A Most Valuable Companion

My thoughts here go to many of my worldwide readers who must wonder too that even as world population continues to grow the more we find many who are alone or feel alone somewhere.  I dedicate this to all who find themselves longing to have someone or something to accompany them through the last mile of  their life's journey.  


Many a time it has been said, “Life is a journey”.  We travel in twos, as a family, even as an extended group, because we are social beings. We build communities because it is safer that way.  The individual can be strong but to have company is stronger still; a whole village, a whole nation strongest.  But if we were to pick one in our life’s journey, who should it be, or what should it be?  Is it a significant other, a friend, a dog or another comparably docile and friendly creature?  Whoever or whatever it is, we need one to accompany us on that journey.

“A good companion shortens the longest road”     - Turkish Proverb

But then…

“I love to be alone. I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude”.  -          Henry David Thoreau

The Swedish actress Greta Garbo who starred in many love-themed films, beautiful that she was and always paired with equally good looking men, was also famous for having the most number of quotes on being alone. The most well-known one was, expressed in her unmistakable Swedish accent, “I vant to be alone”.  (‘w’ pronounced as ‘v’ became her trademark elocution as well). She had expressed that sentiment so many times in her real life and indeed she never married, had no children and she died alone.  (By the way, Ms. Garbo for most of her movie career starred in silent films. It must have been quite surprising for movie fans then to hear her speak when sound was introduced to film when they heard her say, “vant”). 

But then again …

“I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people that make you feel alone”.      Robin Williams

Robin Williams was an only child. He’d tell the story that a good part of his becoming a comedian was growing up mostly alone with very little interaction with other kids, so he pretended to have an imaginary friend/s.  Most children went through that phase. We created companions in our heads, talked and played with characters created in our minds.  Consciously or sub-consciously many did but ultimately most outgrew it.

Robin told this episode in his life growing up, “My childhood was lonely. Both my parents were away a lot, working, and the maid basically raised me. And I think that's where a lot of my comedy comes from. Not only was the maid very funny and witty, but when my mother came home I'd use humor to try and get her attention. If I made mommy laugh, then maybe everything would be all right. I think that's where it all started”.

Robin Williams was well known for ad-libbing and improvisations and did them so well that producers and director/s gave him practically free rein in “Mork & Mindy”, because he was just simply irresistibly funny at adding unscripted lines.  In stand-up comedy he was brilliant at improvisation that he hardly stayed on a set script.  His companion friends in early childhood trained him well.

 

It can be said that he found companionship with entities that were in his head.  As children, didn’t our dreams become our companions? They were our refuge when things didn’t go well. They were our inspiration when we wanted to do well.  Dreams were cheap, we travelled with them, or find comfort in them, and they were at our beck and call. They quickly move away when we were to do something else or had friends and games and sports to pre-occupy us.  Then just like that we summoned them when we needed to be somewhere else.  We filled our imagination with dreams. We day-dreamt but we had real ambitious dreams too.  Our desires to do well in school, at sports, at building things, were all propelled by dreams – to excel, make something of ourselves, emulate others, or follow the footsteps of our fathers or our heroes. Along the way our dreams were our most inspiring, if not entertaining companions.

As we got older we switch our inner/personal companions into ideas. They were not dreams any more.  If dreams acted like apparitions, ideas had concrete forms. They were a focused expression of something that we can actually act on.  Even if we were only to write about it, muse over it, or create or invent with it.

Author Edith Wharton wrote in one of her short stories, “The Descent of Man”, about the main character, Professor Linyard, who would go out by himself sometimes, unaccompanied except by the ideas that were in his head.  Edith Wharton wrote,

“To Mrs. Linyard’s observant eye he had appeared to set out alone; but an invisible traveler had in fact accompanied him, and if his heart beat high it was simply at the pitch of his adventure: for the Professor had eloped with an idea”.

Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, Wright Brothers, Hewlett and Packard, all, and others like them, must have had monster companions to accompany them.  Not only did they elope with ideas, they married them. And today we benefit from the off springs of those marriages – men and women and their ideas.

We do not need to be like those extraordinary folks for our ideas to help us in our journey. We engage in Do-It-Yourself projects with ideas in our heads, our hobbies are where these ideas go out to play with us. Renovating a home, go on some unique travel adventures, and so on and on, begin as ideas in the mind that we acted on. Keep in mind that nothing original we ever get to do without first engaging our companion idea into fruition.

Greta Garbo and others like her chose to be alone.  What about those who are alone not by choice but by circumstance. We have people in prison at 23-hour solitary confinement. Justice system notwithstanding, loneliness could very well be the ultimate punishment to the living and most horrifyingly unbearable for anyone put there by a flaw in how justice was arrived at or applied.

Then we have those living alone in their homes, old and weak, and more by a much higher number in nursing homes. The former is tragic by sheer helpless isolation; the latter a much sadder state to be lonely or feeling alone even when there are people around.

Happiest among these folks, or managing well, are those who choose to be accompanied in the most challenging part of their journey by a most valuable companion.  They choose to bring along their thoughts and memories; or rather for these to bring them along to places and times they can no longer travel to.  They can get their minds to host a reunion of sort for memories to come together, or thoughts to collaborate and give hope, to comfort and to assure. Memories can be plucked from the bins of our experiences; thoughts can be random visitors that come and go – both can be willing companions if we summon them.  Thoughts and memories help to exercise our minds.  We can summon them into our arm chairs or in the comfort of a kitchen table with a piping hot coffee or chocolate within easy reach. They will stay until we let them go. If we are to travel they come not as extra luggage but to help lighten or shorten the trip. 

Thoughts and memories will never complain about the journey, are never jealous, or intrude uninvited and leave like polite guests. Some will say, “But what about thoughts that don’t want to leave us alone, and painful memories that come barging in?”  Well, we actually hold the key to the door of our minds. They come if we surrender the keys to them.  But better still is to have good thoughts and beautiful memories stand guard by the door to keep the unwanted ones out and as far away as possible.

Those are all messages to everyone who seek companions if they are actually alone physically, or traveling by themselves, or who feel alone even in the presence of other people.

To those fortunate to have someone by their side always, I leave with this anonymous quote:

“All relationships have one law. Never make the one you love feel alone, especially when you’re there”.             -             Anonymous     

IT – Information Turmoil

It is fair to say, perhaps not even debatable anymore, that today, as never before, we in the developed areas of the world are confronted with just too much information, too much for our own good, and simply too much for a well-ordered life in the future. Is information over load an example of too much of a good thing? Are we being driven towards a path of total dependence on information technology? Is information technology’s advance infinitely self-sustaining, indomitably inextinguishable? If information made life possible in the beginning, can too much of it stifle our way of lives in the future, or will a sudden absence of it be both existentially and sociologically paralyzing.

Those are not trivial questions to ask. Imagine for a moment that tomorrow, without warning, every communication satellite is disabled. It will be described no less than one massive global information cardiac arrest. Is it highly unlikely, or never to happen?

Think about the following true events:

a.)    One late afternoon on August 14, 2003, a widespread power outage affected Northeastern and Midwestern U.S. and the province of Ontario, Canada. Late that night some power was restored but it took a whole week everywhere else, especially in rural areas, for restoration to complete. “The blackout's primary cause was a software bug in the alarm system at a control room of the First Energy Corporation, located in Ohio. A lack of alarm left operators unaware of the need to re-distribute power after overloaded transmission lines hit unpruned foliage, which triggered a race condition in the control software. What would have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into massive widespread distress on the electric grid”.

b.)    On Nov. 9, 1965 30 million people over an area of 80,000 sq. miles in the Northeast and Ontario, Canada lost power completely for 13 hours.  Ontario is vulnerable, again, because of its proximity to the Niagara generating stations.  Human error was cause of the outage.  “The safety relay, which was to trip if the current exceeded the capacity of the transmission line, was set too low”.

c.)     On March 11, 1999 up to 90 million Brazilians were treated to a total power blackout, “when a lightning strike occurred at 22h 16m at an electricity substation in Bauru, São Paulo State causing most of the 440kV circuits at the substation to trip”.

All of the above occurred during peace time.  What would it be like in times of a major military conflict? Let’s not go there because the mere thought of it will give anyone even with the remotest hint of paranoia a most paralyzing distress or unimaginable trepidation. Sometime in 1876, after the telegraph had changed how information was propagated, the telephone was invented.  Both changed in very dramatic fashion how people communicated. It was the beginning of the age of information technology.  

But lest we forget, both of those inventions and everything else that followed in its wake were dependent on one thing – electric energy. The new technology’s life blood and its Achilles heel is electricity.  Whether from land line or stored from batteries, information technology’s umbilical cord can never be detached from electrical power. And there lies the problem. And there is something even more insidious – modern society is seduced into believing that information technology has the solution to everything. But along with this is the evil misuse of the technology to stream live criminal acts of violence and widespread cyber bullying.

Theologians and non-believers look at the first verse, Chapter I, of the Book of John in the New Testament from two different views, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The atheist makes a substitution, “In the beginning was the information, and the information was with God, and the information was God”.

Here’s how I interpret the biologist’s take on information.  Life as we know it begun with information. The only way for the first single cell organism to survive was to capitalize on information. What linked the primordial nucleus to the external cell membrane was information. The rudimentary brain that was the nucleus depended on that information to make the first synthesis that made life possible. It cascaded from there when everything from the environment, the presence of nutrients, suitable locations, threats and allies were crucial to survival that allowed for organisms to flourish, diversify, evolve to complexity, etc.  Billions of years of evolution depended solely on the use of information.  Think about it. Plants, which by the way are the first living organisms, must recognize the orientation of their location towards sunlight, their roots must know where the water is, nutrients from the soil must be identified, and all of these traits depend on, you guessed it – information.

Before we get to the highly sophisticated information at the human level, we must look back to where it all started. Information was a key sustaining component to the origin of life and, this is important to note, information evolved along with it. Think about it. From the earliest microbes to worms to lizards and amphibians, etc., every species had to rely on it to find food, shelter, and survive. Wolves howl to establish their presence and communicate the extent of their territory. Scent marking surpasses short- lived howls, growls, hisses and all kinds of temporary vocalization. Scents preserved information over a period of time. Fast forward to early human development and information took a dramatic leap when growls and gestures were organized into repeatable vocalization that led to language. Language led to written records. Written records led to another dramatic leap towards the unprecedented explosion of knowledge.

So then man needed to extend the reach of communication.  Where tom-toms and smoke signals begun, the written text made information not only readily available for widespread use, it preserved the usefulness of it indefinitely.  But word of mouth dissemination never stopped.  When gossip took days to spread over a typical village, weeks to cover a typical town, the telephone shortened the distance between people and communities to mere millimeters from the mouth and ear pieces of a gadget invented in 1876.

Just as in any evolutionary processes in biology where traits and even physical organs and extremities were discarded in favor of newer ones that allowed for species to adapt and flourish, technology in communication went through the same path of elimination.  Semaphore flags, ships’ signal lamps, the telegraph and fax machines, camera film rolls and a few others are featured as museum pieces now after giving way to today’s ubiquitous smart phones, tablets, laptops, digital cameras, etc. And these new ones we embrace now so dearly hold them loosely, because they too will not be immune from “who-knows-what” just waiting beyond the next breakthrough.

Alas, information came with the good and the bad. Consider this. Joseph Goebbels was Reich Minister of Propaganda in the Nazi Germany. Propaganda at that time did not have such a bad connotation. The word’s etymology in fact comes from, “that which ought to be spread”, as in propagate, not for carrying out misleading information, as we know it today.  Much earlier, Pope Gregory XV founded the “Congregatio de Propaganda Fide” (“Congregation for propagating the Faith”). In either case, the whole idea was to spread information, good or bad.

Today, we have ministers of information, press secretaries and spokesperson for one department or another, for a cause or any entity that needs speaking for on its behalf. Today, the media is barely above the Congress’ and politicians’ poll numbers.  And it has come to this – the emergence of fake news! The web, the twitter world, Facebook and everything associated with the propagation of information have become instantaneous bulletin boards for everything, or from anyone and from whoever has a story or agenda to propagate.  Urban legend, that foreshadowed the coming out of fake news, used to take months, years, even a generation to spread. The run-of-the-mill gossip by word of mouth, the echo of the tom-tom and the skyward sight of the smoke signal were all the different contrails that information took.  Today, by any name, these things spread with the “speed of summer lightning”.

It seems that there is so little we can do to consume all these knowledge.  There is only so much the brain can take.  A whirlpool of information hits us every day and there will come a time when the overload starts numbing the brain into mental apathy.  Our brain is able to cope because we’ve managed to outsource some of what it used to do. Our children are being unburdened from mastering the multiplication table, calculating for the square root of a number, and even the simple tasks of addition and subtraction are sub-contracted to the $2 calculator. Mastering, let alone, understanding differential and integral calculus will make no difference to sociology and math majors.

If information evolved with our biology, the reverse can happen when biology starts evolving with it. A hundred generations from now, if we ever get there, science text books will explain how texting made us grow out-sized thumbs to make lobsters jealous, how our nape muscles will rival those of the musk ox from prolonged hunched postures over our smart phones. Our peripheral visions will have shifted to scan up and down thus vertically elongating the pupils like a civet cat’s.

Well, it may not come to that because technology will not stand still long enough for evolution to dictate a specific adaptation of particular body parts.  But some things can be predicted more accurately.

The pen and pencil industry will suffer the most.  Good penmanship will be archived as masterpieces hanging in museums (where there is no need for foot traffic because everything is either virtually viewed or downloaded).  Intimate conversation could truly become a lost art. The brain will downsize as more and more of the mental tasks are relegated to the intelligence of silicon wafers the size of a pinhead.  We will become physically frail as robots do much of the hard labor while driver-less and self- braking cars will make even the most trifling physical exertion of driving the car a thing of the past.

Here is where we are today.  The train we’re on is hurtling at break neck speed on the information railway.  It is not slowing down; it is speeding up, in fact, and getting off does not look like a good option.  Unfortunately, the only thing that can stop a runaway train is derailment – a most devastating scenario.  That scenario is the total failure of the energy infrastructure which, by the way, relies heavily on information. Let us not forget that sources of energy, be it oil, nuclear, hydro, wind power or solar, are all funneled into producing electricity.  That whole energy to electricity complex, the whole caboodle, runs on information that runs on electricity.  It is a vicious cycle.

Somewhere in parts of the world hostile to the western way of life are mal-intentioned folks who want nothing more than to break or interrupt that cycle. That’s one.  The threat of conflict between nations is another.  Not to be ignored are those not likely to be in anyone’s mind.  Some 93 million miles away is one object in the sky which goes through a temper tantrum every eleven years causing electro-magnetic disturbances that can disrupt that cycle with impunity if past history is to e examined. From galaxies far, far away, or even in the backyard of our own Milky Way, there are objects, thousands or even a million times more massive than the sun, their farewell gestures outshining an entire galaxy.

Those are not likely it either - at least not during our lifetime.  Has it happened in the past?  Yes.  Our solar system came out of a massive supernova explosion that also created all the heavy elements beyond and including iron a few billion years ago.  This will call for another musing so let’s leave it at that but suffice it to say, that’s a scenario too that could bring us back to the beginning, at zero information.

Meanwhile, we need to re-examine our place in the general scheme of things.  The New Testament verse I quoted earlier must be taken to heart.  Regardless of your faith or personal beliefs, our worries, our fears are all anthropocentric – translation: “the belief that considers human beings to be the most significant entity of the universe and interprets or regards the world in terms of human values and experiences”.

The weakest link in the information technology turmoil is human frailty.  While this technology was borne out of the human spirit, its inventiveness and its resolve to make our lives “better”, it is also the human character that is its weakness.  We use and misuse almost everything we’ve invented.  Until such time that we have perfected the human character, no amount of technology shall ever be safe from misuse or will we ever be free from worrying about anything and everything.

One in 18 Septillion

A septillion is a very large number – 1 followed by 24 zeros!  That large number is the answer to, “what were the odds that one Joan Ginther would win the lottery four times; which indeed she did. Let’s set that aside for a moment.  Before we get too excited about learning her secret in beating the odds, let’s briefly look into the law of probabilities.  Like Lady Justice, Lady Luck also has blindfolds while holding up the scales of probability. Similarly. both can be skewed or tampered with. We know about how justice can be corrupted but the law of probabilities as well?  The third paragraph below explains. Meanwhile, statisticians and math mongers will tell us that had the question been re-phrased to, “what are the odds that a person, not a particular person such as you, or I, or Joan Ginther, will win the lottery four times, the odds are better than we think – 1 in 5 million.

Author David J. Hand in his book, “The Improbability Principle”, wrote that the number of lotteries going on around the world and the number of people playing it allows for winners because of the “Law of Truly Large Numbers”.  That is why when the Powerball prize money gets bigger there will ultimately be a winner(s) as more and more people participate. But the odds are still against you or me specifically winning.  That is the same as trying to guess at which particular blade of grass a grasshopper will land on a 10-acre meadow.  But if it does it will have picked one blade of grass but not the one that you or I chose – in all probability, so to speak.

 

Now, Joan Ginther’s “luck”, truth must be told, had to have an asterisk beside it.  Winning her first lottery was one thing but parlaying a lot of her initial winning into buying more tickets afterwards sort of “stacked the deck” in her favor; three winnings totaled $15 million in Texas. In reality she actually invested over 3 million dollars over the period of her next three wins.  And then she turned around and took tax deductions for her losing tickets. Some estimated that she may only have spent a net of just merely 1 million dollars after the deductions.  And get this, it turned out she had a PhD in statistics from Stanford.  According to an investigative journalist from the Daily Mail, she somehow “could have used publicly available information to look for patterns that could lead her to figuring out the pseudo-random computer algorithm that determines when and where the winning tickets in each packet would arrive”. And she would buy up a lot of the scratch off tickets from the stores in the area.  She was not picking numbers for the Powerball drawing but buying chunks of scratch-off tickets from particular sites that sell them.  By doing so she merely shrunk the 10-acre meadow to the size of an English garden.   

The odds of winning the Power Ball or any state lottery are definitely staggeringly low. Jeremy Elson wrote in a 2011 this analogy, “Keep in mind the probability of winning is, as always, fantastically low. Imagine someone was to lay down a strip of pennies along the road from Seattle to Miami, and put a secret "X" on just one of them. You are about as likely to find the "X" by randomly picking a single one of those pennies as you are to win the Powerball jackpot.”

With that, why do people still buy lottery tickets when the odds of, say, winning the Powerball jackpot are so indescribably, if not dauntingly, low?  We all “know” that but often the most used rationale (if you can call it that) is that $2, or even as much as $10, is actually cheap entertainment for a thrill lasting a few hours or more until the final ball is drawn and the ticket(s) we held so dearly became scraps of ordinary paper. Sadly for some, the hankering for the thrill is repeated time and time again when “cheap entertainment” becomes a habitual financial burden – mostly for the segment of the population that can ill afford it.

The science of probability is not the same as the phenomenon of coincidence.  The human mind expects the grasshopper’s choice of a blade of grass to coincide with our pick, for a number of different reasons – limited only by what can be imagined.  After all, someone won with the numbers he or she took from a fortune cookie, the combination of birthdays in the family, numbers that appeared in a dream, combination taken from someone’s driver’s license number, etc.  Undeniably lotteries have been won that way. The Law of the Truly Large Numbers made that possible.  Around the world there are millions of fortune cookies with lottery numbers sold every day, every body in a family has a birthday, billions of people dream every night, drivers’ licenses in the U.S. alone number no lesser than 200 million and their numbers can be combined in a staggering number of ways.  Believe it or not, one of those will match with one of the many lottery drawings somewhere. We just simply don’t hear about the millions of losing numbers fashioned in a similar manner. A blade of grass will have been randomly picked by the grasshopper.  (Note the future perfect tense of the statement as you read the next paragraph).

Probability and coincidence live separate lives. The former lives in the world of many possibilities in the future, while the latter dwells in both the certainty of the future perfect and past tense. All probable outcomes cease to exist (collapse into nothingness) once one (and only one) of its many faces becomes reality. Coincidence manifests itself after the fact - a sure thing; otherwise, why would it be a coincidence?   Yet, it is the intersection of two or more events or situations with one another without any apparent trigger to cause them to cross. We wish for one probability (our pick of numbers) to “coincide” with the drawing of a winning set of numbers. That’s asking for the two to meet – the Terminator finding John Connor at some point in time.  Coincidence and probability operate independently of each other. 

Probabilities can influence how we make decisions; coincidences just happen without anyone or anything causing them to occur. A blade of grass has no influence on the grasshopper. Actuaries utilize probabilities to assess insurance premiums.  Casino owners rely on it to calculate their returns on investment as well as to make the gaming interests high enough to entice gamblers to keep coming back.  Algorithms for the slot machines must allow for percentage payout within 82% to 98%.  It is called “return to player”, RTP for short.  Maintaining the RTP at those ranges does insure that the casino is guaranteed anywhere from 2 to 18 % rate of return. It does not seem like much but the Truly Large Numbers make that a steady sure thing of a cash cow.  The algorithm does not care who wins, how much and at what time but it makes sure that somebody does win from time to time. Undeniably, we know more people who lost at the slots than those who win.  If we were to conduct a survey by interviewing people coming out of the casino it is likely that we will find winners versus losers at the rate inversely proportional to the RTP.  The reason is that for every jackpot winner of say, $2000 and above, many other hapless folks had contributed their cash to make that possible, after the casino had taken their 2 to 18% cut, of course.  The rule of thumb, if I were to make one, is to stay within the “budget” you are prepared to lose. If you’re lucky to win 2 X or more of that budget before exhausting your capital, QUIT! Also, once you’ve reached your "limit", QUIT! How many people actually do that?  Unfortunately, the longer you keep on playing the more opportunity for probability to conspire against you. That is why there are no clocks anywhere within the casino.

The law of probability is interesting but the phenomenon of coincidences is eerily weird, if not insanely inexplicable. But statisticians will tell us differently.  First of all, there truly are many coincidences beyond the common “small world variety”.  Consider the following that happened to Jean Moisset in April 21, 1988:

“Although I now reside in the city of Nice, when I have a medical problem I prefer going to a hospital in Paris, the city where most of the members of my family reside. After having experienced some urinary problems, I consulted my family doctor who arranged for an x-ray to be taken at the Necker hospital in Paris.

My appointment was for 8:45. I arrived a half hour early, that is, at 8:15. The receptionist told me that I was a half hour late since my appointment was set for 7:45. I showed her my appointment paper which did indeed indicate 8:45. Just as we were discussing the error, a man of about the same age as mine approached the desk. He said that his name was Jean Moisset and that he was sorry he was late for his appointment which was set for 7:45 and was for an examination similar to mine.

The name Moisset is not a very common name. Moreover, having the same first name, having arrived at about the same time at the same desk and for the same type of examination makes it highly improbable that it was by pure chance. To me it was obviously another good example of coincidence (which I call synchronicity) several of which I have experienced over the past few months.”

Jean Moisset had since collected many more such stories.

Here is one I read about the 19th-century French poet Emile Deschamps. This is considered by some who look into the subject as one incredible story of coincidences over a prolonged period of intervals.

"As a teenager, Deschamps meets a man with a strange name, Monsieur de Fortgibu. De Fortgibu is an immigrant from England, and he introduces Deschamps to a very English dessert: plum pudding.

Ten years go by. One day, Deschamps passes a Paris restaurant that has plum pudding on the menu. He goes inside, only to be told the last of the plum pudding was just sold to a gentleman sitting in the back.

"And the waiter calls out loud, 'Mr. de Fortgibu, would you be willing to share your plum pudding with this gentleman?'  It was the same Monsieur de Fortgibu.

Years pass, and Deschamps is at a dinner party with some friends.

The host announces that an unusual dessert will be served. You guessed it — plum pudding. Deschamps jokingly says that one of the guests at the party must be Monsieur de Fortgibu.

"Well, soon the doorbell rings and Mr. de Fortgibu is announced. And he enters, he's an old man by now, but Deschamps recognizes him. And Mr. de Fortgibu looks around and he realizes that he's in the wrong apartment." He was invited to a dinner party next door.

We’re told by statisticians and mathematicians that the coincidences are really no big deal.  They’re weird, strange, or even magical perhaps, but that is because we try to explain them. I cannot explain that except to say that maybe we should just accept them for what they are - mere happenstances. The experts say that that is exactly why coincidences are more common than we think. In fact, our own lives are filled with many coincidences; some good, others not so good. One coincidence may be more spectacular than another but just the same, they’re just one of uncountable intersections that occur on a regular basis.  Oh, well.

A personal story gave me first look into the science of probability as an effective tool for decision making. I worked for a large oil company in the old country where one of my duties as a Supply Assistant (a logistics job) was to oversee the transportation of petroleum product from the refinery to the terminal by barge in open ocean.  Naturally, the product was insured.  The company paid an insurance premium equivalent to 10% of the value of the product for each trip. It seemed like a reasonable expense – 10% against a 100% total loss – and had gone on long before I took over the job.  One day I realized that after every ten trips we were paying for 100% of the value of the product (10% X 10 trips) in insurance premiums.  I figured we can afford to “sink” every 11^th barge worth of product and break even. (The barge carrier had insurance to cover for the loss of their vessel and environmental liabilities were under separate insurance). Convinced by the memo I wrote which begun with the 50-50 probability of a coin toss to the likelihood of a barge capsizing, the Operations Manager, though reluctant to embrace the radical idea, asked me to make the presentation to the Treasury Manager together with representatives from the insurance company in attendance. I was “junior enough” in the hierarchy to be “sacrificed” in case my argument was poked with holes and failed to sail, pun intended.  Not unexpectedly the insurance company representatives agreed with the argument. Paradoxically, however, they did not counter with a lower quote to keep the business. It was likely, we surmised, that they were not about to set a precedent of lower premiums for their other clients; besides they had other businesses with us. Up to that point in time not a single barge was lost.

Now here is the thing.  What if after we implemented foregoing with insurance one of the barges sunk? That would have been just coincidence although a tragic one for my career, even though it should have had no bearing on the idea to forego paying for insurance.  For years and years before that and until I left the company to immigrate to the U.S. no such event happened.  Probability dictates however that sooner or later it will, but by that time enough money will have been saved to cover the loss. I don’t know if that policy continues today. I left the country and the company over thirty years ago.

Fast forward to a few months later, after arriving in the U.S., when a providential coincidence had a role in how I ended up working for the one American corporation I wanted so much to join since arriving.  I must mention that the U.S. company and the one from the old country were both part of the same international group of companies, except that there was no correspondent relationship between the two; besides I did resign from the previous company. One day I sent my application.  Meanwhile, as I usually did whenever possible I would spend time at the Brooklyn Business Library in New York. A few days, maybe a little over a week, after I mailed my application, I chanced upon an article in the Oil & Gas Journal that featured the General Manager for Distribution of the same oil company I applied to. Somehow something prompted me to write to him directly, enclosing the very same resume in my first application. Within a couple of days after mailing the letter, I got a letter from the company – alas, it was a rejection letter, signed by an HR recruiter. It was obviously a rejection-form-letter to my first application but a real damper, nonetheless.  I was disappointed but what can I do?

A little over a week after that rejection letter, a telegram came (for some of you young folks, this was pre-e-mail era) that instructed me to call collect (there was no 1-800 number then either).  It was from the same HR recruiter who signed the rejection letter. Based on our opening conversation I sensed he was talking about my second letter, totally oblivious that his department had already sent me an auto-signed rejection earlier. Anyhow, that got my foot in the door, a chance for an interview, and the rest is history.  Now, had I received the rejection to my first letter before mailing the one addressed to the General Manager, I would not have sent it for the obvious reason.  What may have likely happened was that he probably just initialed my application and had his secretary forward it to HR – a scenario that bettered the odds that the letter was paid some attention at HR. Of course, had I not read the Oil & Gas Journal article about the General Manager in the first place, I would not have been prompted to do what I did. By the way, I never met him (I found he was quite high up in the totem pole) and by the time I had the courage to try to meet him, he had already retired. So, we can say, this was a case where a single coincidence bettered the odds favorably. My career lasted 27 years with the same company.

Guess what, my first job was coordinating barge product movement up and down the Mississippi River. I immediately realized that the company, like all other major oil companies in the U.S. had been self-insuring their products for years. I had no knowledge of it prior to coming over so it was just a coincidence I thought of it earlier as a Supply Assistant.

If we examine it closely, our individual lives are filled with coincidences: many are too subtle to be noticed.  Catching a smile from someone across a crowded room, a casual introduction, bumping into someone from childhood at an unlikely place, etc. while purely coincidental, had on more than one instance led to an enduring marriage.  It is not one spectacular coincidence but if it resulted in a lifelong commitment, the odds of that happening in this day and age has more significance than anyone can ever hope for.  Not exactly one in 18 septillion but it could very well be a huge win in the Powerball of life.

99 Cannibals and 1

I imagined a story that ran this way.  In a very remote island lived a hundred people; 99 of whom were cannibals and one who was not.  One day by an overwhelming majority the 99 decided to make a meal of the one who was not.  End of story.

The longer version went like this.  The island at first had ample resources and all of the hundred people got along well.  Then one day food supply on the island started to dwindle. The non-cannibal had seen to it that he found other ways to feed himself outside of what can just be found on the island by fishing from the sea. So he stayed healthy and looked well while the 99 looked emaciated as food supply diminished. Then one critical day the 99 looked to the one who was healthy and by a unanimous vote decided to sub-divide him into 99 equal parts. In the eyes of the 99 it was well justified that one was sacrificed for the survival of the many.  99 were fed.  For one day.  End of story.

Then there was this version. The one who was not a cannibal employed a few of the 99 to help with fishing.  Soon half of the cannibals were working for him and they were well provided for so that, as a result and by consensus, they and the non-cannibal gave part of what they earned to those who neither worked nor earned anything.  Meanwhile, from the 99 arose a leader who declared that they deserved better and promised that he will see to it that everyone gets fair share of everything that was gathered from the sea.  Furthermore, the non-cannibal who had the most must give more than those who worked for him. In fact, it was so that at the end of each day he was not to have more than what everyone else had.  Since he was out numbered the non-cannibal agreed.  As days went on those who worked deliberately did less and less as it was pointless to work any harder since they will end up with the same as everyone else. Before long only the non-cannibal was fishing.  Then one day when there was no longer enough for everyone, the 99 looked to the 1 and made a meal of him. For one day.  End of story.

The moral of the story, if there was one, was that opportunities may be equally available to everyone, perhaps even guaranteed, but not everyone will want to avail of it.  And even for those who do, equal results are not certain.  Come to think of it, there is really no moral to the story.  For the 99 and the 1, it is the same sad “End of story”.

Of Mice and Lo Mein (my apologies to John Steinbeck)

There are more cook books published today of any subject or theme than any other non-fiction genre, except, of course, for weight loss and exercise books*.  The shelf space they occupy in public libraries and book stores stand as contrasting altars to those who love to cook and those who struggle to lose weight gained from... eating. People love to cook, ergo, people love to eat but hate the extra weight gained.

Conclusion: there is a conspiracy between the cookbook writers and the exercise and diet gurus.

Scientists - or perhaps they were nutrition majors who never stopped matriculating and went on to get their PhD’s in meal preparation - did a study on caloric intakes of 3rd graders and boa constrictors (big snakes for those who skipped high school biology).  They’d feed the snake with one hapless rat and a third grader with cupcake, not in the same cage, of course, and measure the amount of calories they consumed and expended.  The procedure is too lengthy to explain here (meaning I didn’t really quite understand the science behind the bomb calorimeter).  Alas, the cupcake has more than twice the calories of the average laboratory rat – snow white fur, pink eyes and as docile as a jelly fish.  Not wanting to attract the ire of PETA the rat was already dead, as if that makes a difference, but I thought I’d mention it.

As I was watching the documentary I concluded that it was such a waste of government grant money just to prove why snakes stay slim and slender with nary an ounce of fat in them.  Snakes are not exactly bundles of energy and if anything they’d put to shame the most sedentary of couch potatoes among us.  So they don’t go to the jungle gym to work out but obesity is the least of their problems, especially when one considers the odds of them becoming a cowboy boot or western wallet first ahead of excess weight gain.

So what was the point of all that experimentation? Cooked and processed foods have more calories than raw ones (rats or otherwise). That’s stating the obvious, obviously. Actually, we’re told that man’s brain capacity increased when he discovered to cook his food.  Need I say that we’re the only creatures who do?  Bear with me as I try to get to the point.  One more thing before I get there. Human brain, the ones we have now, is the biggest consumer of energy of all the organs.  It (all of 3 pounds) accounts for just 2% of one’s weight but it consumes 20% of the body’s energy consumption per day.  Specifically, the average brain consumes the amount of calories contained in about one half to one whole cup of white refined sugar, depending on what it is engaged in. That might explain why there are no fat nuclear physicists, cosmologists or chess grand masters.  Conversely, those who watch copious episodes of Jersey Shores or the Kardashians tilt the demographic weight distribution off kilter the other way (just kidding).

Let me go back to some serious discussion. So when Grog and his tribe were dining mainly on raw meat, leaves and berries, their average IQs for millions of years remained at barely above room temperature. One day Grog came upon an auroch (believed the ancestor of the modern cattle) that was struck by lightning.  It was still smoldering where a nearby bush was still burning. He stumbled upon the very first barbecue and warmth from fire.  The rest is history.  I wasn’t there when it happened but an idle mind is awash with speculative imagination unfettered by evidence or fossil fragments.

Cooked food is processed more easily by our body and the resulting efficiency makes for the brain’s quick access to energy.  Scientists claim that giving the brain more energy allowed for more and more sophistication in the thinking process and as the brain gets “flexed” with more exercise it grew almost exponentially overnight - in evolutionary terms, that is.  So our raw-food-eating animal friends are stuck in IQ plateau.  But what does that do to sushi enthusiasts and salad grazers?  The Japanese are a smart people.  They make great cars, had a monopoly (at one time) on plasma TV and digital cameras and they write in difficult scripts and I, for the life of me, could not understand one word when they talk among themselves.  After an exhaustive research I found out they invented the hibachi and the “Little and Big Green Eggs”, so we know they cook.  As it turned out, they eat sushi sparingly and certainly not to the same degree that some westerners who had taken sushi seriously, who consume more raw tuna and octopus with sake, the latter like it were sparkling water.

Here’s the point of all these. Now I learned from our dedicated nutrition PhD’s that food is all about having enough to provide for growth, energy, necessary vitamins, tissue maintenance and the pleasure of the eating experience.  All of those cited, except for growth, if you discount finger nails and hair (for those of us who still have it), are still pretty good reasons to keep eating even after we’ve physically matured. Unfortunately, the percentages changed over time.  The pleasure of eating has taken over the lion’s share (pun is intended, I think) of the reasons we eat.  Of all the living creatures we’re the ones that take too much pleasure in eating.  I must wonder whether a garter snake finds as much pleasure swallowing mice as we like lo mein.  Whew, I finally found a way to get “Of Mice and Lo Mein” in there. To be honest I wrote the title first but struggled on how to work it into the body of the musing.  So, there!

Now we have a serious quandary. Vegetarians don’t want us to eat meat, cooked or otherwise, and PETA thinks there must be a way to eat meat without killing animals. Don’t they know that plants have feelings too.  Most Tibetans think so and I believe them.  In San Francisco they don’t want their citizens to keep goldfish in fish bowls at home. If it starts there, where does it end?  Now, cows have an ally in Chic-Fil-A whose ads feature a cow with a sign that says, “Eat mor chikin” (except cows do need to learn how to spell). I suspect there is a loose affiliation between vegans and PETA members but I can’t quite put a finger to it.  Full disclosure: I happen to agree with PETA that the annual presidential pardon on the “lucky turkey” every Thanksgiving is both silly and absurd as they question what the turkey was accused and found guilty of to be pardoned in the first place?  I think I should stop here because I have already managed to offend two groups, the Executive Branch of government plus all those who give two TV shows their Nielsen ratings.

*I can’t back up these statistics but next time you’re in a book store or public library check it out and see if it is so.

What’s Fishy with Human Nature?

I read this unlikely fish story.  In Guernsey, UK, on July 12, 2012, Mathew Clark stole a 13-pound bass from a local aquarium which he entered in a fishing competition and won the top prize money of £800. There are countless shenanigans throughout history – this is not the worst or most despicable – but this may typify the different sorts of misdeeds, uncomplicated they may seem, the motivation simple, clever yet seemingly unencumbered by guilt or the benefit of the basic ethical scruple, or regard for any kind of socially established norm of behavior.

Granted fishing is the most fraught with tales of fish tails, this incident would have had an entrancing ending if Mr. Clark’s intentions went as planned.  You see he envisioned winning the contest, keep the fish alive and later return it to the aquarium.  Not entirely implausible to pull because he used to work there.  Unfortunately, the fish died.  Obviously, Mr. Clark did not think it through very well, especially for someone who used to work at a place whose business it was to keep alive all of its fish and other water creature residents.

Everything would still have worked out for Mr. Clark if not for a keen eyed fish lover who saw the picture in the papers – Mr. Clark grinning as he held the winning catch during the awards presentation.  The person recognized the bass from the aquarium.  Needless to say, Mr. Clark’s fishy misdeed smelled and he was promptly arrested and put to jail and assessed a heavy fine.  Mr. Clark stunk like rotten fish.

Here was a case of a miscreant not thinking things through while another had the presence of mind to think through a most improbable connection by mere happenstance.  Now, what are the odds of that happening?  Of all the tall fish tales this one is true.

So, what is it about human nature that is both noble and corrupt that seems to come up in equal doses in every generation.  Perhaps not exactly in equal doses but let’s throw in a number, for the sake of argument, say, 10%.  If we review history, settling on the 10% number, it appears that no matter what generation we pick, there will always be 10% of miscreants whose deeds will come in a variety of ways and motivation.

There was always a Bernie Madoff in generations past and there will continue to be Bernie Madoffs in the future.  For this musing I will set aside the truly evil side of humanity by not dwelling on the likes of Atilla the Hun, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc. They will take up an entire discussion although, just the same, we will always have the likes of them in future generations in the same dosage as many of their kind had done in generations past.

Explaining Mr. Clark and Bernie Madoff seem simple enough based on the simplest of all motives - greed. Of course, as we all know, it is more complex than that. As our world gets more sophisticated so do the methods employed by anyone who is corrupted or has the will to commit corruption.  In the Old Testament though, simpler times by today’s standards, there was a complex story of Esau who sold his birth right to younger twin Jacob for a bowl of stew.  What Esau did was supposed to be a big no-no in those times because he sold a solemn and spiritual right for something as “basic” as food that was of temporary value, although Jacob was not an exactly honorable brother to manipulate his brother.  And then Jacob and their mother later made it even more complicated when they conspired to deceive Isaac the father at his deathbed by having Jacob pretend to be Esau to get the elder’s blessing.  The story exemplified how one seemingly trivial low point in human nature, simple as it may have begun could escalate into something complex. Mr. Clark may have nothing more in his mind than a few hundred pounds of spending money, and Mr. Madoff may not have been thinking hundreds of millions of dollars in the beginning, except perhaps for a higher social prestige, lavish parties and expensive art work.

There was a B-movie, with a 2-star rating, that reminded me of how one little trickle of a white lie could cascade into an unstoppable waterfall.  A guy called in to his boss with a little lie for not coming to work one morning.  He lied that he was taking care of a sick daughter at home.  Granted he was quite unhappy with his job he didn’t exactly want to quit.  He doubled up on his excuse next time he felt like not showing up for work again by telling that his sick daughter was now at the hospital.  So the one simple lie has taken a life of its own as he lied to his wife as well, doing his routine task of taking his daughter to a baby sitter every morning, but never said anything about not going to work. The third time he called in to his boss for not coming in his boss fired him over the phone.  Then, again bereft of any thought process, he doubled up his lie further by telling his boss that his daughter just died at the hospital.

His daughter was perfectly fine but his boss softened immensely when he went back to work the following day; his boss spoke kindly to him and later took up a collection for him from very willing co-workers to help him out.  One morning a kind co-worker went as far as to bring a home-made quiche to his home.  His wife opened the door to greet the co-worker but his quick maneuver saved the day for him as he shortened the visit without alerting his clueless wife but to the bewilderment of his co-worker.  Of course, as always with cases like this, things unravel rapidly with devastating consequences.  This was fiction but how many have we seen in real life where one simple lie intensified to more lies and ultimately to a disastrous resolution, shattering lives and reputation or sometimes resulting in violence.

What is it then about human nature? The term is sometimes used to mean that it is inherently natural for humans to do the wrong thing, or that at least the path of least resistance being the easy thing to do is not the right way, inferring that to do the right thing is the more difficult one. Of course we do know that human nature is predominantly that of doing the right thing.  I’d say ninety per cent of the time.  Unfortunately, it is the ten per cent that gets the sensational coverage in the media.

We should settle on the fact that it is the inherent goodness of humanity that took our world to where it is today. History showed us that despots and oppressive regimes of empires and governments did not last for a long time.  However, in every era of history including the present one, there is always the ten percent.  In truth, every civilization happened to be more “civilized” than the one it preceded.  From the Magna Charta to the Geneva Convention to International Laws, humanity had been progressively recognizing and condemning man’s inhumanity to man and continues to strive to make our world a better place.  Perhaps it will take us a while to get the 10% (if that is the number, others may view it to be higher) down to zero but the direction points positively from one generation to the next; at least, we hope so.

Future of Presents Past

 “Past, Present, and Future, walked into a bar … it was tense”. (Read it from somewhere)

Regardless of social status, wealth and positions of authority, there seems to be only one universal equalizer – Time.  No one escapes it. Whoever said, “time is money” may have been on to something but no one yet has ever saved it, bank it, lend it or even gather any interest on it.  Yes, we get something in return for our time; we get paid and remembered for it but each and every one gets the same amount, yet somehow we all get different results from it.

I say though, that it is not that one has more time but it is whether one chooses to do more with what quantity of time one has.

 “The past is behind, learn from it.  The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it.” – Thomas S. Monson

“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” – Lao Tzu

If that is the case then we cannot be hostages to an unchanging past nor should we be fearful of an uncertain future. Yet, we all seem to be.

While driving (at or near the posted speed limit, mind you) I’d glance at the rear view mirror and saw the winding black ribbon of asphalt receding and when I switched my attention to the road ahead the pavement rushes by at the same rate. Our car, with us inside, was traveling through time and space – the receding road was the past, the road in front the future while the present moment was a fleeting wisp, shorter than a blink of an eye, or wheezing by the countryside at precisely the rate of 95.333 feet per second.  Thus the musing began.

Humans – of all the creatures around – are the only ones who worry about the future.  But then I must  first wonder about this.  Would events change or results alter in the future if there were only simple organisms around?  If there is no one to contemplate the future or learn from the past, does it make a difference?  The world seems to be what it is because we are here to contemplate, wonder, admire its beauty and sometimes be appalled by some of its ugliness.  I know too that there are as many ways to look at it as there are individuals who try to observe it through their eyes or colored glasses. The world is what it is because we are here to observe it. We worry about its future because it could affect us and those whom we care so much about. Therefore, if there is no one to worry about it, or care, what difference does it make what happens.  What events would change from and to what, when and how, or even where are only relevant to those who have the ability to think about them.

Driving through the vast U.S. highways makes one feel as insignificant as a single blood corpuscle running through a vein that is at one moment I-10, then I-59, later 90 or 93, etc., on a huge expanse of seemingly endless roads and landscapes.  Now, here's the thing. The planet we live in, a trifling droplet in a swirling sea of stars and galactic dust that make up the Milky Way, orbiting an ordinary star, has been around for about four billion years.  Our sun, a first or perhaps even a second generation star, has been around for only a third of the age of the universe.  History had gone on and events happened  when during much of the elapsed time there was no one to observe it; much less to record or critique it. So the past, our past in particular, is like an endless reel of film that has been running in a movie theater with no one watching for 99.9999999999999 per cent of the show.  Technically speaking, that is, because although the dinosaurs had been around for 160 million years of that time, there is no record of their observations, their culture and whether they worried at all after the asteroid hit the area we now call the Gulf of Mexico – a name that has existed for just a fraction of a fraction of a nanosecond if the entire film lasted for a whole year.

If we are part of that reel of film and that it is running as we speak, we (our entire human history) appeared on it as a sliver the width of a human hair on a single frame of film. The future we are and will be worrying about is several millionth of a millionth the width of that sliver on that single frame that is about to unfold on the screen.  Despite what we hear from political speeches and rhetoric, ideological beliefs and ideal dreams of those who profess to worry about the world of future generations, the contextual time frame within which people contemplate the future is about one individual life span – short and sometimes even short sighted.  Yes, we say things such as, “we worry about our children and their children, the environment, the planet, will there be enough of our 401 K left over for our heirs, etc.,” but when the curtain of life descends to end the show for us we will no longer be around to read the review.

As musings go the mind wanders every which way and then I catch myself wondering what is the point of all these?  Oftentimes, in the course of an ordinary day, we all worry about the littlest of things and as is usually the case the things we worry about are far from what actually do happen.  Yet, we worry anyhow.  And not only do we worry about what is about to happen but we sometimes burden ourselves with the things that happened in the past.  Is that all there is then?  I think that the rigidity of our past, because we can no longer change it, is best used as a framework for the present to shape our pliable future.  Did I just write that?  A bit corny but you all know what I mean.

Of course, some of us just can’t seem to shake away the shackles and burden of where we came from, who we are by our family name or the place we grew up in or the school we graduated from.  For others the past is like a millstone on their necks which hold them back in ways that make their ability to move up and get ahead heavily weighted down. However, whether one was born with a silver spoon or found wanting of even the most basic necessities, time will “tic toc” with the same regularity for either one. Choice to use or waste time is what matters. One’s future is won or lost by just that one decision. Time is an intangible asset with real consequences without which no opportunity can ever be possible.

“The past is a ghost, the future is a dream, and all we ever have is now”, a comedian once said. The past cannot hurt us anymore unless we let it; future dreams are  untouchable until we get there, until all the tomorrows have become todays but the beauty of it is that we get the opportunity to prepare for it. What is interesting, of course, is that much of what we do today is almost always a preamble for the future. In fact, if we write down ten things we do today, for example, we will find that most of it are either preparatory for or things we need to complete in the future – an hour from now, tomorrow , days later, or for a much longer term.

This phenomenon we call the present moment - now - is about as fleeting as a blink of an eye.  The second we think of a second it’s gone.  But this has not stopped scientists from breaking down time into even much smaller basic units.  If we think a second is short, can you imagine how short a millisecond or nanosecond is? What about a femtosecond and a picosecond or attosecond?  Well, if those are not fleeting, what about the Planck unit?  There are more Planck units of time in one second than there are seconds in the age of the universe of 13.7 billion years.  From that, the present would seem like an illusion, the past is forever gone, and the future is all we have.

When someone says he or she has no future, or if we judge someone to not have any, nothing could be farther from the truth. The future is all we have and we all have it.  Though today we as individuals have been sculpted by our past, the greatest gift we can give ourselves for a better future is what we do at the present moment.  So, we shouldn’t waste a single femtosecond.