Blogging orthodoxy seems to dictate that short posts of regular frequency represent the best strategy for maintaining a loyal readership. But here at the Knackered Hack we just keep “doing the opposite,” to quote Scott Page and Seinfeld’s George Costanza. It has indeed been a long time since the last (very short) post about memory. Sorry about that. It was not that I forgot — I’m not that dogmatic.

In a nutshell, I’ve been away. And a little busy. And also thinking hard. Now I’m back, both literally and metaphysically. So, “normal” service can now resume. But please be prepared for wide variations in post length, frequency and variety, and possibly more inclusions of pictures and other things to delight your limbic, as I get more of a handle on this Web 2.0 malarkey. Rather than a woeful lack of structure and organisation, I would frame this as a necessary preservation of playfulness and spontaneity in what might otherwise become a predictable yet likely unreadable blog.

Even less frequent a blogger is Nassim Taleb, the Knackered Hack’s favourite interviewee. He does not really have a blog in the terms understood above, but you can go here to see what he had to say about the current credit crunch. He is more regular with his home page notes, where he has an interesting item about fruits and their sweetness. (Hat tip to Paul Wilmott, whose company hosts the Taleb “blog”, while it is Art de Vany who highlights the discussion on the history of sweetness in fruits.)

In a future post I’m going to write about figs, which is connected with what Taleb is talking about. Here is a picture that includes figs, just to be going along with. Underneath all the basil is some parma ham – a delightful partner to fig.

Meanwhile, de Vany says this in response to Taleb:-

The process for producing sweetness and tenderness is selective breeding, as you [Taleb] note, and selection for neotony, the retention of juvenile traits in the adult. Ah, it seems that is true of people these days as well. Many fail to achieve adulthood. On the other hand, humans evolved a form of neotony and retain their juvenile traits of playfulness and pleasure longer than chimps and other animals. It was an advantage for our large-brained, highly social species to retain aspects of youthfulness.”

Prior to this comment, de Vany’s emphasis on play has been having a quite profound effect on Knackered Hack thinking, and much of the Knackered Family’s time away from blogging has been spent head-scratching on that particular issue. Lots more on that in future posts. And, of course, de Vany is echoed in a slightly different context by today’s news, reported in a letter to the Daily Telegraph by a group of scientists, educationists, authors, and other advocates about toxic childhood and the declining quality of children’s play in the UK.

Compelling examples [of research supporting this view] have included Unicef’s alarming finding that Britain’s children are amongst the unhappiest in the developed world, and the children’s charity NCH’s report of an explosion in children’s clinically diagnosable mental health problems.

We believe that a key factor in this disturbing trend is the marked decline over the last 15 years in children’s play. Play – particularly outdoor, unstructured, loosely supervised play – appears to be vital to children’s all-round health and well-being.”

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