The Last Word

After my apocalyptic forecasts for 2012 in last month's column, I thought that we should shun the real world a little and look at some theories - but theories that have definite application in everyday life.

It has struck me recently that we are all stuck in a variety of games: from the Euro debt crisis, to trying to maximise the selling price of cement, from being married to the same person for decades, to deciding to pay - or not pay - your taxes. Many of these situations can be described using 'game theory,' perhaps better termed 'interactive decision theory.' This branch of mathematics (and philosophy and biology) can suggest the optimum strategies to follow in order to maximise your outcome or the outcome of everyone in the game - the two situations not always being the same.

At the moment we are busy staring into our crystal ball, trying to work out if 2012 is going to be a good year, a mediocre year or a bad year. Let's hope that it's not another 2009 or 2010. However, I thought that it might be useful to have a look at a few possible flash points, since being forewarned is akin to being forearmed.

Iran: I've visited five times, and have lots of Iranian contacts and friends: it's a big, populous country with friendly, polite people, great food and awe-inspiring scenery, architecture, culture and history. However, the fly in the ointment is that Iran seems to be determined to build its own nuclear weapons, even though Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa forbidding the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons on August 9, 2005¹. Allied to its pre-stated aim to obliterate its near-neighbour Israel, this is a potentially tricky situation. (No-one seems to question the right of the US, the UK, France, China and Russia's rights - or not - to own and control nuclear weapons: India, Pakistan, North Korea and possibly Israel² all took the decision to develop them anyway, on the basis that it is very difficult to stop a sovereign nation doing what it wants to within its own borders, without invading it).

One of my habits at work is to read a book during my lunch break. Earlier in the year I managed to finish Darwin's 'The origin of species,' which was a fascinating book, full of first hand experience of breeding pigeons and of the sex lives of the Cirripedia (barnacles to you and I). He was a great thinker, but all the way through the book, I kept saying to myself, 'Ah, if only you had known about plate tectonics,' and 'Ah, the wonders that would be revealed to you if you had known about DNA.' He was certainly ahead of his time, but Darwin was no writer: his circumlocutions and plumpness of prose make reading 'The Origins' a fairly arduous undertaking.

One of my favourite odd facts is that the can opener was invented 50 years after the invention of the can. The original heavy metal cans had to be opened with a hammer and chisel for half a century, before the first practical tin opener was patented. Development of the electric light bulb took a lifetime - more than 75 years from the first experiments to the time of Edison's first patents for a commercially practical bulb.

I was recently in conversation with one of the delegates at the wear and maintenance conference in Ankara, and the slightly bizarre topic of whether or not it was possible to have a favourite cement plant came up. The gentleman I was speaking with was a product specialist for an Indian cement services company and had visited around 80% of India's cement plants. Before he named any plants, I asked him what his criteria would be for naming his favorite plants. "Well," he said, "I guess it would start off with being a clean plant, one that is well-maintained, one with a nice simple layout, not built higgledy-piggledy. Yes that would be a good plant."