, no, no we are. Okay. Fraser do you also do you also hold the view that midnight is actually the middle of the night? No I don't, no. Yes, oh you're looking confused Peter you're looking you're looking uncertain. So look okay tell me. I suppose my
Speaker B:uncertainty comes from well does it really matter and why does it matter so much to you Fraser? I mean that the I think these words summer, midnight, midday, noon they're all quite old words I mean they're useful ways of referring to parts of time and sections of time that we've had for a while and and summer would has connotations for the reaping of the harvest and for being outside and you know being able to enjoy a bit more freedom than you would have in the winter when you'd be cowling in your cave and and trying to stay out the cold. So I think that they they they what they are I think are usefully ambiguous ways of referring to pieces of time and they're ambiguous um the the useful ambiguous bit comes from they are they're suitably sort of woolly at either end that you can that you don't you don't need to be any more accurate than that. Sure. So the the the saying I'll meet you at noon um when being a time before we had watches that was probably around about enough accuracy to accurately meet somebody because you could and you could judge noon by the the the position of the sun and all sorts of sort of um very physical things um so I think that that but we we hold on to them because they still they still have a utility for being quite sort of um being quite sort of woolly ways of referring to time. Okay so sorry I just so it's
Speaker C:worth saying of course as Peter is fully aware but uh that these things all have very precise scientific definitions so mid-summer is the point at which uh the earth is uh in the northern hemisphere is is tilted uh as far towards the sun as it's as it's going to be and and mid-winter is when it's tilted the furthest away and the spring and autumn equinoxes are the points at which it's sort of halfway between those two things um likewise um you know uh I mean at least originally a month was a phase of the total uh rotation of the moon around the earth um you know a week it would once upon a time have have been defined in terms of being a quarter of a month um all of these things have precise definitions and uh but but the the real question is how do our woolly definitions line up and the extent to which we should use the scientific precise definitions or the woolly definitions because I'm I'm with Peter when it comes to summer um it's ludicrous to suggest that the 21st of june is the middle of summer that's just clearly bonkers summer you know summer uh it must must include uh august it just absolutely has to you can't you can't have a definition of summer which excludes august how can you have if everyone has a summer holiday in august how can you have a definition of summer which doesn't include isn't mad they and we know that there are four seasons uh right we've you're so irrational sometimes so so they have and each season it makes sense to say that each one is three months long so so I think it makes my my personal definition is uh it completely just involves months and uh june july august is summer um march april may
Speaker A:that's spring that works perfectly look the reality is I think we all probably agree with each other here I remember being very disappointed recently I think it was the first of june I was putting the heating on and I was just desperately unhappy about that but such is the lot of you know we have in life if you're born if you live in England um and also I got really annoyed with Facebook recently when when it was the summer solstice and you probably maybe had the same thing on your news on your feed and it was congratulations or celebrate here we are the first day of summer and I was just so angry um because were you angry because it was raining outside I was angry for different reasons uh for a number of reasons one of them was because it was raining outside um secondly um the Facebook um notification came with a really nice picture of or a cartoon of people sunbathing outside and on the beach and and that was just really contrasted with um you know the reality so that's the first reason the second reason was no it's not the first day of summer because first day of summer is it right at the beginning of june two and then three I don't like this kind of um cultural imperialism um which comes with it with this sort of saccharine hey isn't life great you know it might be great if you live on the west coast of America it's very dystopian isn't it I think you're reading too much into this no I think you need to not let this wind you up so much I just need to let it go a little let it go I mean okay so let's move on so look what we're talking about here really is classification right um but one of the things that you said I think was quite interesting Nick was you have your own personal classification system and this sort of you know whatever these methods are around they don't necessarily tie in with your own personal classification system so what can we build on from there what can we you know either Nick or Peter what do we take from that well I
Speaker B:think the the the um these precise scientific definitions are quite a recent addition um and the indeed the the uh standardization of the Gregorian calendar is is uh not not that was not that long ago indeed actually in in Japan they only they only adopted the Gregorian calendar in
Speaker C: I think it was: Speaker B:edition wait what so classification of time well yes but well I mean the the standardization of it across Europe is recent and indeed the standardization across the world are you
Speaker A:suggesting the builders of Stonehenge followed the Gregorian calendar no but clearly the builders of
Speaker C:Stonehenge put some uh import onto the point in the year at which the sun stays in the sky the longest because that's Stonehenge designed so that the sun right I don't think Peter's disagreeing
Speaker B:with that to be fair no I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the Gregorian calendar yeah
Speaker C:the Gregorian calendar is totally ridiculous I mean it's bonkers 30 days in one month 31 in another random February randomly having 28 except when it's got 29 it's ridiculous I mean it yeah it
Speaker B:seems more imperfect than say the Julian calendar which I think had 10 months each more equally spaced but they weren't quite equally spaced yeah I mean what's the alternative well the um well
Speaker C:decimalized time yeah a bit of a problem uh here in that the the moon doesn't line up I don't have a problem you've got a problem because you're the one who's got months months if we want to like precisely define it and you have months that are based on the moon which I quite like that's that's quite a nice tip and and a year that was based on the uh obviously the passage of the earth around the sun the problem being that those two just don't line up you can't have 28 day months adding up to a 365 day year however you could imagine perhaps having a few weeks off at the end of the year you know a bit of a bit of time which wasn't in any month where you had to you know you had to sort of give up work and pursue an alternative hobby I think the we've we've drifted off in a in a way here but I think that you talked about it as a classification issue I'd say it's more of a more of an issue about chunking and clustering here which is you know how much do we want to divide something into you know do we want what would a sensible definition would it be sensible to have a hundred hundred months each of three and a half days right obviously not that's too many but what could we just have two months well that seems kind of superfluous there is some optimal division of things and it's there are there's some interesting there's a very widely cited paper called the magic number seven and it's something that Peter and I have frequently noted it crops up a lot in all kinds of different endeavours where you're clustering things you're trying to say you know what how many what are the threats to the UK that we need to worry about you ask that question you would probably find that that you somewhere between five and ten big clusters of things and then if you were to drill into any of those clusters you'd find between five and ten sub clusters and if you look across at things like the way that militaries are organized so typically each layer of command subsumes it's sort of somewhere between sort of three four five layers below it so that you you get for example a brigade being sort of three or so battalions a battalion being three or so companies a company being three or so platoons and so on and this seems to be because we are we have some kind of fundamental limit to what we can kind of perceive all at once and and it seems that we can perceive between five and ten things at once as a maximum but but we can't perceive 20 things at once we have an urge to cluster them up so so you know you have 365 days in a year what if we gave each of those days a separate name well that would be really confusing but if but if we cluster by clustering them into months and into weeks we have a means of being uh of of cognitively managing our understanding of that length of time okay so
Speaker A:um i actually you said we're getting off off issue off topic here because we were talking about classification you said really this is about clustering but i don't think they're that far from each other isn't it really all we're doing and a lot of i know a lot of what we talk about amongst ourselves all the time is all we're trying to do is apply order um to the world around us which is not necessarily as ordered as we think it should be and um and that order as nick was just saying helps us understand stuff is isn't that what we're talking about peter i think that's a
Speaker B:bit of it i think the there's it's a certain it's necessary to apply order um take take take for example computation and computer systems you need to formalize time in order for those systems to work so you need you need we have international standards for how time is referenced in computing um so it's an aid to computation and to understanding um i i don't i'm not sure how closely related the clustering thing is to that i think i think in terms of our computation in our own brains then yes there is definitely a uh we we we it makes it easy to package things up into lumps and say well that these seven days are the first week in june and we can refer to the first week in june as a sort of collection of things without saying without independently numbering
Speaker C:them now independently referencing them nick um yes indeed and i think um we i was gonna bring up another borges story actually uh we talked about the library of babel twice before um he also wrote a story called funes the memorius which is about a man who remembers everything in perfect detail um every single experience he's ever had um but uh borges quite astutely says right that this guy who for whom every single experience is utterly unique is unable to think abstractly so for him there is no such thing as a dog there is simply lots of different experiences of a dog which which for him the the concept of explaining them all by saying there's a dog there would be meaningless and unnecessary so so funes can't entertain the idea of a dog all he can do is entertain lots of experiences of a dog and i think that touches on something that we need you need to be able to classify and abstract and pull out the features of things in order to be able to make to identify you know recurring laws recurring scientific laws or everyday laws about the way things behave
Speaker A:okay um i think i think we've we've covered this one nicely i think we've answered it uh peter
Speaker B:anything to say no yeah well i think the the it comes down to a capacity for computation the need to that we seek order i think in the world because we have a finite amount of processing capacity so we need to find generalized rules for to spot patterns pattern pat spotting a pattern it allows you to model the world in more in a more simple way so you can you have a pattern then you can predict what is likely to happen next so that that that that reduces the amount of computation you need to do if you rather than having to compute all of your sensory input considering
Speaker A:all possible possibilities uh and one thing that you said nick i quite actually like quite like the sound of i think you said it'd be impractical but i like the sound of not having days of the week okay and not having weeks and months and just having a year with 364 365 days each individually named okay i bet that has happened at some point in some civilization somewhere and i've got a proposal right which is we could have a new you you said how much you dislike the gregorian calendar here's a suggestion albeit based on the gregorian calendar kind of you could have the aleph calendar right so january the first is no longer january the first it's now aleph one okay aleph two aleph three all the way out to aleph 364 and then once every four years is that wonderful all day of
Speaker C: ic you know you'll be on the b: Speaker A:but no um do you know how the scientific do you know how the postcode is divided up in london uh i i think it's isn't it originally based on alphabetical order sort of i mean it's a really classic british system where um so let's say in one region let's say where we are right now you have north so that's n and i don't know how many um different um boroughs or how many districts there are but let's say there are 20 for example then the the home um i think it's you have like a head district within that and that is always one okay um and then i think the others are they're numbered by um the alphabet of that district so you've got a mix of systems so your let's say your home your home um let's say the chief district is called zebra district
Speaker C:then that becomes number one so is it are you saying it's n1 because mount pleasant sorting office yeah it is there correct if it is okay interesting and there but then all the others
Speaker A:follow the alphabet i think of the district which is so when you look at a map it just looks bizarre because it's they're just all over the place and i i think that's there's something and yet i'm sorry and yet the kind of above it there is some order because you've got n nws which does relate to region so it's a curious but the numbering inside turns out then to be
Speaker C: here's something very sort of: Speaker A:they're just a bit boring and illogical but they're not though are they in this case they're sort of a mixture of two i think postcodes are fascinating especially the london postcodes anyway let's wrap it up there um i think um this was very appropriate to the cognitive engineering podcast i think is exactly what we're talking about in this episode i'm sure this is exactly what we're talking about in every episode but i really felt that on this one so um i'm fraser mcgruer um i've been here with nick hare and peter coghill of aleph insights thank you for listening um until the next time bye
