The winds of change

Change happens in life in all sorts of flavors, from the most gradual change to the sudden events that upends your life. Changes of the first time are frequent and almost imperceptible, such as the growth of your kids: you do not see them grow from one day to the next but one day suddenly realize that they are not as tall as your chin anymore, but the reach to the tip of your nose. Other changes are rarer but more deep-cutting, as in the theory of "punctuated equilibrium" proposed by Stephen Jay Gould, which can also be applied in the social context: an complex organism, including also a society, can stay essentially unchanged for generations until a change in the environment or its internal conditions triggers a sudden and significant change in the organism (or the society).

Life as individual persons is also subject to the winds of change. Some years ago I ran into this article, which illustrates the concept beautifully: for years and years during your whole childhood you meet your parents for breakfast and dinner, and possibly also for some lunches, to the point that you take them totally for granted. Then you move out, probably to a different city, and you relationship is reduce to perhaps ten days per year. As Tim Urban pointed out, that leaves you perhaps 300 days together for the rest of your (and their) live, less than in any given year of your childhood. The time together seemed to be infinite, but suddenly it is not anymore.

Photo: Rafael Albaladejo on Pixabay

But I do not want to get sentimental today. This reflection came about because we saw a movie where the main characters were discussing VHS video tapes, those strange relics from the last decades of the 20th century. The war between the VHS and Betamax formats was long and cruel, and ended with the victory of the former around 1988 due to its price advantage, which much higher than the small technical and quality advantage of the Betamax recording systems. Still, the victory was pyrrhic, because by year 2000 the DVD had gained so much traction that it had effectively wiped out the tape formats from the market. Unsurprisingly, the war was repeated almost identically twenty years later when Sony's Blu-ray disc won over Toshiba's HD DVD.

Another system that experienced a brief but impressive moment of brilliance was the RAR format for file compression. As the internet grew more and more common, and the free email services became widespread, the limitations in bandwidth and storage capacity determined that the attachments in the messages should be limited to 10 MB in size. While this was perfectly fine for many application, certain types of digital media counted their size in tens or hundreds of megabytes. The RAR compressor came with an extremely powerful feature: it could automatically partition any file into as many pieces as necessary of a given size. Furthermore, if used without compression, putting the pieces together was a very fast operation, so sending a slide show of 55 MB was as easy as running the RAR compressor and sending the six resulting pieces attached to six separate emails. The email service provides realized soon enough that limiting the size of individual messages would not solve their storage problems unless they limited the total size of the mailbox, so most of them relaxed the single-message limited and RAR, while still available, fail into the oblivion for many once-avid users.

These are just a couple of examples of how life reinvents itself and manages to pose new challenges almost every day. It is wonderful how we fight to adapt to the new circumstances, which eventually become the new normal. Let us just hope that the grueling circumstances of the current pandemic will eventually go away and let us return to a semblance of what life was just one year ago. Have a nice evening.