Amazing animations allow all an aspect of air. Type in “current jet stream” to see what you, among the first of 100 billion or more humans who have ever inhabited the planet, can know about future weather. The high-altitude flow of air around equally high-altitude low- and high-pressure systems is what directs the movement of lows and highs at the surface. By looking at animated maps of the jet stream’s isobars (lines marking zones of equal air pressure), you can see what is ordinarily invisible. You can see what no others prior to the modern world ever saw.
Storm approaching the West Coast of USA? People of the East Coast can run to the grocery stores to buy bread, milk, eggs, and toilet paper—apparently modern humans’ idea of necessities—because models of the unseen can predict their weather.
 
In fact, we know much about the formerly invisible world. We can see the universe in radio and microwaves, infrared radiation, ultraviolet light, X-rays, and gamma rays. We can overlay images of all of them if we wish, making an image once impossible to see. And we can see Earth’s interior through seismic tomography so we can map magma chambers and other underground features that can help in predicting earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
 
True, what we “see” is usually a computer-enhanced image and not a “photo-image,” but we “see,” nevertheless. And seeing in whatever form makes a difference in living, especially when it lends itself to forecasting and understanding.
 
Now, we are in the midst of a search for “seeing” into the brain, not just mapping it, but actually trying to see thoughts. I’m thinking of studies done by people like Professor Jack Gallant at the Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain Imaging Center at UC Berkeley. Professor Gallant and others scan brains of people watching movies and then develop algorithms that produce images similar to, but fuzzy and blurry, what the watchers saw. * Gallant’s lab people work on constructing a computational modeling framework for brain mapping with the aim of faithfully decoding what goes on in the brain. They want to “see” thoughts.
 
Lots of these gizmos for seeing the formerly unseen are rather large objects or collections of objects, even in an age of miniaturization. Seismic tomography requires multiple sensors, for example, and Gallant’s brain scans occur in fMRI tubes not designed for the claustrophobic. But miniaturization is the current trend, so there might be a wearable brain scan and image projection system that is quite portable, that would enable the rest of us to see what you are seeing and maybe to predict what you will do. Think that’s not in the works? Think of all those popup adds on your computer based on what you were searching.
 
When we can see the future with some certainty, we benefit, don’t we? Pilots of both planes and ships want to know the currents of air and water that facilitate or slow their vessels. Jet stream predictions allow people to err on the side of caution, such as those under storm watches. In January, 2019, AMTRAK cancelled trains to the Northeast while a predicted storm still lay over the American West. And in volcanic lands, people want to know when to flee. Of course, there’s always the danger of “crying wolf.” Shortly after the predicted first eruption of Soufriere Hills volcano of Montserrat didn’t occur, people returned and ignored the ensuing warnings. Nine people died by not heading the prediction.
 
It’s all about knowing the future, isn’t it? And knowing the future is about security, personal security. Trouble is, we can’t know for certain. We can err on the side of caution, but that’s the best we can do. The unseen jet stream can change directions because of some other unseen phenomenon. Magma chambers don’t always respond as we predict. Earthquakes occur when we least expect them. And humans don’t always act in a predictable manner, regardless of what we interpret in their brains or even from their recent behavior.
 
How much of your day is spent in anticipating, in knowing the unseen? Aren’t all of your decision-making neurons focused on what is to come both long-term and short-term?
 
 
*You can see a three-minute YouTube video of the experiment and its results online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FsH7RK1S2E&feature=youtu.be  Accessed on January 17, 2019.

“What are you doing?”
 
“What do you mean? This? Oh! This is my Happystuff detector.”
 
“Your what?”
 
“You hearing challenged? Happystuff detector. You know, a gizmo that will detect the previously unseen material that sometimes makes life fabulous and controls people’s happiness.”
 
“No such stuff.”
 
“Come on. Think. There has to be something that without warning affects the feeling of fabulousness in people. We just haven’t seen it yet, so I built this detector to detect it.”
 
“You’re telling me that feeling fabulous is the result of a physical substance that you can detect if you have the right apparatus. Feeling fabulous is in the mind, maybe driven by hormones, by neurotransmitters suffusing a brain kick-started by some pleasing or beneficial happenstance like an engagement proposal, an award, a beautiful scene.”
 
“Oh! Ye of little faith. Science has determined that there has to be something that we just haven’t detected yet. It goes by different names, such as the oxymoronic Dark Happiness. I think I finally have the detector that will find it. We have hypothesized its existence by its obvious effect: People walking around elated. It must be there because we see its result.”
 
“Are you sure you’re just not like string theorists and dark matter physicists? They keep looking for what they hypothesize by effects, string theory’s effect on the mathematics of Grand Unifying Theory or Dark Matter’s effect on the rotation of galaxies. That reminds me. Did you see the report by the DAMA/LIBRA experiment in Italy, where the apparatus is sodium iodide crystals that flash when Dark Matter hits them? * Did you also see the counter report from the COSINE-100 experimenters who say they found no signs of Dark Matter in their pile of sodium iodide?”
 
“Your point? So, you think I’m chasing after something that either exists but is undetectable by its very nature or doesn’t exist and, therefore, will never be detectable.”
 
“Yeah. Something like that. Sodium iodide crystals also flash when they are hit by alpha particles from natural radiation emitted by many sources. How do you figure out what is causing the flashes? How do you figure out that you are detecting the substance you believe is causing the feeling of fabulousness?
 
“Maybe the universe still holds many secrets, so we are destined to hypothesize and experiment without resolving issues that are beyond our capacities to invent adequate detectors. The string theorists can argue that strings are just too tiny to detect, but that they provide all the math we need to unify the four fundamental forces, assuming that Dark Energy isn’t a fifth fundamental force. The Dark Matter physicists can continue to say that it exists simply because they have no other explanation for the unexpected rotational speeds of galaxies. No string could be detected by any apparatus we have at this time or apparatus in the planning stage because we just can’t get to that level of tiny or into other dimensions. And Dark Matter, though seeming to show its effects, just doesn’t seem to interact with anything in particular, neither with individual atoms nor with molecules. ** And there you are, trying to detect what makes people happy, a condition that appears unexpectedly and in the strangest of circumstances.”
 
“I’m still going to keep on looking.”
 
“Godspeed. I just hope you aren’t chasing after a mental construct you deem necessary because you don’t have some tangible object you can detect. I suppose you’re encouraged by the discovery of the Higgs boson, but that took billions of dollars to detect something that fits nicely into the Standard Model of the universe, another construct, one could argue, that includes quarks that are individually unseeable.”
 
“You know, I was feeling fabulous until you came along with your anti-fabulism comments. I’m going to keep looking because I see happy people out there, and I know there must be something that makes them happy. I just have to find the right apparatus.”
 
*Conover, Emily. A controversial sighting of dark matter is looking even shakier: The COSINE-100 experiement finds no evidence of the evasive subatomic particles. ScienceNews, December 5, 2018. Online at https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dark-matter-claim-dama-cosine  Accessed January 15, 2019.
​**You are probably aware of gravitational lensing, that bending of light’s path as it passes by a galaxy or group of galaxies (or, as Eddington proved, by the Sun as Einstein predicted). The lensing is apparent to even an amateur who looks at any published photos of the effect. The extensive reach of gravity around galaxies and clusters of galaxies has been attributed to Dark Matter, but now a recent study finds that the bending of light far from a galaxy or group of galaxies can be attributed to the amount of visible matter, with no reliance on the unseen Dark Matter. See Margot M. Brouwer et al. First test of Verlinde's theory of Emergent Gravity using Weak Gravitational Lensing measurements, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2016). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw3192 , On Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03034  and https://phys.org/news/2016-12-verlinde-theory-gravity.html  Accessed on January 16, 2019

How would you feel if you had to wait until you were about 15 years-old before you had a name? What would people call you? Just “You”? *
 
That’s what happened to Oganesson, or, as it was previously known, the element You. No, just kidding. It was element 118 for years, but the IUPAC ** (Not a member? Join today) finally gave the element the name of its discoverer, or, more accurately, of the leader of the discovery team, Yuri Oganesson. Yuri not going to believe this, but Yuri and others haven’t made more than about a half dozen of these heavy atoms. Not bad, right? Now Og, the element, bears his name for eternity. Ironic in a way. Og has a very short half-life, one measured in milliseconds, or parts thereof. So, there isn’t going to be much made from supplies of Og.
 
Anyway, back to the question about not having a name? How would not having a name affect you personally? Of course, you could go by a number as Og did from 2002 until March 2, 2017. You, of course, differ from Og. You lasted longer than any Og individuals, and you don’t have sibling clones that need a diet, like Og’s heavier isotopes, some of which tip the scales at more than 294 amu--all the way up to Big Brother Og at amu 313.
 
Could you accomplish whatever it is that you accomplished so far without a name? Would there be a silhouette on your driver’s license? What about applying for a credit card?
 
Does this seem like a foolish exercise for Psych 101 students? Maybe, but having a public identity is a significant part of discussions in which we hear statements, such as “I don’t know who you are anymore,” “I’m trying to find myself,” “I was lost,” “I didn’t know who I was,” and similar thoughts centered on identity or the search for identity.
 
You probably don’t refer to yourself in the third person when you enter into self-talk. *** So, here’s a question for you: What is the significance of your name? Should you have one only after you have established a personality, such as “Dances with Wolves”? If so, what would your Kevin-Costner-Native-American name be?
 
Og is rather unique among elements. It appears to be reactive, but it belongs to Group 18 on the periodic table, the group known as the Noble Elements because they don’t readily associate (react) with other elements to form compounds. Among those elements known for their isolation, Og, in contrast, associates, even if for but a brief time. And You, what about your combination of uniqueness and interaction. Should your name reflect either your isolation or your social embrace?
 
What do you think we should call you? And why?
 
*See the episode “Junior Mint” in the series Seinfeld in which Jerry doesn’t know the name of the girl he’s dating (Delores, aka Gipple, Mulva).
**International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (An opposition organization of the Local Union of Impure and Useless Chemistry, or LUIUC)  
***In another episode of Seinfeld, “The Jimmy,” George adopts the habit of Jimmy, who refers to himself in the third person. 

When I grow up, I want to be a specialist in specializations.
 
Brief historical perspective: As science evolved from the Renaissance on, the first “scientists” were “naturalists” and “generalists.” They had to be. They had little to go on except the writings of Aristotle, the reports of explorers, and the practice of alchemists. No science as we understand science existed until people like Galileo and Francis Bacon started to experiment. Even going into the nineteenth century, many so-called scientists were “naturalists” who pursued whatever knowledge seemed interesting. 
 
But since that time, we have accumulated a treasury of information about biological, chemical, and physical processes. The product of that treasury coupled with a larger human population and more people inquiring about all aspects of existence, is the increase in specializations. Let me burden you with too many examples for comfort: Geological studies now encompass research in physical geology, geomorphology, mineralogy, petrology, economic geology, historical geology, geochemistry, geophysics, geohydrology, mining geology, engineering geology, rock mechanics, geomechanics, metrology, and marine geology. Each of those sub-divisions has its own set of sub-divisions. You can do the same for biology (anatomy, physiology, genetics, biochemistry, biophysics, bioinformatics, chronobiology, developmental biology, forestry, husbandry, immunology, neuroscience, botany, agronomy, etc.) and chemistry (physical chemistry, organic chemistry, chemical engineering, etc.), physics (classical mechanics, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, electromagnetism, relativity, quantum mechanics, optics, atomic and molecular physics, condensed matter physics, and high energy and particle physics, including nuclear physics), and the so-called soft sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, and their many sub-studies). Did I make the point? Apparently, there’s a specialization for just about every human to pursue without stepping on the toes of other “scientists.”

Here’s a social science article. You judge its level of specialization: “Go Long or Go Often: Influences on Binge Watching Frequency and Duration among College Students.” * Now, I’m not a specialist in whatever field generates an article like that, so I can’t judge it except from the point of view of a layman. However—yes, I know, but how else should I introduce my comment?—I’m driven to be a bit sarcastic when I read one of the conclusions of the study: “individuals are enjoying the content they are watching, which is why they are binge watching for longer periods of time.” Knock me over with a feather! Who would have surmised? 

Yes, I want to be a specialist in specializations. If someone lacks a subject for research, I would show up, check out the specialization practiced, and suggest a further specialization.  Yeah! That could be my job. Here’s the scenario:

“Professor Conte, I’ve been working on explaining the phenomenon of binge watching because of its importance in human history, but I’m stuck. I’ve looked into the matter, but I don’t feel I’ve exhausted everything in the topic.”

​“Have you thought of about doing a reverse study? Why do some people not binge watch? Or, what would happen if binge watchers watch binge watchers binge watching? These are just suggestions off the top of my head. Give me a day to think about your problem; I’m sure I can think of further specialized studies you can conduct. Always keep in mind that the world can never have too many specializations. That’ll be $150 unless you want to retain me, in which case, I’ll provide a sub-idea of a sub-idea per week for a year for $1,500.”

​I think I’m going to like this job. I’ll never, at the current rate of developing specializations, run out of work.  
 
*Merrill, Kelly, Jr. and Bridget Rubenking. Social Sciences. January 8, 2019. Online at https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/1/10  Accessed January 14, 2019.

Chances are very good that if you have to carry firewood on your head to your lean-to, this website never reaches you. You have more pressing needs than intellectual stimulation, needs, such as, well, survival stuff like making it through this day to reach tomorrow’s struggle for existence. On a drive from Guatemala City to Antigua Guatemala, I saw a woman walking along the roadside and carrying a few thick branches of firewood on her head. She wasn’t participating in some “iron man” contest. No, the contest was between her daily survival with the luxury of cooked food and the threat of her minimal existence. I might have offered her a ride to ease her burden, but in a culture that views foreigners who approach villagers as potential kidnappers, I felt that practical wisdom was expedient. * I drove on, knowing that trying to help might have been wrongly interpreted. And I know that even though I am aware of her life, because she never saw me, she has never been aware of mine. I ponder the quality of her life; she never ponders the quality of mine, and she will never read what I post in this website.
 
At some time, all of us recognize a difference in life’s so called “quality.” Some have more; some, less. In some cases, some have nothing but life itself. So, why mention the obvious, why say some are poor and others, rich? Poverty is pervasive unless it isn’t.
 
As a resident of Penn’s Woods, that is, Pennsylvania, I’m surrounded by more than 17 million acres of trees. I’m used to seeing an abundance of firewood and also to seeing it delivered by the cords to residences large and small and urban and rural. An abundance of and easy delivery of firewood isn’t a normal “quality of life” indicator. In most American homes, firewood is a nonessential. Stoves and furnaces run on transported supplies of natural gas and electricity. The “quality of life” factor for many lies in having a fireplace or wood stove as an amenity, even a sign of luxury, an object unnecessary for survival, but one indicative of casual affluence, and a great background for having a glass of wine or a cup of tea. Women traipsing for miles with firewood on their heads just to cook a meagre meal don’t make a common sight in the United States.
 
That brings me to a question I have to ask myself: What do I consider to be essential for defining “quality of life”?
 
I do know that humans have tendencies to make do with what they have and that such making-do includes an emotional and intellectual kinship among people associated by necessity, as well as by love and friendship. Any consideration of life’s quality has to include intangibles. But what intangibles? And this where you come in with a contribution.
 
You say, “Didn’t you recently write a blog in which you quoted the late actor Tab Hunter, onetime heartthrob, as saying something about popularity’s not being important, whereas being a good person is?”
 
“Yes.”
 
“Well,” you continue, “I suppose you meant to say that being good has something to do with life’s quality and that being bad would be the antithesis of living a high-quality life. But that isn’t how some people might view life’s quality. Take a drug lord, for example, wouldn’t the power to control others, to bend their wills to his, be his fundamental component of high quality? Or, take a famous person who isn’t Tab Hunter, one who regards fame not as superfluous to his or her quality of life, but rather as essential to it. Such a hypothetical person isn’t the poster child for altruism, or charity, or love, or selflessness; yet, that person might say, ‘I’m living a high-quality life.’ And what of dictators, those deemed pathological liars or killers, and those who are bathed in unending praise by sycophants? Maybe there is no such thing as a life of high quality, and that what you center on in an argument based on a woman carrying wood on her head is merely a product of your own affluence-driven guilt.”
 
“Okay,” I say, “but could good mental and physical health constitute a high-quality of living?”
 
“It could,” you continue, “but there are many who in the midst of seeming good health and mental fitness, adopt a nihilism that leads in some cases to suicide. Surely, there are those who because of what you call intangibles just don’t find any kind of living to be high quality. Maybe those people just suffer from some existential angst that prohibits them from judging any life style, level, or means as unessential, even low quality, because, in the end, ennui wins and death is the leveler.”
 
“Gosh,” I say, “you’re depressing me. I have all this firewood for nothing, you say. Are my ideas of a high-quality life just the defense mechanisms I use to ward off thinking about the inevitable? A drug lord can live a high-quality life whereas those under him live various levels of poor-quality lives that are little different from the wood-carrying woman. But what if she’s very happy? What if carrying wood to sustain life is what makes a life high-quality?
 
“And that makes me wonder whether or not I should have stopped to offer assistance to the woman along the road regardless of my concern about others misinterpreting my act. Did I live a low-quality life in that moment because I drove on and failed to take Tab Hunter’s perspective that being a good person outweighs all other considerations, including wealth and personal safety?”
 
You reassuringly say, “You can’t solve all the world’s problems. Are you going to supply transportation and wood to the poor around the world? If you do help one lady, do you fail to help millions of others improve their lives, even if temporarily? Isn’t she responsible for defining her quality of life? Your helping her might yield temporary physical relief from her circumstance, but are you going to be there throughout her years? What happens when she burns through the wood she collected? You don’t live in Guatemala; you don’t have unlimited resources; you can’t ship some of Pennsylvania’s 17 million acres of trees cut and stacked in cords to her village. Remember the adage about giving a man a fish as opposed to teaching a man to fish. And besides, if you are discussing high-quality life, aren’t you equating it to a charitable life? Is charity what makes life high-quality? Are you adopting St. Paul’s philosophy, psychology, and sociology in which he concludes that of faith, hope, and charity, the ‘greatest of these is charity’? Caritas can be taken as love, you know. And one can love without giving others stuff, caring for their needs, and sacrificing one’s own wealth. Charity that makes life high-quality could be self-love as easily as it could be love of others.”
 
“Now, I’m questioning whether or not I made the right decision in asking for your comments. I’m more confused than ever. I don’t know if there even is such a thing as a high-quality life. Certainly, I haven’t defined it for myself. Am I just living episodically, living like some TV series junkie from week-to-week to see what’s next? Is ‘high-quality life’ a thing of the moment without some overarching meaning? Does it endure no longer than firewood? Is it something I have to go out daily to find just as the Guatemalan woman had to find her firewood? And is high-quality a changing principle, each day different because I burn wild cherry one day, oak another, and locust on a third day, gathering whatever logs are available at the time and at the least expenditure of money and energy? Does ease of acquisition equate to high-quality?”
 
“Sorry I couldn’t help,” you add. “I hope that you haven’t become pessimistic because you can’t define the quality of your life or the qualities of life. But, hey, keep trying. There are many trees in Penn’s Woods. Gather what you can, burn with some restraint, and share the warmth.”
 
 
*There is the story of Japanese tourists in Guatemala who wanted to take some pictures of village children. Seemed like an innocent act, except the villagers decided otherwise, saw it as a potential kidnapping, and killed at least one of the tourists. 

Two simple principles: One should research before concluding. One should think before judging.

“I don’t think he should have said that,” he says, thinking of how what we say can hurt those against whom condemnatory statements are thrown. “Too many lives have been negatively affected by the easy cast of innuendo and gossip.”
 
“Why not?” she asks. “There’s always truth of some kind that is obvious or hidden in any statement. That’s probably one reason that Dorsey, et al., invented Twitter. If they hadn’t, social media platforms would have invented themselves, sprung, as it were, out of a universal need to fill vacuums between people of differing ilk.”
 
He responds, “If there were some universal creative principle that engendered social media, it would be a realm or dimension of judgment, and those media would spring forth riding on a steed called Hypocrisy. Take this one about the President: ‘[He] is to the extent of his limited ability and narrow intelligence [the conservatives’] willing instrument for all the woe which [has] thus far been brought upon the country and for all the degradation, all the atrocity, all the desolation and ruin.’ What do you think about that statement?”
 
She smiles and says, “Hey, if the penthouse fits…”
 
He then says, “But why should a former President make such a judgment on one who followed in that illustrious Office so closely after his term? Don’t you think that broadcasting such a judgment would do little to help the country and much to harm it?”
 
She answers, “Look, if the truth isn’t obvious to you, I don’t know what is.”
 
He can’t help himself in unveiling the source, “I still don’t think Franklin Pierce should have said that publicly about Abraham Lincoln.”

There’s little doubt that with age comes increasing skepticism. Think about it. Babies have to trust. With accumulating disappointments, they learn that they can’t always trust. That was you. That was me. So, where are we now? Do we agree with Ringo Starr, who sang that trust “don’t come easy”?
 
We could argue that a healthy skepticism equates to a healthy maturity and that only the foolish trust unconditionally. Skepticism is a defensive mechanism that keeps the charlatans at bay. But then, all of us have established trust here or there, in friends, loved ones, and some authorities. We might say that trust in loved ones is freely given and unconditional, but that trust in authorities is always conditional. Yet, we know that even loved ones can betray trust as evidenced by infidelities in both fiction and reality. Infidelity leading to a lack of trust is a theme in plays like Othello and in the tabloids that record this or that breakup among the rich and famous: Think Princess Diana.
 
Anyway, take the following skeptically. Because of ideology, we have a tendency to harbor unconditional trust and conditional skepticism. The former we give to our favored ideology; the latter, to any opposing one. A recent story from the halls of academia, for instance, illustrates what I mean.
 
We all realize that once a notion gets into the heads of academicians, they have a tendency to stick with it to the dismay of those who might challenge the intellectual status quo. Thus, we have had proponents of phrenology, a geocentric universe, a homuncular beginning, and a stable set of continents, all with devoted proponents who rejected antithetical thinking: Think Galileo and Alfred Wegener for examples.
 
So, the story of Peter Boghossian, a Portland State University professor shouldn’t be much of a surprise. It seems that the University officials are in a huff about what the professor and a couple of others recently did that reveals unconditional trust and conditional skepticism associated with ideologies. According to the report by Dave Urbanski (N.B., “according to”—that inspires trust in me because I’m revealing my source), “Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose wrote about as series of articles they implanted in journals to demonstrate bias in academia. Their USA opinion piece was entitled “From dog rape to white men in chains: We fooled the biased academic left with fake studies.”*
 
The motive for the project, according to the authors? “We did this as a part of a year-long probe to find out how much certain political biases have taken root within a small but powerful sector of academia…We succeeded [in getting the articles published] not so much because we tricked the journals, but because our papers fit in with what they consider scholarship.”**
 
Apparently, when supposed highly educated adults embrace an ideology, they embrace it unconditionally while rejecting any antithetical thought. In other words, academicians display a infantile trust once they accept a concept. The concepts in the articles Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose submitted were “toxic masculinity,” “white fragility,” “cultural appropriation,” and “microaggressions,” concepts so fully emplaced in contemporary culture that they have become “buzz words.” All the concepts derived from “grievance studies.” Lindsay says, “If our project shows anything, it’s that we have very little reason to trust the concepts coming out of grievance studies.” With regard to one of their article’s suggestion to put white men in chains to make them understand the plight of others, Lindsay says, “Currently, they [the buzz words and grievance articles] have come into our lives via a broken academic sector that doesn’t even know it’s not okay to put students in chains.”
 
Try it yourself. Find a widely accepted ideology in any field and suggest an absurd corollary or version that appears to be consistent with current thinking. If you stick to the buzz words, you’ll probably find a trusting audience, regardless of the absurdity of your thought. Unconditional trust pervades ideologies.
 
You shouldn’t be surprised that the American Psychological Association has taken a position against “traditional masculinity”—whatever that is. Well, here it is: “Thirteen years in the making, [the new guidelines] draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful….” Guys, get in touch with your sensitive side; obviously, “traditional masculinity” is bad for you because it makes you suppress your emotions. You should especially abandon that traditional masculinity in times of war, home invasions, and muggings. And think of what all that machismo is doing to the little ones, those boys who develop competitiveness, obviously, according to the APA, to their own detriment.
 
Now we have to wonder whether or not to trust APA articles that address the psychology of males. Do we put unconditional trust in the research? In the conclusions? Or should we apply some healthy skepticism that we learned along the way between infancy and adulthood?
 
*Online at https://www.theblaze.com/news/professor-who-exposed-biased-academic-left-with-fake-studies-is-in-trouble-with-his-college-over-it  Accessed on January 9, 2019.
**The original article is Lindsay, James, et al., USA Today, Online at https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2018/10/10/grievance-studies-academia-fake-feminist-hypatia-mein-kampf-racism-column/1575219002/ Accessed January 9, 2019. The article was published on October 10, 2018 as an opinion piece in the newspaper.

Why is there widespread obsession with reality TV, with social media, and with rock and movie stars? What’s the reason some people reshape their bodies through cosmetic surgery to mimic people they idolize? * Have we finally reaped the crop of existential thinking that grew from the seeds planted by Sartre? Have we emplaced in our psyches twentieth-century anxiety that arose from a feeling of meaninglessness? Is our answer to nihilism a continuing search for approval based on imitation? Is acknowledgement by others the ultimate mechanism that establishes personal meaning?
 
If President John Tyler were around today, here’s what he would post on Twitter:  “Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette—the more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude your embrace.” Maybe he was thinking of the Whig leader and editor of the Albany Evening Journal, Thurlow Weed, when he said that. Tweed had called Tyler a “poor, miserable, despised imbecile.” Or, maybe Tyler was just stating the obvious, that popularity is a wheel like fortune. As just about every popular person discovers, for each idolater, there’s an equal and similarly intense iconoclast. That iconoclast is the reason popularity is like a coquette.
 
The late teen idol Tab Hunter (d. 2018 at 86) once said, “I don't care whether people like me or dislike me. I'm not on earth to win a popularity contest. I'm here to be the best human being I possibly can be.” Of course, we could debate the meaning of “best human being,” but Hunter’s statement reveals a fundamental dichotomy in the way humans find identity and meaning. The divide seems always to be between those whose identities are imitations and those whose identities are unique because they are homegrown.
 
“No,” you say. “Such either/or thinking misses the grey areas.” Then you add, “All of us imitate to some extent because all of us have matured under the influences of others. Sure, some people seem a bit more ‘different,’ but even they have their influences. Remember Dylan Thomas’s line ‘After the first death, there is no other’? We could substitute person for death here. Or, we could provide an analog from the biological principle ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’: All of us reflect the world of our development; all reflect the combined personalities of others. We imitate not necessarily because we seek popularity—though that is a part of it—but because we cannot divorce ourselves completely from the models of humanity we acquired through simple inculcation and the heritage of preprogramed neurons.” And finally, you add, “I’m not on social media because I seek my identity through popularity. Your implication that anyone who appears frequently on social media is a lost soul is false.”
 
That insight by you, dear Reader, is why I like to have these conversations. I will grant that not every outreach is a cry for popularity. But you might entertain the assessment that many outreaches are. Regardless of what Tab Hunter wrote—and he probably wrote it sincerely—he made a career in entertainment, a profession that judges success on popularity. Having been highly popular, he had the luxury of reflecting on what a lack of popularity among the young means as his jobs in entertainment waned with his increasing age. Like many other once-highly-popular entertainers, he also saw the downside of popularity, namely, the lack of privacy and the fall from grace that seems inevitable for anyone who peaks in fame at a young age. It seems natural for more mature people to  reassess what is ‘important. If we take late heartthrob at his word, Tab Hunter acknowledged that being popular pales in contrast to being “the best human being.”
 
 
*Bruk, Diana. “Man undergoes 23 surgeries to look like Superman.” Cosmopolitan.com. Online at https://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/news/a42649/this-man-got-23-surgeries-to-look-like-superman/  Accessed on January 3, 2018. “Unbelievable!” you say. No, not really. Check out the web for stories about people like Lacey Wildd, who underwent 12 breast augmentation surgeries and other surgeries because, as she said, “I want to be an adult Barbie, like the extreme Barbie.” So, not only do we see people wanting “to be” very much the clone of someone they idolize, but we also see people seeking to become clones of fictional characters like Superman and Barbie.

Experience has been a relatively good teacher in matters of human interactions. I say “relatively” because all of us are limited in running the human experiment. On a planet with seven billion humans, there are just too many variables for inductive thinking. The experiments we have run by interacting with individuals apply only to those individuals, and even they can change the laboratory venue and apparatus for ensuing encounters, and thus, alter the experiment, at any time. Nevertheless, given a choice between interacting on the basis of a personal history with others and advice by any guru, most of us go with the former. Not that the latter doesn’t make sense in his or her self-help book: It’s just that the advice of any guru is a model for action. Models are rather sweeping in design, and that means the modeler had to choose what to include and how to include it; modelers sometimes fudge the facts, also. Scientific models do, however, serve a purpose: They present an overview, a larger context than that afforded by limited experimentation. Yet, for most of us experiment is greater than model. “Out in the field” most people probably rely on what they have witnessed. Experimentation, even in matters social, appears to be as valuable as Richard Feynman said it was: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is; it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
 
And so, the two of us should consider some kind of modeling and corollary experimentation to see whether or not that model holds true. After that, let’s consider why we interact as we do.
 
You probably are aware that much of the fuss over climate stems from “climate-change models” derived by some pretty smart people with seemingly unlimited funding. If we are dealing with “climate science,” then we should pay some attention to “climate-change modeling” because the ultimate goal of science is some encompassing model that explains whatever—weather, climate, atoms, metabolism—to our permanent satisfaction. All climate-change models can appear, in general, to be reasonable and to predict with some credibility if one accepts the parameters on which they are based. But, as you know without even being a scientist or because of being one, Earth is a complex place with many components that affect climate, some of which lie outside the planet’s surface boundaries (e.g., orbital position and shape, tilt of axis, and solar input) and others that surround us (latitude, ocean currents, albedo, atmospheric composition, mountains, and land-water distribution).
 
You also know just by running the experiment of your life that some climate predictions from the 1990s were erroneous to some degree, as demonstrated by current conditions that differ from those predictions. The complexity of the planet and the failure of past models makes one wonder whether or not we aren’t seeing in the modeling the same thing we see when computers spit out incorrect information, that is, junk in, junk out. We should all ask: What goes into the modeling of climate? Why do the models differ? What relationship lies between predictions so far and the recent history of temperature and precipitation (the two most significant climate measures)?
 
First a bit about climate modeling and experiment and then a bit about human modeling.
 
If you read through the gajillion studies that somehow get related to climate research, you will come across many that focus on plants and their response to temperature and precipitation patterns. That makes considerable sense since we know that palm trees don’t grow on permafrost. So, what, we might ask, do forests tell us about climate? We like trees, don’t we, and we know that they sequester carbon through photosynthesis at the approximate rate of about 2.5 tons per acre per year in a temperate forest and probably more in a tropical rainforest under more rapid growth. With so much sequestration in growth one might think that forests do not release greenhouse gases. But, even though we expect tropical rainforests to increase their storage of carbon as atmospheric carbon dioxide rises, complicated interactions arise. Here are two examples:
 
Dr. Emma Sayer and others of Cambridge University’s Center for Ecology and Hydrology studied the release of CO2 from rainforest soils in Panama, and, in 2011 reported in Nature Climate Change that an increase in plant growth leads first to an increase in leaf litter, then to an increase in soil carbon followed by an increase in soil microbes that—you guessed it—leads to increased decomposition of leaf litter followed by a consequent release of soil carbon to the atmosphere. And this increase is not accurately accounted for in most global climate change models.  Want some more complexity? Throw in a feedback loop: In 2014 Xuhui Wang and others published an article in Nature that strongly suggests that even an increase of a single degree Celsius in tropical rainforest’s average temperature will lead to an additional annual release of more than two tons of carbon dioxide per hectare.** If CO2 in the atmosphere increases because of human activity, does that portend greater plant growth and greater sequestration or further greenhouse gas increases? So, should you plant a forest or cut one down?
 
The importance of this question lies in how we pattern our behavior and shape our attitudes on the basis of our perceptions and our trust in the objectivity of the scientists who supply models.
 
Wait! Before you answer the question about planting or clearing a forest, consider a study Stephanie Roe conducted in Puerto Rico to determine whether or not temperature had an effect on the release of carbon from a tropical rainforest. Let’s run with an assumption first: Wouldn’t you think that as temperature rises, bacteria—the great decomposers—become more active? Seems reasonable in light of the two studies by Sayer and Wang: Under increasing temperatures decomposition of forest floor litter should increase, causing a greater release of carbon into the atmosphere? Hey! That’s what I thought. But, not so. Apparently, in Roe’s experiment, higher temperatures meant increased drying of the forest floor litter. The drying, to my amusement, dampened the effect of bacteria. Less moisture, less decomposition, more storage of carbon in the soil.*** I think Feynman would be happy with Roe’s assessment because it serves as an example of his statement about experiment: She said, “We would expect that microbes tend to work faster [under increased temperatures]…What we found is actually it went the other way because moisture was impacted so much.”
 
We read the IPCC reports and their popularized agenda-driven and watered-down explanations that scream “the sky is falling” as the models predict. Then we read the results of experiments to find the models don’t tell the whole story—or tell the wrong story. Well, maybe in future experiments we’ll uncover information that will enable us to construct models more aligned with verifiable data derived from experimentation.
 
And while we struggle to demonstrate the validity of mathematical climate models, you, I, and everyone else must daily also deal with models of humanity versus personal experimentation. And that’s why there is more than one kind of psychology. Just as climate models and the scientists who promulgate them serve as tests of trust until we verify by experimentation, so human models, regardless of our assumptions, hypotheses, and derived theories, serve similarly. We know through personal interactions that the only models worth accepting are those based on experimentation. It really doesn’t matter, as Feyman notes, how clever we are, what we think and put in practice in climate science and in our daily lives on the basis of models. All models require some basis in experimentation to be effective and truthful. Models that fail to take into account what we know from experiment always seem to lack some component or parameter that manifests itself later, just as past climate-change models seem to have lacked something that led to faulty predictions.
 
In both climate science and in life, it seems that we always discover what works and what doesn’t by experimentation. Climate-change modeling has proved to be a very difficult subject with many unknowns, making current models suspect at best. Yes, maybe there will be an approximation that is good enough to serve predictions. But I caution with yet another study on climate. Francis Macdonald recently presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union findings about the role Indonesia’s highlands might be playing in the climate game. Apparently, climate models haven’t included the relationship between volcanism, erosion, and carbon sequestration. As Paul Voosen reports, “…Macdonald and his collaborators …found that glacial conditions 90 million and 50 million years ago lined up neatly with the collisions of a chain of island volcanoes in the now-vanished [and tropical] Neo Tethys Ocean with the African and Asian continents. A similar collision some 460 million years ago formed the Appalachians [when they were deep in the tropics]…their uplift matched a 2-million-year-long glaciation.”**** The study seems to imply that the recent 2-million-year-long glaciations and interglacials of the Pleistocene seem to be tied to the same processes that produced those ancient glacial periods. In other words, as Voosen writes, “A hothouse Earth appears to be the planet’s default state, prevailing for three-fourths of the past 500 million years.”  We can have all the Paris agreements we want, but nothing we do will match these natural and largely unaccounted for influences missing from climate-change models of the past 30 years. And here’s another angle that has been addressed by other students of climate: Maybe our adding carbon to the atmosphere is actually staving off another glacial advance, just as the movement of tectonic plates and their associated volcanoes seems to have reestablished that default hothouse Earth.
 
Human interaction appears to be even more complex than climate-change: Just when we think we can model those interactions in our personal histories and apply them to the next person, we discover that there is a virtual forest of complex processes or an increase in erupting emotions that affect interrelated components.
 
I understand the need for models. They can provide some intellectual security in a confusing world. But they can also mislead when they are not comprehensive enough for us to make valid predictions. At the same time, our reliance on experiment as a check on models leads us to think inductively in an indefinite (or infinite?) universe. And as we know, we can flip a coin a million times without being able to predict whether or not it will come up heads or tails on the million-and-first flip. Macdonald’s model provides yet another possible driver of climate-change and argues for a default warm planet, but it is an earth-bound model that doesn’t account for orbital and solar influences.
 
Back to the personal: Do you interact with others on the basis of a model? How effective is your current model of human interaction? Are you willing to change the model if experiment shows it to be ineffective?
 
* Sayer, Emma J, Matthew S. Heard, et al. “Soil carbon release enhanced by increased tropical forest litterfall.” Nature Climate Change. Published online August 14, 2011 at http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n6/full/nclimate1190.html.  Accessed January 4, 2019.
 
** Xuhui Wang, Shilong Piao, Philippe Ciais, Pierre Friedlingstein, Ranga B. Myneni, Peter Cox, Martin Heimann, John Miller, Shushi Peng, Tao Wang, Hui Yang, Anping Chen. “A two-fold increase of carbon cycle sensitivity to tropical temperature Variations. Nature, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nature12915. Online at http://sites.bu.edu/cliveg/files/2014/01/wang-nature-2014.pdf  Accessed January 4, 2019.
 
***Pontecorvo, Emily. “Climate warming experiment finds unexpected results.” Phys.org. January 4, 2019. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-01-climate-unexpected-results.html . Accessed day of release.
 
****Voosen, Paul. “Rise of carbon dioxide-absorbing mountains in tropics may set thermostat for global climate.” Science. December 28, 2018. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/12/rise-carbon-dioxide-absorbing-mountains-tropics-may-set-thermostat-global-climate  Accessed January 4, 2018.