Datum Point

It has been over two months since my last post here; the longest period of inactivity ever since I restarted this hobby of writing back in 2011.

You would have to be (blissfully) living under a rock to say that there wasn’t much going on during that time – both locally and globally – which warranted my thoughts and perspectives… However, that was the primary crux of the problem – that there was too much going on in such a very short time scale.

Pandemic, protests, riots, political shenanigans, changes in employment, potty-training, departures for adventures unknown… all of it tended to be overwhelming and the reason for several open Word documents with unfinished idea threads itching to be rectified.

The biggest one is that of datum points.

In my voracious reading of both fictional and non-fiction accounts of submarine warfare, the idea of a datum point stands out as relevant to many issues we see unfolding every time we become engrossed in social and traditional media.

In the operational sense, a datum point is basically some sort of signal or transient indication of a noteworthy contact. Nothing is known other than there is something out there on a certain bearing. Additional characteristics like type, distance to, and speed of the contact are impossible to derive from just that one indication; therefore, it is necessary to compile more information to cultivate a better understanding of the overall relationship between the sensor and source.

Of course, going in a straight line would help – the additional bearings of any subsequent noises from the source, when compared to the movement of the receiver over a given period of time, generates more data. Unfortunately, it might not offer an accurate representation of any movement relative to the receiver: is it moving slower than the sensor in the opposite direction, or is it moving faster on a converging/diverging course?

The solution could be changing the sensor platform’s speed or – even better – to change direction to build more baselines (or tracking legs) upon a firm signal. In doing so, you gain different perspectives of what is going on with that which you are focused upon… and what to do about it.

How does this relate to the chaos that has been 2020?

Any given event – whether a slow-progressing pandemic or rapidly shifting social unrest/protest/riots/whatever – are all basically datum points: a moment in history where an internal or external force interacts with the inertia of a group, nation, or society in some strange variation of social Newtonian physics. Unlike the hard reality of physical science, there are no firm equations to consider as to how much force was imparted, for how long, and what this means for the new direction. These datum points are imperfect, usually imperceptible as “one” event, and messy; they are sloppy points of human reference.

However, they are datum points nonetheless.

The problem is, we have grown addicted to the immediate, reliant upon the closest version of absolute we are comfortable with, and resistant to contradictory information. We miss these datum points because of yet another ASW (anti-submarine warfare) term: signal-to-noise ratios – where the cacophony of the environment drowns out the interesting signals. Like arctic ice floes of grinding opinion and angst, the din of the online world is nearly impossible competition for calm voices of moderation and reason.

What made these analogies come to mind back in late May was the fact that we tend to forget that, as time progresses and more information becomes available, the understood facts of an issue, event, or person becomes more tangible in relation to the larger causes and effects they were central to.

While I was mulling this post over earlier today, I scribbled a note:

Emotion of the moment becomes the regret of reaction; justice is not instantaneous, but injustice is immediate.

Ideally, we would need more time to better develop these societal datum points – to better understand how they have come to the critical mass that they are, how to implement short- and long-term compromises and plans, and what today will mean for tomorrow.

We don’t have that time, unfortunately; it would seem that we are always one more moment past some odd point of no return…

…Or do we have that time to change things, the ability to stop – just for one moment – and consider the course we would rather take… not for our own gratification, but for “the good of the many”?

As I have written before – it is not up to anyone but the person in the mirror.