Will We Ever Know Everything?

There are just two major places from which to look: The Physical Sciences and the Philosophical and Spiritual realm.

In February, 2006, almost a decade ago, Scientific American published a special edition on scientific frontiers – topics, theories and questions – that were yet to be resolved, answered, or settled.  I kept a copy and today, some were answered but a lot more still remain as frontiers.  According to Moore’s Law, computational power doubles every two years.  Surely, by the end of the century we will have had enough in computing power, technological advances in new measuring tools and theories to finally know everything.  But something tells me, “Not so fast, old man.”

What has propelled our development as a species is our ability to collectively learn and more significantly to become adept at passing on what we learn from generation to generation with logarithmic multiplying effect.  From the discovery of the many ways fire can be harnessed to the invention of the wheel to gun powder and so on and on, we expect that we are equipped with almost limitless ability to forever expand our knowledge.  To know everything seems like something just barely over the horizon.

In the sciences empirical evidence is obviously the source for answers.  Philosophy and religion begins where the sciences end. But that has not been the case in the beginning. Philosophy and religion, in fact, preceded the sciences for far longer time than the latter had existed. We can even say that science came about because of the questions asked by philosophers early in history.  Science too became an arbiter between what people believed to be true or assumed to be the truth and the charlatans, magicians, and the superstitious. Chemistry is the child of alchemy, in fact. Science, philosophy and religion are believed by most to be seeking the same answers from three different points of view and via different processes. Meanwhile, religion is under assault, secularism is on the rise, and a philosophy degree is considered one of those very low on job prospects.

Science asks, makes conjectures, it does test after test repeatedly before concluding.  Religion and Philosophy can be somewhat interchangeable if not supportive of each other but both counterbalances the sciences.  What the sciences lack in assessing morality the latter grapples with those that cannot be tested in test tubes or with instruments but by the way we live our lives. Where the sciences say, “we don’t know”, the latter offer what is possible given a set of suppositions testable only by either logic or belief and faith.

Today, a high school senior with a B+ average in math and physics knows more about the subject than Isaac Newton ever did.  We know more about relativity theories than Einstein when he was alive.  The operative word is “know” and not necessarily “understanding”.  Einstein died knowing only one element of his General Relativity Theory and one of Special Relativity that were proven to be true.  Measuring instruments have not yet been invented then to test the other elements but in less than a century much have been proven to be correct, including perhaps what he thought he had gotten wrong but it turned out he was right all along.  And there was one field proposed by others that he could not get himself to believe or agree with – Quantum Mechanics - that had since been proven and he was wrong.  However, and this is very significant, and it is the reason he was recognized Person of the 20^th Century by Time magazine because his ideas had the most impact in human history.

Old Albert’s contribution is the one I look at because, contrary to popular belief, his theories were not stand alone or new concepts, but were built upon from previous works by other folks before him or contemporarily with others.  It was his so called thought experiments that put it all together. And that was where his genius came from.  He was not even strong in mathematics and needed help to get his thoughts the mathematical structure.  This is a good example of knowledge building on another, ad infinitum, but will it really go on?  For one thing the new knowledge he brought up overturned a few of Isaac Newton’s concepts that stood for over two centuries.  Einstein was known to have apologized as he stood in front of Newton’s statue at Cambridge University, England.

Albert was the man all right but two women, relatively unknown to the general public, made significant contributions in their own right to deserve a mention here.  And I promise to quote only one three-lettered formula, E=mc².

Emilie du Chatelet was born in 1706, died at age 42, and would have lived in obscurity as an aristocrat’s wife, albeit with a checkered romantic life, if not for her other ardent love - science.  As a side note, Voltaire, himself an intellectual giant and one of several of du Chatelet’s paramours praised her as a great man who just happened to be a woman. Her French translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica is still textbook material in France today. She improved on Newton’s theory on momentum and energy ideas but more importantly her advance ideas on light and its velocity was way ahead of her time. 

It was on those foundational thoughts on conservation of energy and light that, in no simple but indirect ways, led to E=mc².  We know ‘m’ to be mass but why ‘c’ for the speed of light?  It is from “celeritas”, Latin for swiftness or as an attribute of something very fast.  And what can be faster than light itself?

The other woman was Lisa Meitner who, like Einstein, was also a Jewish scientist but of Austrian citizenship who happened to do her research in Germany before the country fell into Nazism.  Albert was lucky to get out before Hitler’s campaign against the Jews begun while Meitner had to be smuggled out by Dutch scientist colleagues later.  Her work on nuclear physics is barely a footnote because her German mentor received the Nobel Prize for physics when Meitner had much to contribute to it; at the very least, she should have been a co-awardee. Unfortunately, at that time women were kept out of research leadership positions.  Ironically, the German mentor who remained in Germany in pursuit of splitting the atom corresponded with Meitner while she was in exile and continued to consult her ideas. It was, in fact, her insight and calculations that gave his mentor the edge towards nuclear fission to produce the first atomic bomb.  Fortunately for the Allied Forces, Germany was then under a barraged of U.S. and British air bombardment curtailing drastically its ability to produce heavy water.  Lisa Meitner solved the puzzle that physicists were grappling with.  They were bombarding the nucleus of uranium atoms hoping to see the nuclei increase in mass.  Instead what they observed was the opposite.  There was a loss of mass.  Meitner concluded that the loss of mass was due to the fact that some of it was being converted into energy as the atom’s nuclei were being split.

Meanwhile, Einstein wrote to FDR about unleashing the power of the atom by converting matter into energy through nuclear fission.  He warned that the Germans were close to doing it as he was tuned to the development there from fellow scientists.  Thus began the Manhattan Project and the rest is history.

This is just an example of how the speed of knowledge and information can perhaps lead humanity towards knowing everything.  It does seem like a feasible track, but is it?  It took less than seventy years from the first 120 foot flight at Kitty Hawk to landing on the moon.  The science for the lunar trip was Newtonian cosmology and the on board computer on the moon lander paled in comparison to a $10 hand held calculator today in terms of computational power.  We can go on to talk about leap frogging development in medicine, machines, engineering, computers, telecommunication, manufacturing, etc. and we will have to say that the multiplying effect will have no boundary by which to curtail our ability to know everything.  I happen to believe we are not likely ever to know everything.

1)      For every knowledge we gain about anything new questions emerge

When Anton van Leeuwenhoek first improved the microscope and saw clearly the structures of cells, when before that a bacterium was thought to be the smallest living matter we can see, scientists thought they had reached the wall on magnification. Now, electron microscopes had gone down to the level of the structure of DNA and we now can see a picture of the individual atom.  When we thought the atom, the nucleus and electrons comprised the smallest components of matter we now know about quarks and the Higgs boson. But the curtain is about to open up to “strings” as the basic building block of matter that are so small they can only be conjured in eleven dimensions.  String theory is sure to blow our mind, but eleven dimensions?  We can barely deal with four – Time being the fourth dimension.

2)      The Enigma of Time

Speaking of time, Einstein died not knowing that his theory on time was correct all along when solid proof later on was provided by super accurate atomic clocks.  Now we know that an atomic clock at the top of the Empire State building will run a little faster compared to a similar clock at the basement.  So, an executive who spends more time at the penthouse office will age faster than the janitor below by 100 millionth of a second in their lifetime.  That’s negligible, obviously, but when we’re talking GPS satellites 250 miles out in space the time differential can be so great that if it is not correctively synchronized every hour on the hour, you can be off by 6 miles after just a day of driving without correction; in a month, you could be in another time zone. Additionally you must also account and adjust for the speed of the satellite, because speed causes the clock to slow down.  I don’t think we will ever know why time behaves that way, except via Einstein’s equations.  We will not know for example if the twin paradox theory is true.  That is, if a twin astronaut leaves in a spaceship and travel at 90% the speed of light, he will come back (still alive, aging normally) but find that his twin brother is long gone because a few hundred years had elapsed. But Old Albert’s theory says that to be true.  Einstein doubted too that black holes could exist because his theory predicted that in a black hole the laws of physics will no longer work and time may actually stand still.

When Thomas Edison was asked what he thought of Einstein’s theories.  He replied, “I don’t think much about it because I don’t understand it”.

3)      Size Does Matter

Will the average human mind, even collectively of the six billion people in the world, be able to comprehend a solid block of iron the size of Mt. Everest compressed to a space occupied by a grain of sand?  Try contemplating a star ten times bigger than our sun, collapsing on itself from a sphere of 8.6 million miles in diameter into the size of a small city in a matter of ¼ of one second.  Einstein predicted it and today cosmic black holes are widely accepted to exist. Short of actually taking a picture of a black hole – we cannot because no light can escape from its clutches – it is beyond doubt that it exists.  It is estimated that our galaxy alone may contain millions of them and at the center is one super massive black hole that feeds on other very large objects, stars and even other black holes that come close to it.  We’ve established that light travels very fast – 186,000 miles per second – incomprehensibly swift but try to imagine that one of those flickering lights in the night sky left its source long before the collapse of the Roman Empire.  What about light that left its source when the dinosaurs were still roaming around?  That might seem frivolously pointless to even imagine the source of that light but think that its distance from us is a mere fraction of the girth of the universe. Some places we will never see because there is not enough time for light to reach us.  And yet, as incomprehensibly huge the universe is, the entire amount of visible matter (all the galaxies and stars combined) is a mere 5% or less of the total.  Now, we’re being told that 68% is dark energy and 27% dark matter.  If you say, “that is insane”, I am there to agree with you.  Then, are there intelligent beings somewhere in the vast universe who may know?

4)      We will not know what we cannot know

Let’s go inside the mind of a single fish, perhaps pretend to be one of hundreds in a school, lazily swimming around under twenty feet of water.  Think for a minute when out of the surface of the water from above came down a thin filament with a morsel of food attached to something like a curved fin and the fish next to you grabbed it quickly.  It was running away with the food when suddenly it was pulled up, yanked away with such force that it disappeared from view entirely in an instant.  It was gone.  How were you to explain what just happened?  Something from out of your world caused one of you to disappear.  You could be the Einstein of fishes but there was no way you could ever imagine what it is like above the surface of the water.  You were captive by the dimension of your own watery world.  You have no idea that other living things breathe not through the gills as you do and they inhabit the bottom of an ocean of air. As a fish you cannot know what you do not have the ability to know.

5)      Will we be able to read the Mind of God as Stephen Hawking suggested?

I recall a scientist, a Jesuit priest, if I remember correctly, who gave this analogy. 

Suppose we live as characters in a comic strip, drawn by an illustrator, who is thus the creator of the two dimensional world that we inhabit.  Suppose the creator gave us the power of life, the intelligence and free will to go about our life as we pleased; however, we are still confined to the pages of a flat paper.  One day, we began asking, “What is out there beyond our flat world?  Who created us?”  We do not see the extra third dimension, the depth that the illustrator has so he can actually see from above, while holding a pen or pencil, and see his characters “come to life” as he draws them.  He not only lives with the extra dimension to see from above what he was drawing, he was also experiencing the concept of time differently from how we do.

As hard as we try to know, using all the knowledge we can muster, we are still confined to a world from which we cannot get out from to see, “what’s out there?” We will never know using only the information we get from our own flat world to understand what’s outside of it. We need to transcend from that world in order to understand what’s outside of it.  It is only then that we can get a glimpse of who illustrated us.  That is where possibly, in my opinion, science can transition to philosophy and religion, just as the latter had transitioned to the former early in history.  How else do we go about it?  Insisting on only using science, with all its limitation, and ignoring another method of thinking to achieve the goal of knowing everything is sure to limit our ability to understand. 

This takes us back to the anonymous writer who said, 

“I’d rather not know some things than know absolutely about everything.  Trust me I know.”

6)      It is next to impossible to define consciousness

To quote Einstein again, he said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

The source of imagination is as varied as there are individual minds.  So, what is the human mind?  To have a working mind means to have consciousness.  And consciousness seems to defy science.  Something seems to be working outside of the physical brain.  At least many of us think so.  It is only through our mind that we can transport ourselves from here to somewhere else or to places only we can imagine, to any time other than now or yesterday, to what could have been instead of what really happened.  Only in our mind can we look at as many scenarios as we want before we decide to do anything, but alas, why are we only able to do or experience only one of them?

Finally, I leave you with this.  Today it is no longer just matter and energy that make up our world because information is admittedly the third component. Information – light, sound, touch, etc. – is how individual cells survive, how our ancestors made our journey to today possible, how everything works in nature, in fact.  Information is the medium by which we perceive reality.  Without information we, everyone and everything around us, the whole universe, in fact, ceases to exist. And the most important of all is the information we have in our mind. It must be conserved the same way as matter and energy, so where does it go when we cross the threshold of the great beyond?

When Rattlesnakes Don’t Rattle Anymore

This is an ecological and a metaphorically sociological and political look at the silencing of a rattle.

Each year in March, in a place called Sweetwater, Texas is the world’s largest rattlesnake round up, sponsored by the local Jaycees. Round up is, of course, a euphemism for mass killing of the snakes.  “Harvesting” would have been another euphemism.  It is a festival of sort – complete with a parade and a beauty contest for Snake Charmer of the year, carnival rides and a cook fest as well. The latter features the many ways a rattler can be prepared and cooked. This has gone on since 1958, I read, and apparently it is regulated in a way so that the rattlesnake population is hardly affected in an adverse way as to have caused a rodent population explosion which would be a bad thing.  I am not sure though if such a study has been made at all.  It is a fund raising event that benefits several civic projects but we’re told that the biggest benefit is in the collection of venom.  Not only does that provide a healthy supply of antidote for rattlesnake bite, there is ongoing research on other benefits from snake venom.  Foremost of the benefits is snake venom’s usefulness in fighting cancer cells and ability to control or mitigate the effects of tumor.

Why think about this at all? The average person will have no qualm with the snake round up.  Certainly the snakes are by themselves a public relations nightmare for anyone who will try to take up their cause, let alone find even a few sympathizers among the public.  Snakes are far from being photogenic and the flicking tongue does not present a pretty picture.  Dogs are still cute even with their drooling tongues hanging out and slobbering profusely but a snake that samples the air with its tongue to catch minute traces of airborne molecules and then swiping them at the roof of their mouth where the information is “read” with pinpoint accuracy is still a sinister look. We must understand that for a creature that has no legs or arms to hold anything close to its nose this is a superior adaptive ability. Yet, among hunters who must walk the fields on a hunt, snakes are as much a target as the prey they’re looking for.  Animal Rights activists may say something but given a choice they’d rather be defending guinea pigs and rats and other experimented-on animals than speak up on behalf of snakes.  Therefore, I will.

First, why does a rattlesnake rattle?  Like many venomous snakes these reptiles do provide warnings to animals which are not their prey or animals they cannot eat or don’t want to.  And venomous snakes that are without the ability to make noise advertise their presence instead in a different way - that is by having loud and bright colorful skin.  Coral snakes, certain vipers and tree snakes are good examples.  Typically non-venomous snakes are bland or have darker coloration.  Interestingly, certain non-venomous snakes pretend to be one by having colorful skin also as a survival adaptation so other creatures will leave them alone or keep their distance.  Poisonous frogs also warn with very bright colorful skin.  The rattle is mistaken by humans as a provocation whereas animals take it for what it is - a warning - and they stay away.  And remember that when a rattler is stalking a rat it is completely silent.

Venom to the snake is a resource it would rather not waste on anything it cannot eat.  It takes a lot for the snake to produce venom so it conserves it whenever it can. And often snakes would rather retreat than confront us and it is a last resort to strike at anything they do not wish to kill and eat.

Now then, when do rattlesnakes no longer rattle?  The story may surprise you.  Naturalists just recently discovered that in places where rattlers are heavily hunted, i.e. for the round up, there was eerie silence instead of the familiar sounds that typically betray the presence of the snakes.  Needless to say, the pickings were slim at these places but there was evidence that rattle snakes were present.  What rattle snakes they caught by sight had fused rattlers that no longer rattle.  The rattles are ring-like keratin tissues (similar material like finger nails or claws) that develop at their tails every time the snake sheds its skin. The rings are connected loosely to each other and when the snake shakes its tail we would hear the familiar rattle.  Some of the rattlers have these appendage atrophied because of a genetic mutation.  The snakes that do not rattle escape detection from the hunters and collectors and there lies the multiplying effect.  As the loud rattlers get caught the silent ones thrive and go on to pass their genes that are inherited by subsequent generations.  Soon we have silent venomous snakes.

We are now told that worse than a spine tingling sound of a rattler nearby is no sound at all.  We no longer benefit from the natural warning.  The rattlesnakes have become silent but are still equipped to defend themselves by striking at anything that threatens them.  It is another one of those unintended consequences that we put upon nature to resolve.  By the way, snake population around the world had been steadily declining that mystifies herpetologists (fancy way to call people who study snakes) who are not able to explain it.  There is, however, an exception in the case of the Burmese python explosive population growth in the Everglades in Florida and black snakes in Hawaii and Guam.  In this case, it is more about a combination of the lack of natural predators to control the snakes and because they are alien species to the habitat their prey is not equipped to identify or avoid them.  The Burmese pythons apparently were released by pet owners when the snakes got too big; the black snakes hitchhiked on airplanes to Guam and Hawaii.

The ecological lesson is that once we tamper with the eco-system by systematically going after either prey or predator the consequence is catastrophic to the health of wild life in general and sometimes to the environment, such as the case of the destructive changes in water systems and wetlands and flooding when beavers were hunted down uncontrollably for their fur early in history.  Anecdotally we hear stories when snakes were hunted down to near extinction in some places that resulted in the rapid population explosion of rats.  Rice and grain production from the field and at granaries was so adversely affected by the rampaging rats the people suffered as well.

Now we have a moral lesson – a metaphor of a sort in social and political discourse.  One of democracy’s most important attribute is freedom of speech.  It is because a democracy works when all sides are heard, discussed and decided upon by the people.  It ceases to be one when a monolithic voice takes over because that almost always happens when the government turns into a dictatorship that strives to silence any and all opposition.  It comes either from the persecution of the press or the press becoming an ally to restricting the voices of dissent with the aim towards the final eradication of anyone who opposes the prevailing ideology.  It works badly for either side of opposing ideologies when one tries to suppress the other’s ability to express.

Today, however, the silencing of opposing ideas is done more subtly.  It is done with what seems like an innocuous activity, even with the appearance of reasonableness.  It is called extreme political correctness.  It used to be an effective method to discourage racial slurs and sexual harassment, which was fine.  Unfortunately, it is now being used to silence anyone who speaks with dissenting opinions.

It has become a force now that the liberals employ with impunity against conservatives and conservative ideas.  Of course, it could also work the other way around but today universities and the political arena are fraught with it. Ms. Condoleezza Rice was forced to cancel a speech at Rutgers University because of protests from students. It marked the beginning of the silencing of opposing views that are contrary to those who profess another. It has now recently evolved into student power that is powerful enough to force a university president to step down and this movement is now escalating in many places of learning.  A symposium on free speech at Yale was disrupted by a student whose own ability to exercise free speech allowed him to at least temporarily stopped the discussions.  The mainstream media also has become an effective purveyor of political correctness and often against conservatism.

When one ideology prevails lopsidedly over another the danger is that the latter will lose its ability to rattle.  The silence will have serious repercussions.  A monolithic society or government will always turn into an indivisibly and inflexibly oppressive aggregation of people when reason and dissenting voices are diminished if not entirely silenced.  That is a dangerous condition.  Whoever is in power must be aware that silence does not mean the demise of an opposition.  It must understand that it is easier when opposing voices are heard – not just for the logical reasons – because that is the best way to understand and know them and perchance to work with them (one can only wish).  Worse than hearing the opposition is the silence that percolates underneath.  History teaches us that political power changes hands, dictatorships are toppled and ideologies change or evolve   even amidst every effort to silence the opposition.  Worse than hearing too much out of the political and sociological discourse is when one side no longer rattles.

As a footnote, in the Genesis story it was not a snake that tempted Eve.  The snake will tell us it does not have prehensile hands, let alone any appendage, to hold a fruit (and it was not an apple either), to entice Eve.  It is also untrue that Viking helmets had horns on them.  It started when a very imaginative costume director decided to put horns on Viking helmets in the first Wagnerian operas.  Since then even female opera singers in cartoons are almost always depicted wearing horned helmets.  Any Viking worth his salted beard would have had no use for horns on his helmet that would only have added extra weight and a hindrance during battle.

Life, Living, Death

Life

It was May, 2000, when at last the human genome project was completed.  What that meant in a nutshell is that the blueprint of what makes us human had been “read”.  Of course, we are not talking about sheets of paper drawings as in a house plan, or even a topographic picture that maps it all out.  It is more complicated than that and what makes it even more astounding is the microscopic size of this blue print.  A single cell is very, very small but imagine increasing its size to that of a basketball.  Inside it is the tennis ball size nucleus where in it resides our twig-like chromosomes (carriers of our individual characteristics).  A chromosome unravels as a very long continuous looped ladder-like structure with rungs connecting two parallel strands.  The analogy is that of pulling a loose thread from a knitted sock where a long strand of yarn unravels in a twisted pattern. The blue print is configured like that – a ladder-like structure twisted about in a helix. Each rung is made up of a pair of chemical bases labeled as the letters A, C, T and G, short for each chemical base name.  Interestingly, which makes it simple in a way, ‘A’ only pairs up with ‘T’ and ‘C’ with ‘G’. Nothing man has ever created comes close to the complexity of the DNA.  We’re told that in each of our DNA is the order and sequencing of these rungs that differentiates us from other living things and from each other.  The DNA is the information molecule that has what it takes to be you or me.

Francis Collins who was the Director of the Human Project Genome called the success equivalent to having read the language of life.  The language, however, had to be incredibly boring.  Just imagine reading a million-page-book with repetitive sequences of nothing but CG, GC, AT, TA over and over.  So scientists rely on computers to do the reading of over 3.1 billion rungs in that ladder.  All mammals have about the same number, some amphibians may have more but I read that there is a plant – a fern actually – that has a hundred times more as ours.  Now, try writing the blue print for that one.  Apparently someone did to make the determination that it is 100 times more than ours.

Every living thing has DNA, including plants.  We share 50 % of our DNA with a banana!  We and chimpanzees share 98 %.  Incredible as that may seem – about the banana, in particular – it is not at all, because we are told that everything that lives has in its ancestry a history that goes all the way back to a single cell life form just a little less than 4 billion years ago.  Let’s set aside for the moment the arguments from each opposing camps of creationism and evolution.  In fact, it is actually not about which side is right or wrong because, and this is very important, both can be right. Indeed, if we stop the debate and just say that the chronology of creation and evolution seems to match up except for the fact that we have “days” in creation and a few billion years here and there in evolution.  The fact of the matter is that the diversity of life is so phenomenal that from one end we have microscopic planktons and 150-ton blue whales at the other and everything in between. But we find DNA to be the most absolute common denominator.  In other words, no living thing is without a DNA, and DNA has a way of relating one living thing to another.

The Dalai Lama may be right after all although one Australian TV host made fun of it by joking with the revered spiritual leader that he (the latter) can order pizza by saying, “make me one with everything”.  Not only was that perplexing to the Dalai Lama he failed to catch the punch line. The TV reporter was teasing him about the spiritual concept that in the end we are all related one to the other and that means with every living thing.

From the frozen tundra to the black depths of a deep ocean to the vicinity of boiling sulfur lakes and volcanic calderas life manages to manifest its many forms. It has extraordinary adaptable attribute, it is flourishing, and defies imagination.  Life finds a niche anywhere and everywhere.  How did life become so easily possible here?  And why the inter dependence?  Everywhere we look we are reminded of the “balance of nature” but what does that really mean? Fortunately, the reason you are reading this is because life had produced us - a thinking intelligent creature with an ability to ask these questions.  Foremost of those questions is one that had been asked since the dawn of civilization that remains unanswered today; at least not to the unanimous satisfaction of everyone. First, there is this – is there really a meaning to life, and if there is, what is it?  And there is something we often forget to ask.  In life’s diverse landscape – from the simple amoeba to the jelly fish to the complex organization of harvester ants and termite colonies to how families of capuchin monkeys operate, and so on and on – how did one organism emerged to lay claim of dominion over others. Yet, we second guess with this, “Is human life more meaningful than all others and should not everything be considered along that line?  It is often times unintended hubris on our part to assume that we are responsible for many things that go wrong around us when it comes to the welfare and survival of other species.  That is why we have “protected species acts” imposed by governments when we destroy the habitats of other living things, so we need to limit our use of energy or reduce its ill effects and apportion the resources lest we destroy the environment, prevent cruelty to animals. That is deemed a civilized response; although the killing of people and the methods used have grown in sophistication war after war and expectedly through to the next one.  Even today the world has in its stockpile weapons with enough power to destroy itself many times over.  The quest for life’s meaning will lose its relevance.

The rise in worldwide population is self-ascribed to our nurturing nature and it didn’t take long to double it from 3 to 6 billion people despite the fact that the road we took to get there is littered with a history of tribal wars and escalating conflict that defy the very premise by which civilized society is based and the promise of lasting peace is a broken refrain repeated over and over. 

Civilization, its rise for the betterment of society, revolves around the value of life – human life. The New International version of Genesis says, “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." That we had done.  The other Biblical versions even used the word “dominion” over other creatures.  God rested on the seventh day after six days of creation.

On the other hand, historical, scientific and archeological evidence paint a different albeit parallel picture.  The development of life had gone on for billions of years and the fossil record is filled with life flourishing only to be snuffed out abruptly, then re-emerging to develop once more and then die out again.  There were five major mass extinctions but there were two dozen extinction events; the former were truly about extinctions in a massive scale cutting across a wide swath of organisms, while the latter was about certain species being wiped out due to competition or catastrophic events affecting specific habitats.  Incredibly life always managed to re-emerge, with species coming out better adapted than the previous ones. Dinosaurs whose fossils are the main draw in many natural science museums ruled for over 160 million years but incredibly were wiped out 67 million years ago by a catastrophic event suspected to be an asteroid impact.  It was that mass extinction that ushered in the age of the mammals. It was not until about just two hundred thousand years ago that our nearest ancestors appeared and it was likely not for another hundred thousand years after that when the first humanoids walked away from the safety of the forests to the plains of the savannah. 

Life, however one looks at its origin, is very persistent.  Life is not content with mere survival but it appears to have a goal towards perfection. 

Here is my last word on the subject of creation versus evolution.  If science has established that every living thing has a blue print of its DNA it is faced with the question as to whether it was written intentionally by a Creator or the language just simply manifested itself as a random occurrence over a period of time.  That is what faces every scientist and religious leader who wants to tackle the issue because regardless of which side one decides to hold on to there is always the lingering question, “So, what was it before this or that?” You see, even if we accept that science has proven, for example, that the whole universe began as an explosion from a single point at the beginning of time, there will always be the question, “So before that so called explosion, what was there?” A shrug is of course not a very good answer.  Stephen Hawking, the wheelchair bound physics laureate and bestselling author who is heavily involved in the quest for the Theory of Everything, answers with, “the universe has no boundary”, in time and space, whatever that means. The universe just simply existed all along and for that reason he supposes that it has no need for a Creator.  On the other hand if one camp agrees, for example, that evolution is a subset of creation whereby a Creator used evolution as a tool to make creation possible then the conversation could be less intractable.  But that is not likely to happen and that being the case it is therefore best not to engage debating it at all.

Life as we know it today is a complex phenomenon but only because we are here to contemplate it, examine it from both the spiritual and scientific points of view, to be astounded and awed by it, to be grateful for it and to cherish it.  However, more importantly and limited only to our humanity, we must live it.

Living

If life is God’s gift to every person, then living that life however one chooses to do it is a measure of the value we put into it. The manner by which we live that life also reflects how we relate to those around us – our closest loved ones, friends, co-workers and the community of people around us.  If life is the hardware then the manner of how we live is the operating program that sits in our brain and governed by software that is in our mind. 

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.”

William Shakespeare

Indeed, but we must never forget that the stage we get, the one we grew up in, the very place where everyone we know also inhabits, may not always be the one we prefer or dream about.  A suburban home in the western world is a lofty place, almost heavenly like to someone living in the streets of Calcutta, the remote region in Outer Mongolia, or the impoverished section of every congested city from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Mogadishu in Somalia to Tondo in Manila, Philippines.  But life must be lived whatever the stage we live in or by the state of one’s existence because life is persistent, resourceful and enduring.  Yet, often we somehow manage to devalue it, destroy it, and most of all despite all the prevailing chances and golden opportunities, we just simply waste it.

If I must, and often I do, use another metaphor, our birth, our entry into the world begins at the “Start” button and from there living is our operating system.  The program may do well for a while, for some it does run splendidly because the stage is set in a stable two-parent, middle class family in a developed society, for others (by a huge margin) it is rough going that may begin with poor child care and diminished opportunities. Nevertheless, in many instances not only that life prevails, someone who is like a drop in the ocean of poverty and hardship floats up and sparkle as a gem from a scattering flotsam. In both cases the “Start” button may not have been equal but in many instances life was well lived because we had seen it countless times from history and we expect that for many in generations to come.

Continuing with the metaphor, just like with the computer program, life allows living to have a “Reboot” option and again we saw countless examples of rough starts getting a fresh re-booting for a life well lived.  There had been Booker T. Washington’s and Horatio Alger’s in history. Today we have J.K. Rawling, Daymond John and Chris Gardner, to name just a few.  They all had rough “Starts” but each one took the opportunity to “Reboot”.

Life is not a gift were it not accompanied by the chance to live it.  If life were a canvass, living is the variety of colors we have at our disposal to paint whatever landscape we choose that shall become our life portrait. We live and we work, we love and we enjoy, we toil and then we rest.  Each of us can be defined in just a few ways.  The free spirits live free, others live for free, some exceptional individuals live to work, while a majority of us work for a living. 

Lest we obsess over work we must know that if each life can be contained in just one sentence, the individual is the subject, his life the predicate and how he lives is the verb but work should just be well within a parenthesis. We are born, we grow up and parenthetically we work, hopefully have a family and blessedly have children and grandchildren but then we, without exception, retire - hopefully for many more years thereafter.  The latter is what it is all about and it must count because a complete sentence always ends with a period.  No one, however one tries, can ever have a fragmented sentence, a prepositional phrase or independent clause.  At some point, sooner or later, we all end with a period.  And enough with the metaphors. That last phrase, as you know, is what a fragmented sentence looks like – undeserving of a period.

Death

Every life, from the simple to the complex, begins with the raising of a curtain. Everyone who lives long enough has a chance to play on stage, under bright lights for the very few but for many under subdued lighting and anonymity for some, but like everything all must face the final curtain.

And now the end is near

So I face the final curtain

My friend, I'll say it clear

I'll state my case of which I'm certain

I've lived a life that's full

I've traveled each and every highway

And more, much more than this

I did it my way

Paul Anka

We all would like to have “lived a life that’s full” but even if we fall short of our dreams and aspirations we hope to have left something to mark our passing.  For the few there will be accolades and applause; however, much to their wish, an encore is impossible.  Everyone else will do his or her best.  Along the way we do get sporadic applause lines from loved ones and friends and colleagues but it is not the size of the stage but the quality of how well we lived that matters.  Such quality should not be measured by how much wealth and material we leave behind to our heirs because often a person is remembered for the immeasurable deeds of kindness, love and caring for others.

Mankind though had always asked this. “What is it for me when I begin to cross that threshold of mortality and find that beyond that curtain there is nothing but nothingness?” Well, if that is the case then really there is not much we can do – we will not be able to regret, to second guess, and certainly not able to have a do over.  There is no mulligan.  But then we are also allowed to speculate with this, “The good deeds I did were all for naught then?”

To those who ask the last question are reminded by the likes of Mother Theresa, the countless first responders to a disaster, the doctors and nurses who volunteered to face the scourge of Ebola head on, the soldier who was willing to sacrifice himself to save a comrade, and many more examples.  These people do those things because it is already rewarding enough to see a face relieved of pain and anguish at the moment of rescue, the smile of a recovering child and the gratitude of a soldier who will get to go home to his family.  These people who do these deeds do not wait to see what’s beyond that curtain because a well lived life today is his or her reward – in the present tense.

I cannot seem to get too far away from metaphors.  In the end do we shut down the computer of life or is it just an exit?  I notice the new Windows 10 has a sleep option.  The Dalai Lama and partly in the Hindu religion the possibility is more than suggested.  What if life, living and death follow the laws of the universe?

 

You will have to bear with me here.  The first Law of Thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed and can only be transformed from one form to another.  Einstein added to that by saying that matter and energy are interchangeable, as evidenced by nuclear power – matter converted to energy.  The combined energy and matter in the universe remains constant throughout from the start of the Big Bang – the moment of creation.  From that beginning nothing can be added or subtracted.

Now, as we all know the universe is the ultimate recycler.  Nothing is ever wasted.  What God created apparently cannot be violated in any way. Even at the sub particle level where protons collide at near light speed at the Large Hadron Collider they merely splinter to their basic components even for mere nanoseconds only to re-emerge in other forms – but never destroyed.

Is it then too farfetched to think that what religion teaches as transformation of the body to the soul to re-emerge in a heavenly state or its lower opposite, or in the form of reincarnation proposed in the Hindu religion or what is behind the Dalai Lama’s re-emergence for the 14th time or the end of days in the Book of Revelation and other interpretations have some validity?  I am only asking the question to accommodate all the various faith that man had been subscribing to for millennia.  It is true that we can set this all aside, lest we begin a contentious debate, but it must be worth to ask, “Surely there is more to just have a life begin, live it, and then death, isn’t it?”  If God gave us the intellect to ask these questions then these must be well within our operating system.  It has been programmed.  It must be in our DNA.  Thus we go back to the beginning of this musing – at the beginning where life began.

Uber-board

It was four a.m. in the outskirt of Boston – the city of Malden – as we were preparing to head out to Logan airport for a flight back to Texas a few days ago.  My brother in law, who had always taken us to and from the airport many times in the past, will be spared the early wake up because that morning I wanted to see for myself what this latest hoopla in business innovation is all about.  With our bags by the hallway I tapped an icon App on the smart phone and typed origin and destination.  In less than a minute the screen came alive with the name of the driver with his photo, the model of the car he’s driving and license plate number, the estimated ‘fare’ and announcing that he’ll be arriving in five minutes.  Sure enough he did.  A few minutes later we unloaded our luggage right at the departure area where he helped to unload our bags, then a handshake and a tip – fare was taken care of by the credit card on file. Before our flight was to board I received an email with the receipt for the credit card charge and a thank you note from Uber. 

Uber – now quickly emerging as another word verb, like Google and others – is fast becoming a successful business model that can and will only function based on cyber technology but performing a service as basic as the transporting of people from A to B.  It was at first a curiosity to many, including myself, until one gets a firsthand experience of finding out what this new made up English word is all about.  Of course, in German it is a qualifier of sort – a superlative prefix for anything extremely above all others.  English speakers are content with over anything, i.e. over the top, over worked, over taxed, overlord, etc., but Uber could very well be the ultimate choice if not a better alternative to urban taxi service.  It is not a solution to mass transportation but it is as innovative as the subway system was over a hundred years ago. 

Uber, the company that is now the bane of taxi operators and even by the limo industry is an uber-example of entrepreneurship that carries on the idea that if necessity is the father of invention then it had just sired a child of technology.   Utterly impossible to pull off over a decade ago it is now a legitimately viable business because the light speed flow of information over the web makes it almost as easy as a short order at the fast food’s drive through.  Inevitably it will spark competition but Uber might remain the word to describe the ready-when-you-are transportation genre as coke had done with the soda industry, or fridge (for Frigidaire) in refrigeration, etc.

Uber, now a worldwide phenomenon, albeit mainly if not totally for urban consumption only, is not new of course.  The idea that it is in the transportation business but does not own a single vehicle is quite a feat but not entirely unfamiliar.  Amazon has been selling products, now outselling Walmart even, without the façade of a single physical store.  Nike had in the beginning sold a bunch of shoes without owning a shoe factory.  It is mainly a designer of footwear and outsourcing the production to some far flung Asian shoemakers was an uber-business idea.  I am not sure that Nike today even has its own shoe factory anywhere.  Mercenary armies in history had been employed for a fee and a dictator is able to impose his will without implicating or using his own military.

Angie’s List, Home Advisor, and others are a subtext to the main theme.  They provide the uber-shortcut to word-of-mouth.  Uber has also adopted the Star-rating system with a twist.  The passengers get to rate the driver but drivers too do get to rate their passengers.  This is the uber-equivalent of a two way street.  Uber, from what I understood from our driver, takes about three days to vet the prospective drivers who apply to drive – full or part time and at the hours and days they choose and the area they wish to cover.  Uber passengers need to sign up ahead and become an Uber user but the vetting only takes about 1-2 hours based on address and credit card information.  I’m sure Uber can access a lot of data, including credit and criminal, about you from just that basic information.  Car dealerships actually do the same thing.  Why the ratings on both sides?  Well, Uber probably likes to keep good drivers and drop those not in keeping with their standards; unruly, habitually un-ready, drunk passengers (passing out or throwing up in the car), etc. are also dropped from the service.  Uber is naturally the uber-clearing house.  When a passenger wishes to contact the driver, the phone number he or she calls is routed to Uber then to the driver and vice versa.  So the information is buffered between passenger and driver, except of course for just the necessary passenger name, location of pick up, driver’s name, car model and license plate.

Is this going to be the basis for most other business models in the future?   Naturally, as always, affected businesses are pushing back, including politicians beholden to the transportation business, as what seems to be happening with the New York mayor taking on Uber on behalf of the taxi and limo industry. Ultimately, the users of the service will determine the outcome.  For now, there is the attraction to the perceived safety and assured service from Uber.  The drivers are ordinary citizens, working part time and certainly not overworked to meet quotas as taxi drivers need to, who live within the neighborhood of the origination location; hence, they can pick up within five minutes or less.  The passenger knows ahead of time the estimated fare, and except for tips there is no exchange of cash and receipts are automatic.  For others it is like having a neighbor drive a school child or relative to and from locations with the safety of vetted drivers. Uber can tell when and where a passenger had arrived with the precision of a GPS.  When I got the receipt, it provided the route taken, how many miles were covered and the origination and destination times – something parents or relatives get instantly for a child pick up, for example, if a parent is running late or unable to for one reason or another, but the child gets to go to tennis or football practice or get picked up from the movie theater for a safe trip and assured arrival to the house.  Critics lament the absenteeism in parenting if one day that piano recital, the perfect catch of a baseball or football, or thrilling end to a tennis match are easily missed but unburdened by guilt because after all dad or mom did do everything to ensure the child will be safely home after not missing an activity because they were not around.  And that could be the problem because this could make it easier to not be around and yet feel good that their child is safe. 

This is not an endorsement for Uber but it is something to have in your back pocket just in case you find yourself in an unfamiliar urban setting somewhere and you need a ride.  It does not cost anything to apply but it could be crucial when the need arises. There is something about having a personal driver to take you to an unfamiliar place where finding a parking space becomes an unnecessary headache. 

Who knows what comes next?  We may not have been paying attention but a long, long time ago somebody came up with the idea to cook meals for you at a place that is not your home where you don’t need to clean up or wash the dishes. The place is now what we call a restaurant.  Then when we are really in such a hurry, we just drive through.  Somebody now does our laundry if we’re willing to pay for it.  The uber-doing of these chores is as much part of modern life as the symbiotic relationships between organisms of providers and recipients of services or material in exchange for something. Let’s hope we don’t uber-do it because someone is already thinking about robot nannies for our young.  But wait a minute!  Don’t we have televisions and video games already doing that?  We need to be careful because some are already doing the thinking for us through social media where we’re told what to say and not say, or do and not do.  Something we cannot do is out source our thinking because in the end our thoughts are all we have left if suddenly everything stops flowing through the ether, the airwaves and the web.  And thus begin the debate and the uber-thinking but there is the danger of the Gotterdammerung of civilized society, or any society for that matter when much of what we do is outsourced and when we lose that capability the landscape of our future is not going to be a pretty picture.

Memory

“One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.”

― Antonio Porchia

That quote may seem too simplistic or even puzzling but it is packed with a unique insight into our lives. Animals do not worry about how they will be remembered because their basic needs are food, survival and reproduction and their memory revolves around those and nothing more.  We, on the other hand, have a philosophical need to first of all know ourselves and to be known by others.  We as individuals have a fervent view of ourselves but outside of it, everything about us resides in the memory of other people.  If our lives are to be summarized when we’re long gone, we are merely an aggregated hologram made up by and coming from how people remember us.

One of the saddest, if not the most profoundly sorrowful, condition in the human experience is the loss of one’s memory due to dementia or worst – Alzheimer; or to see it happen to someone we know, and more so to a loved one.  Let’s set that aside for the moment.

….

“When the dawn comes

Tonight will be a memory too

And a new day will begin”

That is a portion of one stanza from the award winning Broadway musical, “Cats”.  Unfortunately, that’s about the only song I could remember from it.  And lest we forget, all the singing was done by cats.  Hardly would we associate “memory” with cats but it would have been a little harder to make the musical with elephants on stage.  Elephants are known for their extraordinary memory, we are told, but they have large brains; however, even for crocodiles whose brains are supposed to be the size of walnuts, they too depend on memory for survival. 

There is more to memory than memory itself.

We all know, of course, how important memory is. It is memory that gets high school students through SATs, what a matriarchal elephant has to lead her herd to the next water hole, how penguins recognize one from the other when they definitely all look alike, how we find our car after a ball game in a ten acre parking lot, and so on and on.  It is quite a remarkable feat considering that we often don’t think too much, or at least we do it so effortlessly as to not even be aware of how our brain does it.  That is, when all goes well.  How often do we tap our forehead with our palm to remember something, to connect a name to a face, remember that quaint restaurant, or who won last year’s Wimbledon men singles championship?  Yet, we’re told it’s all in there somewhere in the deep recesses of the complex labyrinthine tissues of our brain.

How could we really, when we’re also told that perhaps we have as many as 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses.  How do we account for all the activities that go on inside our head? A synapse is one connection between two adjoining neurons.  As these synapses occur, we can imagine traffic signals blinking on and off at trillions of intersections and somewhere in our brain something is sorting them all out, coding what the signals were at a particular time, framing the groups of yellow, green and red lights, and somehow allow their sequences to mean something when they are reviewed later.  We’re told the hippocampus of the brain does all that coding and structuring and segregating them into short and long term memories. 

Memory is such a tricky thing to manage, if it can be managed at all.  We have no trouble dialing a phone number from a piece of paper but once we’re done with the call hardly can we remember the number we just called, unless we look at the piece of paper again.  At a party we could still be talking to the person we’ve just been introduced to but suddenly we’d draw a blank about his or her name. Yet, we have no trouble recalling the name of our favorite teacher in high school decades ago. Some of us can still remember what it felt like when we saw our first crush, although we may not remember his or her name, walking down the hall way, crossing the street, or catching a first glance, a smile, or hear the laughter.

Memory, the way we remember, contrary to what we hope it can do, is dishearteningly unreliable under certain circumstances because it is well known that eye-witness accounts are the least dependable of all the available evidentiary tools. We’re aware too of selective memories. It is a popular joke among husbands who proclaim they do not need to remember the bad things they did because their wives will recall it for them. Those among us (husbands) who think that’s funny, beware of outsourcing such memories because it is fraught with potentially perilous repercussions. Our spouses’ memory of our past transgressions can be severe or slightly endearing depending on what brought it about. If you presently committed another stupid act, the severity of a past mistake is multiplied in the manner that Archimedes would have been proud of when he was contemplating the power of his compound pulley. 

That is why memory could be tricky, sometimes.  According to one expert, “memory is not retrieved from a storage system the way a file is read off a hard disk. Instead memory is reconstructed using an associative neural network process that is not yet understood”.  In other words, memory is in the mind of the beholder where it can be influenced by subsequent experiences after the event or even by factors already in someone’s head prior to the witnessed episode.  We are talking here about recollection of events.  Obviously, memories for mathematical formulas, poetry, and the response to a clue in “Jeopardy” are cast in rigid forms as to not have any misattributions.  We can’t worry about this too much – that’s what books and Google can handle.

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“To be able to forget means sanity.”

― Jack London, The Star Rover

The preceding quotes define from many different points of view what memory means.  Forgetting is almost essential for complete forgiving because not being able to do so is a burden too heavy to carry around.  Jack London is right.  Forgetting could mean making room for other good memories, it could also be that a fresh look at something we’ve heard or felt before is redefined, sometimes more deeply the second or third time around, to fit the circumstances presently.  Our love for the person is almost always about forgetting their faults and remembering everything good about them and what they’ve done. 

One sweet story that has been around is unforgettable.  It is about a husband who visits his wife who suffers from Alzheimer regularly at the nursing home.  At one time a friend asked him why he does it with such regularity when his wife does not even remember him anymore.  His reply was simply but profoundly beautiful, “Because even though she may not remember me I do remember her.”

Islets of Langerhans

I was watching the TV monitor at the credit union where we bank.  My wife was waiting in line for a teller to call her.  The TV was streaming, I guess to entertain the customers who were waiting in the long line, and what caught my attention was a quiz that asked, “Islets of Langerhans are in what organ of your body?”  Then the picture shifted to something else, such as the bank’s 1.99 % rate for a new car loan and a 2.99% rate for a home equity loan under $100K, but promised to give the answer in a bit.  I was at the sideline, so to speak because my wife was actually the one standing there with the hapless crowd – my role was to drive her to the bank that day and for me to enjoy the bank’s complimentary Java Dark Roast, while waiting; granted customers had to pour their own coffee from any of four different dispensers, real sugar and artificial sweetener, regular cream or non-fat, etc.

Obviously, I became a captive anticipator for the answer to the question posed by the TV monitor.  I never heard of “Islets of Langerhans” before, what they do, and curious about which organ of the body the question was referring to?  It was one of those phrase words combo one heard for the first time then recalling and remembering them indelibly, such as, The Straits of Hormuz, The Gulf of Tonkin, Sea of Tranquility, Broca’s Brain, etc.  My wife was still about number 8 down the line so there was time for me to catch the answer before she could finish her transaction.

 Well, if you haven’t yet, as most people probably haven’t, you read it here first – Islets of Langerhans are in our pancreas.  So, as we headed back to the house, my compulsion was to Google it.  You see, unlike the guy whose T-shirt said, “I don’t Google, my wife knows everything”, I do not have that luxury; or misfortune, depending on how you look at it.

Indeed, “Islets”, small as they are, play a very significant role in what is one of today’s rising chronic illnesses – diabetes.  Let me back up.  The pancreas is one tiny organ. Islets of Langerhans make up just 1-2% of the total mass of our pancreas.  A healthy adult has a million of these islets – that’s how tiny they are - which contain the endocrine cells that produce insulin.  This then leads to how critical these cells are, when impaired, to the development of diabetes, which then leaves one to wonder how these tiny, almost insignificant particulates of tissue could be so important.

How it got its name goes back to 1869 when a German anatomist discovered these tiny dots in the pancreas. Paul Langerhans was that pathologist who perhaps fondly called them islets, for little islands of cells.

How could something that is a mere fraction of our anatomy cause such serious condition?  Indeed it is the little parts that give the whole so much issues – from a tooth cavity, a busted ear drum, a bursting appendix, trouble with the pituitary gland, an aneurism, etc. all involve little parts.  A blood clot from the leg can traverse through the blood stream and cause extreme damage at the artery near the heart or the lungs.

Directly or indirectly we know someone afflicted with the commonly known Type 2 diabetes. If TV ads for diabetes medication are any indicator, the condition seems to have reached epidemic proportions, although statistically it is just about 10 % of the general population in the U.S. But indeed, if one were to look at it from a particular context, it would mean that one of every ten of our relatives, friends, co-workers, has diabetes.  In fact, try naming ten relatives or friends, look at your work place, and you will have one diabetic in each group of ten.  The U.S. population alone will have over thirty million diabetic patients.  China and India, whether they have a slightly lower or higher ratio, each country has over 100 million diabetic patients.  It is therefore a non-trivial trend.  In a rapidly increasing age group of seniors, as more and more people get older, the proportion goes up to one in five, 21% !, although for 18-39 year olds, the stats bear only 2%.  However, by the time someone gets past the age of forty, the ratio goes up to 11 %.

Islets of Langerhans are critical because diabetes, or more precisely its development, operates at the cellular level. It begins at the tiniest level of our anatomy.

Here is a quote from the “Biology of Diabetes”

“The tissue cells of the muscle, fat, and liver are designed to take glucose (sugar) out of the blood, pull it into the cells and change it into energy.

These cells require insulin to absorb glucose. When these cells fail to respond adequately to circulating insulin, these cells lose their sensitivity to insulin (a condition known as insulin resistance) and blood glucose levels rise.

The body responds to this situation by signaling the pancreas to produce more insulin, causing insulin levels in the blood to become too high. This condition is known as hyperinsulinemia. The cells in the liver also become insulin resistant and respond by making too much blood sugar. Because blood sugar is not absorbed by the cells, it stays in the blood, causing blood sugar levels to rise — a condition known as hyperglycemia.”

“All of this leads to diabetic complications that can lead to blindness, kidney failure, amputation, heart attack and stroke. Other health issues include high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high inflammation markers, periodontal disease, and erectile dysfunction.”

We can say that diabetes is a new age condition.  Apparently, we can surmise that over two thousand years ago, or even earlier, diabetes may not have been a condition people worried about: (a) most folks probably didn’t get past the age of forty (b) they worked so much harder physically that excess sugar and glucose in their blood was unheard of; (c) there may not have been that much unused sugar in their diet, to begin with – just guessing.  As an aside, other age-related afflictions like cataract, glaucoma, even arthritis were likely very rare as well.  And likely still, obesity and gout were suffered only by the very rich.

Today, however, the million islets of Langerhans, can be overwhelmed by the million and one sugary foods out there – from M&Ms to sodas to cheesecakes to even bowls of rice or loaves of bread.  What are we to do when the sweetness of life, the delectable ingredients of our favorite snack, the staple carbohydrates of our basic food are to be doled out in small portions as to obliterate any vestiges of guilty pleasures from our lives?  Well, as Yoda might say, “0ne to thirty nine years had you with sugar and spice, suck it up you will do to live twice”.  Or, walk five miles a day or skip a bowl of rice; a bowl of ice cream or do ten miles.

Now, diabetes is not a death sentence anymore when caught early.  Tests are accurate and medicines are widely available.  Diet, if followed, helps greatly and recommended exercise regimen is effective.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that sedentary life styles prevail in the developed world and sugar in many forms finds itself in most of what we eat; and, in the underdeveloped countries, health care management is still found wanting.

Since you have read this now and you are well aware of what the “islets of Langerhans” are, you have so much less excuse to ignore the warnings on diabetes.  We even have less reason not to read a bit more and find out about it in more detail, or at the very least raise our awareness.

We are not going to know everything but this we know – we all should take a pancreatic oath, requiring but a small sacrifice to take care of the million islets of Langerhans.

A sweet tooth is as real as the tooth fairy - resist it.