Have you ever seen the film, “The Out of Towners”? It stars Jack Lemmon and has a plot where a man and his wife go on a trip to New York City (from a town in Ohio) and absolutely everything goes wrong – from a long flight delay, to a booking mistake and no hotel rooms in the city, to a garbage workers strike, an armed robbery, a chipped tooth, and many other misfortunes. --- Periodically I have days that feel just like that.
I just yesterday had a day like that. Here in Hangzhou. A day where everything seemed to go wrong.
Some of you may be familiar with another recent misadventure that I had – where my passport was stolen in Indonesia and it took me six days to get home to Singapore. So another such day can mean one of two things: either I a becoming clumsy and trouble-prone, or I am simply living in challenging environments with more potential for errors and problems.
But such troubles might not be that bad… I read a book recently that had an interesting concept in it, and the bad day I had in Hangzhou (which I will describe in a moment) reminded me of the book’s concept.
I read a book called “The Most Human Human”, which is about artificial intelligence, computer science, philosophy of mind, and what it really means to be human. In this book, the author brought up an idea from computer science, and specifically data compression science, called something like “information density”. This basically looks at how much you can compress a file (text, song, photo, etc) by identifying and exploiting patterns and repetitions to reduce the overall file size. MP3 files, internet videos, zip files are all important examples of this.
As a simple illustration, let’s say you have written a novel and it is sitting in a computer file. To compress the text of your file, a compression algorithm may recognize that your novel has the word “scientist” used 100 times. In this case, we will say that each instance of the word “scientist” uses 9 letters (and the resulting amount of computer memory bytes). The algorithm could compress each “scientist” with, say, a single code number (e.g. 3), and this only takes up one “letter” or unit of computer memory. You can thus shrink the novel’s file size by replacing each “scientist” with this code number and then remember only the code number locations and the code definition. The density of the information then is how tightly you can compress data because of repetitions of identical patterns. High-density means lots of repeated data that can be packed efficiently into the special “code words”. Low-density means, not much repetition.
So anyway, in the book I read, the author extends the idea of information density to our own lives. I am finding that living and traveling abroad makes for a very “low information density” life. It is harder to compress descriptions of my days into code phrases like: “woke, commute, work, commute, eat, sleep”. Instead, I have to describe entirely more complex events, like getting lost for an hour in Hangzhou, losing my passport in Indonesia, or this terrible day that prompted me to write this post. From this perspective then, the lower information density of my recent troublesome travels makes for better reading and a richer, more memorable experience.
… although maybe I wish some of the misery of this most recent bad day would have been a bit more “compressed”. Ha!
Here is what happened to me yesterday:
First, I had planned a trip to Beijing. I already bought the high-speed rail ticket and arranged a hotel and some sight-seeing activities. But I overlooked and underestimated the time needed to renew my China Travel Visa. When I enquired about renewing my visa, I found that it would take one week and that meant I needed to postpone my trip.
I also had washed some clothes the night before and intended to set them out to dry in the morning. But it was raining and I was not able to do so.
When I left the house in the morning, I found that my bicycle had been stolen the night before. There are local security guards where I live, but they were not of much help.
I had to walk a long way to the bus stop on my way to school. But I found that my shoe had a hole in it, and given the rain my foot got entirely soaked on the walk.
Then when I went to the train station to try and change or refund my rail ticket, and after waiting in the queue for about 20 minutes, and when I was next in line, the clerk at the window put up a sign announcing, “吃饭时间” – which means lunch-time. They entire closed the window and patrons were to wait 30 full minutes until the clerk’s lunch had been eaten. I could not believe it. I needed to get back to class so I left the station with the intention of returning later.
… So it was a pretty bad day. It did get better from then on, but it certainly was a series of bad events in the morning. But again, it makes for a pretty good story – and keeps my life rather low in information density, but high in memorability and adventure.
<<the picture on this post shows the train station at lunch hour, with all the patrons who had to wait until the clerk was done eating.>>
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