Lessons from megapodes: You can waste a lot of time trying to save time

In his book Last Chance to See (co-authored with Mark Carwadine), Douglas Adams describes nesting by megapode birds. Megapodes don’t build a typical next out of sticks and feathers and mud and the like. Instead, they build these enormous mounds, stacked with decaying vegetable matter.  Compost, basically. As the compost decays, it generates enough heat to incubate the megapode’s eggs.

In his often imitated but never equalled style, Adams wrote:

So all the megapode has to do to incubate its eggs is to dig three cubic yards of earth out of the ground, fill it with three cubic yards of rotting vegetation, collect a further six cubic yards of vegetation, build it into a mound, and then continually monitor the heat it is producing and run about adding bits or taking bits away.

And thus it saves itself all the bother of sitting on its eggs from time to time.

Put like that, it doesn’t seem like that much of a time saver.

To get those numbers of megapode nest size to put into his book, Adams had to do some calculating. Two facts about Adams are relevant here.

1. He was an early Apple fanboy.
2. He was a notorious procrastinator.

Not satisfied with pen and paper or a spreadsheet, Adams wrote a complete program in HyperCard to calculate the volume of megapode nests on his Mac. It is a rather beautiful little app for the time.

Adams was naturally aware of the parallel between himself and the megapode.

I’ve just spent a cheerful hour of my time writing a program on my computer that will tell me instantly what the volume of the mound was. It’s a very neat and sexy program with all sorts of pop-up menus and things, and the advantage of doing it the way I have is that on any future occasion on which I need to know the volume of a megapode nest, given its basic dimensions, my computer will give me the answer in less than a second, which is a wonderful saving of time. The downside, I suppose, is that I cannot conceive of any future occasion that I am likely to need to know the volume of a megapode nest(.)

I see a tendency in a lot of scientists (myself included) to build megapode nests. Because some existing solution fails in one way, we will create elaborate schemes and software to do something that is ostensibly “better” in that one way. 

The amount of time spent can be large.

The potential re-use of that solution for yourself, never mind others, can be tiny.

And the moral of the story is: Before you start some project because you don’t like the existing solutions, ask if you’re acting like a megapode parent.

External links

Douglas Adams’s megapode next volume calculator

 Picture from here.