Ken Tilton  <kentilton@gmail.com> wrote:
+---------------
| Rob Warnock wrote:
| ...[trimmed]...
| 
| I might name that category K3 after the day I got stuck at some 
| innocuous point on a rock climb called Kascading Krystal Kaleidoscope, 
| because there were two perfectly even ways to proceed, each with a small 
| problem, but each on the face of it seeming dead easy, so each could 
| tempt me away from the other as being easier, yet once settled on seem 
| dicey opening the door to the other. I finally made one of the moves and 
| when my partner joined me on the ledge ten minutes later he demanded to 
| know WTF I had been doing, it was easy. He said he had never seen me 
| like that, and in fact /while/ I was stuck I noticed the phenomenon.
| 
| This is close to "hunting", as in automatic transmissions on an upgrade 
| and autofocus lenses faced with fuzzy scenes, but different I think...
+---------------

Probably not "hunting" per se [which is closer to the phenomenon of
"Pilot-Induced Oscillations" (PIOs) which can cause "porpoising", e.g.,
<http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief2.asp?ev_id=20001207X03069&ntsbno=ATL95LA064&akey=1>,
especially when landing tail-wheel planes], but more like the classic
"approach-approach conflict", e.g., the dog starving between two bowls
of food.

+---------------
| Next metaphor: coding encounters of the third kind? This is a first for 
| me: the code is starting to write itself. Better put, the design is 
| starting to architect itself, I am still writing the code of course. I 
| am thinking of the actual encounter with the aliens, the point at which 
| the computer takes over in the musical conversation after initial 
| guidance from its programmers.
| 
| I have a clear sense of not having written this code. I have a pretty 
| good memory, and I am looking now at mechanisms and frameworks I never 
| intended or conceived. 
+---------------

Isn't this called "being in the zone"? It's said to happen to
athletes all the time.


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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