I’m told that the boiling frog syndrome is a myth. The popular belief is that if you suddenly immerse a frog in boiling water it will jump for its life, but if you put the same frog in cold water and then gradually heating the water to boiling point, it will not react and perish.




True or not, the syndrome describes something we all recognise. If you see your grandkids every day, you hardly notice them growing. But if there is a gap of three years between sightings, you will notice a massive change. If you want to be depressed, try looking at a photo of yourself from ten years ago and then looking in the mirror.



Most examples are negative ones. If something bad creeps up on you slowly, you will not see it. But the same is true with good things. I’ve used the example before about learning to sing, that I like to try out a piece from a couple of years ago every so often. It is only then I notice that the piece that used to be tough is now easy, and I can be sure I have progressed.



I was struck by a different example last week, when I had a particularly trouble-free travel experience, including a wonderful time interval of less than fifteen minutes between my plane touching down and my emergence from the terminal. In travel and suchlike, we only tend to register when things go wrong. Hence we complain, and we tend to conclude that progress has been in a negative direction.



But my happy experience of last week led me to reflect on the typical journey I would have made twenty years ago, and how it has changed for the better.



First of all, my choice of destinations twenty years ago would have been more limited. For those places I could travel, there was probably only one airline flying, and that only once per day. The price was higher, even without allowing for inflation. To book, I would have had to use a travel agent, where I sat for ages in a queue, before dealing with someone who alternated between bad computer screens and endless phone calls to confirm my booking. Remember?



Next, the journey to the airport. It says on the ticket to allow two hours before travel, and in those days it really meant it. What is more, that meant allowing three hours in practice, because of the frequent traffic jams approaching the airport, the huge distance to the car park and the infrequency of busses to the terminal.



Once inside the airport, I would queue in a long line of people at check in, holding a ticket so large that it would not comfortably fit in my pocket (why did we need those?). I never understood why it seemed to take each party in front of me in the queue three or four minutes to complete the simplest procedure. Nowadays we have e-tickets, internet check in, and baggage drop (though I still don’t understand why that bit takes as long as it does).



Then there were several more lines before getting onto the plane, all asking overlapping information that an integrated service would remove the need for. This part hasn’t improved in twenty years, indeed it may have got worse, because of the added security checks these days.



Perhaps the biggest improvement is once we are actually in the plane. Can you remember how frequent it was that the incoming plane was late, and then seemed to take forever to turnaround? Easyjet have mastered the 30 minute turnaround, and other carriers have slowly copied that. Then we could often sit in the plane for an hour waiting for a take-off slot. Despite that, once we had taken off and flown to the destination, it seemed de rigeur to circle the airport a couple of times before coming in to land. Nowadays, air traffic control seems to work almost flawlessly. Apparently, we are less likely to bump into another plane than in those days as well.



Finally, on arrival, it was more common to have to wait for a vacant gate, the passport queues were longer (now, praise be, we even have Schengen), and the luggage comes more quickly as well. I even think incidents of luggage not arriving are less frequent too.



Of course when it goes wrong it still goes wrong, and delays can be hours, whether due to weather or mechanical failure. Even there, at least nowadays most airports have humane spaces to wait in with at least a modicum of facilities.



The improvements continue once we have started our business in the foreign country. Twenty years ago, money was always a problem, with lots of cash (where legal), bought at the airport for exorbitant rates, those quaint things called travellers cheques, and long queues at banks. Now ATM’s usually process foreign debit cards, and credit cards work nearly everywhere, and both of these services rip us off a lot less.



Then there are communications. Remember queuing at a foreign post office to make a phone call home? Or, in the early days of computers, the utter impossibility of connecting to any useful service? Mobile phones and the internet have changed all that.



So, next time you are delayed or stuck in a queue, remember what travel used to be like, and celebrate the progress we have made. You might at the same time celebrate progress in other areas. Infant mortality for example. Or the defeat of smog, at least in most countries. We are somewhat attuned to moan, and it is good for us to put our moans in perspective every so often.



On this happy note, this blog might go into hibernation for a month or two now, due to some momentous events coming up in my life. This weekend I’m getting married again, and a week later the family are moving to New York City. Even those this should be more trouble-free than it would have been twenty years ago, I somehow don’t think finding a connection and sitting down to blabber to a keyboard for an hour will loom large in the priorities in the coming weeks. I’ll be back though, hopefully and God willing in July, and can start to reflect on new beginnings in some letters from America.

Dyslexic distinction

Over the last week, I’ve been watching some Monty Python compilations. As an adolescent, I remember the watching parts of each show creased up in laughter, and failing to see anything funny at all in other parts. That hasn’t changed. Some of the hilarious passages have not withered at all with age, still seeming edgy and original. Wow, how far ahead of its time this material was. But many of the animations and a few of the sketches still leave me as cold as they did forty years ago. Python set many trends. One was pacey progression within a sketch. Before Python all sketches had a theme, a beginning, a middle and an end. Python often started with one theme but then deviated, as the saying goes, into something completely different. This must have frustrated ordered minds, but, watching it again now, I love it, as it maintains momentum and enables the team to get full value from their time. Nowadays, the Python way has become standard, though I would say few do as well as the Python team even now. A stranger thought from watching the sketches was that Python may somehow have been the forerunner of reality TV, or at least celebrity TV. Many times the sketches revolve around the ridiculousness of people with one strength doing something else. Remember the philosophers playing football? Or, in a similar way, Marx and Mao being asked when Coventry last won the FA Cup? Brilliant. And not so different from celebrity Mastermind, or Strictly Come Dancing, or many other popular shows of today. Should we thank Python for this or curse them? Make up your own mind on that, but at least remember the laughs they gave us. One thing that was never pleasant about Python but which sticks out like a sore thumb now is their attitude to stereotypes and to women. Poor old Connie Booth is never anything but a dumb sex object, and the boys seem strangely attracted to women’s clothing and hag characters that might just be their own mothers in psychological disguise. Gillam’s animated women seem to lose their clothes all the time. This sort of stuff has been relegated from the mainstream by now, and a good thing too. Well done, Pamela Stevenson and Tracey Ullman, I think you were the first two women to break into sketches and sketch-writing as equal partners. There is a lot of cruelty and disrespect in Python for other groups, including homosexuals, which seems strange since Graham Chapman was gay himself. Perhaps we have become over-sensitive now. In any case, I don’t think Python helped tolerance. We have moved forward in these areas despite them rather than because of them. And then there is disability. The 1500m for the deaf, where no-one hears the starting gun. The 100m for people with no sense of direction, where they all go off in random ways. Various other examples. Brilliant, and hard not to laugh. But over some line of acceptability? How far is this from the paralympics? With physical disability, we have made a lot of progress in Western society, even if I am still always knackered after pushing Mum’s wheelchair along the uneven streets and unfriendly curbs of Eastbourne (of all places). Sometimes, it does seem almost Pythonesque in its tokenism. On Sunday, I saw a news piece about a warship fitted out for a disabled crew. OK, the armed forces should indeed make space for disabled people (after all, they create a lot of them), but on a warship? I couldn’t but think of what Cleese and Chapman would have made of that, with the Chinese or Al Qaida attacking with mortars or bombs while the crew were patiently queuing up to use the lift. Still, there are now many relevant and brilliant applications of the special skills of the physically disabled in our lives, which we can celebrate. But then I read Schumpeter in this week’s Economist and was completely taken aback. The article focused not on physical disability but on people whose minds worked differently, like dyslexics and autistic people. It included stunning statistics from a recent survey. Dyslexics make up 10% of the population, yet only 1% of professional managers. Wow. Then, dyslexics make up as many as 35% of successful entrepreneurs. Wow again. Many of the entrepreneurs that we admire the most are dyslexic. There is a parallel story with Asperger’s syndrome, ADD and autism. Here, the link is to IT, software and so on, as well as to entrepreneurism. Apparently, Zuckerberg and many in silicon valley show some of the associated symptoms. The IT link is maybe understandable. Great memories, focuses on numbers and facts not nuances. Not easily distracted. This makes some sense. All the positive of features of geeks combined with natural talent will lead to a great software professional. But dyslexia? That is more complex. One possibility is that those dyslexics who happen to be smart and commercial and ambitious are excluded from many fields, so gravitate to entrepreneurship. That makes sense, based on the statistic about professional managers. Most smart non-dyslexics end up as lawyers or bureaucrats or whatever else. Dyslexics are disadvantaged there, so start their own companies. Even if this is the only factor at work, that says a lot about most companies. Dyslexics seem to prove that companies can succeed without the skills which companies demand of their professional managers. So some of those skills most be over-valued, or indeed counter-productive. If we couldn’t write reports, we wouldn’t. Perhaps the reports are useless, or at least less useful than the other things we could do with our time. But perhaps there are other factors at work too. I have seen this myself, since I work closely now with a dyslexic. I can see ways he has used it to help him. He hates reports, so makes fast and simple decisions, asks good questions and uses great examples. But he is also unusually commercial. My own arithmetic is very strong, but compared with this guy I am slow, especially when money is involved. A company may have 40,000 customers per day who could be persuaded to spend 30 Romanian lei more; what is that worth in US dollars per year after tax? It is useful to be able to rapidly compute things like this to a rough order of magnitude, and I find I make mistakes, but my friend does not, almost seems to know the answer intuitively. Is that just him, or does dyslexia help him somehow? He also has a great feel for what customers might want. Might it be that while the rest of us are poring over useless market research or analysis, he is just observing? Just like a blind person hears well, does a dyslexic observe well? This whole area must have massive potential for business. We have worked out how many different types of diversity benefits businesses, even if we don’t yet always embrace it willingly. But we are still quite narrow in how we typically view categories of diversity. These examples show clues to a multitude of new categories based on our mental indicators. The potential in this field seems almost unlimited, and the advantages for those ahead of the game huge. Now I’ll go and enjoy some more Python.