Category: Irregular ideas

There was once a old farmer who had spent many years tending his crops. One day, his horse broke the fence and ran away. The neighbouring farmers said, “That’s bad luck,”. The farmer shrugged and said, “Maybe.”

When he woke up the next morning the found his horse had returned and brought with it three wild horses. “How wonderful, such good luck,” the neighbours exclaimed. The farmer calmly fenced in the horses and said, “Maybe.”

The following day, the farmer’s son tried to ride one of the untamed horses. The wild horse bucked and the son was thrown, braking his leg. Again, the neighbours offered their sympathy. “Such misfortune,” they said. The farmer nodded sagely and said, “Maybe.”

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. When they saw that the farmer’s son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbours congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. The farmer simply said, “Maybe.”

So you just never know.

Sometimes things look good or look bad in the moment but look very different when we look back. But more often, even when we look back, we continue to convince ourselves that things are the way we first thought. We don’t change our minds.

It’s easy to see why. It’s easy to look at social feeds and news websites and only see the dramatic downsides of political events and people being horrible to each other. These platforms set out to group like with like, to reinforce the points-of-view we agree with and create opposition with any alternative. They help convince us we’re right. We have the one and only truth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Instead, when faced with opposing opinions we tend to believe that only ourselves and those who have the same opinions have the intelligence to have reached the conclusions we have. We tell ourselves the others must be stupid for believing what they believe. We find it really hard to be open-minded.

Maybe we tell ourselves that we’d change our minds if the evidence proved us wrong. But that’s not what the research shows. In fact, one of the most important things we need to allow us to change our minds is knowing we have an accepting and supportive social safety net. If everyone around us believes the same as we do, and we fear that if we changed our minds we could be ostracised by that group, then we are very unlikely to change our minds. Our opinions become entrenched, not because we have strong evidence for them, but because the emotional and social cost of changing them is too high.

So if we want to be open-minded, to be able to change our minds, then we should seek out people who change their minds, or who don’t hold fast to opinions in the first place. These people are the open-minded social safety net that we need. If we are surrounded by people who change their minds, we’ll be more able to change ours too.

And if we can’t find those people, then maybe we can become them for others.

Maybe we can be more open to changing our minds, and tell others when we have. Maybe we can accept that there are other points-of-view, and be public about it. Maybe if we’re less dogmatic in our opinions about things where the good or bad outcome is ultimately unknowable, we can create a social safety net for open-mindedness.

Human population is expected to reach 8 billion later this year. Or it might have already happened. It’s hard to keep up.

Two hundred years ago there were only 1 billion humans on planet earth. Two thousand years ago, it was probably about 100 million. And two hundred thousand years ago, there was maybe about a million of us. Population growth increases exponentially, like the grains of rice on a chess board that double with each square. But that isn’t the whole story, because as population increases so does it’s consumption of resources. Not just more people, but more people each using more. Exponential growth growing exponentially.

When we talk about growth we mean consuming resources in order to create something new that is of benefit to the thing that is growing. Flowers grow. They do it by consuming sunlight, water and nutrients from the soil and turning them into stems, leaves and petals. People grow. We are genetically and culturally programmed to want to learn more, live in nicer homes, make more money. Economies grow. They consume resources such as energy and people’s time and effort, and turn them into goods and money. Nothing can grow without consuming resources.

But resources are finite. This makes growth always a zero-sum game. For an individual or a species or an economy to grow, some other individual or species or economy cannot.

We humans evolved in a world that had abundant resources. Finite, but abundant. And maybe we didn’t quite understand the difference. We have all evolved to grow. We’re not genetically, or culturally, programmed to preserve any particular state of being. We don’t know how to do it. We always want to grow. We always seek to do more with less, not to do less. And we do it in three ways.

Human populations have grown by expanding into new geographical territories and consuming the resources available. That’s what was going on all those hundreds of thousands of years ago as our species spread out across the planet, and it’s what was going on hundreds of years ago when European countries invaded other countries. They claimed the resources of those places to grow their population and grow their consumption.

The second way we try to get more resources is through technology. From ploughs to robots, the goal of technology has always been to be able to produce more from less. Grow more crops. Build more cars. The tech optimists might like to believe that using technology to optimise production can enable continued growth but it doesn’t change the fact that resources are finite.

Exploiting people who have resources is the third way we enable growth. From invading countries to unethical labour practices, growth comes those with more power exploiting those with less. And at the end of a growth period, as we start to realise that growth is lessening, humans naturally tend to become more tribal to protect what they have. They come up with reasons for why some people shouldn’t be allowed to continue to have the resources that they have, and justify their group having them instead. We see this occurring ideologically in the mass media as the rise of fascism, the narrative around immigration, but actually it’s a universal phenomenon with all groups of humans whatever their ideology.

It’s not hard to see how these three have worked together in the past and we can see their “success” across the globe as the zero-sum game of ‘who owns what’ continues to plays out today. But now we face a new situation. One that humans are not genetically or culturally equipped to handle.

We face a future where those finite resources have run out. The planet doesn’t have enough oil or fresh water or clean air or farmland or any of the things we use up when we grow. Soon, growth will no longer possible. But we don’t know how to stop growing.

So, yes, we could (and should) stop using oil. And, yes, we could (and should) have better governments making better economic decisions. But just stopping using oil or having better governments doesn’t answer the question of how we stop growing.

And if we don’t figure it out, we’ll become the cost of our own growth.

There are five and a half billion searches on Google every day. Five and a half billion questions asked every single day. That’s a lot of people looking for answers. Google’s mission, “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, is about providing answers to all those questions. Ask Google any question you can think of, and it will provide an answer. The answer might not make sense, it might not be what you were looking for, but it is an answer, nonetheless.

Asking questions is an inherently human trait. Every human language has questions. Children ask questions almost as soon as they learn to speak. We ask questions to start conversations, to learn things, to find out how people are. When want to know the truth about something, we ask. Lawyers and teachers ask questions. So do therapists, researchers, job interviewers, and philosophers.

Socrates is perhaps the most famous questioner. Socratic questioning is a method of teaching by ****asking thoughtful questions. They are questions asked from a place of genuine curiosity, encouraging the student to think deeply about their responses, to examine complex ideas and challenge assumptions. Asking questions is a skill.

Computers can provide answers, but they don’t ask questions. They don’t desire new knowledge, and they don’t care whether the answers are truthful. The problem with any algorithmic system based on collating mass behaviour, like people putting search terms into Google, is that it can be gamed. As more people type racist, sexist, Islamophobic, discriminatory terms into Google, the more Google shows those in autocomplete options for all to see and click on. There’s no shortage of research to demonstrate this.

Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of communications at Elon University, mapped right-wing and fake news websites to show how they use search engine optimisation techniques to gain positions in the search results Google displays.

Robert Epstein, a research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioural Research and Technology, has shown that the contents of a page of search results can influence people’s views and opinions, and even affect voting patterns.

The technology companies have a responsibility to ensure the algorithms they deploy are able to rebalance the search terms they provide. The argument that the algorithms simply reflect human behaviour can’t stand up if the algorithm can be intentionally gamed. The world’s information is not universally accessible and useful if only one point-of-view is displayed in the search results. But do any of us think technology companies take this responsibility seriously?

If not, then we simply can’t leave it up to the computers to provide better answers. We ask questions with the intention of uncovering the truth, of understanding the world around us more clearly. To do that online means we have to take the responsibility for thinking more critically, being more Socratic in our questioning, developing our skills.

For our technology to get better at answering questions, we have to get better at asking them.

If you happened to be hanging around the Czech Republic town of Hradec Králové in 1921, and you happened to go to the theatre, you might have seen a play called “Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti” **or, in English “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” Karel Capek, the writer of this play, coined the term robot to describe artificial people built to serve humans.

If you happened to be hanging around Paolo Alto in California a hundred and one years later, and you happened to stroll into the office’s of Tesla, you might have seen the unveiling of the unimaginatively named humanoid robot, Optimus. Optimus has a head, torso, two arms and two legs. It walks, squats, picks things up, climbs stairs. Tesla’s goal is “to make a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible”. But why make a humanoid robot?

Robots have been used in manufacturing since the 1960’s, but they aren’t humanoid. They are single arms built to perform specific tasks. What makes humanoid robots different is the idea of being ‘general purpose’. General purpose technologies always have a huge and lasting effect on an economy and entire society. Electricity is a general purpose technology. So are computers. You don’t have one computer designed specifically for typing and another for browsing the internet. Economists Lipsey and Carlaw suggest that there have only been 24 technologies in the history of humanity that can be classified as true General Purpose Technologies. Will humanoid robots become the 25th?

MIT professor and director at the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Diana Rus, isn’t convinced. She says, “the more you generalize, the less you optimize,” which is why so many robots that we have today do not take human shape. Tesla wants to change that. So, when Musk says, “it really is a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it”, he’s referring to making robots that can do lots of different things. A single robot that can interact with all kinds of different scenarios, perform all kinds of different tasks, would undoubtedly transform civilization. But maybe not in the way Musk suggests.

In Rossum’s Universal Robots, the robots revolt and kill all the humans. This is the nightmare scenario that has been depicted in science fiction ever since, and I’m not saying it’s not going to happen, but I think something else might happen first.

If we build humanoid robots that look and move like an able-bodied man, then we reinforce designing society around that single physical form.

As robots become more able to lift heavier things, more things will be packaged into boxes that people can’t lift. As robots become better at walking up steps, more buildings will be designed with more steps that people can’t access. As robots become able to cross roads by detecting vehicles, fewer roads will have visual and audible crossing signals that help people cross safely.

In this future, we gradually become more and more reliant on the robots, not because we’ve become lazy and complacent, but because we’ve designed our society to work for them and not for all of us in all the various shapes, sizes and abilities we come in. And those who cannot afford a robot to perform tasks humans can’t become excluded all together.

We make society less and less accessible, less and less equal, when we design around one way of being and doing.

My takeaway has just been delivered. The person who delivered it is one of 5 million people working in the gig economy in the UK. He works for a company where he doesn’t know any of his colleagues but they compete with him for work, will never meet a manager or understand why they make the decisions they do. He interacts with his employer solely through an app on his phone.

Technology has always shaped the way we work. In the eighteenth century, the introduction of the factory and the manufacturing of interchangeable parts moved workers from lots of smaller places to fewer bigger places. In the nineteenth century, the electrification of workplaces promised greater productivity. In the twentieth century, office work was changed by computers running regular routine jobs previously done manually. Today, how we work is highly mediated by technology.

Technology changes the dynamics of the relationship between employer and employee. And it changes the power the employee has to change those dynamics.

When, in 1880, Karl Marx conducted a survey of workers it was with the intention of identifying where workers had leverage within the workplace that could enable them to organise successfully against exploitation and advance their own interests. This has long been the power play between company and employee. With traditional employment, because of how work is organised and located, workers have an inherent coordination power. Workers work with each other, they see how many other people work for the company, they talk to their colleagues, share stories of their treatment, and join unions. Unions are intent on improving the working conditions of employers through collective coordinated influence. Where one person can’t influence how a company treats them, a union can.

The app-ification of work changes all this. Where technology mediates the relationship between employer and employee, it removes the coordination power of the workers. It separates them from each other so they do not know each other, can’t talk about their treatment, can’t organise in response to their treatment. It forces them to drive down their own wages, accepting the lowest offer because if they don’t someone else will.

Interestingly, how gig workers feel about gig work depends on whether it is their only source of income or a bit extra in addition to other work. Those for whom gig work is the only job feel unease about the uncertainty of their income. Those who do some gig work in addition to having other, more stable income, appreciate the flexibility it gives them. But referring to those who do this work as gig workers focuses on the piecemeal nature of the work and misses the shift in power that comes with it.

More and more work is being app-ified. Not only delivery drivers but warehouse pickers, care workers, taxi drivers, dog walkers, waiters, maintenance and repair workers. As this happens, the power shifts in favour of the platform provider. Benjamin Sachs, professor of labour and industry at Harvard Law School, says “History shows that if workers don’t have an institution, organisation or mechanism to translate their market power into some kind of sustained form of collective voices, then signs of optimism from employee activism soon fade”. The power of the platforms to prevent activism by ensuring workers never coordinate and have no choice but to compete with each other, means no mechanisms can arise from those workers themselves. That leaves the only power in the hands of law-makers, and the gig economy has proved hard to regulate and platform providers quick to find ways around laws.

Technology mediates so much of the relationship between employees and employers, and it will do so more and more in the future. How workers create a sustained collective voice in the face of the app-ification of work is a significant challenge for the coming decades.

Chelsea was bullied. And she wanted revenge. She wanted to feel some control. A fake Facebook profile of a handsome, confident guy that she could use to message her bullies seemed like the way to do that. And then she messaged more people. Over four years she chatted with lots of people who wanted to get to know “Jamison”, Chelsea’s alter ego.

One of those people was Sunny, a nursing student and star of the Catfish TV show’s first episode. When Sunny found out that Jamison was really Chelsea she vented her feelings, saying Chelsea must have a personality disorder to have done what she did. But pretending to be someone else online, or saying things we wouldn’t say in person, isn’t the same as having a mental illness.

It’s called the online disinhibition effect. When we feel anonymous, or even just hidden behind a screen, we feel less restrained, more able to express ourselves in ways we might not feel comfortable doing in person. It affects all of us. It can be good and it can be bad.

One study published in the journal ‘Computers in Human Behavior’ in 2014 found that young people can get emotional relief by sharing their feelings or telling secrets they had been holding onto through anonymous messaging. And another, in the Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace in 2015, showed that the online disinhibition effect had a positive effect on people who found communicating in face-to-face situations more difficult.

But we’re probably more familiar with the negative things that we hear about anonymous online messaging. Bullying, harassment, grooming, fraud. Feeling anonymous sometimes leads people to make poor choices about how they treat others. Not sure we can blame the online disinhibition effect for that.

For good or bad, messaging apps are the most used apps on our phones. Most of the time we’re messaging with people who know who we are, and who probably ignore the effects our own online disinhibition has on us when we get frustrated or annoyed a bit too quickly. But there are hundreds of anonymous messaging apps on Google Play and Apple’s app store. And with more than 42 million messages sent every minute, many of those messages go between people who don’t know each other.

One-to-one online communication is fraught with difficulties we’re not really equipped to deal with.

Robert Epstein also got catfished. Not by an American teenager, but by a Russian chatbot. After two months of romantic messages from Ivana, Robert got a bit suspicious. Perhaps it shouldn’t have taken him quite so long to realise as he’s one of the founders of an annual prize in which chatbots try to convince the judges that they’re talking to a human. If he can be misled and become confused by chatting online, anyone can.

When it comes to chatbots, it seems that knowing you aren’t talking to a person helps to extend the online disinhibition effect. In the 1960’s, Joseph Weizenbaum working at the MIT Computerized Reasoning Laboratory created Eliza, the first ever chatbot. Eliza was programmed to respond to people by repeating back to them what they had said as a question, much like a non-directional psychotherapist would. From the anecdotes, people seemed to really appreciate being about talk to something that wasn’t going to judge them.

And a more modern version, Woebot, which calls itself a mental health ally, not an online therapist, also helps people by prompting them to share things they might not feel comfortable talking about either in-person or to another person. The online disinhibition effect not only works if you know you aren’t talking to a person, it might even be stronger.

The more we rely on chat messaging for staying in touch with family, arranging things with friends, contacting customer service departments, coordinating with colleagues, etc., etc., the more the online disinhibition effect becomes embedded in how we behave online. Good and bad, there’s no avoiding it. But perhaps we can be more considered about it.

Is that the lesson Chelsea from Catfish learned? She founded ‘Win From Within’, an anti-bullying organisation to help people find self-acceptance and get support for bullying issues. I wonder if they offered support over online chat.

Greenland is the largest island in the world. Its rugged coastline is also one of the longest in the world at an estimated length of roughly the same as the circumference of the Earth at the Equator. It’s estimated, because coastlines are difficult things to measure.

The coastline paradox, also known as the Richardson Effect after the mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson, describes this measurement difficulty. Richardson’s interest in the problem was sparked by Portugal and Spain claiming different lengths to border between the two countries. As Richardson looked into it he realised that the Portuguese and the Spanish were using different length rulers. When they measured the irregularly-shaped borderline by counting how many increments of the ruler it was, they got different answers.

Wherever the thing being measured has an irregular shape, the measurement will always depend on the size of the measure.

If you were feeling ambitious and set out to measure the length of the coast of Greenland, you might take a kilometre-long measuring stick with you. You’d start somewhere on the coast, perhaps Cape Farewell, Greenland’s most southerly point, and you’d lay your measuring stick along the coast. Then you’d move the stick, end over end, counting as you go until you get all the way around the coast and back round to Cape Farewell. You’d probably end up with a measurement somewhere around 39,330 kilometres.

If you did the same exercise again, but this time with a metre long measuring stick you’d get into all the rough ins and outs that your kilometre-long measuring stick smoothed out. So, when you got back round to where you’d started you’d have a much longer measurement of the same coastline.

If you went back yet again, this time with a centimetre long measuring stick, you’d get into even smaller twists and turns of the rocks and ice, and so get an even longer measurement of the same coastline.

Fry realised that there was a “mathematical uncertainty in the measurement of irregular boundaries”, and said that as the measuring stick approaches zero the length of the coastline approaches infinity.

What if, instead of spending your time measuring Greenland, you had some other large goal you wanted to achieve? If your goal doesn’t have an exact definition, and what big goal ever does, then it’s a bit like the Greenland coastline, or the Portugal-Spain border – it’s irregularly shaped. To measure your progress towards achieving a goal like that you might breakdown the things you need to do into small, achievable tasks. Ticking them off shows you how many you’ve completed on your way towards the goal.

This approach to achieving goals is sometimes called ‘think big, start small’. It encourages us to have ambitious goals with the promise that if we complete enough small steps towards them, then one day we’ll get there, we’ll achieve our goals. For irregularly-shaped, uncertain goals, that might not work.

The coastline paradox shows us the inherent contradiction of the ‘think big, start small’ mantra; the smaller your steps, the further away the big goal becomes. Starting with small specific actions doesn’t guarantee achieving big irregular-shaped, uncertain goals, because how you define and measure those steps changes what you end up with.

Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi social entrepreneur and civil society leader, suggests that instead of thinking big we just start. Start with whatever is in front of you, something you can do now. He didn’t start with the big goal of being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. He started by providing microfinance loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans, and founding the Grameen Bank, and helping people find ways to break out of poverty. And then he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

If we set out with the one big goal to get an even more accurate measure of the coast of Greenland we might miss all the other things we could have achieved along the way.

Pablo Picasso made 50,000 artworks during his lifetime. His first major exhibition was at a gallery on Paris’ renowned rue Laffitte in 1901, aged 20. But he started exhibiting when he was 13. His father was a painter, art professor and curator at a local museum and supported his son’s talent by arranging shows for Pablo’s paintings. Today, Picasso is still one of the most exhibited artists in the world, with four of his works on the list of the fifty most famous paintings, and he continues to be an inspiration for thousands of artists and millions of school art projects.

Would Picasso’s creativity have had such an impact on the world without his work having such curation?

Curation is more than just a collection of creativity, more than distribution of creative work. It is the careful and considered selecting and organising of artworks. Good curation takes expertise and knowledge about topic and about how to curate. If creativity is the combining of previously unrelated things to produce something novel, then curation is the combining of related things to produce something coherent. It is often over-looked and under-appreciated, but without it creativity remains disconnected and artworks only exist in isolation.

Creating and curating need each other. They work together, feed each other.

DALL-E is a machine learning neural network that creates images from natural language text

. You type a description of the image you want, something like “panda drinking a milkshake in the style of Picasso” and DALL-E generates some images that look like Picasso might have painted if he’d been into pandas drinking milkshake. Is that creative?

Is the person describing the image being creative, or is the technology generating the image? Is DALL-E just the modern version is brushes and canvas and the more skilled the artist is at describing the image to be created, the better the work of art? DALL-E hides the creative process. It takes place in the translating of ideas into ones and zeros rather than by paint on a canvas, but it isn’t any less of a creative process.

As soon as there is natural language processing to generate images, there is a need for people who are good at writing the words to be processed. These prompt artists sell their work on marketplaces like Promptbase to show their skills in being able to generate just the image you’re looking for. But it’s not hard to imagine those artists quickly replaced by a technology that could bring together ideas of previously unrelated things and describe them to DALL-E in ways that human’s couldn’t to produce artworks we’ve never even imagined. Infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters creating every variation of image possible. Is that curation?

It is a collection, but as long as every artwork is treated equally, it isn’t curation. It doesn’t rely on knowledge and expertise to filter from all that is available and select those that relate and connect. Curation offers more than that. Perhaps as creativity and the creative act becomes even more abstract and mediated by technology, curation of the works in meaningful ways becomes even more important for making sense of the world.

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” – Picasso.

When Marty slammed the DeLorean into overdrive and fired up the flux capacity as he raced away from the bad guys at 88 mile per hour, he was given an opportunity none of us will ever get. Back in the past, he could change things that would make his future better. He had the benefit of knowing how things will turn out if he made no changes, but once he made a change in his now present, the future he was trying to get back to was unknown to him. The ancients Greeks thought of themselves as having their backs to the future. They conceived of time as moving on them from behind where they couldn’t see what was coming, and with the past laid out in front of them with all their mistake to see.

Nowadays, we tend to think of time the other way round, with the future in front of us but still unknown. Despite millennia of thinking, incredible scientific advances, and numerous sci-fi films, the future remains unknowable. And always will.

We can only experience time as flowing one way, that’s all our brains are capable of. But that experience isn’t the same for all of us and we aren’t all affected by time in the same ways.

Susan Schneider, writing in Scientific American magazine, claimed that the flow of time is such an inherent part of experience that we can’t experience anything without a sense of time about it. That sense of time changes depending on how we feel. Neuroscience recognises the integral role that happiness, sadness, fear, and other emotions play in the way we feel about the passing of seconds and minutes. Pursuing rewards changes our perception of time. Novel experiences and new situations make time feel like it’s going slower. Getting absorbed in a flow state makes time pass unnoticed and when we look up from what had us absorbed we wonder where the hours have gone.

We all experience our time differently, and uniquely to us. Which is fine when we’re on our own, doing our own thing, and not having to rely on other people. But as soon as we need to work together, things change.

Regular time keeping is a modern invention. As society became more connected, with, for example, trains travelling between cities, we needed a means of coordinating ourselves. Time was the obvious way to do it. But it wasn’t simple to start with. The non-mechanical way we understood what the time is, was to look at the sun. When it’s highest in the sky, that’s midday. But midday is different depending on where you are on the planet. Midday in London doesn’t happen at the same time a midday in Glasgow. So, train drivers setting their clocks to London time would arrive in Glasgow at a different time to when the people of Glasgow were expecting. The big step in that coordination was everyone agreeing a single time that all clocks and timetables could be based upon. That agreement shifted us away from an experience of time and towards agreed convention about time.

Since then, we’ve found increasingly more accurate ways to measure time and use it to coordinate a complicated and interconnected society. Global positioning satellites factor time into their calculations to show us where we are on Google Maps. Stock markets conduct transactions in mere milliseconds. And the most accurate Strontium Atomic clocks only lose 1 second every 15 billion years. That’s pretty accurate, and with this accuracy we’re better able to coordinate ourselves.

So we have these two experiences of time, but they feel intertwined. We have our personal sense of time, boredom when we’re waiting for something, or a sense of flow when we’re absorbed. And we feel the effects of the agreed convention of coordinated time as we try not to be late, and check our calendars for where we need to go tomorrow. And mixed up in this experience is the desire to make the most of our time, to not waste our present or to look back on our past with regret.

Back to the future is a hopeful film. It tells a story of someone who can change the past to make their future better. But without a time machine, we’re left with only our present to do that. Maybe being more aware of, and intentionally changing how we experience time, could help us make the most of our present. Maybe choosing when we should be paying attention to our own sense of time and when we should be complying with the convention of coordinated time can help us shape the future.

As Ptahhotep, the ancient Egyptian thinker, said, “Follow your desire as long as you live, and do not perform more than is ordered, do not lessen the time of the following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit…”