Why the return trip always feels shorter

One of the core ideas I took from Moonwalking with Einstein, ​one of my favorite books of 2011, was the tight relationship between memory and our perception of how quickly time passes. The more you fall into routine, the more your brain chunks those blocks of time, and thus the faster time seems to fly by. Break up patterns in your life, introduce variety, and time slows.

I haven't seen an actual description of the mechanism​ by which that works until now, but this is a good one from professor of biochemistry William Reville:

Biological cycles are measured by an internal clock that emits steady signals. The signals emitted over a given interval are counted by something called an “accumulator”. The counts can be stored in memory by an animal and used to repeat certain durations by counting signals until they match the count stored in the memory. No awareness of the passage of time is necessary. Humans however are aware of the passage of time and are easily influenced by attentional demands over a target interval.

Humans have an “attentional gate” through which the signals from the clock must pass in order to reach the accumulator. If the individual decides that the passage of time is important , then the attentional gate is opened wide and signal accumulation is maximised. If the passage of time is unimportant then the gate is narrowed and fewer signals are accumulated. Assuming that the estimate of time duration depends on the count registered by the accumulator, it is easy to see that the same objective time duration, eg 15 minutes, will seem longer when waiting for interview that while relaxing. And, memorising the complex figure requires more attentional resources than memorising the circle, leading to a narrower gate and a lower signal count.

​Well worth reading the whole thing, it's not very long, and its power is in how it helps to explain all sorts of time perception phenomena. When Reville follows up his description with this homework assignment, suddenly everything makes sense:

Using the attentional gate model of prospective timing, explain why “a watched pot never boils”, why earthquakes feel longer than they are, and why the “return trip” always feels shorter.

Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story

D.T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, comes out next week.​

DFW is widely considered the most influential writer of his generation (I can't look at a footnote on Daring Fireball or Grantland without thinking of Infinite Jest), and he was certainly the most important one in my life. He was more than a guy who could spin mean prose; he was a model of intellectual clarity, ambition, and honesty.​ I'm in the midst of rereading his complete works for the third time now, and needless to say, this biography will go into that pile.

The origins of Monopoly

The origins of the board game Monopoly lay with a game that was designed to teach people about the evils of rent-charging property owners. Called The Landlord's Game, it was desgined by Lizzie Magie who thought a board game would drive her point home better. Matthew Yglesias would approve?

The irony, of course, is that people now play Monopoly ​with the aim of driving all their opponents into bankruptcy, and so it's become a lesson in ruthless empire building, "Walter-White-Heisenberg-style. Even if the message had been retained, though, much of the game's context and many of its references are outdated now. 

However, using games to teach people some basic economic concepts still seems worthwhile, and techies love games. Someone should adapt a version of Monopoly for Silicon Valley. Among the little character pieces would be a blue-button-down-shirt-and-khaki-pants-wearing VC, and taking the place of the colored real estate properties of Monopoly would be colored web properties. For example, instead of the two blue properties Boardwalk and Park Place we'd have the two blue internet properties Facebook and Twitter (oh wait, someone already thought of that). Instead of Electric Company and Water Works you'd have Amazon Web Services and Github. And as other players landed on your properties, you'd charge them, either by taking a lot of cash from them (direct monetization, the equivalent of hotels in the original Monopoly game) or a little cash from them as ad revenue (like houses in Monopoly; easier to build than hotels, but they monetize more poorly).

Among the Chance and Community Chest cards would be ones like "Facebook just dialed up your newsfeed story frequency coefficient, collect $100,000 in traffic bounty from all the other players"​ or "Google just stole one of your best developers by offering twice the pay, better benefits, and cushier hours, sit out two turns".

Why does copyright continue to exist?

Or, as Tim Parks asks in the New York Review of Books, does copyright matter?​ A good overview of the history of copyright, and some of its implications. Of particular interest is speculation on what would happen if copyright didn't exist.

One sees here the difference from the music industry: unable to police their copyright on CDs, musicians nevertheless go on writing songs and can enjoy the feedback and hopefully some income from performing them to an appreciative public; if the songs happen to catch on through the internet then the musicians can enjoy notoriety and expect bigger concerts, if not a huge income from selling albums. But there is no such performative context for the prose thriller, or even the great American novel. Without the prospect of money, the author would have to think very hard what it is he really wants to write and how he plans to engage with an eventual community of readers whose appreciation, if not cash, must suffice to give him the gratification and encouragement he seeks. In short, you wouldn’t launch blindly into a major novel, as so many young writers do, simply because novels are the form that command attention and promise an income.

There is no real performative context for television and movies, either. Leave aside the heated and emotional debate about piracy and how we should value the arts. Parks concludes that copyright exists because we enjoy long-form fiction, and so copyright continues to be pushed down the road to shelter that art form.

Copyright, we see, is not essentially driven by notions of justice or theories of ownership, but by a certain culture’s attachment to a certain literary form. If people only read poetry, which you can never stop poets producing even when you pay them nothing at all, then the law of copyright would disappear in a trice.

​So by continuing to buy novels, we continue to extend the life of copyright. How does that loop work, exactly?

Does the same mechanism fuel the continued existence of the broken patent system in technology? Are we, as consumers of lots of patented technologies, complicit? Is our spending funding, indirectly, a powerful lobby? That may be an unintended side effect of our economic and political systems, that the collective well being of society as a whole is undermined by the concentrated will of special interests who, perversely, are funded by the purchase choices of the same people who will be hurt the most. Patent law could just be a glitch in the tech industry's economic matrix.