The Law of Average

This seems to be one law that has no jurisdiction over anything.

Consider this.  A financial adviser in his presentation was making this point.  “My sister and I are runners; we average running twenty miles a week.  She runs forty and I run zero.”  Now you see why this so called law of average does not make sense at all.

I made up this other example about two basketball teams, each with five players.  Team A has one 7-footer and the other four are all 5 ft. 6 in. tall.  Team B players are all 5 ft. 9 in. tall.  Both teams’ average heights are practically the same.  But doesn’t Team A have an advantage - maybe?  I leave that to basketball aficionados out there to debate that.  And again, the law of average may not have jurisdiction over this one either.

Average also lives in the jungle of statistics.  It thrives there by gathering up and organizing other data-denizens into troops and brigades, then declares some of them middle-of-the-roaders. Those below the middle are less than mediocre while those above it develop stiff upper lips.  In other words, the law of average became a discriminatory agent.  It also becomes an aspirational, though not very lofty, inspiration to some – “hey, if I get average, I’ll be just fine”.  In fact, the “average Joe” seems almost an acceptable moniker for anyone who inhabits the median range, in looks, wealth and social status.

Average is also often misused, sometimes to advance an argument, to get someone to feel good when they are depressed, or get him or her to not feel too ambitious – “the average homeowner, after all, does not have a 70-inch TV in their living room, or a mortgage shorter than 30 years”.  The average life span of an American male is 76 years so don’t expect to go much beyond that, but if you do, it’s a bonus, or at least be happy when you get past the expiration date which for many is unattainable.  Now, since the average life span of an American woman is 81, historians should all be women, since they get to observe the whole story for far longer. That is also the main reason that over 90% who buy photo albums or write on their diaries are women. However, I don’t agree with one comedian who said, “The reason women are usually late is because they know they have more time to spend in this world”.

There is something that can be said about average though, which is not so bad.  Average loves company. The spots occupied by the exemplary go-getters, by those at the top of the heap, by the kings or queens of the hill, by the CEOs, etc. are all lonely places, reserved for the very few who truly aspired to be and actually make it there. The majority of the population resides in a bigger community of the average.  The world of the average is a busy place.  A lot of things happen there.  The buck may stop at the very top but it gets tossed around, passed from one to another, in the area of the average where the plentiful choose to live.  The average sets up a trend. They determine the marketplace.  Mass production is solely dedicated to provide them whatever they want. The average influences a lot of what goes on. The average voter determines the next president.  Not even the incumbent president has the same power.  The average determines whether a movie becomes a block buster, or a product launch is a success or not.  There is so much the average does.

What about this? Is the average a standard? It is if all it does is give us a relative position from where everyone is.  Garrison Keillor’s radio broadcast closes with this, "Well, that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." That has always been how Keillor closes his show and obviously people find it funny. It is comedic but will it work given an ideal place where indeed the first two phrase-statements can be true - Lake Wobegon can be a stand-alone place where all the women are indeed strong and the men good looking.  It is, however, impossible to have all the children as above average.  For that you’ll have to bring in all the surrounding towns’ children in the entire state, collect data and make relative comparisons.  Once we start on that road, average makes a mess of all along its path.  We can say, for example, where no one may argue, that all the participants in a popular beauty contest are all beautiful. But it gets messy once we say that from a given general population of women, on a scale of 0 to 10, their average physical attributes are 9.85. What does that say to the rest of the women population? Once we bring in relative comparisons we bring trouble.

There is a commonly phrased statement accepted by many as this, “The average room temperature is 72 deg. F”. It is perhaps true in the developed western countries but only if one were in an air conditioned office or bedroom.  Even so, 72 is probably on the low side because the truth is most bedrooms are probably kept at between 74 and 78 in the summer, and likely at 68 to 70 in the winter – in air conditioned homes.  Suddenly we are getting into the question, “What is the ideal temperature at which the average person feels comfortable?”  That’s another can of worms.  In the tropics, in most third world countries, what would be considered average room temperature may shock those used to living in air conditioned comfort from the developed countries.  Then again, comfort is all relative.

Staying with room temperature but using it as a metaphor, comedians use it to hurl insult as in, “He has average room temperature IQ”.  That is already a bit much in the Fahrenheit scale but can we imagine when that same comedian dishes it out in Europe, where temperatures are expressed in Celsius scale? The insult gets horribly unforgiving. European readers of my blog - there's a number of you out there - know how that feels.

In baseball, a batting average of .250, meaning that a batter gets a hit (and gets on base) one in four times at bat, will get a ball player in the major league.  In basketball, however, shooting free throws at .500 is within the booing range of the fans.  On the other hand, a .900 in gymnastics will not get a gymnast a spot at the podium of victors.  Of course, we are talking apples and oranges here, but only if we mix the numbers.

Then it is to my favorite – the average muzzle velocity of a sneeze for which a study was indeed made. It was determined that the average is 70 miles per hour.  Without the proper context or actual data, we could say that some sneezes were at 60 mph and others at 80 mph in some kind of relative proportions. But we could also say that some sneezes were so gentle as to not even ruffle a feather while others are propelled with hurricane gale forces of 140 mph winds. So, here average could be a great deceiver.

On average it took you about six minutes to read this.  It is a mere fraction of the average amount of time a western person spends surfing the web.  Which is to say that, “On average, it is neither here nor there.”

   

The Orphaning of Humor

The death knell of humor is nigh and the dragon slayer is political correctness.  If it continues on its humorless track in our society, laughter - this once instinctive reaction to have fun with what we hear or see, or say - will be looked down upon as a rude expression of emotion.  Ironically, once where humor used to hold court – the entertainment industry – is both purveyor and slayer of humor.  The “politically correct” sector of entertainment is an endorser but avid police/critic of their fellow entertainers who commit humor that are directed at people, if in an oblique way.  If we cannot laugh at ourselves, or about ourselves then what are we going to laugh about.  Even Larson who projected his humor at animals, the background theme is still about humans. There is only one reason for that. Animals can’t read or laugh at themselves, let alone understand what’s funny.

Granted humor in some instances had become downright crude, sometimes obscene and in some cases prejudicial or racist, society had a way to deal with it.  Those who committed it get headline lashing and ratings-killing castigation that proved fatal to their careers.  Andrew Dice Clay may have been one.

Today, even Seinfeld is handcuffed from college gigs because universities today operate in the ether of political correctness.  Clint Eastwood gets public censure from the media for saying “that Caitlyn somebody”, a somewhat dismissive reference to the former Bruce Jenner.  Will we see the day when Monty Python, “Faulty Towers” and “Cheers” DVDs will be banned from the school library?  If one were to see the once popularly favored sitcoms of the older generation, “The Golden Girls” and “All in the Family”, not excluding “Married with Children”, with P. C. colored, rosy tinted glasses, one will be made to squirm and fidget over the humor that were disbursed then.  We might even venture that the portrayal of Ricky Ricardo in “I Love Lucy” will today be considered racist.  Someday we may lament for, “where have all the laughter gone?”

It will be a sad day when we can no longer laugh or elicit laughter in the office without being dragged to Human Resources, or be forced to take sensitivity training.  This is not to say that humor should be used with abandon at the office or any other social setting.  But, as usually the case in instances of so called social upheavals, we go overboard and react hard the other and opposite way that makes hysterical sound like a calming adjective. We always tend to overdo it when confronted by even a tingling of conscience for fear of a backlash.  I recall one Seinfeld episode where at one time each sentence in one scene had to have an inoculative phrase, “Not that there’s anything wrong with it”.  And blond jokes can only be told by real blonds.

Humor will be orphaned because no longer will there be anyone willing to parent a sense of humor.  HR and the liberal elite shall become the dust bins of humor; an orphanage of laughter-less social setting will become of our universities and offices.  Sensitivities towards offending someone or something are going to be so thinly tender that language will have evolved into a bland mix of humorless, unimaginative dribble of grammar, but politically correct language, so neutral it will lack any color because redskin, black, yellow and brown, among many descriptive words in the dictionary, or for that matter, tomahawks, gunnery, rifled through, even Gypsy Rose Lee, short, fat, limp, etc. have to be vetted for their context when used in talking or writing.

Did you know that expressions we commonly use that were actually quotes from Shakespeare are words like, “it’s Greek to me”, “kill with kindness”, that may someday be expunged?

Let me then connect other Shakespearean phrases that will make it right for political correctness sake, that all will be “pure as the driven snow” because, “as good luck would have it”, it is “good riddance” that we do away for “forever and a day”, all politically incorrect statements, hence, be prepared to, “lie low”, because “fair play” may have “seen better days”.  “Be all, end all” or “off with his head” if someone insists on being politically incorrect.

Someday, Broadway shows like, "The King and I", “West Side Story” or “South Pacific”, “The Bird Cage”, may have to be revised for language and theme correctness.

Lastly, I was not offended because I thought it was funny, and you may see it here for the last time because no one else will re-tell it, when I was told by a Caucasian these two Filipino jokes.

“What do you call a Filipino contortionist?”  Answer: “A Manila folder”.

“What is a Filipino love call?”  Answer:  “Pssst”.

I’ve been told those are both politically incorrect, unless a Filipino tells it.  I guess I have eternal immunity if I were to re-tell them.

Why Things Happen, bad ones mostly?

Indeed, why do bad things happen?  Or, as expressed by a bit cruder philosophical theory – “_ _ _ _ happens!” What are we to make of this when the pages of history are not without bad things happening?  Yet, today the prospect of more of the same has not lessened and for many the future seems bleak.

Let’s see.  A lot of bad incidents did occur throughout history. Attila the Hun, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot, just to name a few, happened. The Biblical story of Cain slaying Abel may have been the metaphor that it was meant to be to describe man’s inhumanity to man, man’s cruelty to another; and all other bad things in between – from the meanness of a simple gossip to a group’s hatred of another to all-out war of destruction, pillaging, enslavement and persecution.

Nature has not spared us of bad things either.  From earthquakes and tsunamis, global epidemic, incurable diseases, even the rare but deadly impacts from asteroids, to all kinds of weather driven forces like lightning strikes, tornadoes and hurricanes, our world had been host to all of these. The human drama of death and survival attest to the apparently random visitations by these calamities.  They were just bad things happening in different places, to different people.

“People” from the end of the last paragraph are what matters because we were here and are still here to observe and chronicle those disasters.  And even when we were not, we have the means to know about them from our knowledge of archeology and interpretation of left over evidence.  Of course, we found out too that natural disasters (or just events when we were not here to suffer from them) have been occurring for more than 99.9% of the time that earth had existed long before we got here to provide context, to contemplate, to complain and to be fearful. Whether we are here or not, natural things happen.  And a lot of other living creatures, 95 % of all species that had ever existed are no longer here for one natural reason or another.

Then there is the more crucial question.  Why then do we have inhumane behavior exacted among and between all of us – the dominant, most intelligent and most understanding of all living creatures?  If an extraterrestrial were to observe us or monitor news coverage from TV, radio and print media, their only conclusion is perhaps not to be anywhere near here because we are a violent, malevolent species.  Our only excuse for human behavior is that after all we are part of nature and nature has not exactly been free of disastrous behavior.  It is an excuse or an explanation dished out by psychologists and psychiatrists, telling us why Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Boston strangler, did what they did.  Even Hitler’s behavior had been explained.

Then there is the other crucial question.  Why do bad things happen to certain people?  Why do most serial killers victimize mostly women?  Why do innocent children have to suffer from abuses by adults? Why does a nation, a group of people or segment of a population suffer solely for attributes of being who they are?  Sadly, those are difficult questions to answer.  Victims of personal crimes and their families are a big number but in the context of our history victims of war were far greater.  In war, men, women, children have been indiscriminately eliminated in huge numbers.  And, sadly, the cruelty continues even today.

Furthermore, the question begins to be even more emotionally complex when we address a specific case, especially when it is about someone we know.  Why does it have to happen to him or her, or to a whole family?  Do things happen because they do have to happen?  That is not a fair question and although it is one to be asked, as some philosophers would have us believe, because the universe we live in is set in a “world of what happened and the probabilities of all kinds of events happening”.  Deep as this may seem, it is truly simple. Without having to go to the beginning – the creation if you will – and we pick up a point in history where we, as humans, have a hand in it, we see a pattern: if we collectively or individually cause something to occur, the effect is that of an event happening and that event is set to lay out many probable events into the future. Out of those probable outcomes one will prevail and it will in turn become the event and then cause other probabilities to produce an event, and so on and so forth. It is as if something is set in motion and the unwinding of it is governed by probabilities. “The genie is out of the bottle”.  But it is not all bad.  Read further below.

Everything that can possibly happen does come to fruition – both good and bad. It is from that truism that Murphy’s Law originates from, that if something can go wrong, it will.  What Murphy never talked about was that a lot of good things also actually happen.  They don’t get as much press as the bad ones because catastrophe makes better copy.  Actually, it is just that catastrophe gets hyped up more.  You see, if it were true that bad things happen most of the time, we will not have much of a civilization.  In reality a lot of good stuff happened over and over again throughout history.  More good things happen than bad ones.  Population growth, even at a time of inadequate prenatal care and pediatrics, infant mortality lags behind birth that resulted in children growing up and becoming adults despite the seemingly low odds of survival even in very inhospitable environments going back to ancient days.  Notice that while history is lined with one despot after another trying to do evil things, there were a lot more good guys around to put a stop to it.  In other words, for every bad deed there seems to be more good ones, by a huge margin, to quash it.

Astrophysicists tell us this.  At the beginning of creation, from the big explosion came out of nothing an unimaginable form of energy, from which material particles and anti-material particles were created.  Unfortunately, every anti-matter will destroy every matter particle it came in contact with.  However, as luck would have it, for every billion particles of anti-matter, there was a billion and one matter particle.  It was that imbalanced sheet that allowed for matter to prevail. That is how our present world came to be.  Believe that or not, the Genesis creation is not in conflict with that at all. To see everything that is all around us today, “Let there be light” had to have been a massive release of energy in an instant that can be explained by The Creator willing for it to happen. Both Genesis and the big bang theory are aligned along that analogy as to why we have more good things than bad ones – more matter than anti-matter.

We can perhaps take comfort that the only way for our world to exist as it does is for more good things to happen for every bad thing that occurs. 

  

Something of Value

In our search for the meaning of life, a sometimes common, if not often frivolous quest, what we could actually be searching for is the meaning of value.  How we sometimes overlook that what we value most in life is what gives meaning to the life we want.

I am reminded of the old movie, “The Yellow Rolls Royce”, made in the mid-sixties, but from which we find even today the meaning of value.  Nothing was more symbolic of ostentatious wealth and prestige as early as the twenties when the story began than owning a Rolls Royce. A wealthy man of high pedigree in the rarefied world of royalty in England bought a brand new yellow Rolls Royce - surely just the latest of a few previous models he had owned - as a wedding anniversary for his dear wife.  It was a most valuable possession in the eyes of many who circled the man’s gravitational field of wealth and power.  But, alas, how quickly the value of the car depreciated when the man caught his wife in a dalliance with a lover in that same yellow Rolls Royce. To him the value of the car plummeted to zero and promptly returned to the dealer. Several thousand odometer miles later an American gangster bought it to please a girlfriend. It lost its value as well later in another romantic twist.  Another American - a woman then living in Europe – bought it on a whim to own one so fancy but which by then had a markedly lesser value as a high mileage used car.  The war came and spread all over Europe.  The Rolls Royce served well the new owner’s noble desire to help in the war effort by ferrying the injured and later to transport underground fighters fighting the Nazis.  I am only telling the story to explain that the value of anything actually changes with time and with people.

Material things do change in value but even when ideas and principles are supposed to remain inviolable, the people who harbor them do change, thus sometimes diminishing the value of those ideals as well. 

Then there is the case of the humble bee.  It might seem a play with words but this is not about the bumble bee; it is about the ordinary honey bee.  Almonds are big business.  Not only is it highly valued among nutritional nutty delights for snacks or beer companion, it is pricey at the grocery stores; but the weakest link in the almond industry is the lowly honey bee.  Without the honey bees to pollinate the almond blooms there will be no almonds. The honey bee and almonds are big business in California.  Commercial bee keepers are in high demand during the season when bees, by the millions are moved from farm to farm, orchard to orchard, depending on the needs of which fruit trees demand the bees’ unrelenting and tireless airy hops-skips from flower to flower.  Suddenly, the ordinary but ubiquitous insect that we take for granted around our flower beds and backyard, have a value so well guarded and cared for that in the off-season, bee keepers spend a lot of money on tons of sugar to keep these bees fed in winter or when there are not enough flowers to pollinate. A bee colony could be anywhere from seventy to a hundred thousand bees and some of the big bee keepers maintain a thousand or more colonies. Far from the glamor of the Rolls Royce and the Maserati these bees have something of value, beyond what we ordinarily see.

 

The lesson here is that by taking control of these bee colonies, because after all they have become a captive organism – trucked in 18 wheelers from county to county in hours of driving distances – we took something from these bees.  So we must, personified by the bee keepers among us, give something of value back to the bees.  In times of their needs and because we want their population to remain robust in the off season we give them sugar – something of value, back.

That brings me to the theme of another movie, “Something of Value”, ca 1957, set in Kenya about colonizers and the colonized. A quote from that story summarized what the characters grappled with when one white man said of the people of Kenya, "we steal their earth and their religion, we've got to give them something of value instead".  This story - thankfully it is now from past history and hopefully never to be repeated again - was refrained many times before from the colonization of early Europe to North and South America and to many parts of Asia.  Over all we can say that something of value was offered and taken.  The Renaissance, the spread of knowledge, medicine, technology and the industrial revolution have been values brought and expanded.  However, the value of a national character and culture destroyed later were impossible to replace, or have been altered beyond recognition. 

Is it justifiable then that in the larger picture, civilization - the continued development and improvement of the human experience – is made possible by replacing old and existing values with new ones?  Is it not that superstition and old practices of quackery in healing were better replaced with modern thought and better health care practices?  I guess it can be said that there were times indeed that when we took away something and replaced it with something of value, humanity was well served.  Unfortunately, and this is where we find conflict and disagreement, the group of people from whom something of value is taken away, the loss has taken so much more pain and anguish than can ever be had in return from what had replaced it. 

In our individual personal stories, something of value is all in the eyes of the beholder.  In Cuba today, a 1957 Bel Air Chevrolet is still a very valued car, sans radio, air conditioning and a GPS Navigator.  Just 90 miles from its shore, in the U.S., there is something of more value in the sweet smell of new leather upholstery with all the bells and whistle of a 2015 2-door sporty vehicle, or that of a brand new 8-cylinder SUV. They are to replace a three year old model, still shiny with its original horsepower undiminished by an under-twenty-thousand-mile reading in its odometer but which by now had already lost its luster in the mind of its restless owner.

Is it going to be a better world if we begin to understand that the meaning of our individual lives is defined by something that does not lose its value no matter what circumstances befall us?  You fill in the other examples of something of value and let me begin with the “value of the contents of our character”.  And you follow with, “…”

Happiness Is …

If we let folks fill in the second half of a plausible sentence that begins with the phrase, “Happiness is …” we are likely to find as many answers as there are respondents.  Except, of course, if we happen to poll all Tibetan Monks.  They will only have one answer.  “Happiness is a feeling”.

There is probably something to that because one song writer, Morris Albert, composed the song, “Feelings”, now considered a pop classic, noted for the chorus  refrain, “whoa, whoa, whoa, feeling”. Morris Albert would have been happy, as his song topped the charts in 1975, from his debut album, if not for the fact that in 1981, a French composer, Loulou Gaste, sued him for copyright infringement because the melody was plagiarized from Gaste’s 1957 song, “Pour Toi”.  Both composers now share the credit for the same song.

Pop composers do see something with feeling because Simon and Garfunkel also had a hit with their own song, “Feelin’ Groovy” released in 1966, much earlier than Morris Albert’s version but later than Gaste’s.  And more artists did sing their song than Albert’s own, unless you include Karaoke.  More Karaoke singer wannabes sing “Feelings” than “Feelin’ Groovy”.

So, there has to be more than feeling to define happiness. Actually, when I thought happiness had to have been at the top of all aspirational wishes – hence, had to be the most quoted – it is apparently not! This is of course totally unscientific to base it on the number of quotes generated from people; but then we are the only species who would know about and aspire for happiness.  Truth be told, love ranks highest, with the most number of quotes – 43,058 quotes!  Humor came in second (33,671) but happiness was a distant 7^th with only 8,656 just below wisdom at 9,858.

Now, how about humor!  Well, all I can say is that for those single men and women out there looking for love, don’t dismiss anyone being referred to you just because attributes like beautiful, handsome, wealthy, even a good personality, are left out, but pay attention instead when the friend (even of a friend of a friend) says that the person that is the object of the referral has a great sense of humor.  That is because happiness may yet be possible between you and the person with a great sense of humor.

Since I already started to write about happiness, let’s stay with it.  I won’t be up to the task to talk about humor and wisdom; love is all right, but we’re awash with expertise on that already.

Here is something that troubled me.  Mark Twain said this, “Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”  What did he mean by that?  Is it that we have to be certifiably insane to achieve genuine joy?  Or, is it that we have to be crazy to be thinking about attaining happiness?  I like Mark Twain’s writings and he had to have been a sane writer to have written them, so by his statement, he must not have been a happy person.

Would it perhaps take the mind of a Forrest Gump to be happy?  In the short story, “Flowers for Algernon”, later made into a movie, retitled, “Charly”, Charlie Gordon was happiest, in the end, when he reverted back to his original mental capacity – that of someone with a diminished IQ. I mention that because it was Ernest Hemingway who said, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” Well, as we all know, as much wealth and fortune he amassed from writing which allowed him all the adventures worth many lifetimes, he killed himself.

Einstein, I thought was a happy man, Stephen Hawking has a great sense of humor but Newton may not have been a happy man and Galileo had his problems with the Church that made him commit some serious scientific retractions for fear of ex-communication, so there’s a mix bag from the deeply intelligent folks.  We can set aside what Hemingway said.

What is happiness then? Let’s hear from the Dalai Lama XIV who said, “Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” It is easy for him to say - he’s been around through fourteen lifetimes so he knows the feeling of, and how to feel as, a happy person.  But then again, the Dalai Lama The First apparently said the same thing.  We’re back to feeling happy as the answer to this most elusive definition.

This much we know.  In any culture, from any region on earth, from the poorest to the wealthiest, from the most powerful to the ones barely able to defend their borders, the happiest from every population are the children.  Yoda had it right when he said, albeit in Yoda speak, “Truly wonderful the mind of a child is.” You see if laughter is the side effect of happiness, children seem to have an unlimited amount of it.  Not only that, children have the sincerest, most genuine form of laughter. I used to not pay attention until our grandchildren came to brighten our lives.  Reader’s Digest was right all along with their monthly, “Laughter is the best Medicine”.  If so, then children are the best portable carriers of it and they must be allowed to infect us all.