Are you passionate about something? Do you know something inside out where others barely give it a glance?

As a schoolboy, I thought I was into birds—until my dad and I stayed with some family friends who were truly into birding.

They had a powerful telescope trained on the birds at the feeder in their garden. They had crystal-clear binoculars we used on a bird walk, which showed me birds clearer and closer than I'd ever seen. They knew what birds to look for and had tape recordings of specific bird calls that brought them to nearby bushes. They talked us through trips they'd been around the world to spot rare and remarkable birds.

Spending time with them changed how I saw birds forever. It was impossible to be around them and not start to love birds.

There are classic disciplines for geekiness: science, maths, computers, birdwatching, plane spotting, model trains.

But over the years, I've seen people geek out about so much more: gardening, plants, pottery, DJ'ing, Pokemon, sport, skiing, cycling, endurance, beekeeping, writing, business, spreadsheets, coding, magic tricks, sailing, a musical instrument, nightclubs, restaurants, personal development, gaming, crypto, cooking, travel, film, thrillers, local history, deals, football boots, coaching, shopping, clothes, cars, building, cameras, art, museums, relationships, pets, insects, decorating, and on and on.

If you don't pay close attention to Premier League football, it might be boring, but if you follow every detail, it can be engrossing. I didn't think much of textiles, but I found it fascinating after spending an afternoon weaving in Laos.

One of the 5 Ways to Wellbeing is Take Notice. Being a geek is noticing everything about something. It can also Connect you with others and keep you Learning—two more of the five.

The word geek derives from a word meaning fool or freak as if it's foolish to devote so much attention and time to one area. But the truth is, as the physicist Richard Feynman says: "Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

"The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself."

Some of us had "publicly being a geek about something" trained out of us at school. The challenges of trying to fit in, to look cool, to make ourselves less vulnerable, to conform to social stereotypes (pretty, sporty, funny...), and to avoid snarky comments. As I've gotten older and more confident in myself, it's easier to unashamedly be a geek about something. I still meet with sarcasm and raised eyebrows at times, but now I'm comfortable enough to brush it off (most of the time). I love this quote from Simon Pegg about it:

"Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It's basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating."

Let's embrace our inner geeks. Dive deep into what fascinates you.

Try not to dismiss others' passions until you've had a go at getting into depth yourself. Their joy could be just the same that you feel with something else.

Everyone's a geek about something. And that's wonderful.

This is a revised and expanded version of my original sketch, which had just a few passions. I've thought about it so much since I first heard the phrase—I couldn't remember where—that I thought it needed an update. And we had a blast talking about this on the podcast.

When putting together a draft of a Sketchplanations book, this was my first title idea (preview).

Related Ideas to Everyone's a Geek About Something

The writer's in the writing. The artist's in the art.

Everyone's a Geek About Something — Revised and Expanded

Hanlon's Razor is the adage: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Or sometimes, "Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence."

It appears in a similar form by the inimitable Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as, "And I have again observed, my dear friend, in this trifling affair, that misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness. At all events, the two latter are of less frequent occurrence," in The Sorrows of Young Werther. The same sentiments are also shared by William James, Churchill, and H.G. Wells. More recently, Douglas Hubbard gave a more modern version in his book The Failure of Risk Management: Why It's Broken and How to Fix It: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system."

The mistake of assuming bad intentions was brought home to me when puzzling why people kept leaving paper towels in the sinks of the bathrooms at university. How hard is it to put them in the bin?? A year after assuming my fellow students were either lazy or inconsiderate or both, I was washing my hands when another student dried his hands on the towel, walked to the door, opened it by covering the handle with the paper towel — presumably to avoid the germs — and then aimed his paper towel at the bin which was between the sinks. He missed, and it landed in the sink as he walked off down the corridor. Suddenly, it was clear to me that the hygiene of the door handle was higher in consideration of towel-in-the-sink people than whether or not their towel hit their target (and whether it was worth checking if their towel had hit the bin). It made sense. Someone later moved the bin next to the door, and it didn't happen again.

Besides towels in sinks, I've seen people get mad at others pushing in line when the pushers-in didn't realise other people were queuing. I've seen drivers shouting at another driver who's in blissful ignorance of the trouble they've caused. I've seen agents blamed for terrible customer service when the system is at fault, and customer service blame users when the product is at fault. I've seen people despairing at others leaving litter in the park or on the street when animals had dragged out the mess overnight. I've seen people vilified for not moving down on a train when they weren't aware of the squeeze at the other end. And, usually, I think people aren't smart or capable enough, or in fact wicked enough, to carry out the conspiracies that people credit them for. Very often it's the person assuming bad intentions and getting mad who suffers the most.

To be sure, there are different degrees of negligence. We can all make mistakes, but if you're doing your taxes, it's not okay to make a mistake because you didn't read the instructions. If you're standing on a busy train, you owe it to others to be aware that you may be blocking an aisle, and we should do our best to make sure our rubbish stays where we put it. But none of us are perfect and so often I think Hanlon's Razor has some truth to it.

Perhaps a better formulation of Hanlon's Razor would be, "Before attributing to malice, try attributing to incompetence." But I'm not a fan of the wording with 'stupidity' or 'incompetence'. Awareness is so often the necessary start and what's missing.

Since posting this, a few people also shared with me Clarke's Corollary:  "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." And another relevant name for a similar situation is Cock-up Over Conspiracy.

Hanlon's Razor, which encourages us first to consider innocent mistakes rather than assuming ill will, was a submission to Murphy's Law, book two: more reasons why things go wrong, by Arthur Bloch (p52). Murphy's Law is "If anything can go wrong, it will." I've also previously covered Muphry's Law, where, when criticising spelling or grammar, you will make a spelling or grammar mistake yourself.

Fundamental Attribution Error (someone shared Hanlon's Razor with me on posting this)

More conjectures and thinking named after people:

Hanlon's Razor

1 in 8 men in the UK get prostate cancer, according to the charity Prostate Cancer UK, and the risk of prostate cancer doubles if you're black. It's also the second most common cause of death from cancer for men in the UK, after lung cancer.

Prostate cancer is not always life-threatening, but an early diagnosis can be life-saving. So, for Men's Health Week 2024, I worked with experts at Prostate Cancer UK to visualise how screening for and diagnosing prostate cancer has changed. In short, it's more accurate and safer than before and needn't rely on a chance conversation to trigger a discussion—you can do a 30s online check for your prostate cancer risk on the Prostate Cancer UK website right now.

The new way has reduced reliance on the imperfect DRE (digital rectal examination—the test that might come to mind for many). After a suspicious PSA blood test result, you can be referred for a pre-biopsy MRI scan. Clinical trials show that pre-biopsy MRI triage can rule out 27% of men from having an unnecessary biopsy (a biopsy is when a doctor removes some cells for analysis).

Biopsies have also improved and can now be guided by imaging, allowing doctors to identify the areas of the prostate they need to biopsy. It makes it safer and has fewer side effects.

These changes, together, mean fewer unnecessary biopsies and diagnoses that find a higher proportion of clinically significant cancers over clinically insignificant cancers (which may not require treatment), meaning fewer men are at risk of harm from the screening.

Rob Bell, host of the Sketchplanations podcast among many other talents, is an ambassador for Prostate Cancer UK, which supports our "dads, brothers, partners and friends by raising awareness, funding life-changing research, campaigning for change and providing much-needed support." Rob made the connection (this isn't a paid promotion), and you'll hear our discussion with Amy Rylance, Assistant Director of Health Improvement, on how screening has changed in this week's podcast.

Medical research and knowledge is always changing. This sketch has been checked by the team at Prostate Cancer UK based on research. See, for example, the article Fewer Men Face Harm in Prostate Cancer Diagnosis. It's intended to raise awareness, help early diagnosis now or in the future for men reading this, and maybe even save a life. If you have feedback or comments on it, please do write to me: jono.hey@gmail.com

Didn't know when Men's Health Week was? I learned that International Men's Health Week is the week preceding and including Father's Day.

Don't forget, you (or someone you know or love) can do a 30s online prostate cancer risk check online now.

Aside from helping your father avoid prostate cancer, he might like a copy of Big Ideas Little Pictures.

Reference: Most common causes of cancer death

Detecting prostate cancer: old way, new way

Anchors and tugboats. One holds you back, and one pulls you forward.

Negativity can act like an anchor holding you back, narrowing your focus and restricting your potential.

By contrast, positivity acts like a tugboat pulling you forward. It's expansive. It opens us up to opportunity, gratitude or joy.

I heard this analogy from sports psychologist Justin Ross. It's a curious thing, he points out, that we don't actively learn how we should talk to ourselves; it just happens. If you're out running and things get tough, or if you're having a hard time at work or as a parent, our self-talk starts about how things are going and how we got here. But rarely do we consciously think about how we should talk to ourselves.

To get to positivity from a place of negativity, Justin says, the first step is awareness and noticing the negativity anchoring us down. Only then can we think about transforming the negative thoughts into positive ones and starting to feel the pull of the tugboat.

This example is sports psychology, but it applies throughout our lives.

Justin discusses this from 29:40 in the Löw Tide Boyz podcast episode 193.

Anchors and tugboats

Cake Wrecks is the blog and book of when professional cakes go hilariously wrong, by Jen Yates. But a cake wreck is also a useful metaphor for how easy it can be to misinterpret instructions—often by simply taking something literally when it was expected to be interpreted. Examples from Jen's collection include a smart-looking cake with "Nothing" written across the front, a graduation cake with "I want sprinkles" next to a graduation cap, or a cake sporting a full "Happy birthday on a gluten-free cake." If you haven't seen them, you could do much worse than look some up now. It's easy to laugh at these examples, but it's also easy to find real examples in day-to-day work.

I learned about cake wrecks from Jeff Patton's excellent book User Story Mapping. He gives cake wrecks as an all too common example of communication in software development. For example, a user story or specification for a feature is written and passed on to developers who, in the absence of other communication and with perhaps cultural or status barriers, may carefully build exactly what is written rather than what the writer intended. Cake wrecks are funny and silly—except if it was for your special occasion—but mistakes in projects are expensive in time, money and relationships and are worth avoiding.

The recipe for avoiding a cake wreck is, in principle, simple:

Don't assume that what you see is what someone else will see

Use stories and specifications as tools for talking about what's needed and not as equivalents of it

Create a safe space for everyone to question what they don't understand or don't agree with

Give everyone the 'why' behind a project and autonomy and flexibility to suggest other ways to meet the goal

Check in during a project and adjust as needed

Cake wreck

What does biweekly mean to you? How about bimonthly or biannually?

While each of us will have our own, perhaps unambiguous, reaction to it, the word biweekly is interpreted as "twice a week" or "once every two weeks." I know this from personal experience of confusing people en-masse. The dictionary even carefully, if unhelpfully, defines it as meaning either. It's a strange quirk of the English language. But it's so handy, what to do? An excellent, concise solution is the word fortnightly.

Fortnightly has the helpful unambiguous quality that it means "once every fortnight," so "once every two weeks." And it's also just one word. If something happens "two times a week," I think you need to spell it out or use "twice a week" or perhaps "every Monday and Thursday." Or perhaps semi-weekly might give you some mileage.

The same source of confusion applies to the words bimonthly and biannually—to be sure of being understood correctly, it's best to avoid them. Phrases like "every second month," "every two months," "twice a month," or "two times each year" are helpful here.

Ambiguity in how we talk about time is also illustrated in some of my favourite research done by Lera Boroditsky. For example, if I say, "The meeting on Wednesday has been moved forward by two days," when is the meeting now? It turns out that people are split on whether the meeting is now on Monday or on Friday. And I remember a fascinating example of the Kuuk Thayore aboriginal people in Australia who don't use words like left and right, and instead, always use the cardinal directions like north, south, east and west—"Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg". There's a taster in her talk, How Language Shapes the Way we Think.

Fortnightly

A Pyrrhic victory is one where your own losses or damage make it nearly as costly as defeat.

Perhaps that business rival finally went out of business after you lowered prices so much that you can now barely get by. Maybe you managed to prove you were right at the cost of ruining a relationship. Or it could be that the kids did in fact get in the car and go out on that blasted walk only for everyone to have a miserable time, angry at each other for the rest of the day.

Or maybe, as King Pyrrhus of Epirus found in 279 BCE, you won several battles against the Romans while losing so many of your best warriors as to make you wonder at the worth of the whole campaign.

Pyrrhic victory

Optimism bias is believing things will turn out well despite past evidence or circumstances.

It can be extremely helpful. It allows us to attempt things that many may deem impossible. It probably helps motivate entrepreneurs even when everyone doubts them. Optimists are often healthier and happier.

We might overestimate our chances of success because of what we want to happen rather than what's likely to happen.

We may feel pressure from others to give a rosier outlook — like when you might underestimate a timeline when speaking with your boss.

We might want others to succeed, or they may be paying us money and hoping for good news.

We probably think we'll get more done next week. 

We probably think we'll be more disciplined than we will be.

We might think that this time it'll be different or that everyone can't be wrong.

Or we may be just discounting evidence without realising it.

Optimism bias

How do you avoid confusion when spelling things out verbally, particularly when the sound isn't clear or there may be background noise? So, for example, something like Y I V B D T doesn't unintentionally get heard as Y Y B P D D. Or perhaps as I Y P V T D. A lot of letters sound similar.

A phonetic alphabet, or spelling alphabet, is a way to ensure all letters are unambiguously heard correctly by using words starting with each letter. The set of words was chosen from 1,000s of tests, including real-life ones, to maximise clarity and avoid overlapping sounds with other letters that might cause mix-ups. When written out they include deliberate misspellings Alfa and Juliett to avoid misinterpretation.

The NATO phonetic alphabet is a standard one, but there are other variations.

Phonetic alphabet

Phubbing is snubbing people for your phone.

We've probably all experienced it—heck, we've probably all done it at one point or another—or at least it's likely familiar. It could involve someone in a restaurant waiting for their friends to put their phones down, a family gathering where people are no longer talking to each other, a teacher without the attention of their students, or a child failing to get the attention of an adult who's trying to process some messages on their phone.

Research on phubbing, mostly since the word was coined, says it largely has the effects you'd think it would. The effects vary with who's being phubbed and who's doing the phubbing: bosses and employees, family members, parents and kids, or partners. Whoever's phubbing who, snubbing is a suitable root word for it — it's not so nice to feel snubbed.

I learned about phubbing from the Mind over Tech community, which also publishes a newsletter on forming better digital habits.

The word phubbing has the unusual distinction of being created for an advertising campaign to sell a dictionary.

See, for example, Knausenberger, J. et al. (2022). Feeling Ostracized by Others’ Smartphone Use: The Effect of Phubbing on Fundamental Needs, Mood, and Trust. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.883901

For more phone annoyance, see Halfalogue.

Phubbing, you may have spotted, is a portmanteau

Phubbing

Sharpen the saw is a metaphor and story to remind us to refresh and recharge ourselves.

When you're deep in, it may feel like you have no time to pause. No time to take a break, there's too much to get done. Perhaps no time to stop and think about how you're working. No time to step back and improve your processes or work on your tools. Maybe even no time to look after yourself, to recharge, to reflect, to take a walk.

As the metaphor goes, you may feel you have no time to stop and sharpen the saw. Until you do it, and then you may realise you have no time to not stop and sharpen the saw.

Sharpen the saw is habit 7 of Stephen Covey's classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Sharpen the saw

Groupthink arises from the desire of a group to maintain harmony and consensus. Groupthink can reduce the diversity of ideas and opinions — people can seek to avoid conflict, or avoid expressing unpopular views, and end up thinking down the same path. When psychological safety is low and people feel they may experience disapproval, particularly from people with higher ranking or status within the group, groupthink can get worse.

It can be uncomfortable to express opinions different from a group. Perhaps you remember that feeling when a teacher asked a question in class and if everyone raised their hand to one answer it wasn't always easy to be the only hand up for a different one.

Fortunately, there are some solid ways to minimise the tendency to groupthink. These include:

Generating ideas separately before coming together — can be effective remotely too

Increasing psychological safety so everyone feels comfortable expressing contrarian views

Establishing the norm of a shared work product rather than individual credit/blame

Groupthink

A pleonasm is using redundant words, often in established phrases or idioms.

I tried to write something to explain it, but it's hard to beat this excellent excerpt by the comedian George Carlin from When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops — spot the pleonasms:

"My fellow countrymen, I speak to you as coequals, knowing you are deserving of the honest truth. And let me warn you in advance, my subject matter concerns a serious crisis caused by an event in my past history...At that particular point in time, I found myself in a deep depression, making mental errors which seemed as though they might threaten my future plans. I am not over-exaggerating.

I needed a new beginning, so I decided to pay a social visit to a personal friend with whom I share the same mutual objectives and who is one of the most unique individuals I have ever personally met. The end result was an un­expected surprise. When I reiterated again to her the fact that I needed a fresh start, she said I was exactly right; and, as an added plus, she came up with a fi­nal solution that was absolutely perfect.

Based on her past experience, she felt we needed to join together in a com­mon bond for a combined total of twenty-four hours a day, in order to find some new initiatives. What a novel innovation! And, as an extra bonus, she presented me with the free gift of a tuna fish. Right away, I noticed an immedi­ate positive improvement. And although my recovery is not totally complete, the sum total is I feel much better now knowing I am not uniquely alone.”

Other examples people have shared with me include one-year anniversary and revert back. The other day, I wrote "new discoveries", which Grammarly helpfully suggested shortening to "discoveries." I also wrote "we haven't met before" before deleting "before" along with a face-palm.

Pleonasm

Fungible goods are mutually interchangeable in that, in principle, you could swap in any unit for any other unit of the same type or kind, and it would be equivalent.

Money is a classic fungible good. A $10 bill is equivalent to any other $10 bill, so if you were to borrow $10 from someone, they wouldn't care or expect to get the same $10 bill back.

Non-fungible goods are unique and not mutually interchangeable. Each house, even cookie-cutter houses, is in a unique location with different neighbours, quirks, and histories.

A print of the Mona Lisa on your wall is not the same as having the original from the Louvre. Swapping people between work teams, even people with similar experience, will still result in different outcomes.

Distinguishing Fungible from Non-Fungible Goods

A nice thought experiment to distinguish fungible and non-fungible goods is to ask if, if you were to borrow one, it would make a difference if you returned a different one.

For example, if you were to borrow my car, you could return it to me with a different tank of fuel (a fungible good), and it wouldn't make any difference to me. But if you were to return a different used car (a non-fungible good), that would be rather odd.

If you've heard of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) and would like to understand their flaws and promise better, I recommend the NFT Freakonomics episode of the 3-part series What can Blockchain do for you?

Related Ideas to Fungible and Non-fungible Goods

Fungible - non-fungible

Heat islands are urban areas that can have higher temperatures than surrounding rural areas with more greenery.

Heat islands are caused by several factors, including:

the types of materials we use in cities for buildings, pavement, and roads that can absorb more heat than natural surfaces such as leaves or grass

human additions to the sun's heat, such as air conditioning, vehicles, cooking, or machinery

the shapes of our cities that may restrict airflow to carry heat away

the mass of our buildings that can absorb heat and release it gradually, even through the night

More natural, often rural areas with greenery may reflect more light, release moisture and provide shade.

There are ways to help reduce the effect of heat islands, such as planting more urban trees or using green roofs.

Deciduous trees have the handy feature of providing shade for a house in the summer while letting light through in the winter when the leaves fall.

A study using 2015 data found that "doubling tree cover in European cities could cut the number of heat-related deaths during summer months by nearly 40 per cent." In Columbia's Medellín, creating 30 Green Corridors helped to reduce temperatures by 2°C in the first three years of the program.

Learn more about the heat island effect on the EPA site.

Heat islands

Only dead fish go with the flow. To me, this is a nice reminder to swim your path in life and be true to yourself.

I heard about this from Patricia Ryan Madson in her book Improv Wisdom, and she, in turn, saw it in a Welsh pub.

"To reach a port we must sail. Sail, not tie at anchor. Sail, not drift."

Only dead fish go with the flow

There's an old story about the statistician who drowned after seeing that the average depth was 3ft. Averages, or in this case the mean, necessarily hide some data, but very often they also hide what's really going on.

Let's say you run a delivery service and have an average delivery time of one day, it could be that most deliveries are actually a few hours while a few particular ones have people waiting for a week. Or a figure of average incomes might hide that most people have low salaries and a few are millionaires. But just looking at the average you can't tell. Sometimes a different measure of central tendency, like the median, can provide a clearer picture.

Sheldon Zedeck, a UC Berkeley psychology professor who taught me about the design of experiments, gave wise advice: spend time with your data. Sometimes it's the only way to know what's happening for sure.

Sneaky averages

It's easy to want to fill an awkward silence. However, a pause in conversation is often a time for reflection. When conducting research, and maybe even in normal conversations, try to trust your questions and avoid filling the silence after asking a question. Just wait and listen.

My experience is that it's very easy to follow a nice open-ended question such as "How do you feel about it now?" with all sorts of qualifications or assumptions because silence feels uncomfortable.

It can quickly become, "How do you feel about it now?... I guess it must have been hard for you, right?" And instead of giving someone space to share a thoughtful answer of your open-ended question all you might get is a "Yes" and perhaps your chance of finding out what they really thought has gone.

Instead, have faith in what you ask and stick out the silence.

Don't fill the silence

I'd never heard the words flotsam and jetsam used in any way but together so had always assumed it was a term to mean general debris floating in the water or washed up. It turns out they have distinct meanings that also affect how they're treated by law.

Flotsam, from flotter to float, refers to debris accidentally lost or washed overboard, often from a shipwreck or accident.

Jetsam is debris that was deliberately jettisoned by a boat in distress, likely to try and lighten the load.

Being that flotsam was lost accidentally, under maritime law, it can be claimed by the original owner, but jetsam can be claimed by the person who found it.

The rubber duck in the sketch refers to the story of the thousands of rubber ducks that washed overboard (flotsam) in the Pacific ocean in 1992. Over the next 25 years, the ducks found themselves washed ashore all across the world revealing much of the ocean's currents as one giant connected system.

Flotsam and jetsam

Most of us behave differently in a flashy restaurant than we do in a job interview or at a funeral. We naturally tune our behaviour to our audience and environment.

As part of the metaphor of Life As Theatre with Social Life As a Performance, the famous sociologist Erving Goffman called this front stage behaviour — how we behave when people are watching. In contrast, we may only let our guard down and fully relax when we're by ourselves — here we're back stage.

In a flashy restaurant, wait staff will behave differently in their interactions with guests than they will out back in their break time, and you may find yourself saying a wine you've just tasted is lovely even when you don't think it is. Once you start thinking about front stage and back stage behaviour you'll spot the "performance" of social life throughout almost every daily interaction.

In his classic sociology book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman explains the front stage, the back stage, and more.

Front stage, back stage

Yak shaving describes how when setting out to do something, you found you had to first do something else, which needed you to finish this other thing, and so on until you found yourself shaving a yak, or equally unrelated activity, to do the first thing you set out to do.

It's pretty frequent in life — tidying your room? — and particularly resonates in software development, where when tackling one thing, you often find yourself fixing something else, which needs you to fix something else, and so on. Here's the ever brilliant xkcd on fixing problems.

Yak shaving features, lovingly polished, in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures.

Here's a brilliant 40s clip of Hal changing a lightbulb from Malcolm in the Middle, classic yak shaving

Early yak shaving features in the song There's a Hole in My Bucket in which fixing a bucket requires straw, which requires a knife to cut it, but the knife needs sharpening, which needs a stone, which is too dry and needs wetting with water, which needs fetching...with a bucket

The first I found of yak shaving was a short article on productivity in the first issue of Make magazine by Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann.

Yak in the style of Alison Green and Adam Stower's excellent children's book, What can you Stack on the Back of a Yak?

Yak shaving

We all know that racing drivers overtake on the inside — it's the shorter, faster route. It was only relatively recently that I found how useful it can be on a long drive, too, not for racing but for using the bend on a multilane road for easier, safer overtaking.

Perhaps this scenario will resonate: after cruising at a steady speed for miles of a long journey you slowly catch up with a car traveling just a few miles an hour slower. You're not driving fast enough to zip by them, but the difference is enough to slow your steady progress on a long journey, and if you're driving near the speed limit anyway you probably don't want to accelerate much to overtake.

On a multi-lane road like a motorway or freeway — not a single lane road where you'd be overtaking with reduced visibility on the corner in the opposing lane — timing your overtaking so you're on the inside of a bend and the slower car is on the outside allows you to get round the slower driver in a shorter time and without needing to travel nearly as fast.

And the converse is also true: if you've timed your overtaking when approaching a bend where you'll be on the outside you'll find that you'll have to go a lot faster to get round or perhaps that your intended overtaking is actually not getting you past at all.

Passing on an inside bend

The essence of the bystander effect is that in a situation where someone needs help, if others are around who could help, then it discourages us as individuals from stepping in.

While there may be many reasons for this, and it has been replicated in many different contexts, a recent study of CCTV footage paints a more optimistic picture. In the study, they saw that although the likelihood of any individual intervening may be reduced with other bystanders present, the chances of someone coming to help increase the more people are around. In 9 out of 10 public conflicts they studied at least one person, and often several, came to help. So the lady in the sketch would probably be OK.

Given the bystander effect, I remember being taught that if you are in a motor vehicle accident, don't assume that someone has called for help already: it could help to choose someone directly and ask them to call for help to avoid everyone thinking everyone else will do it.

It reminds me of the story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody (also known as the responsibility poem):

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have.

The paper referenced is: Philpot, Richard & Liebst, Lasse & Levine, Mark & Bernasco, Wim & Lindegaard, Marie. (2019). Would I be helped? Cross-national CCTV footage shows that intervention is the norm in public conflicts. The American psychologist. 75. 10.1037/amp0000469. (pdf)

The Bystander Effect

Not all of us can ditch jobs, families and responsibilities and choose to spend the next few months trekking across some tundra or cycling to China. Those are adventures, sure, but, argues Alastair Humphreys, we don't need something of that scale to get a perspective-shifting snap out of the daily grind and connection with nature—we can try a microadventure instead.

A microadventure might be as simple as camping in the garden with your family, paddling down a local river and camping on the bank, or staying the night on a nearby hilltop under the stars, catching the sunrise with a wild swim to wake up and being back in time for breakfast.

The essence is that they are short, simple, local, and cheap. No fancy gear, complex planning, big budgets or long travel—an achievable adventure for regular people without giving up the rest of our lives to do it.

At the time of writing, around the COVID pandemic, when bigger trips are challenging, it seems that people have been spending more time exploring locally and discovering the richness of nearby natural spots. In fact, Al wrote another book about precisely that: Local.

We could all use a microadventure from time to time.

The Fun Scale: type 1, type 2 and type 3 fun

Microadventure

Starting a company isn't easy. Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, says:

"Starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling the plane on the way down."

But just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. I remember receiving some advice that you shouldn't wait around for the right time to have children as you'll never find it. I suspect starting a company is similar. It reminds me of this lovely quote I have taken to heart from Hugh Laurie:

"It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any."

As far as I could tell, unconsciously or separately, Reid's version relates to Ray Bradbury's earlier advice of jumping off a cliff and building your wings on the way down.

This quote, modified to a lovely two-page spread, features with a number of others in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures.

Starting a company

An average car, sat idling, can produce exhaust emissions to fill 150 balloons. That's a lot of balloons to imagine puffing away out of the cars idling outside a school for a pickup, say. Other tests have found (pdf) that for any time over 10s fuel use and emissions are always greater when idling than turning off the engine and restarting. Spread the word.

Of course, if you have an electric car this won't apply.

I did draw 150 balloons, but a few of them didn't fit on the page.

Idling

In some forests where the trees grow tall and straight, like those in the US Pacific Northwest, when a giant tree falls it creates an opening in the forest canopy that lets in light for new growth to take foot.

The mighty fallen tree trunks themselves provide a new surface for seedlings to take root, away from the competition of the forest floor. When this happens, the fallen tree becomes an integral part of a new ecosystem.

Such fallen trees are known as nurse logs. Sometimes, a nurse log is so successful as a nursery for the young trees that they will grow along the full length of the fallen trunk. When the nurse log finally decays, it leaves behind a remarkable straight line of trees.

This sketch appears in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures

Podcast sketches