The Ubiquity of Goodness, The Inevitability of...

We would like to think that at every patch of the human experience, where history has  a running tally sheet between good and evil, that it is not evenly split down the middle but rather lopsidedly in favor of goodness. Or, are we to believe in the pessimism that the ubiquity of goodness is always matched by the inevitability of what is bad?

We bring back Claire to share the letter she wrote to her dad before coming home for this Christmas.  We met her in, "Leap of Faith Into The Less Traveled Road", (August 23, 2023).  I introduced her story from when she started asking her dad questions when she was nine years old.  In her own quest at finding answers, and after a time thereafter, she changed her mind about what to major in college.  She at first considered majoring in history but before the summer ended after her senior year of high school, she opted to double-major in biology and chemistry instead. After which, her plan was to go on to pre med to pursue a medical degree.  

Her natural intelligence, coupled with a tirelessly inquisitive mind, gave her the strong paddle that made her academic pursuit more like going downstream rather than negotiating the opposing rapids of the onrushing river that is the first year of college.  Outside of the confines of the classrooms, the study halls and the dorm room desk, she did not abandon the pleadings of her probing mind to sometimes go beyond the textbooks and lectures. She kept up with what was going on in the world but she stayed away from  social media while she kept up with the news feed through her own personal filter. When she needed inspiration her go-to reference was the Bible her mom gave her before she left for college. 

This Christmas is her first time to be back home months away from her family.  Last Thanksgiving she and two of her classmates decided to stay on campus to do volunteer work at the local shelter for the homeless. The university acquiesced to the request of the Dean to allow the three students free meals at the faculty cafeteria throughout the week.  

Days before the Christmas holiday break,  Claire wrote to her dad.

Dearest Dad,

First, please hug Mom for me.  Second, thank you for the plane ticket.  I had actually saved  money for it from my part time job on campus; so,  I guess I have money now for Christmas gifts. But don't tell Sandra and Jim I got them something special. And I got you and Mom something too but don't expect much, okay? I know Mom will always say that the love of an obedient daughter is plenty enough, right? 

Why can't this letter wait till I get there?  Remember I used to ask you lots of questions when I was nine. Well, I have more. Back then I knew you were particularly surprised by the questions I asked. Now you have more time  to prepare. These are questions coming from your studious daughter who is well on her way to a 4.0 average this semester but don't be intimidated by that (😊). First of all, that is just my way of saying that your money is well spent. You know me. That's one of the ways of saying thank you (so much) and especially to Mom who worries a lot about how her loving daughter will handle life away from home. I hope 4.0 is reassurance enough for her not to worry.

The volunteer work my two classmates and I did at the homeless shelter on Thanksgiving week opened our eyes in very profound ways.  It is not easy to actually explain what the three of us felt, collectively. I will share mine. It is not just  that it touched me deeply but also that it evoked certain emotions which, naturally,  prompted me to ask some questions. 

I ask - all three of us actually asked in the same way - why I, my sister and brother, have the good fortune to have parents like you who have paved the way for us a better future while two young kids and their  mother at the shelter had so little to hope for.

The two children, ages 4 and 5, and their mom had been homeless the last two months, we found out. The mother told me that those  two months - nightmarish and incredibly painful  -  were a relief from the last five years or so of her eight years of marriage. How sad is that? Being homeless the last two months is a relief?

The children. They seemed to manage better than the adults. One afternoon, it was right after Thanksgiving lunch, I helped the two kids with the puzzle they were working on. They were happy, showing little care because, after all, there was a roomful of donated toys. I glanced at their mother who was watching nearby and I saw the furrowed brows, a face filled with despair and worry.  As she watched us, she smiled rarely. The seemingly forced smile would dissipate so quickly as if she did not want anyone to notice it.

Dad, why does something like this happen? Let me say this first. I saw so much good from everyone at the shelter - from those who run the place, the volunteers and from those who come by to donate clothes, baby and children supplies and non-perishable food items (meaning canned goods, mostly). But notably, it was the young children and how transparently innocent they were. There were not that many actually - there were just seven of them. We were told that on average, there are not that many children at any one time except during holidays like Thanksgiving.  

The shelter showed me what was good in people. Remember Dad, you said more than once that I always saw a lot of goodness everywhere, but was it because that was all I ever looked for? Was I really a Pollyanna the way my high school classmates described me? The volunteer work made me look closer to the outer peripheral edges of my view of the world to ask why society has made it necessary to have shelters like this. What could be so bad that makes people seek refuge at places like these. Then I wonder too how many are out there who are not able to find such a place; or worse, that there are those who know where to go but they simply can't leave the predicament they're in.  

First, my quantitative mind asks, "What is the ratio of good over bad in the world?" I presume that goodness must lopsidedly predominate what is bad. I have good reasons to say that Dad, because if that were not true, would we still have a civilization, such as what we have now? My biology professor, though,  once casually made a comment during one of her lectures, that luck and not a whole lot more is responsible for civilization. I hope to someday discuss that with her if I get the chance.

The weekend after Thanksgiving as we were wrapping up our volunteer work, I did manage to talk with the mother of the two children while the two kids were taking a nap. She said that she didn't want to stay at the shelter forever but she didn't know where to go. Her husband doesn't yet know where they are.  The shelter is very good at keeping all information about the residents confidential, even allowing them to use aliases. She can't contact her parents who are out of state because she knows that's where her husband was going to look first. Besides, her dad was not in good health and she wanted to avoid putting her mom through more stress. She confided to me, though not with much detail, that she suffered both from physical and emotional abuse and she is scared for the kids who are already suffering collateral damage.  She had no more tears to shed, she said, as she saw my eyes well up.  Then she stopped talking about the abuse, sparing me the details.  But she did bring up something that keeps bothering me to this day.

You know Dad, she must have been like me today when she was young.  She too believed in the goodness in people. She said that was what attracted her to her then boyfriend. They met at work and she thought he was perfect. They got married after a year of dating.   He became a monster, she said, after the birth of their second child. I was struck by what she later said.

She came from a devoutly religious family. Her husband was too. She abandoned her faith when her prayers were not answered, she said, after her husband became abusive and cruel to her the last five years of a once wonderful marriage. It was as if the devil just took over their marriage - her words. 

I was disheartened that I could not convince her to renew her faith in the Bible and the church. She questioned everything in the Bible, such as why as early as the third chapter in Genesis, the devil was already present to wreak havoc on the very first man and woman relationship by tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. 

She then said, "I don't believe anymore in a God who allowed that to happen in the first place? Didn't God not have the choice to not allow the devil to do such a thing, knowing how vulnerable the first man and woman were? Am I and my children still paying for the so-called original sin to this day?  So, please spare me any more encouragement to seek spiritual help. But thank you for helping, especially with the kids. Do you see as I do that for everyone like you, the devil has a thousand?" All I could do, Dad, was to hug her.  Then she cried profusely.

I would like to talk about this when I get home. Now you know ahead of time what I was going to ask you. Don't worry.  I will not spoil Christmas for you and Mom. But I think I would like this to be part of our conversation these coming holidays. And I know too that you will tell me the allegorical purpose of some of the messages in the Bible.  I know that. I get that.

Now, please don't finish decorating the tree until I get there.  But I must warn you I have questions about that too.  The mother, for the sake of the two children, dreads this coming holiday.  She's conflicted, shaking her head, about the way  Christmas is celebrated by quoting to me, Jeremiah, 10: 3-4  (KJV)

3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.

4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

What can I say? If that was a description in the Old Testament, then she is right about that practice predating the birth of Jesus by many centuries. She, and she's not alone with this because like many who subscribe to the idea about the unlikely origin of the Christmas tree with not a single reference of it in the New Testament, believes that this is another way people are deceived to believe in something that has no basis in what really happened a long time ago.

School stuff after Thanksgiving kept me busy but I promised to check on her and the children after the holidays. I would like to have some answers for her, if they are still there when I get back. 

I can't wait to come home to cry on mom's shoulders and listen to your wise counsel.

Kisses and hugs to you and Mom,

Claire

Let's hope Claire will get her answers and every reader gets his or her wish for a Wonderful Christmas and a New Year better than all the previous ones.

 

Music to Our Ears

Language and music.  Which came first? Both are obviously universal for humanity but a similar  question that attempts to define "which came first, the chicken or the egg", manages to intrude in conversation among those who care to engage in that kind of futile debate. I am just a kibitzer on the subject. However, I cannot resist the fascination with what it was like during the first moment when our ancestors realized they can modulate their vocal chords to produce sound in repeatable patterns to replace hand and bodily gestures to communicate with one another. I wasn't there to witness it but I can assume that was the beginning of language.  However, can we not also assume that perhaps our ancestral mothers, long before speech, may have hummed some soothing sounds, then a  tune even, to calm and reassure the  little creatures of their safety and comfort in the warmth and secure clutches of motherhood?

We can leave those speculations as they are. What is certain is that today we have language and music that make us distinctly human.  Naturalists and scientists will beg with exceptions, of course, because in their world songbirds and whales do sing and chimpanzees and gorillas can be taught sign language. Ornithologists claim that birds - crows, ravens, canaries and the common sparrows, etc. -  have regional or zonal dialects in how they caw, croak or tweet and sing.  Be that as it may, we know  not to expect any of those species to write a sonnet or compose a piano concerto. "That hurts", a bird might say, in whatever dialect it uses but speak it still can't.  "Double hurt"! Well, okay, let's leave the birds alone.

Now for the next question.  Is music (vocal and instrumental) the language of the soul? We don't know for sure where the expression came from or who actually said it first  but it may have originated from the time of Plato.  Or later, expressed as,

"Music is the language of the soul, the voice of the heart, and a message from eternity."        ---- Debasish Mridha

"Music, said Arnold Bennett, is “a language which the soul alone understands but which the soul can never translate.” It is, in Richter’s words “the poetry of the air.” Tolstoy called it “the shorthand of emotion.” Goethe said, “Religious worship cannot do without music. It is one of the foremost means to work upon man with an effect of marvel.” Words are the language of the mind. Music is the language of the soul.

Music, like language, evolved over centuries of human development. Today, generally speaking, music is hailed from two proponent camps: the classical buff and the fans of pop music. In between, the list may start from the time of the minstrels, liturgical and choral hymns, Gregorian chants, to spirituals, from opera to Broadway musical, from ragtime to rock 'n roll to Bluegrass to reggae and Rap music, romantic and pining songs and the often moping messages of country music and  several others.  In other words, we've enriched music and music enriched us.

Let us not forget music's presence even in times of battles - from the bugle call to charge or retreat; the legendary effect of bagpipes  on advancing British and Scottish troops, the sound of the bugle during reveille to wake the troops up, taps to mourn the dead, and, of course, national anthems that instill patriotism.

Not the least of music's power is its integral influence on dancing. From ballet to the tango and the waltz; from polka to Latin dances; from swing to jazz to rock 'n roll, various folk dances, etc.

This will not be a thesis on music because I cannot even hold a tune. If perfect pitch is analogous to the height of Mt. Everest, I put myself at the lowest flatlands at the foothills of the Himalayas. In high school a friend told me that I was out of tune even when I sneezed or cough; and he was a friend. That is why today, I relegate myself to tuning a table saw or a hand plane but I stay away from attempting to do the same with a piano or violin.  But I think I know and appreciate music.

We've all learned to appreciate music and it seems like our brains are hardwired for it; however, we're told by overly-funded researchers looking to spend grant money on anything, that other living creatures and certain plants have an "ear" for music too. They have us believe that classical music makes plants grow better and in experiments fishes were drawn to music. Some pet owners claim that their pets have developed an affinity to music. Anecdotally or by experiments, we are told that music does seem to have some kind of universal effects on creatures outside of our species. Suffice it to say that perhaps there could be some kernel of truth in there somewhere.

Back to the two camps comprised of classical and pop music, generally speaking, as the two largest groups.  Let's cut to the chase. Fans of pop music have this to say, "Why does classical music change moods so much and have so many boring parts"? On the other hand, classical buffs say, "Why does pop have to have a noisy rhythm section, and why is the beat always the same?" And, "It's too simplistic".  To which, Pop fans say about classical music, "It's too complicated". {From the book,  Classical Music: A New Way of Listening}.

At one time some centuries ago, classical music was cloaked in utmost snobbery. That was because only the rich, the elites of society, had access to it; only they had the money and time to engage the services of musicians and composers or the wherewithal and means to attend live concerts (no recordings then) or private chamber music. Even as late as the 20th century, classical music was for snobs.

On the other hand pop music and love songs became the music of the "general public".  Unfortunately, they were and still are trendy. Songs of the 20's gave way to the 30's and 40's, then to the 50's, and so on and on as taste and genre evolved. After Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra .. came Elvis, then the Beatles, Michael Jackson .. Rap music and so many other artists and styles, too lengthy to list everything. And don't forget country and western music.  Except for Rap I've enjoyed all the genre of pop music as they came along from generation to generation. I would still listen to Elvis and The Beatles and romantic songs today.

Meanwhile, classical compositions from as early as the 17th century and for 300 hundred years after that are still being played today in concert halls and large venues like sports stadiums and parks.  Anyone now with access to various recording media from smart phones to TV to  sophisticated multi-speaker systems at home can listen to it. Snobbery may still exist among those self-elevated classical purists  but access and desire to enjoy the same music is no longer limited to the ruling class.

And the thing is, during that long period of almost four centuries, only about forty or so composers are considered to have attained greatness that to this day their works remain the foundation of classical music upon which modern composers continue to build on. The music of Brahms, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninov, and thirty plus or so others, are the standards of classical music today.  But only a handful from each composer's works are considered signature pieces that are most sought after by both listeners and musical performers (either vocally or instrumentally).

Pop music by definition is already widely popular to the music-consuming public so we will not spend much time with it.

The encouraging words I pose here are for those sitting on the fence; not for those who are already knee-deep if not entirely immersed in classical music. For those willing to dip their toes into classical music, it is not necessary to go out and buy CDs or download them. Be aware that knowingly or unknowingly you  already have an ear for it. And YouTube is happy to provide.

Those of us of a certain age who loved the Lone Ranger TV series growing up, enjoyed the theme song though perhaps not aware it was from Rossini's  "William Tell" overture.  People who may have already forgotten what the sci-fi movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was all about, even disliked it at the end, will not forget the opening theme music. It was from Richard Strauss's composition "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", followed later "during two intricate and extended space travel sequences" in the movie by "The Blue Danube", that is inarguably the best well known waltz composed by Johann Strauss. A few other award-winning movies like, "Shawshank Redemption", "Fatal Attraction" and "Room With A View" had featured opera arias. 

In the U.S. graduation theme music, often during the recessional, people are familiar with "Pomp and Circumstance" composed by English composer, Edward Elgar. Outside of the U.S. the graduation theme is usually the "Triumphal March" from Giuseppe Verdi‘s opera "Aida". So, whether we like it or not, we've been exposed to classical music.

Broadway musicals, relatively late in the evolution of music, are an easier bridge to cross for most folks. A few of them were adapted from successful plays. "My Fair Lady" from "Pygmalion", "West Side Story" from "Romeo and Juliet", "Camelot" and "Brigadoon" from tales of chivalry and folklore. The Broadway musical, "Rent" was adapted from Puccini's opera, "La bohème". 

Now, I will be the first to admit that I have never sat  nor cared to spend time through an entire opera, let alone listen to all of the arias. And not all classical compositions I find pleasing or tolerable. I know I am not alone in this.

Both Broadway musicals and opera are capable of drawing all kinds of emotional responses from the listener but if I were to draw just one from several memorable sequences - even though I do not understand Italian - there is one aria that is certain to evoke an emotion. Puccini's "Madame Butterfly" was later adapted to Broadway via  "Miss Saigon" by Andrew Lloyd Weber. I recommend this one aria, sung by Carmen Monarcha, a Brazilian soprano, because  the story behind it is explained first by Andre Rieu (famed Dutch conductor and violinist), from the YouTube clip below.  Copy the link  and paste it on your search toolbar and click.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd0j007Y9fY

As a way to convince the reader that perhaps we are indeed hardwired for music, please do the same with the link below and watch a baby sitting on a high chair who for the first time listened to Pavarotti sing. Towards the end watch the baby's feet move with the music, or so it seems.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX6fsvXKw7M

In a nutshell, from all the diversity and choices that music has provided us in so many ways and in the amount of time that humanity has existed, is it not God's gift to the soul?

P.S. It is never too late for anyone to begin a journey into classical music and Broadway musical. All that is needed is a foray into YouTube. There, check out piano prodigy Alexandra Dovgan, whose childhood from as early as five years old to now when she is perhaps 17 or 18 is prominently featured on YouTube.  Patricia Janeckova, soprano who tragically died at age 25, last year, before realizing her full potential. She lives on in YouTube. For Broadway, "Sierra Boggess is an Olivier nominated actress, best known for originating Ariel in Disney's "The Little Mermaid" on Broadway and re-inventing Christine in Phantom of the Opera".

Check out Chopin pieces for piano. His nocturnes and polonaises should be familiar.  Chopin's Piano Concerto No.1 live with Olga Scheps, pianist, is worth listening to on YouTube (13 M views). There are more, obviously, but it is best to let your own taste and preference lay out the framework of your quest. It is food for the mind and a stimulant for the brain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bFo65szAP0

 

 

 

The Timeliness of Gratitude

Alternatively, to be more profound, it ought to be, "The Timelessness of Gratitude". For most of North America timeliness of gratitude is the highlight of the month of November, specifically on the last Thursday.  That week is often one of, if not the busiest travel days  of the year. It is also just about a month before another important day that is celebrated across all nations that subscribe to the Christian faith.  Christmas, however, may have veered off a bit farther away from its original intended meaning when it seems to merely denote when people are thinking about whom to express their gratefulness, or to whom they will be grateful for in the aftermath of ripped wrappers, shredded ribbons and crumpled boxes heaped into a pile by late morning of the 25th. Those two months have become the highlights to outshine the rest of the year. That is when introspection can help us put everything in perspective.

Timeliness of gratitude must transcend the pages of the calendar. 

"Timelessness: the quality of not appearing to be affected by the process of time passing or by changes in fashion".  --- Oxford Dictionary 

The expression of gratitude should therefore neither be bound by time nor changes in lifestyle or social and cultural evolutions.  

Why then do we set only a particular segment of each year to be grateful?

Decades ago that now seems so far back in time, growing up in one of the central islands on a Pacific archipelago, a post war baby  nurtured by shell shocked parents in 1946, barely a year after the country's liberation was a phenomenon of nature filling a vacuum - labeled later by sociologists as the "baby boom era". To have survived the conditions brought on a population of parents reeling from the ravages of war was as much a phenomenal feat as it was miraculous. For millions of children from that generation around countless parts of the world ravaged by war, the miracle was to last a lifetime of gratitude.

Seven years after that island was liberated, those post war babies, having survived against all odds, were now first graders in the public school system. It would seem strange, even incomprehensible, by today's standards, that those children who up to that point in their lives knew only one language - that of their native tongue - found their first day at school looking at their first grade books completely written in English.

Odder still was the fact that the entire archipelago was a Spanish colony for three hundred years prior to 1898 when after the Spanish-American War, it became a U.S. colony (or commonwealth, depending on who looked at it at that time) when Spain gave it up along with Puerto Rico and Cuba (where the Spanish-American conflict started). However, the U.S. granted the archipelago its independence fifty years later in 1946, immediately after the war; whence, the first Filipino baby boomers were born. That explains why the first books they were handed on their first day of school were entirely in English - a holdover from the American educational system; every postwar school teacher a product of it.

Some of those young children would often spend some of their idle time watching by the shorelines as big foreign ships come and go. Those huge tankers came to load sugar and molasses. Sugar cane was the island's main agricultural crop.  They learned that their country was a huge exporter of sugar - the bulk of which headed for a "mythical" country far, far away.

And they all wondered what it was like to be in that far away land called America. 

Stranger still was that in elementary school they were taught to sing "America The Beautiful" and learned about Thanksgiving. They had no realistic grasp of "amber waves of grain" or "purple mountain majesties" but they sung the song with gusto anyway.  Even stranger was for those young kids to be singing "dashing through the snow", with  no earthly  way to imagine  "what fun it is to ride and sing a sleighing song tonight", when tropical weather was all they knew, even in December.  

I was one of those kids. 

Growing up in a seaside town, in a poor barrio, kids my age somehow survived malnutrition and post-war living conditions. Some of us continued to dream, however fantastical the idea was of ever leaving the island for that mythical land.

At the city plaza stood a monument. 

The monument honored the heroism of Private First Class (Pfc) Theodore C. Vinther, 185th Infantry Regiment, US Army. He enlisted at the age of 29, a bit older than most young men, in April, 1942, out of Berkeley, CA. Like so many young men of that time (some as young as 17) who volunteered for the war effort, they were shipped to foreign lands many of them may not even have heard of before then and fought to free so many they did not know.  Many of them did not come back.

The effort to liberate the Philippines was hard-fought in an island-to-island battle against the Japanese occupation. U.S. forces landed on the northeast side of one of the central islands before heading towards the city. A  bridge at a town several kilometers from the city had to be secured. 

"Vinther volunteered to be one of the men to cross the bridge, which was rigged with explosives, under enemy fire, to overtake the explosives control point. It was 5:00 am the morning of March 29, 1945. Vinther was mortally wounded at the bridge after killing two Japanese soldiers, one of whom was but a few feet from the electrical controls. The capture of this bridge sped the advance of the 40th Infantry Division by two days and took the Japanese by such surprise that they rapidly abandoned the City of Bacolod--they were unable to execute their plans to burn and destroy the city and to inflict pain and death on the civilians as they did in other cities of the nation". 

My parents lived in that city.  Who knows what could have happened to them if the American forces did not make it in time.  My mother later would recall when she saw the American soldiers walking along the rice paddies. She said they appeared to her like giants from another world.

Pfc. Vinther was buried at the Manila American Cemetery. Like thousands of U.S. soldiers who died in foreign lands, Pfc. Vinther occupied only a small cemetery plot. (Below is a photo of that cemetery).

There are twenty five American cemeteries in five continents, in ten foreign countries - from Belgium to Tunisia where 130,000 U.S. servicemen lay permanently buried.

Lest we forget, November is not just Thanksgiving month, it is also when we celebrate Veterans Day on November 11.

And so it was for one of those skinny boys by the shoreline watching those ships when three decades later his family of four  made it to that "mythical" place.  Our two sons, ages 5 and 6, who have not yet learned to speak English, were thrust into the public school system.  Their first day at school was the same way it was for me.  A little over a decade later, our eldest went to the U.S. Naval Academy, graduated and served as an officer in a nuclear submarine. A small token of gratitude to a generous nation.

And so it is that we ought to be reminded of the "timelessness of gratitude". Everyday is a gift.  We open a present each morning we wake up. If we set just one thing aside to be grateful for each day, we will find that there are way more than there are days in the year.  And we will find new ways to be grateful for everyday forward so there will be an endless accumulated number at each passing year. Hence, the timelessness of gratitude!

To one and all, I wish you,

 

What Can Possibly Go Wrong?

"What can possibly go wrong?" is the question asked by anyone from either side of the political divide in the U.S. today, days before the presidential election, and is  filled with trepidation and unprecedented concern. It will still remain a nagging question past November 5th.  In fact, it will raise more questions. Those who rooted for the winning candidate will still be asking, what can possibly go wrong with meeting the promises made, what roadblocks ahead will derail their agenda, what possible challenges not anticipated that can harm the new administration, etc. On the other hand, supporters of the losing candidate will lay out every scenario they feared the most about what  can and will go wrong. It can be most debilitating for some, for others it will be a huge collective shrug towards, "wait till the next election".

Meanwhile, there will be those who will be asking, "What if..?" Far from just being hypothetical, a "What if" question always summons either hopeful or dire consequences.  Hopeful and dire scenarios can be real or imagined, depending on who is making the assessment.  Let's keep in mind though that scenarios we imagine, even if hopeful, can have dire situations on the flip side. Give me a minute to explain.  

Seven years ago I mused about, "What If".  Questions preceded by "What if" are almost always interesting and intriguing. 

For example, one of the "what if" scenarios I proposed then seven years ago is shown below.  You can tell it was a while back because I talked about world population being just 7 billion; it is now well past that, closer to 8 billion, actually.  Also, I mentioned the 2017 Tesla Model S. 

Anyway, what I proposed then still works today.  Please read, then we'll go from there.

What if suddenly this morning we (all of 7 billion people around the world) woke up and each household or every single unmarried able-bodied adult has a net worth of over a million dollars?  Don’t ask how? What would the world be like?  I think it will be worse than yesterday. Imagine Elon Musk – I’m picking on him – took out his top of the line 2017 Tesla Model S to drive to a nearby Starbucks for his favorite latte. He won’t get one because the barista who served him yesterday (and all baristas, in fact) is no longer working there. Would you, if you had a million dollars in the bank? Elon Musk will soon find out there is no one to collect his garbage, deliver his mail, and there is no one working at the Tesla plant or the SpaceX headquarters. He will not be alone in that predicament.  

Try imagining every scenario anywhere and you’ll know it is not going to be pretty. The Maasai cattle herder in Tanzania, previously subsisting on a daily food intake of 1400 calories or less daily, who can now afford to increase his herd of cattle, will find out that there are no cattle available for sale because every Maasai around the region will want to do the same. There is much celebration across the country and alas, every cattle was butchered for the big party.

Around the world home prices will skyrocket when every homeowner, including those living in cardboard boxes from everywhere poverty was the norm yesterday, will want a nice home today.  Mathematicians, sociologists and political scientists will not want to answer this “what if” scenario.  Economists – let us not forget them - will for the first time agree on something: the world economy will collapse into a sudden implosion. There will be no one to sell anything to anyone; besides who will be working anywhere to produce the goods or provide the services of any kind. Who will keep the peace on the streets, and so on and on? You get the picture. Suffice it to say, it is going to be a maddeningly chaotic world!

What seemed like a positively well thought out fantasy to best address the biggest drawback of a capitalist economic system will after all become a destructive engine.  I think I have written enough in the past about equity not to be confused with equality.  We will not digress to that discussion. 

What can possibly go wrong, sometimes will. Even in the best of circumstances something unanticipated can upset even the best laid plan. This might seem like a very pessimistic view but realities after elections, any election, local or national, have ways of turning away from the pages that promises were written on. An optimistic view is that the new or an incumbent administration continuing on can and will keep most of its promises or is able to successfully maneuver the country into the right track despite all the unanticipated roadblocks or detours from the agenda.  The administration's ability to succeed hinges on how far away it can separate itself from doing the wrong thing over and over again.

Elections have come and gone for nearly a quarter of a millennium now in this country.  A handful of elections were more pivotal than others, some can be described as ineffectually successful as artificial sugar - deceptively sweet but lacking in calories when a nation needed the energy to move forward.

This year's election could be one of those pivotal turning points in the nation's history. For one, in an evenly divided country, the greatest need is for a nation to be as close to three quarters of its population united in purpose and direction.  If it remains at 50-50, it will be like a spinning top that can easily topple over at the slightest gust of political winds or when it loses its energy to stoke the people's will or support.

The biggest thing that can go wrong is when the people lose their faith in the system that is supposed to work for them. We know that is about as ill defined as wind blown pages of history left unlearned or simply because time has a way of eroding the granite-hard foundations that used to define what was right that is now wrong or only half-right, or what used to be wrong is now right or partially justifiable.  Morality, as we have come to realize now, is not the etched-in-stone prescriptions that the elders in the early stages of this country used to believe in. And there were good reasons for re-evaluating the prescriptions when what ails the nation is changing by the decades. 

New morality, for lack of a better phrase, can be an agent of virulence or simply sugared water. Either one can be brought on via one or two election cycles.  Before we can wake up to the realization,  we are a changed nation.  A nation that will be led to the same path as nations not unlike the ones that had gone past their historical shelf life, like those of every empire - no matter what power it achieved - that came and went in the last six thousand years or so.

Whatever your inclination is, whatever political persuasion you adopted, please vote on or before November 5th. To remain uncommitted does not excuse you from what will happen or for what can go wrong past that day. Not voting is a choice.  Worse is that it is a choice to not care.  

So, please vote.  What can go wrong that definitely will go wrong is when you ignore to cast your vote.

P. S.  This has been sort of a tradition on my part prior to the last three elections to muse about the subject.

November 13, 2015, a year before the 2016 election I wrote, "When Rattlesnakes Don't Rattle Anymore" 

January 21, 2019, a year before the 2020 election I wrote, "The Silencing of the Lambs"

Small World, Big World (Ultimate Answer to the Meaning of Life)

A man who spent the early years of the first half of his life searching for answers to the meaning of life finally reached the place where he was told he would find it. At  the proverbial mountain top he at last faced the old man - with thick white hair down to his waist and a beard and mustache to match - sitting cross-legged on a granite seat; nearby was a  walking stick and a stack of parchment on a flat slab of white stone and a quill pen.

Old Man: What is it you seek, young man?

Young Man: I am looking for the meaning of life.  I also want to know my place in the universe. 

Old Man: I have four words for you. From them you will find your answers.

Young Man: How do I get my answers from four words?

Old Man: The four words are:  Small World, Big World.  I will say no more. You may leave now.

Did the young man understand what he was told? Did he find his answers?  What did the old man really mean? Do we speculate or we throw in our best guesses?

That young man lived close to a hundred years old when he died. We cannot really know  for sure because lack of a birth record could not confirm the exact date of his birth. At his home, which is now a heritage place in a village where he grew up, spent his childhood, and later from which he began his journey, then back to start his own family, was where he kept a detailed record of his life.  

His children and grandchildren preserved and maintained the upkeep of the humble home, open to people from all over the world who come to visit and pay homage. Inside the home was a small bedroom and just outside of it were two tables.  On one table, encased in a glass top, is a thick book of bound yellowed parchment, an inkwell and pen next to it. On the other table was another hard-bound book of modern paper.  A  reading lamp was next to the book and a simple though comfortable chair with no armrest fronts the table.

The old manuscript under glass is not for public perusal; however, visitors may read the book with the modern pages - an exact copy of the old book - and they can take pictures of the pages but they may do so only without moving the entire book to another spot in the room.

By the entrance door is a larger table. On it are neatly arranged decks of 8-1/2 by 11 bond paper with one side printed on.  It is a one-page summary written by the man who authored the book.  Visitors may take a copy.

It read:

To Each One and All, Greetings!

I know that not all of you who come will have the time to read my entire book. I wrote this summary for you to read here or take home with you. I hope it will serve you well and please share with your friends what you have experienced here.

I must tell you that  I found the answer to my quest for the meaning of life and where my place is in the universe almost immediately. Half way down the mountain on my descent after I left the old man, I stopped to rest on a rock under a small tree. Then I noticed along a cliff, an eagle feeding a newly hatched chick. It must have just hatched because next to it was one still unhatched egg.

To the eagle chick the nest was its small world.  It will be for the next few weeks. One with an even  smaller world is the egg next to it. Then it dawned on me that not too long earlier, both eggs came from something even smaller - smaller than even a tenth of a grain of rice - deep in the mother eagle's oviduct.

Small world indeed. I knew. I pondered, I too was in a small watery world in my mother's womb for nine months. 

My thoughts then were that in a matter of a few weeks, the eagle chicks will leave the nest. They will  soar high above over a world a million times, more perhaps, than the small world that was their nest. Then I thought of the hummingbird. For one so tiny to begin its life from such a small  world of a nest the size of a teaspoon to a swath of several thousand square kilometers it must cover during several migratory trips, its small world and the big world it must fly to and back explained to me my place in the universe. 

The meaning of life is how I lived it throughout its entirety. It was about what meaning I managed to add to it that became the answer.  A big world is what we make from a small world where we began. Our place in the universe is never larger than the footprint we occupy.  Hubris is mistakenly believing that our footprints leave a deeper impression than everyone else's.  Humility is acknowledging that our place in the universe is the small world from where we started and where we will end. 

I began my life in a small world. Restlessly I went to see a bigger world. I doubled that world when I met my wife, then increased it to several fold with our children and grandchildren.  Alas, when my wife passed away, the big world shrunk back to where it was.  As I was finishing the last few pages of the entire manuscript, I was back in the confines of a small world. My failing vision can hardly make out the four walls of my bedroom. I  know that what remains  of my time in this world will be hours of the day spent in my bed. 

We may stay in one place or travel far and wide but we must always remember that each one of us gets an equal amount of time that comes and goes at the rate of one second per second whether we use it or not. 

Do not fall into despair, my dear visitor. I had lived. I had put meaning to that life as best as I could. I know my place in the universe. I respected everything and everyone that is in it. I gave, I helped and I did the right thing at every turn as best  as possible, regardless of whether I got anything back. I saw to it that I was grateful for everything that was good that happened to me.  

From this one page that is the summary of my life, I urge you to read between the lines. Find as many lines as you can because it is from those  that the answers you are seeking will come. You have a place in the universe. It is what you make of your small world that matters. The big world is where every living thing dares to seek and  make the most of what it finds. Be sure to find yours but, most of all, make the most of the time you spend here and there.

Farewell, my dear friend.

 

  

Scary Witches, Recast (for Halloween 2024)

It was two years ago this month when I wrote, "You Think Witches are Scary?" I am recasting it this year as a temporary antidote because we seem to be inundated with so much fear in the face of disasters and we worry for one reason or a  cluster of reasons. Fear that is either rational or not  differs from person to person but, of course, it is the irrational ones that seem to carry more weight in anyone who cares to be fearful. Folks from either side of the political divide are scared out of their wits over what will happen after November 5th. But that's the thing. Why do people care so much to be fearful over an election? We know that on November 6th, after all is said and done, everything is going to be alright. Besides, whether we worry or be fearful, there is little we can do but cast our votes.

Instead let's try to be fearful if only temporarily over something else - the one that goes away as we finish the last chapter of a scary book or at the end of the credits of a horror movie. As FDR famously said, "There is nothing to fear but fear itself".

Of course, it is not right for anyone, including myself, to diminish what people fear. Let's set aside  worrying  about the price of candy to dole out on October 31 or if prices of food and all essentials are ever going to come down?   Or, do we have enough in reserve to weather the scourge of inflation; or, the scourge of the weather?   We pray for those affected by it. But they need more than our thoughts, so please donate what you can to help.

Forget the upcoming election, the prices of candy, international news and to be thankful that if you are reading this means you have electricity, far away from the ravages of the weather.

What about our personal safety at a time when we are confronted by the instability of our surroundings or that of those from far away lands that today seem to dominate the news. "Wars and rumors of war" intrude with regularity because we are told that the world is again witnessing what used to be the time before 1914 or what it was like before 1939. 

For the moment, let's just be scared only temporarily until you're done reading this.  Happy Halloween.

Here it comes.

Halloween as traditionally celebrated may not be totally global but without exception, in any country or culture, there are enough stories and widely held tales to make many a childhood nightmare part of growing up. 

The scary witch in black loose clothing, cape and pointy hat straddling a broomstick will not hold a candle to the "aswang" where I grew up. From the other nearby islands they even evolved into taking different but no less menacing forms.

They're mostly female but the occasional male is more fearsome and unforgiving. During the day, they live normal human lives as regular members of the local community.  At night, when everyone is asleep, the "aswang" will go to a secluded place, usually thickets of vegetation of banana trees or bamboo.  There, the "aswang" will sprout bat-like wings and proceed to separate her upper body, from the belly button up at the waist, then off  she will fly away for a night of marauding menace, leaving the lower body unattended, standing still. Before sunrise the "aswang" will come back to the same spot to reunite with his or her lower body, back to  human form to the unsuspecting community.  

What did they hunt for? And how?  

They would fly to the towns or barrio away from their own community, which they typically leave  alone and unharmed.  However, that is not to say that other "aswangs" from the other towns will not be doing the same thing.  So, just because the local "aswang" will fly somewhere else, no one is safe in any town or barrio.

Vulnerable homes are those with thatched roof of nipa fronds, such as ours when I was growing up.  The "aswang" would alight at the top of the roof where a child or children are sleeping on the floor below. She then separates the nipa  ever so slightly for a good look.  Then, once she finds her victim, she would release through her funneled lips  a thin, continuous strand of her saliva through the slit on the roof into the child's mouth or nostril.  This takes away the child's spirit from the body. By morning, the child is dead. The "aswang" will come back later in the week, during wake. That is when she will devour the body from the inside.   It will take several night trips before the "aswang" is finished. The village people who attend the all-night wake are told to remain awake because even if only one person is up, it will keep the "aswang" from completing the task, but invariably everyone doses off, which enables the "aswang" to devour its victim through its long tongue from the rooftop.  The family and the villagers will take to the cemetery a body empty from the inside except for banana stalks and coconut husks  that the "aswang" replaced it with.

Then there was the famous "Tio Gimo" (nickname for the formal Spanish name of Guillermo) from the other island across from ours.  He had several attractive daughters, fair skinned with light brown hair - typical of mixed Spanish and native blood. Many young men would be lured into calling on the young maidens' home lorded over by "Tio Gimo"; Tio actually means "uncle", obviously endearing as it sounds.  These men, always from out of town, will never be heard from again. "Tio Gimo" and his daughters were "aswang" who had evolved into a different form by preying on love-struck adult males instead of young children. That is how "Tio Gimo" and his daughters survived  by feeding constantly on the strangers' flesh, blood and bones.

Listening to these stories, we were too young or perhaps even too scared to question how people knew of the story if nobody ever came out alive.

Something we did know, however, was how to defeat the "aswang".  One will have to find the lower half of the "aswang" as she forayed into the night. Pouring capfuls of salt or vinegar or a combination of both over the exposed lower half prevented the flying  "aswang" from reuniting and reconstituting herself or himself into a full human form again. At night when all is quiet, we occasionally hear a distant and faint wailing or moaning sound.  We were told by the elders that an "aswang" somewhere was pleading to allow its body halves to be put back together.  We will not sleep well that night.

The "tamawo" was something else.  

One side of the lot where our nipa hut stood, was where the edge of a pond began, part of a larger watery world of  mangrove - muddy, dark, as vegetation obscured the sunlight from getting through. From our lot stood a huge tree. One of its main branches leaned over as an overhang over part of the pond that was clear of aquatic grass and water lilies.  It was a perfect spot to fish. With one or two of my friends we would go up there, straddling horseback-riding-like on the huge branch, with our bamboo fishing poles, tiny hooks and wiggly worms in old rusty tin cans, excited to snag perch and mud fish just below the opaque water.  We were careful to always ask for permission in hushed tones addressed to whichever spirit was present every time we go there. We cannot see the "tamawo", of course, but they're bound to be there because that part of the pond was where their vessels would come to dock.  

The "tamawo" is invisible to everybody, except to some of the elders who are gifted with extraordinary eyesight.  They would tell us that the "tamawo" would leave us alone, in peace and free from harm, if we don't offend them. When asked what the "tamawos" look like, the gifted elders told us that the "tamawos" are pale skinned, almost white, but they have one distinguishing facial feature.  They do not have a philtrum - "the vertical groove on the surface of the upper lip, below the septum of the nose".

When we were out on that tree or anywhere else we ventured to go in the field or thicket of wild berries and such, not only were we not to forget to ask for permission to pass, we were not to point at anything or our fingers would fall off. At the pond, it was often that we saw a kingfisher a short distance away, perched on a drooping branch, watching for fish below.  The kingfisher had striking features of a pointy beak and plumage of beautiful colors of blue, green and red with a tinge of orange.  Not only can we not point at it, it was best to leave it alone. More than likely it was a "tamawo's" pet. 

In fifth grade, a beautiful classmate of ours did not come to class one day.  We heard later that she passed away  the night before. Our teacher took those of us who wanted to go to her wake. She was the quiet type who pretty much kept to herself, except to be with one or two close friends.  Though not very sociable, her pretty face and a rare but unemotional smile framed by long curly dark hair made it hard to ignore her. 

We were told she was taken by the "tamawo" away to their  invisible outer world, adopted to live among them.  There were many unexplained childhood deaths when we were growing up.  Half of them were attributed to the "tamawo" and the other half predated upon by the "aswang".

The "mantiw" was one that no one had ever seen but they were around when it was windy. During the night, of course.  They have long legs because everyone can hear them running over the homes, but not touching any of the structures; but they'd come by so fast  disturbing the air to rush out and back, accompanied by a whistling, sometimes roaring, sound. There could be a herd of these "mantiw" running, especially when it was raining, as if they were either fleeing from or going after something.  But nobody could see them and they were not known to harm anyone.

The "kapri" was another harmless creature but no less sinister. We never asked but I've always wondered why those who were "allowed" to see them always described them as male.  There seemed to have been no female "kapris".  The "kapri" is a giant, about 10-12 feet tall, who resided in big abandoned homes. They have a hairy body, large head with disheveled crusty hair, over large piercing black eyes.  Once, a bunch of us young kids and older teenagers and one adult went to an abandoned home because there was a "kapri" there.  The adult and an older teenager who could see the "kapri" described the creature to us.  The "kapri" was reclining his giant body with his back against the wall, legs splayed on the floor, smoking a huge cigar.  Yes, "kapris" were known to smoke cigars!  And the reason we go there to "gawk" at a creature we could not see was because the "kapri"  too was  a harmless denizen of the dark realm.

Up to this point of my musing, I was re-telling from memories of my childhood.  What follows below are those from sources that are at least two to more times removed from  directly hearing or experiencing them.

Many islands away up north of the archipelago were  creatures that those in our island felt fortunate to not have to deal with them.  I will only mention one here.  The "tikbalang" has a huge torso, hairy and muscular, an ugly face and disproportionately long legs like those of a giraffe's. We were told it indiscriminately preyed on anyone - adults and children - who wandered through the open field or empty streets late in the night.  Its hunger and appetite for human flesh rises with that of the waning and waxing moon, when the night is dark.

In the capital city in the main island was a story that today would seem to follow a universal pattern.  It is called the "Lady in White".  One major street, Balete Drive, so named because  one giant tropical tree species - Balete - stood in one corner, and there used to be several of them along that road.  There are so many versions of the story, episodes too long to cover here but what was consistent was that a Lady in White waiting by that tree would hail and get into a taxi, or privately driven car, in the middle of the night. After that, the stories would turn into so many different terrorizing versions.  Actually, this story may have started from way back when the method of conveyance was still a horse-drawn carriage. 

Photo of a Balete Tree

Below is a representation of what "witnesses" described what the lady looked like.

In the southern islands, at the university where I went, the school hospital had one prevailing story of a Lady in White, presumably the apparition of a deceased nurse, doctor, or previous patient. The reader will note that such stories abound in different parts of the world, across all cultures.

As I said in the first paragraph, we outgrew the stories by about the same time we learned there really was no Santa Claus, some later than others.  Whatever the effects were on the other children I grew up with, I am in no position to assess.  For me, those stories that included episodes from the comic book version of The Twilight Zone (we had no TV then) were what pushed me to the sciences by the time I got into my freshman year in high school. I embraced physical science, math, algebra and geometry because elements of those subjects were provable, and as in geometry, postulates and theorems and proofs of congruence, shapes whose areas and circumferences can be solved, etc. without any ambiguities.

But I wondered why the stories, even to this day, in many parts of the world, remain in circulation. Is it because fear is just a natural  human instinct, stoked by so much we do not and cannot know?

I was scared of moving from home for the first time to go to college. Integral calculus scared me after I failed it the first time I took it.  College graduation was a happy time but we were all scared about not getting a job.

Potential recession, the threat of war, crime, waiting for medical test results, all of these feed into our capacity for all sorts of mental anguish from what seems like our instinctual nature to be fearful.

I feel that those stories that I seem to remember so well, though I cannot vouch with a hundred percent accuracy of my recollections, may have actually prepared me in how I dealt with all kinds of fear later in life. For example, I knew that the "mantiw" that our elders would tell us about came during the monsoon season when rains would be accompanied by high winds. That explained for me the whistling and roaring sounds, which were much too fearsome when one lived in a nipa thatched home.  The death of young children - so difficult to comprehend or accept - which could only have been caused by the "aswang" or "tamawo" is not a good accounting of the fact that the childhood mortality rate could have been explained by inadequate health care and prevention during those times.

Imagine what it was like for our early ancestors to be fearful of so many things beyond their comprehension. But fear must have been and still is a survival tool. As children, our learning brain with a default feature to be fearful of the unfamiliar perhaps have yet to discriminate between and among a lot of stimuli.  

The question is why adults relish the idea of scaring young children.  There are a lot of reasons, I'm sure. It is fun. It is passing on an initiation tradition of the time they too had been scared. It is a way to get the kids to behave or be wary of unfamiliar environments. Who knows?

All of these can be relegated to superstition because who doesn't have one? We eventually outgrow almost all superstitions and  childhood lore we hear, but woe to those who do not.

I think it is best to quote Carl Sagan, from his book, "The Demon-Haunted World" (Science as a Candle in the Dark):

"..when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..."

"The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

I hope I have redeemed myself for subjecting the reader to some of the ghoulish recollections of my childhood, then coming up with rational explanations as to neutralize the irrational.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN !

What's Up With 6174 and 495

They are numbers. But not just ordinary numbers. But before we try to explain why, I suspect there are among the readers who already know what they are.   The explanation will not be for them. However, they might benefit from whatever insights they will read into  why these numbers are special, along with several others more popularly, if not commonly, known. But I must hasten to wager that these numbers are rarely known to many.

First, we acknowledge that language, in every manner that they are used or exhibited, is the single and most special quality that separates us from all other creatures. It is what makes us human. Words - singly or part of a group - are what and how we communicate. They are spoken or written.  In prose or poetry, in songs and speeches, in sad or happy tones, words are the meat and potatoes of language. But lest we forget, we have numbers that are significantly part of language as well, and they are what give superpowers to language.  

One example of the superpowers of numbers are when they are employed in statistics; in polls (in about a month, numbers will decide the fate of a nation in crisis); in defining socio-economic issues because numbers can dominate in how goods are sold and purchased; inflation numbers affect the rich and the poor and sometimes the very viability of a business or how a family manages to make life livable, and so many other things too lengthy to list here.

Okay, so let's dive into these two numbers: 6174 and 495. Then we'll go into  more insights on numbers later. Including zero, which technically is not a number but it is the most important fuel that provides numbers with unlimited energy because it not only can double up, it can exponentially increase the power of numbers.  However, it too can literally render a number as powerless as a feather wafting in the air, practically reducing a number to inutility. We'll get to it later.

6174 is named after an Indian mathematician named D.R. Kaprekar who discovered it. It is now known as Kaprekar's constant.

The number will show up constantly when manipulating the digits of a four-digit number in a certain simple way of subtraction that will result in 6174 all the time.

"Take any four-digit number, with at least two of the digits to be different from each other (leading zeros are allowed).

Arrange the digits in descending and then in ascending order to get two four-digit numbers, adding leading zeros if necessary.

Subtract the smaller number from the bigger number.

Go back to step 2 and repeat".

It's best to illustrate with an example.  Take the number 8457. Arrange it in descending order to become 8754. In ascending order it becomes 4578. Now, subtract the lower number from the higher number.

8754-4578=4176, now, 7641-1467=6174     

Let's try the number 1234:

4321-1234=3087, now 8730-378=8352,  8532-2358=6174

Try this on your birthday, using month and days, i.e. Dec. 7, as 1207. 6174 will always show up at the end, in as short as two steps but no more than seven. Remember though that at least there must be two different digits. It will not work, for example in 1111, or 0000. Which makes you special if your birthday is November 11. Your birthday thwarts the Kaprekar's constant.

Now imagine if you are tasked to determine the variety of numbers or number combinations that will give you the constant 6174? It is a huge number. That's why, even a combination padlock, shown below, poses a challenge. Put simply, four digit combinations are a formidable challenge even if we know that given the Kaprekar's routine, you will always come up with a constant, 6174.

495 is the constant when using the same operations on three digits (always keeping in mind that at least one digit is different from another. Sometimes, it only takes one routine to arrive at 495. The number 612 will give us 621-126=495. And on and on for any 3-digit number.

Now, y'all know the Kaprekar's constant.  What is it good for?  Other than 

that it works almost beyond our ability to understand why and how? You've heard a lot lately about algorithms and AI. 

 

al·​go·​rithm ˈal-gə-ˌri-t͟həm 

: a procedure for solving a mathematical problem (as of finding the greatest common divisor) in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation

broadly : a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end

n+1... is a simple example of an algorithm instruction to add 1 to any number in a series, say 1+1, 2+1, 3+1. It can easily be made complex by simply modifying the definition of n or the value of 1 to something else.

The algorithm behind the Kaprekar's constant is just a tad more complicated.

Throughout our history since our ancestors discovered it, the role of numbers has gone from that of marking how many deer Grog the caveman had to his credit by scratching them on a piece of bone to treating numbers with superstition or fear.  Before the Babylonians kind of invented zero, humans had gone on with their lives without it.  But once known, the Greeks actually banned the use of it, while the Hindus worshipped it. We will not get into constants like the value of pi or the Hubble constant because they deserve more pages than merely be part of a musing.

Today, there is just no way we can conduct our lives and businesses without the zero. The zero to the right of any digit, and however many is added, gives power to that number and we had to come up with words like billion, quadrillion and gazillion when children run out of words in place of so many zeros.  And don't forget the Googol (different from Google). On the other hand, when a zero is written to the left of a number with a decimal point before the zero, the number gets smaller and smaller and for the purpose of nomenclature we add 'th', say, to the million or billion to signify how small a number has become. But get this. Computers only understand zeros and ones when they do the gazillion calculations with "the speed of summer lightning" (from Henry Higgins, in My Fair Lady).

Then we invented infinity (∞) and every number became even a lot smaller, in comparison. We hear that the universe began with a huge explosion 13.7 billion years ago. With infinity to look forward to beyond today, the beginning of the universe might as well have started this morning, relatively speaking, that is. But (∞) is real to anyone who uses integral calculus.

But numbers too have gone on to influence our psyche. They have become tools for superstition. At one time there were no 13th floors in tall buildings. 8 is revered in Chinese culture but 4 is not. 666 is not to be written down or uttered by devout Christians. 7 and 12 are good numbers in both the Old and New Testaments but 40 seems to have a disastrous connotation as when it rained for 40 days and nights that floated Noah's ark.  And nothing good came to the Israelites when Moses went to spend 40 days away from them.  Before that they wandered through the desert for 40 years.

When I was in college my lucky number was 13.  It annoyed my friends but what I was going for was that 13 is a prime number, the consecutive numbers 6 and 7 when added together is 13. 7 is a prime number but although 6 is not, the product of multiplying the consecutive prime numbers 2 and 3 makes 6.  At the gym, the locker number I always use when it is not occupied is no. 67.  It is not superstition but simply to help me remember every time I go to retrieve my stuff after swimming.

Now, if you are encountering it for the first time, you will not forget 6174 or 495. I know what you are going to do. You are likely to make number combinations from those two on your next lottery pick.  If you win, I hope you remember to send me a commission. I'll take a small fraction because  even with just a few zeros my share from $120 million  will still be a windfall.  GOOD LUCK !