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Does this mean that human carpenters are no longer considered capable of exact measurement, or of following precise specifications?
Or does it mean that the furniture industry, like many others (including, by the way, the software industry) is becoming polarized between machine-made and man-made. Machines are associated with exact measurement, straight lines and right angles. Some designers have apparently decided that, if you want furniture to have "character", it has to be obvious that it was made by a human carpenter. So man-made furniture is rough and approximate, not because men are incapable of exact measurement, but because machines are incapable of inexact measurement!
So if it is obvious that the furniture is man-made, why does the store need to warn customers about the variability of the dimensions? Because many people actually buy furniture to fit into an existing space. If you've got 75cm clearance between the wall and the fireplace, and you order a 75cm cupboard, you're going to be pretty annoyed if the cupboard they deliver turns out to be 76cm instead.
The real problem here is that you've got mass production pretending to be craft production. The variability is a contrived (and therefore inauthentic) way of making a product appear more real. The character is a false one.
Imagine someone trying to replicate the Who formula. Take all the elements, mix them up, and put them back together in a different configuration, and you get Queen. All the high-energy stage presence of Pete Townsend, Roger Daltry and Keith Moon was poured into Freddie Mercury. The on-stage steadiness of John Entwhistle was distributed among the other three members of Queen, who looked as if they could have been lecturers at some minor polytechnic. Except that, inexplicably, the Queen guitarist was wearing Roger Daltry's hair.
And some of you may remember old-fashioned TVs. The reception was so poor, the picture jumped if someone moved a spoon too quickly, or a car went down the street. Dad was always up on the roof adjusting the aerial, right?
Modern computers are just as flaky. Try breathing on a DLL file and see what happens. Do you know anyone who dares edit the CONFIG.SYS file these days? How many people even know what that is?
We now have distributed computer systems built of thousands of interoperating components, whose interaction seems impossible to predict or test. All organizations, all economies, are increasingly dependent on these flaky systems. What a nightmare!
Or is it? Economies have always been dependent on the interactions between
thousands, if not millions, of people. Some of these people have been reliable,
some less so. The interactions between people have been rich and surprising.
Out of control, yes. Nightmare, no.
But what does an organic recipe look like? The concept of an organic recipe book seems to reflect a confusion of the boundary between buying organic and cooking healthy.
Organic ingredients are no different from ordinary ingredients, except for the fact that they don't contain the same chemical residues. So why would you cook any differently?
And there is no particular reason for organic food to be especially healthy. It is perfectly possible to buy organic white bread, and spread it with a mixture of organic white sugar and organic beef dripping. Indeed, there is a growing market in organic junk food, which sometimes contains just as much refined sugar, excess salt, and saturated fat as any other junk food. This is no doubt sold to the kind of people who imagine that honey is healthier than regular sugar, and sea-salt is healthier than regular salt - but that's nothing to do with organic food.
If you want to eat organic food, you may shop differently, or organize your own garden produce. But once the food gets to the kitchen, it's too late. It's hardly the case that the non-organic cook is likely to shovel extra pesticides into a cakemix, and an organic cake recipe reminds her not to do so. And surely organic cooking doesn't have to be done on peat fires, or cowdung.
Or are people so dim, or insecure, that they need a recipe book that inserts the word "organic" in front of every ingredient?
When the most popular CDs are reissues or new compilations or new version of old material, when the top bands of the late nineties sound like the second-rate bands of the sixties and seventies (at least to many people of my generation), there is clearly a preference for reuse over novelty.
"Now that's what I call music" captures this attitude brilliantly. It says: we don't want any of the new-fangled stuff, we just want the old stuff again, packaged onto the new format. Back to basics.
UNIX programmers have the same reaction to Linux: now that's what I call software.
At least as taught in schools, Intelligence is largely to do with what a child can achieve on its own, and is tested for each child in isolation. Collaboration between children during tests and exams is regarded as cheating.
In contrast, Character has to do with the behaviour of the child in social situations - in the playground or the sports field. Healthy collaboration, direct competition, responsible behaviour, standing firm against bullying. Even such apparently private matters as concentration or self-esteem have strong links with social behaviour.
If we're interested in what a person can achieve in isolation, then Intelligence may be an important factor. But if we're interested in what a person can achieve in collaboration with others, then Character may be just as important.
In particular, Leadership is usually regarded as a question of Character rather than Intelligence. The leader doesn't have to be the most visibly intelligent person on the team.
Do we have to make the choice between Character and Intelligence? Can't we have both?
There are certainly people who have both Character and Intelligence. But it's often difficult to spot them. Because it is usually the people without Character that want to draw attention to their Intelligence, and the people without Intelligence that want to draw attention to their Character.
To my father's logical mind this description seemed both simple and sufficient, but it puzzled the help desk staff. It took them some time to work out that my father was referring to the component officially known as The Power Knob.
When one buys a complex piece of kit, one doesn't necessarily know the official names of all the components. This doesn't matter when everything is working, but it can cause huge problems when things start to fail. How do I reinstall or replace a faulty component, how do I even know whether a given component is still in use, when the suppliers' names of the components (try mnb123.dll) are obscure and undocumented?
Once my father had overcome the barrier of terminology, he thought it would be a simple matter to persuade Tech Support to supply him with a new "Power Knob".
Not simple at all. It turns out that the makers of this brand of computer have used a variety of different Power Knobs, without adequate tracking. Although Tech Support were supposedly in possession of a complete specification of my father's computer, this specification failed to tell them which of several different (and incompatible) Power Knobs had been used in this particular assembly.
It was therefore necessary to replace the entire front panel. Sounds familiar?
Harvey points to the fact that the road-testing of new cars - whether by the manufacturer or by car magazines - is almost exclusively carried out by highly skilled drivers. They delight in fancy cornering techniques that would be lethal if practised by ordinary drivers in less-than-perfect conditions.
Harvey also points to the extreme shortage of time for proper testing, in the context of compressed production lead times that now take less than two years from concept to showroom.
Both these phenomena, or their equivalents, are widespread in the software industry, and elsewhere. Experts are often asked for their opinions on things, on which their very expertise disqualifies them. If you want to know how effectively a given textbook or training course or TV documentary communicates a given body of knowledge, ask someone who already knows it backwards. If you want to know how persuasive a given campaign is, ask someone who is already persuaded.
We ask experts because it's quicker. Sounds familiar?
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