The long, long childhood of the Greeks

One of the weirder aspects of Athenian life was that a man was legally a child until his father died.

Thus when he rose to power, Pericles was the foremost man in Athens...and a child.

The effect of legal childhood was that a man had to run to Daddy for his allowance from the family estate (if the family was wealthy), for approval of any commercial action, in fact for approval of just about anything.

You might think reasonable fathers would interpret the requirement loosely, giving their 30+ year old sons lattitude to make their own decisions. But you'd be wrong. There are numerous known instances where fathers reversed decisions they didn't like made by their fully grown sons.

Xanthippus, the son of Pericles, thought his allowance from the family estate was niggardly. (It probably was...Pericles had a reputation that way). Xanthippus was a fully grown man with a demanding wife, who expected the son of the most powerful man in the city should be able to do better by her. So Xanthippus borrowed money from lenders to maintain his lifestyle. It all came out when repayment fell due. Pericles was furious. He repudiated his son's agreement, and sued the lenders for fraud against him. Why fraud? Because the lenders were demanding money based on an unenforcable contract with a legally incompetent child.

This system reached its ultimate ridiculous position when the great playwright Sophocles, at the age of 90, was sued by his eldest son Iophon. Iophon wanted his father declared mentally incompetent so he could take control of the family estate. Family dinners must have been interesting affairs while this was going on! But it's hard not to feel some sympathy for Iophon; at the age of about 60 he would still have had no more legal status than a 12 year old. Sophocles defended himself in court by reciting, on the spot, the ode to Athens from his latest unpublished work, Oedipus at Colonus. The poetry was so brilliant that the jury dismissed Iophon's suit, who one can imagine got a sound spanking from Daddy when they got home.

The three numbers that scare me: 90, 95 and 99

Back when I was doing project management (for software development, but that's irrelevant here), there was an amusing and frequently ineffective ritual that I carried out on a regular basis. It was called getting status updates from the team.

It worked like this. Let's say Fred has been assigned a 1 week task, which he began on Monday morning last week. It is now first thing Monday morning this week.

I could, in theory, have collected Fred's status update at close of business on Friday afternoon, but that wouldn't have been playing according to the rules, because everyone knows there is an infinite amount of time available during the weekend to finish a job.

So, it is Monday, and Fred's job is due. Needless to say Fred does not volunteer it, so I go to him.

Gary: How's that task going?

Fred: It's 90% done.

or

Fred: It's 95% done.

or (and this means Fred's task is in deep trouble and is going to be very, very late)

Fred: It's 99% done.

The answer to the last one is easy...

Gary: Oh good! Then I'll stand behind your back for the next 24 minutes while you finish it, shall I?

Because 1% of 40 hours is 24 minutes. And Fred replies:

Fred: Oh...uh...well, there's this problem and that problem...none of which are my fault of course, and...how about Wednesday?

Wednesday is actually code for end of the week, making a 100% overrun.

Gary: So it's not 99% done, is it? It's more like, 50%.
Fred: Errrr...guess so.

Now you might argue I should have checked with Fred halfway through, to make sure he was on track, and you'd be right. I did check with Fred halfway through, at the end of Wednesday last week, and he replied, "Oh, I'm going fine. It's half done!" Because, you see, Fred can count to 5 (probably) and he knows that on day 3 he should be halfway done. He didn't actually check to see if he was halfway done, he merely said that, because that irritant Gary was bothering him again, and this was the right way to get rid of the irritant.

The funny thing is, the one week task that Fred has screwed up on, was scheduled on his own estimate. Whenever possible, I did bottom up scheduling in which the person who had to do the job was the one who decided how long it would take, and that's what went into the schedule.

This teaches a hugely important lesson:

People are really, really bad at estimating how long it will take them to do things.

By bad I mean, I kept records of how long people said it would take them, and how long it really took them, and on average, it took 3 times longer than they said.

I call this the fudge factor, and used to keep records of everyone's personal fudge. The ratios varied per person from about 1 to 5, 3 being the average. I only once met someone who had a fudge factor less than 1; his was about 0.7. That guy had two PhDs, one in engineering and the other in astrophysics, and had memorized the entire set of emacs commands. If you are familiar with emacs, you'll know this is like memorizing all of War And Peace, only harder because it doesn't make sense.

Although individual fudge factors varied widely, for any one given individual their fudge factor was remarkably consistent across many tasks and many estimates, even if the tasks were of a wildly different nature. If I asked how long it would take you to do the shopping, or to write some code, or to proofread your novel, you would be wrong by about the same ratio in every case.

So, what's your personal fudge factor? If you're not sure but want to find out, try writing down some estimates for things you'll be doing in the next couple of weeks, and then record start and stop times using a watch.

St Valentine's Day

It's St Valentine's Day, so what better time to talk about...aphrodisiacs.

Our word aphrodisiac comes from Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of Love.

Aphrodite was a girl who got around. I suppose that's part of the job description.

Her most famous lover was Adonis. Adonis was killed by the God Ares who'd transformed himself into a boar (the pig kind, not the party kind) to off his rival. The death of Adonis made it into religious festivals, paintings, and the odd poem.

A guy called Theophrastus, who was a student of Aristotle's, had a few things to say about aphrodisiacs. He declared that corn-flag, which has a bulbous root and which, "boiled, pounded and mixed with flour, makes bread sweet and wholesome," would work as an aphrodisiac.

Truffles, garlic, leeks, and a type of orchid called satirio were all considered aphrodisiacs. So for dinner tonight, I recommend truffle and leek soup with garlic.

It's said that Aristotle advised Alexander the Great not to let the soldiers drink mint tea, because it would make them horny. Not that there was much chance of soldiers drinking mint tea. Unwatered wine was more their thing. Hippocrates on the other hand, said that mint reduced your sperm count and caused erectile dysfunction.

The Greeks also practiced love magic. However, almost all the spells and charms I've come across are to improve male potency, so it seems what we're really looking at are early versions of viagra. In The Acharnians by Aristophanes there's a bride who's given a special wine to rub on the bridegroom every night to make sure he doesn't stray. Theophrastus, who I mentioned before, talked of a lotion which when rubbed on the penis produced 12 erections in succession. One assumes he tried it. That's not the only penis lotion, by the way. Ancient writings are chock-a-block full of penis lotions. The mind boggles.

Nestor's Cup is a rather cool love magic system which has survived. Here is a Wikimedia Commons of the underside of the cup.



The inscription underneath says:

I am Nestor's Cup,
Good to drink from.
Whoever drains this cup,
Desire for beautiful-crowned Aphrodite
will fall upon him.

Ritual butchering in Ancient Greece

Here's your trivia for the day. One of the reasons so little red meat was eaten in Ancient Greece was that all meat animals had to be ritually dedicated to the Gods before they could be slaughtered. No exceptions!

So if you wanted chicken for dinner, you had to catch your chicken, and then hold the equivalent of a church service before you were allowed to wring its neck and start plucking. This was a pain in the neck for more than just the chicken.

The same rule did not apply to fish. Seafood was just plain easier if you were a Greek.

Backup systems for writers

Having abandoned a life as an ultra-techie to become an author writing in classical times is a bit of a jump, to put it mildly. One which I am enjoying immensely, btw.

You couldn't think of two more radically different careers, however, my old life does help my new in a couple of ways. The first is, I apply the principals of project management to writing novels. Which is to say, I get the job done. (I may regret that assertion come next deadline...)

Secondly, my backup system, to be immodest about it, is immaculate.

The first thing to notice about the backup requirements for a writer is that they are really small. A 90,000 word manuscript in Microsoft Word comes to about 1.2MB. The same in OpenOffice's equivalent Write application (which, btw, I much prefer), is no more than 300K. You could store this on the head of a pin.

There are three levels of disaster you need to cover:

1. Your computer is stolen or blows up.
2. Your office is burgled and everything taken.
3. Your house burns to the ground. (Sorry, Travis)

Saving a spare copy of the manuscript on your own computer does not cut the mustard, not even for the lowest level of disaster. It is essential you copy your manuscript to a drive external to your work machine. If you are a nomal human bean, you won't do this religiously every day, so you also need to automate the copy.

My own backup system is over the top for writing, but it's a legacy of my old job and since it works well I'm not going to change it.

I have ethernet cable laid from one corner of the house, where the office is, to the far opposite corner of the house. In the opposite corner I've installed a network drive.

I have configured all our PCs, using the built-in Windows backup system, to copy the entire contents of every data disk in the house to the network drive every night. Yes, it's a big network drive. There are two instances of this script on every machine, which run on alternate nights. So there are two total backups of every disk on the backup drive. That's to cover the risk that a machine might self-destruct while halfway through writing its backup.

This means any file lost can be recovered as long as the loss is noticed within two days. I'm not worried (much) about long term archiving because (a) if I tried, I would go mad, and (b) we have a zillion family photos and videos, and network storage of 10+ copies of everything isn't cost-effective. Occasional DVD copies work okay for archiving.

Online (internet) server space is very cheap these days, but extremely slow to copy to. A select number of crucial files, including the manuscripts, are copied to internet storage every night. This covers the possibility of the house burning down and me not being there to grab the backup drive. In fact, since my server space is in the US, it covers off the possibility of a giant meteor crashing into the earth and obliterating Australia. I may be reduced to my component atoms, but somewhere on the other side of the planet my words will live on.

It's this last piece I that I really think every writer should consider doing. Buy some internet server space. Create a scheduled task to copy your ms to somewhere far away from your house every night. If the worst occurs, you'll be thankful you did.