Longitude 0'0'0"
My mother Marian and I went down to Greenwich yesterday to visit the Cutty Sark; the Maritime Museum; the market; a couple of pubs (the Coach and Horses and the Gipsy Moth); and the Royal Observatory. The latter is of course on longitude 0'0'0", where the eastern hemisphere ends and the western hemisphere begins. As people of all nationalities danced over the meridian line like the pre-cognizant monkeys of Kubrick's 2001 I thought about the moment when some Englishman arbitrarily decided that the Royal Observatory in Greenwich was the centre of the world. What did it take? Arrogance? National pride? I thought some more, and I realised that the making of arbitrary decisions takes one thing above all: courage.
One of my favourite fables concerns a hungry donkey. This donkey, finding himself equidistant between two equally desireable bales of hay, looks left and right, unable to decide which bale to eat first. The donkey dies of starvation. Like our donkey, I sometimes find it hard to make what seems like an arbitrary decision. The fear of making the wrong choice weighs heavily. I might attempt to rationalise, concocting reasons why one choice is better, but in the end it's courage that averts starvation.
On a slightly related topic, I came across this link via BoingBoing. It appears that cognitive scientists have shown that the average human can track just four mental variables when trying to solve a problem. That could explain why I'm such a reckless chessplayer.
