The Year of the Monkey

I know very little about the Chinese Zodiac sign but this I know – I was born on the Year of the Dog and 2016 is the Year of the Monkey. (They happen to be my two favorite animals).  I was at a local Chinese grocery store early this year on the eve of Super Bowl 2016, which also happened to precede the Chinese New Year.  I just had two packets of frozen banana leaves and a couple of cans of coconut milk for a cassava dessert I was going to make for the Super Bowl party we were hosting at home.  The “10 items or fewer” checkout was lined with people snaking all the way from the produce section. I am recalling this episode now because we’re halfway through 2016 and I am somewhat alarmed at what is going on around the world.

Striking up a conversation while waiting, I asked the guy in front of me, who was Chinese, about the coming Chinese New Year.  As is known, the Chinese Zodiac sign has a year’s worth of portent as opposed to the daily or monthly presages of the western horoscopy.  While I am not one to subscribe to the predestined path that is determined by an animal attached to each year of the 12-year cycle, I asked him what he thought the New Year had in store. He told me that the Year of the Monkey is often a harbinger of bad omen.  Another Chinese at the 24-Hour Fitness that I happened to chat with a few days later also said the same thing.  According to her, what came to mind was the recent earthquake that devastated Taiwan, where she’s from, and the economic travails that ail China today etc.  “What does that say about the upcoming U.S. election?” I asked. She shrugged her shoulder and that was about the extent of her response. How about the zika virus outbreak in South America and the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro?  Then, we hear the drop in oil prices that most thought was a good thing is partly to blame for much of the trouble in the global economy.  So, what is going on?

Buried in the middle section of newspapers and as an aside in a radio broadcast I noticed stories that animal rights activists have taken up recently as their current cause celeb.  It is about macaque monkeys employed as forced labor in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia as coconut gatherers.  I read that chances are 95% of the coconut milk at any grocery store comes from coconuts gathered by these hapless primates that more than having opposable thumbs like we have, they can do with their feet what we can’t with ours – they have opposable toes equally adept at grabbing things.  It got my attention because I am a regular buyer of coconut milk.  A quick search produced a good number of YouTube videos showing exactly how the monkeys are trained to do their human masters’ bidding of gathering coconuts. Below are the links to those videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gWEsNL-RJc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf8mbxR2LQM

The videos are meant to be both informative and amusing (although perhaps not to the animal rights folks) and one cannot help but be awed by how well the monkeys do the job.  In some places tourists pay good money to watch them in action. There are all kinds of statistics on their productivity as I came to find out but what is certain is that the monkeys are far more proficient by as much as ten to one better than the human gatherer for the same amount of time working the coconut groves.  Then there is the fact that the monkeys do not need very much by way of compensation; they are not known to complain or threaten to form a union; their housing accommodations are very minimal, to say the least; and they certainly cannot sue or file for grievance.  I read too that monkeys engaged as coconut gatherers live much longer than their counterparts in the wild.  It too is true though that only young macaques that exhibit traits of promise go on to become professional gatherers, so to speak, while less talented ones are sold as pets.

But there is a dark side, according to animal rights activists.

Much had already been said of the inhumane treatment of monkeys at medical and scientific laboratory test facilities.  The pharmaceutical industry is a constant target of activists.  Using them for forced labor might seem ethically benign and certainly a lot less stressful to the collective conscience of the general public but the activists feel very strongly against the whole idea of forcing an animal that has 98% of our DNA to work against its will.  The activists complain too about elephant labor and how some beasts of burden are treated: water buffalo tilling farmlands in Asia; pack animals like Mongolian yaks and reindeer, etc.  I have not heard much complaint about eagles that are trained by Mongolians to hunt prey animals and what about falconry? They all fall within the exploitation of animals for the benefit of humans.  As a side note, let me mention that the domestication of the horse is credited with advances in agriculture and transportation and more importantly the rapid exploration of the open lands and spread of civilization in pre-mechanized era. But I digressed.

The year of the monkey, is a harbinger of bad things?  The ancient Greeks used to describe the basic elements as Earth, Water, Air and Fire.  A Chicago rock band named itself, “Earth, Wind and Fire”, and they indeed played in a Greek theater sometime in 2004.  I really don’t know where I was going with that one but I thought I’d mention it, if only to say that whoever of the band members who came up with the name knew his ancient Greek history.  I digressed again.

I learned that the Chinese version of the basic elements include Metal, which makes it one more than what the Greeks had. Their five are Metal, Water, Wind, Fire and Earth.  What then does the Year of the Monkey bring to world events?

 “According to Chinese Five Elements Horoscopes, Monkey contains Metal and Water. Metal is connected to gold. Water is connected to wisdom and danger. Therefore, we will deal with more financial events in the year of the Monkey. Monkey is a smart, naughty, wily and vigilant animal. If you want to have good return for your money investment, then you need to outsmart the Monkey. Metal is also connected to the Wind. That implies the status of events will be changing very quickly. Think twice before you leap when making changes for your finance, career, business relationship and people relationship.”

So, based on my limited conversation on the subject which I mentioned earlier with the couple of folks who seemed to know, the referendum result in England to leave the EU adds to the ominous portent that can befall the world. Should we worry?

Let’s see, the last time it was the Year of the Monkey was 2004.  I already mentioned that the rock band, Earth, Wind & Fire, played in Greece that year.  Bill Clinton had a heart bypass surgery and it was a success.  A 97 year old woman was found alive in the aftermath of an earthquake in Iran and five days later a man was also found alive from the same quake.  Those were the good news. But there were a number of disasters, not the least of which was the earthquake in Indonesia that produced one of the worst tsunamis the world had witnessed in modern history.  It devastated long coastlines around the area, including the beach resort area in Thailand.  The total death toll from the affected areas around the Indian Ocean exceeded 200,000!  That happened right at the last days of the year.

244 pilgrims died from the Hajj stampede in Saudi Arabia, an earthquake in Morocco killed 300 people, over 1,000 people died when hurricane Jeanne hit Haiti, there were plane crashes and supermarket fires, etc.  2004 had its share of disasters.  We should really worry about this Year of the Monkey, shouldn’t we? 

However, we should keep in mind though that WWI, WWII and the 1929 Stock Market Crash that brought the Great Depression did not begin or occur in the years of the Monkey.  In fact, we can say that each year of the modern world has had its share of catastrophic events – natural and man-caused.

Let me digress for a bit again.  What I would like to know is what year was it when the Mount Everest-size asteroid slammed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico sixty seven million years ago.  Oh, but wait, there was no calendar then yet, no Chinese calendar, for certain.  But, can we extrapolate?  No, that’s too much work, of course. It was a really bad year for the dinosaurs. It had to have been the most devastating experience in climate change the world had ever seen, through the eyes of the then dominant species on earth. Their extinction began soon after that, after over 160 million years of raw dominion over all living things.  But it was great news for the tiny mammals which up to that point in time occupied a very insignificant niche in a landscape dominated by giant creatures. Those mammals subsisted mainly on insects or vegetation on forest floors and crevices and it was likely that their activities were limited at nightfall. Fast forward to many millions of years later and here we are – the most able descendants of those mammals that were no bigger than today’s squirrels.  Smaller dinosaurs did survive and we still see them today as lizards, iguanas and alligators but others even had loftier ambitions, not content with just climbing the evolutionary ladder, they flew off the ground: today’s birds! 

The Yucatan asteroid impact may have put an end to the rule of the mighty dinosaurs but you will not be reading about this had the evolutionary road remained unchanged. From those early mammal ancestors arose the general branch of species called primates – lemurs, tarsiers, monkeys, apes and us, humans. Let us be clear about this.  We, humans, did not come from monkeys or apes. Consider primates as a big branch that split into prosimians (where lemurs belong) and simians; the latter is split into apes, monkeys and hominids (where modern humans developed from).  While primates are generally defined to have relatively larger brains (brain size relative to body weight) than all other mammals, humans dominate that category.  That is why, except for Antarctica, humans inhabit all corners of the world while the other primates are mostly concentrated in tropical environments.

Where am I going with this?  We share 50% of our DNA with a banana but 98 % of our DNA is shared with monkeys and apes (which, by the way, include gorillas and orangutans).  Animal testing and research are what they are.  Inhumane, we are told by animal rights groups, but should it be less inhumane if we applied the tests directly into human subjects from the get go?  In the last five years alone 10 Nobel Prizes for medicine were awarded to researchers and scientists whose contribution to medicine were formulated from laboratory testing on animals that ranged from mice, frogs, rabbits, dogs and cattle and yes, monkeys.  In the past, small pox vaccines were developed using cows, but polio and rubella vaccines, and most notably advances in AIDS medication, just to name a few, came from research and experiments using monkeys. By the way, advances in veterinary medicine were developed out of research and experiments using animals.  A couple of days ago Perdue, a huge producer of poultry meat, announced that it is reforming its animal welfare policies.  Animal rights activists were largely responsible for this and many other improvements in the treatment of animals.

Among other traits that separate humans from animals are our capacity for compassion and it is because of that unique characteristic that voices from animal rights groups and animal ethicists are being heard. This has brought about humane treatment of animals in laboratories and food production (meat and poultry), farming, hunting and entertainment.  The death of a zoo gorilla had, in fact, gotten more sustained coverage than dozens of human deaths that occur every day on the streets of Chicago, Detroit, Sao Paolo or Fallujah.

After what had gone on during the first half, should we be worrying too much about the remaining half of the year?  Even as I declare that I am not putting too much stock on the symbolic significance of the animal-related-12 year-cycle of Sheng Xiao, here I am with a discombobulated musing on the Year of the Monkey.  All we can hope for is that the world’s leaders, soon to be chosen ones here and everywhere else, pick cleverness and smarts of the Monkey and not the mischief and bad portents it is associated with.  Didn’t I just say I don’t put much stock into it?  Oh, well, I am hedging my bets. 

   

There was a Book Sale …

It had been awhile since I last visited our local library, which had been closed for renovation although I had already cut down my trips there even before the work had begun.  I still read and my use of the library has not diminished.  What changed was that I serendipitously discovered e-books.  The county library, steeped in the tradition of brick and mortar, took some time to embrace the electronic medium of acquiring and lending books.  I’m sure budgetary considerations were a factor and the median age of its users – a good number of whom, like me, couldn’t let go of the old traditional way of reading where one actually has to flip pages and use book marks.  Apparently, e-books were not a priority for the library system and its patrons, I suppose.

Earlier, kindle and tablets to me, for a very long time, meant fire starter and headache pills.  Then I heard of a much acclaimed book - “The Martian” - that was made into a movie - which the author published online for free.  So, I said to myself, “I better hitch on to this e-book reading thing”, if I wanted to read it.  Just then the local library opened their electronic bookshelves, not with too much fanfare because until I inquired at the front desk I never heard of it. So, I signed in and voila I was connected to the ether world of bibliotheca from the cloud.

What brought me to the library this time, after it had just recently re-opened, was to sort of circumvent the system.  I had checked out an e-book, “The Girl on the Train”, but failed to finish it within the 14-day period as my schedule got hectic by a short out-of-town trip and some wood working projects that needed to be finished.  It is a popular book so there was no renewal to accommodate the long waiting list.  I hedged my bet by reserving a hard copy as well several days earlier when I knew I couldn’t finish the e-book.

Last Saturday the library pinged my phone of my good fortune that the hard copy book was ready for checkout.  So I got in my car to make the four mile trip.  The parking lot was packed! There was a book sale.  I thought I’d saunter in to the hall where the book sale was humming with book mongers and bargain hunters before proceeding to the main lobby counter to pick up the book.

There they were – books past their utility to entertain, or had overstayed their welcome at their owner’s tightly packed bookshelves or for any number of other reasons.  I browsed and was surprised to see these books in excellent condition.  Some were New York bestsellers only a year ago.  A good number of them still had their glossy dust jackets.  These were books that once graced the display tables at Barnes & Noble, the toasts of critics, or were so eagerly awaited by readers across the country from any town with a Post Office or accessible by UPS or Fedex; therefore, within reach by Amazon.  Tons of books today come that way.  But now some of them were there at the book sale, discarded by their original readers, donated for free to the library and are being re-sold for pennies to the dollar.  Books are that easily discarded these days.

Each table was well labeled for every genre.  There was a complete volume set of Sherlock Holmes mysteries and there were children’s books and self-help or self-improvement books.  I was kind of surprised at the number of cook books.  Have the previous owners mastered them or have they simply gone on from Chinese and Vietnamese or country style barbecue to now experimenting with Indian or Afghan cuisine?  But get this.  There was almost an equal number of diet and exercise books. I am almost certain the cook books and diet books were not given up by the same donors.  A real surprise was the number of massive Tom Clancy novels that were there. His books average about a quarter million words per novel.  Some of the books still had tightly packed pages in them, which seem to indicate that the previous readers/owners were finicky page turners or they just simply gave up at 2/3 of the stories, not being able to deal with the convoluted plots of characters and places and techno-warfare jumping in and out of every chapter.  No, I’m sure the previous readers finished the stories.  There were a number of Sue Grafton’s “alphabet” thrillers.  I have not read any of her books and she’s down to the last two letters of the alphabet.  She just published, “W – is for wasted” and a one-letter title, “X” (no clever add-on phrase since what good is xenon or xylophone to a murder mystery).  It won’t be long before we get to, I guess, “Z – is for zero suspect”.  I’ll wait when she gets down to the Greek alphabets, with perhaps, “Alpha – is for alibi”.  How’s that for a suggestion to Ms. Grafton’s first Greek alphabet series?

It was tempting to let go of a few dollars.  For ten bucks or less I was going to have a stack for much of my summer reading.  The Sherlock Holmes volume set was going to be a good one to give to the grand kids when they get to the age when logical thinking will be something to try once video games lose their allure.  I’m not sure of it but I hope their parents will indeed keep them away from video games.  I decided against the purchase because I figured by the time the grand kids do some serious reading they will be going for e-books, or some other yet but soon to be invented medium of spreading information and reading material.  I left the hall empty handed.

I went to the counter ready with my library card in my hand – there’s a big sign that tells you to do just that because they don’t want you fumbling for it from your wallet when you get there as that would take up a few seconds of the busy schedule of the other patrons waiting behind you.  I sled my card towards the lady behind the counter announcing politely that I had a reserved book.  As practiced before, she would scan your card and without saying much she’d turn and walk towards the back room and in less than a minute she’d be back with your book/books and you’re done. 

Well, the library now had a new system for checking out reserved books. She motioned me to go somewhere first. The “back room” is now three long shelves at the center of the library behind the information desk. I was to go there and find the book myself.  Books there were on shelves not arranged according to the familiar Dewey Decimal System but alphabetically according to the last names of the borrowers. Making use of my mental acuity, I went to the section labeled with the first letter of my last name. Lo and behold, there on one of the books was my name on a piece of white paper stuck between the pages.  Those demanding the higher minimum wage should now understand that it is just a matter of time when customers at a fast food restaurant will soon be picking up their orders from the kitchen in the back.  There they will pick up the cooked patty off the hot plate into the face up buns, put the condiments on, after which they either pick up a paper plate or paper bag, depending on whether they were dining in or taking it out.  Fast food customers have for ages been serving sodas themselves so there will be no change there.

I picked up the book and went back to the counter.  Not right away because there were now about eight people ahead in line.  When my turn came I confessed to the lady about not finishing the e-book so I was borrowing the hard copy.  I did not expect her to respond to that. She didn’t but she did say this, “Well, soon if the trend goes towards e-books we will be saving a lot of trees, won’t we?” She was smiling, so I assumed she was just kidding.  Then again she may have been serious about saving trees. She looked like the environmentalist type.

How about that, we’ll save trees with e-books! Soon my idling mind revved up to a higher gear, switching quickly to the implications of e-books.  Saving trees is a distinct if not profound possibility that will potentially reverse the current trend of deforestation, flooding and the balding of mountains.  But then, what could possibly go wrong?

For one thing, Barnes & Noble will have to close shop; Amazon will need to find a good chunk of bulk sales to make up for books now being peddled through the ether; the time to retire some cargo planes at UPS and Fedex will have to come much sooner; some paper mills and printing companies will come down to a few survivors; and worst of all the rank of the unemployed will swell, and so on and on.  Are these the unintended consequences of e-books?

From the space station, or its replacement at some future time, astronauts will see a very deep green-in-blue planet earth as mountains and plains abound with trees.  We can dream, can’t we?  Because this assumes the population of people has stood still at a mere seven billion and livestock kept at minimum because vegetarianism is on the rise.  But let’s make that scenario, anyway.

For trees to flourish in that scenario there should be plenty of carbon dioxide in the air to support their needs. We may not have that much today with just the existing number of cars and fossil fuel-burning power plants, so it must be supplemented perhaps by more than the occasional volcanic eruptions to insure CO2 sufficiency in the air. We will need one Krakatoa every six months. (The last time in earth’s history when there was hardly any ice on either pole, perhaps the greenest period of time when vegetation was dense, was during the Eocene epoch – 56 to 39 million years ago.  It was also marked by frequent volcanic activity).  But here’s the thing.  As trees gulped CO2 they will expel oxygen.  With the existing population of people and other air breathing animals, there may not be enough to consume all the oxygen to keep it at the level it is today.  So the oxygen in the atmosphere could exceed 21% to maybe 30%?  That has a potential to change the atmospheric makeup of the air with hazardous consequences!  But nature will do what it needs to do.  It will cause more lightning strikes.  As oxygen level goes up, forest fires will be easy to start, burns hotter and will take longer to extinguish. But forest fires, in the aftermath, are precursors to more trees and plant growth and …

I can go on and on with these wild scenarios.  Who knows what else can happen that I haven’t worried about.  Then I realized that indeed my idle mind did rev up to high gear, or perhaps the oxygen level has come down a bit in the room.  Well, you can all rest easy. Get e-books and don’t worry about it.

From Trivium to Tedium

We will not stray too much from the truth if we admit that much of what we talk about in the course of a normal day is much about trivia.  What we experience on the drive to work, on the subway or some other public mode of transportation that took us to work, what was on TV last night and, oh, the weather, what’s coming up over the weekend, etc. are all trivialities that far outweigh the serious stuff we do or discuss.  There are exceptions, of course, and perhaps I am exaggerating here. But get this.  Even surgeons and their staff talk about trivia while in the middle of a surgery.  Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell (of Lone Survivor fame) relayed the story in his book (which was featured in the movie version) about a conversation while in the thick of a mission.  He was admonishing his Seal buddy that it is Arabian horses, not Arabic horses.  And they did spend some time talking about that particular breed.

What is it about trivia that permeates human culture?  Human interaction is, culturally speaking, defined by our capacity to absorb and disburse information, vocally or in writing; however, we do know that trivial stuff fills the bulk. We expect public speakers, no matter how serious the topic, to begin with something amusing or just plain funny anecdotes or quips about trivialities.

It is very unique to us because no such thing happens in the animal world.  Notice how ants stop each other every time they meet along a single path.  They exchange nothing but serious information about where food can be gathered from somewhere at the end of the line. There is no time for trivial stuff in the animal world – it is all about food, should one flee or fight and, by the way, finding a mate is serious business and decidedly so if one is trying to hold on to several of them if you’re the top alpha overlord of the pride, the pack, the gaggle, the herd, or the pod, etc. 

Humans, on the other hand, have time for other things when food, finding a mate and flee or fight decisions do not preoccupy them constantly. We do have time for trivialities even though these do not have anything to do with basic human or animal needs. There is an exception. Trivia becomes supremely important when one is trying to win in “Jeopardy”, “Wheel of Fortune” and the former top show, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”.  It perplexes me though that the show about trying to win a million dollars failed while shows where winning a very tiny fraction of a million are still popular.

Now, here is the thing.  The ultimate trivial information ever is where the word trivia comes from. But first it must be duly noted that there is some validity to why some folks’ complain about Wikipedia. You see, it was pretty clear cut for a very long time that trivia comes from Latin “tri-via”– three roads or the intersection of three roads.  Latin was popular then because at one time, believe it or not, “all roads led to Rome”. Anyway, according to early etymology (fancy but clever one word to describe the origin of words) travelers would leave important messages to family members or friends posted at the intersection of these three roads.  Indeed, where the tri-via - the three roads – intersected was a strategic location suited for relaying important information about travel activities and destinations. However, over time people were soon leaving unimportant pieces of information that progressively turned notably un-notable. It did not take long for what used to be important stuff to become trivial pieces of information. But this is no longer the popular explanation since after Wikipedia was inundated with so many explanations and origins coming from all sorts of sources.  Soon, many generations from now, trivia will etymologize its origin from three letters, www, or the World Wide Web. Reason: Facebook, Twitter, and others will be the new tri-via.  It will be multi-via, numbering in the millions of intertwining connections now fondly or derisively labeled social media, to which this blog is a sporadic epistler of sort.

I do not have a Facebook or twitter account so I can’t open or view them.  I therefore hold judgment. During the 1st quarter of 2016 I read that there are 1.65 billion active users of Facebook.  There are an estimated 974 million accounts in twitter.  Granted there are overlaps, that is an awfully big number of social media users.  If we include You Tube that has monthly active users at 1 billion, Instagram and blogs (including this one), that is a lot of electronic signals that propagate at light speed from the twirling globe. 

There is an earth based scientific program, SETI, for Search for ExtraterrestriaI Intelligence, which dedicates arrays of radio telescopes listening for any kind of signals emitted by an intelligent life form from anywhere in the galaxy.  So, if we’re doing that it presupposes that intelligent beings outside of our world, if there are any, that had advanced their civilization as we have are doing the same thing.  We know those SETI folks would be excited at any meaningful signal they can and, hopefully, will capture someday. If there are aliens out there, listening, they’ll also pick up all TV and radio programs, military, radar and distress signals, etc. that had so far been propagated since Samuel Morse tapped the first electronic signals over the air waves.  They won’t pick up any non-electronic material like animal sounds, even the infrasound elephants make, whale songs, even roars of lions and least of all actual tweets birds make.  However, the alien listeners could conceivably pick up the primal scream Marlon Brando made of, “Stella!!!”, if they happen upon a rebroadcast of “Streetcar Named Desire” from Turner Classic Movie Channel.  But not right away, of course.  They will have to wait at least a few years from the time the signals leave earth (even at light speed) if they are from some planet orbiting stars within the same vicinity as Proxima Centauri (our sun's closest stellar neighbor).  It could be hundreds if not thousands of years if they’re panning their antennas from across the galaxy.  Residents from Andromeda Galaxy won’t get I Love Lucy reruns or know last year’s Super Bowl winner sooner than 2.6 million years.

The good news is that mal-intentioned aliens as Stephen Hawking seems to be concerned about may quickly lose interest after decoding the signals they get.  They may be fearful if they happen upon humanity's bad behavior and proclivity for war; or, we may not be worthy of their effort based on how trivial our world is.  On the other hand, well-intentioned alien listeners may suffer from tedium upon what they observe on social media.

Stephen Hawking can rest easy.  We may after all be saved from alien intervention if trivium makes them grimace with tedium.

Will We Ever Know Everything?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2)      The Enigma of Time

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

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

3)      Size Does Matter

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

4)      We will not know what we cannot know

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

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

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

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

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

This takes us back to the anonymous writer who said, 

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

6)      It is next to impossible to define consciousness

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

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

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

When Rattlesnakes Don’t Rattle Anymore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life, Living, Death

Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living

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

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

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

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

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

Death

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

And now the end is near

So I face the final curtain

My friend, I'll say it clear

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

I've lived a life that's full

I've traveled each and every highway

And more, much more than this

I did it my way

Paul Anka

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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