I'll be back ... [Washington and Elsewhere NE from 17 Jan]

[mike carey]

Hey guys, looking forward to renewing old acquaintances and making new ones on MLK/MAL weekend in DC. Hopefully I'll also catch up with some old military buddies from when I was a young RAAFie in the US all those years ago. (No, I don't think they'll be reading this!)

[+ Avalon]

I know what MLK stands for but not MAL. So I did a search.

 

https://www.leatherweekend.com/

 

What an interesting combination to celebrate at the same time!

[mike carey]

So, I've travelled to the US again, and I had a great time. I went to DC (with and without the shut down, so I saw some Smithsonian museums that I thought I'd miss), Philadelphia and New York. I didn't see everything I wanted to (hello TB) but I did see a lot. The $14 trip (I'm a senior, hey) to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island is amazing.

 

But one thing I wanted to talk about, unconscious bias. We all talk about it, about race, sex and privilege in general. Some of us decry it but it's real. I come from the southern hemisphere and from a right-hand drive country, and for both of those things I have my own unconscious bias.

 

Walking around New York, I tried to set my bearings. I tried to work out what was north, and what were other directions and I failed. In my mind, the sun is in the north and it moves anti-clockwise during the day. All my assumptions were wrong in the northern hemisphere where it is in the south and moves clockwise. My world was turned on its head.

 

Similarly, my world assumes right hand drive (and keeping to the left). On the Metro I see the signs that say where trains are going but I expect trains on the two tracks to be travelling in the opposite directions to those that they are. It's unsettling.

 

They are minor examples and examples where an unconscious bias is easily identified and explained, but they show how your worldview can be influenced by how you perceive reality.

 

In a similar vein, I have to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit when I am I the US. I understand both but think in Celsius. I was in the process of converting a temperature when talking to a guy in a hotel lobby when he stopped me and said that he was Canadian and 'spoke Celsius'. In NY I was talking about the weather and stopped and said that I was using Celsius, and the people I was talking to said, 'Oh, proper measurements'. (They were European.)