longreads

Sandra Magnus: What It Is Like to Travel into Space

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Sandra Magnus was one of the four astronauts (along with Chris Ferguson, Doug Hurley, and Rex Walheim) who made up the crew of the last space shuttle mission, STS-135. In the most recent issue of Georgia Tech’s Alumni Magazine*, Sandra Magnus recounts what it is like traveling into space:

The thing that catches everybody by surprise, the thing you can’t train for, and the thing you’re constantly warned about as a rookie is that, when you get up there, you have to have a plan. You’re going to take your gloves off—where are you going to put them? You can’t just set them down. You have to put them in a bag, or under your chair. You can’t disconnect your five-point harness. Leave at least one band around your leg so you don’t just float up out of the seat. When you take your helmet off, you’ve got to get it in the bag. The recommended way to take your helmet off is to put the bag on your head, then disconnect your helmet and take it off as a unit. You’ve got to get out of your seat, and your parachute is going to want to float away as soon as you get up and disconnect from it. You’re in this bulky suit, so your footprint is rather large. The first time you get to space it’s a little overwhelming if you don’t have a clear idea of what you’re going to do with your stuff. You develop a step-by-step plan. “Take gloves off, put them under leg. Put the crew notebook on the Velcro on the console on the right side of my seat. Turn off the cooling unit. Disconnect the cooling unit.” These are the first 20 actions I’m going to take in space.

By the time you get up there, you’re just overwhelmed, because your brain’s busy processing the bizarre environment. You have work to do. You can’t just sit and look around with wonder.

A brief rumination on what kind of food they serve in space (it doesn’t sound so bad at all):

Living in space, on the station, you’re on a rotating menu. You see the same thing over and over and over again. The food in itself is actually really good. It’s a little higher in salt content than I would normally have. They need to do that, they claim. You get a decent variety, but you miss crunchy, and you miss fresh. And I miss melted cheese. I always look forward to a piece of pizza when I get home.

Every now and then you’ll get a cargo vehicle with a load of apples and oranges, onions and garlic. Crunching into an apple is very rewarding when they show up. And the oranges, they have that nice citrusy smell—that’s very nice.

I always liked the red beans and rice. The Japanese had a mackerel and miso sauce that tasted like fresh fish. It was awesome. I liked the cherry, blueberry cobbler. I liked the creamed spinach. Shrimp cocktail is good. A lot of the veggie dishes are good. The Russians’ mashed potatoes and mushrooms are very good.

I respect Sandra’s stance on being responsible, regardless of gender/class:

We’ve had women in the [Astronaut] Office since 1978. They represent 20 percent of the office. Which, if you look broadly at science and engineering, it mirrors pretty closely. It’s certainly as male-dominated as engineering.

It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female. It matters that people can count on you. You’re expected to contribute, pull your weight, react certain ways in an emergency. People’s lives depend on you. And you’ve trained with these people forever. They’re like your brothers. I feel like you know their sense of humor; you know their family really well. It’s like acquiring new family members.

A very good personal account overall.

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*I am a subscriber to the magazine, as I am a Georgia Tech alum. This is another excellent feature in the magazine.

An Investigative Look into Solitary Confinement

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The mission of the Dart Society is to connect and support journalists worldwide who advance the compassionate and ethical coverage of trauma, conflict and social injustice. In the latest issue, Susan Greene goes in depth reporting on solitary confinement in this country. The investigative piece paints a grim view of solitary confinement. It is difficult for the prisoners, but the reporting was a challenge as well:

Covering solitary is an exercise in inaccessibility.

Reporters’ visits and phone calls are out of the question.

State and county prisoners usually can be glimpsed only by their mug shots. The federal system makes no photos available of the people it locks up or the spaces they inhabit.

Family members can pass along information – if a prisoner chooses not to shield them from what isolation is really like.

“My philosophy is, I don’t care if you have a knife stuck in your back, you tell your mom that you’re okay,” Sorrentino writes. “Seeing how they looked at me on visits, handcuffed, shackled, chained to the floor and behind glass, killed me inside.”

Prison officials don’t help much with transparency or public accountability. They cite pending lawsuits and security risks for refusing to be interviewed. They have scoffed when I’ve asked if they’d consider passing a disposable camera or hand-held recorder to a man who hasn’t been seen or heard from in years. (“What do you think we are — bellhops at the Hyatt Regency?”) Officers are dispatched to berate journalists, even off grounds, for aiming lenses toward their prisons.

And a brief history of solitary confinement:

Solitary confinement was largely unused for about a century until October 1983 when, in separate incidents, inmates killed two guards in one day at the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Ill., which had replaced Alcatraz as home to the most dangerous federal convicts. The prison went into lockdown for the next 23 years, setting the model for dozens of state and federal supermaxes – prisons designed specifically for mass isolation — that since have been built in the name of officer safety. “Never again,” promised Reagan-era shock doctrinarians who set out at great cost to crack down on prison violence.

Administered by corrections officials, not judges, solitary confinement is a punishment beyond incarceration, removing prisoners not only from the rest of society, but also from each other and staff. It’s now practiced routinely in federal penitentiaries, state prisons and local jails under a number of bureaucratic labels: “lockdown,” “protective custody,” “strip cells,” “control units,” “security housing units,” “special management units” and “administrative segregation.” Federal justice officials say the different classifications prevent them from keeping track of how many people are being isolated. What is acknowledged even in official records is that the vast majority are men and that rates of pre-existing mental illness exceed the higher-than-average levels in general prison populations.

I loved this excerpt of how one prisoner, Jack Powers, spent his time writing to pass the time:

“I miss being around people. I miss being able to run on the track or walk on grass or feel the sun on my face…One time I kept a single green leaf alive for a few weeks. And one time I had grasshopper for a pet. And one time I made a dwarf tree out of yarn from a green winter hat, paper and dried tea bags. I made a guitar out of milk cartons, and it played quite well. I invented a perfect family – mom, dad and sister – so that we could interact and love one another. One time I wanted to take a bath, so I got into a garbage bag and put water in it and sat there. For a while I made vases out of toilet paper and soap and ink from a pen. I have done a thousand and one things to replicate ordinary life, but these too are now gone.”

Overall, a must-read piece.

Stephen Wolfram on Personal Data Analytics

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Stephen Wolfram, the designer of Mathematica, believes that someday everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves.

In a fascinating blog post, Wolfram admits that he’s been collecting data for many years (since 1990!), and until now, hadn’t had the chance to truly analyze the data. Using the data analytics tools in the latest release of Wolfram Alpha, Stephen Wolfram provides a summary of his outgoing and incoming email (on a daily and monthly basis), the keystrokes he’s used on his computers, how much time he’s spent on the telephone, and the number of steps he’s taken on a daily basis (since 2010). He makes the following observation about his data collection:

The overall pattern is fairly clear. It’s meetings and collaborative work during the day, a dinner-time break, more meetings and collaborative work, and then in the later evening more work on my own. I have to say that looking at all this data I am struck by how shockingly regular many aspects of it are. But in general I am happy to see it. For my consistent experience has been that the more routine I can make the basic practical aspects of my life, the more I am able to be energetic—and spontaneous—about intellectual and other things.

Wolfram mentions that the data he presents in the blog post only touches the surface of the kinds of data he’s collected over the years. He’s also got years of curated medical test data, his complete genome, GPS location tracks, room-by-room motion sensor data, and “endless corporate records.” I am guessing a secondary post from him will be forthcoming some day.

As for Wolfram’s conclusions about the future of personal analytics?

There is so much that can be done. Some of it will focus on large-scale trends, some of it on identifying specific events or anomalies, and some of it on extracting “stories” from personal data.

And in time I’m looking forward to being able to ask Wolfram|Alpha all sorts of things about my life and times—and have it immediately generate reports about them. Not only being able to act as an adjunct to my personal memory, but also to be able to do automatic computational history—explaining how and why things happened—and then making projections and predictions.

As personal analytics develops, it’s going to give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives. At first it all may seem quite nerdy (and certainly as I glance back at this blog post there’s a risk of that). But it won’t be long before it’s clear how incredibly useful it all is—and everyone will be doing it, and wondering how they could have ever gotten by before. And wishing they had started sooner, and hadn’t “lost” their earlier years.

Definitely check out Stephen Wolfram’s detailed and insightful post. And if you’re interested in data analytics, this site is a great resource. I also recommend watching the brief TED talk “The Quantified Self” by Gary Wolf.

Roberto Bolaño’s Labyrinth

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Labyrinth

Take a look at the photo above. It’s a real photograph, but in a story published in The New Yorker last month, Roberto Bolaño creates a (fictional) story for each of the individuals seen in the photo. He goes in depth hypothesizing on how the characters are named, how they are dressed, why they are or aren’t looking at the camera, what’s going on in the background, and ultimately into behavior of the characters. The title of the story is “Labyrinth,” and it is fascinating:

The photo was taken in winter or autumn, or maybe at the beginning of spring, but certainly not in summer. Who are the most warmly dressed? J.-J. Goux, Sollers, and Marc Devade, without question: they’re wearing jackets over their turtleneck sweaters, and thick jackets, too, from the look of them, especially J.-J.’s and Devade’s. Kristeva is a case apart: her turtleneck sweater is light, more elegant than practical, and she’s not wearing anything over it. Then we have Guyotat. He might be as warmly dressed as the four I’ve already mentioned. He doesn’t seem to be, but he’s the only one wearing three layers: the black leather jacket, the shirt, and the striped T-shirt. You could imagine him wearing those clothes even if the photo had been taken in summer. It’s quite possible. All we can say for sure is that Guyotat is dressed as if he were on his way somewhere else. As for Carla Devade, she’s in between. Her blouse, whose collar is showing over the top of her sweater, looks soft and warm; the sweater itself is casual, but of good quality, neither very heavy nor very light. Finally, we have Jacques Henric and Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. Henric is clearly not a man who feels the cold, although his Canadian lumberjack’s shirt looks warm enough. And the least warmly dressed of all is Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. Under her light, knitted V-neck sweater there are only her breasts, cupped by a black or white bra.

All of them, more or less warmly dressed, captured by the camera at that moment in 1977 or thereabouts, are friends, and some of them are lovers, too. For a start, Sollers and Kristeva, obviously, and the two Devades, Marc and Carla. Those, we might say, are the stable couples. And yet there are certain features of the photo (something about the arrangement of the objects, the petrified, musical rhododendron, two of its leaves invading the space of the ficus like clouds within a cloud, the grass growing in the planter, which looks more like fire than grass, the everlasting leaning whimsically to the left, the glasses in the center of the table, well away from the edges, except for Kristeva’s, as if the other members of the group were worried they might fall) that suggest a more complex and subtle web of relations among these men and women.

If you’re a fan of fiction, don’t miss it.

Inside the World of Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping

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Mac McClelland took a “brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying” job at the Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide, Inc. This is her story:

The culture is intense, an Amalgamated higher-up acknowledges at the beginning of our training. He’s speaking to us from a video, one of several videos—about company policies, sexual harassment, etc.—that we watch while we try to keep our eyes open. We don’t want to be so intense, the higher-up says. But our customers demand it. We are surrounded by signs that state our productivity goals. Other signs proclaim that a good customer experience, to which our goal-meeting is essential, is the key to growth, and growth is the key to lower prices, which leads to a better customer experience. There is no room for inefficiencies. The gal conducting our training reminds us again that we cannot miss any days our first week. There are NO exceptions to this policy. She says to take Brian, for example, who’s here with us in training today. Brian already went through this training, but then during his first week his lady had a baby, so he missed a day and he had to be fired. Having to start the application process over could cost a brand-new dad like Brian a couple of weeks’ worth of work and pay. Okay? Everybody turn around and look at Brian. Welcome back, Brian. Don’t end up like Brian.

Pretty harrowing.

Alain de Botton on Religion and Society

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In the Saturday essay for The Wall Street Journal, Alain de Botton considers how religion influences society. After contemplating specific examples (such as Catholic Mass), he comes to the following conclusions:

Religion serves two central needs that secular society has not been able to meet with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in harmonious communities, despite our deeply-rooted selfish and violent impulses; second, the need to cope with the pain that arises from professional failure, troubled relationships, the death of loved ones and our own decay and demise.

Religions are a repository of occasionally ingenious concepts for trying to assuage some of the most persistent and unattended ills of secular life. They merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition and for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture—a range of interests whose scope puts to shame the achievements of even the greatest secular movements and innovators.

It feels especially relevant to talk of meals, because our modern lack of a proper sense of community is importantly reflected in the way we eat. The contemporary world is not, of course, lacking in places where we can dine well in company—cities typically pride themselves on the sheer number and quality of their restaurants—but what’s significant is that there are almost no venues that can help us to transform strangers into friends.

He brings up an excellent point: if I go to a restaurant alone and order a sit-down meal, is it my intention to be left alone? Perhaps I want to be entertained. Perhaps I want to hear others’ stories.

The large number of people who patronize restaurants suggests that they are refuges from anonymity and coldness, but in fact they have no systematic mechanism for introducing patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which they segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others. At a modern restaurant, the focus is on the food and the décor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections.

Patrons tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely reaffirmed existing tribal divisions. Like so many institutions in the modern city (libraries, nightclubs, coffee shops), restaurants know full well how to bring people into the same space, but they lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there.

Which leads to de Botton to propose the following:

With the benefits of the Mass and the drawbacks of contemporary dining in mind, we can imagine an ideal restaurant of the future, an Agape Restaurant. Such a restaurant would have an open door, a modest entrance fee and an attractively designed interior. In its seating arrangement, the groups and ethnicities into which we commonly segregate ourselves would be broken up; family members and couples would be spaced apart. Everyone would be safe to approach and address, without fear of rebuff or reproach. By simple virtue of being in the space, guests would be signaling—as in a church—their allegiance to a spirit of community and friendship.

Therein, guests would be able to ask each other introspective questions–What do you regret? Whom can you not forgive? What do you fear?”–and over time, our fears of strangers would subside. This sounds like a marvelous idea.

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Note: this essay is part of Alain de Botton’s newest book, Religion for Atheists, to be published in March 2012.

Remembering Anthony Shadid

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It is with great sadness that I learned of Anthony Shadid’s death yesterday. He was an intrepid, extraordinary reporter for publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting twice: in 2004 for his coverage of the United States invasion of Iraq and the occupation that followed and in 2010 for his coverage of Iraq as the United States began its withdrawal.

His obituary in The New York Times appears here, but I wanted to highlight pieces about/by him below, all of which are a must-read:

1) “Libya Struggles to Curb Militias as Chaos Grows” [The New York Times; published February 2012] — the last piece Shadid filed for The New York Times.

2) “Syria’s Sons of No One” [The New York Times; published: August 2011]

3) “4 Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality” [The New York Times; published March 2011]

All of us had had close calls over the years. Lynsey was kidnapped in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004; Steve in Afghanistan in 2009. Tyler had more scrapes than he could count, from Chechnya to Sudan, and Anthony was shot in the back in 2002 by a man he believed to be an Israeli soldier. At that moment, though, none of us thought we were going to live. Steve tried to keep eye contact until they pulled the trigger. The rest of us felt the powerlessness of resignation. You feel empty when you know that it’s almost over.

They bound our hands and legs instead — with wire, fabric or cable. Lynsey was carried to a Toyota pickup, where she was punched in the face. Steve and Tyler were hit, and Anthony was headbutted.

Even that Tuesday, a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn’t matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman.

4) “What He Knew” [Columbia Journalism Review; published November 2011]

5) “A Boy Who Was ‘Like a Flower'” [The Washington Post; published March 2003]

He will be missed.

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Update (2/18/2012): The New York Times has an excellent tribute to Anthony Shadid here. Turns out, Shadid filed another piece for the paper just before his death. It was published posthumously by The Times today.

Equity and the Banking System

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Writing in London Review of Books, Andrew Haldane provides a brief history of banking (with emphasis on the U.K. banks) and considers the too-big-to-fail conundrum:

Consider the effects of the too-big-to-fail problem on risk-taking incentives. If banks know they will be bailed out, those holding their debt will be less likely to price the risk of failure for themselves. Debtor discipline will therefore be weakest among those institutions where society would wish it to be strongest. This encourages them to grow larger still: the leverage cycle isn’t merely repeated, but amplified. The doom loop grows larger. The biggest banks effectively benefit from a disguised, and growing, state subsidy. By my estimate, for UK banks this subsidy amounts to tens of billions of pounds per year and has often stretched to hundreds of billions. Few UK government spending departments have budgets this big. For the global banks, the subsidy can reach a trillion dollars – about eight times the annual global development budget.

We have arrived at a situation in which the ownership and control of banks is typically vested in agents representing small slivers of the balance sheet, but operating with socially sub-optimal risk-taking incentives. It is clear who the losers have been in the present crisis. But who are the beneficiaries? Short-term investors for one. More than anyone else, they benefit from a bumpy ride. If their timing is right, short-term investors can win on both the upswings (by buying) and the downswings (by short-selling) in financial prices. Bank shareholding has become increasingly short‑term over recent years. Average holding periods for US and UK banks’ shares fell from around three years in 1998 to around three months by 2008.

Bank managers have benefited too. In joint-stock banking, ownership and control are distinct. That means managers may not always do what their owners wish. They may seek to feather their own nests by making decisions that boost short-term profits and thereby justify an increase in their own pay. Such decisions may also increase banks’ vulnerability to shocks. In an attempt to avoid this problem, shareholders have sought to align managerial incentives with their own. One way of doing that, increasingly popular over the past decade, has been to remunerate managers not in cash but in equity or using equity‑based metrics. This can generate hugely powerful pecuniary incentives for managers to act in the interests of shareholders. At the peak of the boom, the wealth of the average US bank CEO increased by $24 for every $1000 created for shareholders. They earned $1 million for every 1 per cent rise in the value of their bank. But such equity-based contracts also set up some peculiar risk incentives. In the 19th century, managers monitored shareholders who monitored managers; in the 21st, managers egged on shareholders who egged on managers. The results have been entirely predictable. Before the crisis, the top five equity stakes were held by the CEOs of the following US banks: Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Countrywide. We know how these disaster movies ended.

The evolution of banking as I have described it has satisfied the immediate demands of shareholders and managers, but has short-changed everyone else. There is a compelling case for policy intervention. The best proposals for reform are those which aim to reshape risk-taking incentives on a durable basis. Perhaps the most obvious way to tackle shareholder-led incentive problems is to increase banks’ equity capital base. This directly reduces their leverage and therefore the scale of the risks they can take. And it increases banks’ capacity to absorb losses, reducing the need for taxpayer intervention. Over the past few years, this case has been pushed by regulatory reformers. Under the so‑called Basel III agreements struck in 2010, banks’ minimum equity capital ratios will rise fivefold over the next decade, from 2 per cent to close to 10 per cent of assets for the largest global banks. That is a significant shift. Will it be enough?

 

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

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As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist…

This is a fascinating New York Times piece that explores how stores monitor shoppers’ behavior and then market to them accordingly, with the hope they come back to the store and spend more money. The NYT piece focuses on Target, and in particular, pregnant shoppers… The central question: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?

First, the background of how Target monitors shoppers in stores using a unique Guest ID:

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own.

Much of the piece focuses on human behaviors, and how these behaviors become habits if they’re consistently repeated:

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What’s unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be.

My favorite part of the piece is about Febreze, a product that P&G initially marketed to combat orders. Unfortunately, it was a dud. Turns out, P&G was marketing Febreze as a *way* to remove odors, but what made it more effective was convincing people to use the product as a reward after the routine of cleaning (i.e., it was re-marketed as a reward):

And so Febreze, a product originally conceived as a revolutionary way to destroy odors, became an air freshener used once things are already clean. The Febreze revamp occurred in the summer of 1998. Within two months, sales doubled. A year later, the product brought in $230 million. Since then Febreze has spawned dozens of spinoffs — air fresheners, candles and laundry detergents — that now account for sales of more than $1 billion a year. Eventually, P.& G. began mentioning to customers that, in addition to smelling sweet, Febreze can actually kill bad odors. Today it’s one of the top-selling products in the world.

A note on how Target sent ads and coupons to expectant mothers without making them upset:

“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.” But for pregnant women, Target’s goal was selling them baby items they didn’t even know they needed yet.

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

The conclusion is startling: your favorite department store will be (if it isn’t already) sending you coupons for products you desire before you even know you want them…

Brainstorming Doesn’t Work

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Jonah Lehrer has a good piece in The New Yorker on the brainstorming myth. Briefly, brainstorming doesn’t work:

The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.

The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientists gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. The results were a sobering refutation of Osborn. The solo students came up with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative. Although the findings did nothing to hurt brainstorming’s popularity, numerous follow-up studies have come to the same conclusion. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.

In the piece, Lehrer discusses the famous Building 20 on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (I’d never read or heard of it before reading this piece), which turned out to be a hub for creative work (this is where Chomsky got his start as a world-renowned linguist):

Room numbers, for instance, followed an inscrutable scheme: rooms on the second floor were given numbers beginning with 1, and third-floor room numbers began with 2. Furthermore, the wings that made up the building were named in an unclear sequence: B wing gave onto A wing, followed by E, D, and C wings. Even longtime residents of Building 20 were constantly getting lost, wandering the corridors in search of rooms. Those looking for the Ice Research Lab had to walk past the military recruiting office; students on their way to play with the toy trains (the Tech Model Railroad Club was on the third floor, in Room No. 20E-214) strolled along hallways filled with the latest computing experiments.

The building’s horizontal layout also spurred interaction. Brand quotes Henry Zimmerman, an electrical engineer who worked there for years: “In a vertical layout with small floors, there is less research variety on each floor. Chance meetings in an elevator tend to terminate in the lobby, whereas chance meetings in a corridor tended to lead to technical discussions.” The urban theorist Jane Jacobs described such incidental conversations as “knowledge spillovers.”

Building 20 was full of knowledge spillovers. Take the career of Amar Bose. In the spring of 1956, Bose, a music enthusiast, procrastinating in writing his dissertation, decided to buy a hi-fi. He chose the system with the best technical specs, but found that the speakers sounded terrible. Bose realized that the science of hi-fi needed help and began frequenting the Acoustics Lab, which was just down the hall. Before long, Bose was spending more time playing with tweeters than he was on his dissertation. Nobody minded the interloper in the lab, and, three years later, Bose produced a wedge-shaped contraption outfitted with twenty-two speakers, a synthesis of his time among the engineers and his musical sensibility. The Bose Corporation was founded soon afterward.

So what kind of interactions are the most useful for sparking creativity? Jonah Lehrer concludes:

The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant—not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism—that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.