Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

I just finished reading The Cultural Creatives (a very worthwhile book), and one of the themes it reminded me of was the lack of a story of how to live in our culture. We don’t have a shared myth, or, maybe more accurately, our shared myths haven’t been updated since we lived in small tribes. And people are getting hurt because we don’t have these stories to help guide our behavior, to help us navigate life. We need a pattern language for living.

But how do we intentionally write a new myth? A new story for people to live by? As a computer scientist, I see myths as abstractions of true stories. In order to design a new abstraction, you first have to look at a large sample of its concrete examples. My idea for myth-writing is to make it a collaborative process based on a wiki, but with a twist. People who log in will have access to a personal area whose content they control completely. Here, they can provide examples — stories from their own life — without worrying that anyone will change them. Then we will have a public area into which the community can distill and abstract individual stories into common myths intended to resonate with the entire culture. Anyone will then be free to take these stories and retell them outside of the myth-wiki in the hope that the stories can help someone live their life better.

So what do you think? The details aren’t here yet, but are there general suggestions that might make this sort of project more likely to succeed? Has someone already done this? Do you have stories that you want to tell?

Say you’re driving your car at 70 mph on the highway, and you need to stop. As a rough calculation, you’re going 110 km/hr or 30 m/s. Your car weighs on the order of 1000 kilograms, so the energy your brakes absorb is 1/2mv² = 1/2*1000*30*30 = 450 kilojoules. Unless you have regenerative breaks (i.e. are driving a hybrid), this energy is wasted. A desktop computer uses on the order of 300 watts. So the amount of energy your car wastes every single time you stop from 70mph is enough to run your computer for 25 minutes. I’m sure you can find other good comparisons.

Since we drive on city streets more, it might be more fair to consider a stop from 30mph. That’s 13m/s and 85kJ, with which you could run a computer for about 5 minutes, for every time you stop at a traffic light.