Imagine a meeting between Emma Nutt, the first female telephone operator, and the disembodied Siri. Emma was an experimental hire. Male operators were a bit too curt or rough in their handling of callers. Emma changed all that. Her more patient approach and sympathetic voice started the replacement process. Female telephone operators became the dominant connecting force in electronic communications. The year Emma started her employment was 1878.
 
Like the young men who first served as operators, the first Siri was a bit of a rough character. Apple changed that for obvious reasons: “She” had to serve millions of people, so she became more Emmafied. Of course, more recently, Siri has, in the current crude milieu, taken on a little more edginess.
 
“Operator.”
“Operator, may I have Glendale 7680?”
“One moment, please.”
And there, efficiently and politely, Emma makes the connection by putting phone jacks into the appropriate outlets.
“Operator.”
“Operator, what is the weather in San Juan today.”
“I’m sorry. I have no way of knowing, but I can connect you to the city. Long distance charges will apply.”
 
“Siri.”
“How can I help you?”
“What is the weather in San Juan today.”
“The temperature in San Juan is 83 today.”
“Okay, Siri, call Frank.”
“Calling Frank.”
 
Ironic, isn’t it. In a world more connected, we’re connected more to the disembodied voices from places we can only imagine as computers connected by cell towers or satellites. The days of Emma’s sitting alongside other women in a room in Boston, looking at a bank of receptacles and wires, and shoving in phone jacks one-by-one to make connections, well, those days are gone. Men are back, but not for those many ordinary calls that they originally connected in the nineteenth century. Rather they sit with the remaining Emmas waiting for those rare 411 calls we make when Siri can’t understand our diction. Apparently, humans haven’t completely abandoned us, but they are working on it.
 
What we had gained in Emma we lost in Siri. Disembodied placeless voices dominate. The electrons are in control. Obviously, we enjoy their participation in speeding up connections, but we might consider what our technology has done. Unlike snowflakes, whose individuality is legendary, but unverifiable, electrons are all the same. An electron spinning about a proton in a distant galaxy is the same as one orbiting an atomic nucleus in your phone. That’s the quantum world. Subatomic particles are identical except for their “spin.” The pleasant individuality of Emma and her coworkers through decades is gone. The electrons of Siri have largely replaced them.
 
Just when we think, “Oh! Look what a sophisticated individual I am. I have a phone that talks to me. It answers my questions.” Just when we think we have acquired a new kind of individuality, we have ironically done so by giving some of our control to undifferentiated subatomic particles, electrons without individuality throughout the universe.
 
The hiring of Emma Nutt shaped the nature of communications for over a century. What would Emma think if she met Siri?

Every time you ask someone a question about yourself, you imply a lack of self-knowledge. Yet, you cannot live without questions: “What am I doing?” or “What am I doing here?” There is nothing wrong in asking, of course. In fact, there might be something wrong with you if you have never questioned yourself.
 
Yes, I know there are some who make a statement about their surety: “I’ve never questioned myself because I know what I want.” Nonsense.
 
Questioning is the nature of brains that have to deal with the world. Otherwise, life would be even more hazardous than it is. “Can I put that in my mouth?” “Is it too hot to touch?” “Would I get hurt if I jumped in?” “Is it secure?” “Will it hold me?” “Is there any future in this career?”
 
Questions about oneself differ from questions about the world we encounter. We can rely on tradition, encyclopedic knowledge, and experiment to determine answers to the latter. Getting answers for the former is far more difficult. “Am I really in love?” “Should I trust?” “Why do I keep making the same mistake?”
 
If I could be there when you pose questions about yourself, would I offer words of encouragement, advice, or caution? Sorry, I know that is what you expect, but I decline.
 
If I could be there, I would probably just say, “That’s a good question. Do you have anything else you want to ask?” Just like you, I have questions. Will you answer the questions I have about my own circumstances? Let’s think about that. If you can answer my questions, maybe you have more answers than what you currently believe lie in your inventory of wisdom.
 
Sometimes only you can answer the questions you ask. 

The black-and-white 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still is now a cult movie, and its fans all know a key bit of dialogue. In the film the alien Klaatu (Michael Rennie) arrives on our planet with a stern message: “You Earthlings better stop this nuclear weapons stuff” (Not his words, of course). That’s not the key bit of dialogue, but I’ll get to that shortly. As often happens in such movies, we Earthlings shoot the alien. Trouble is, this one has landed with a giant, powerful, and protective robot named Gort.
 
Before he is shot, Klaatu tells Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) that if anything happens to him, she must tell Gort: Klaatu barada nikto. Why? As Klaatu explains, Gort is capable of destroying Earth. That wouldn’t be good. Because Helen gives the message to Gort, it refrains from destroying Earth and revives Klaatu, literally bringing him back from the dead. The movie ends with Klaatu and Gort ascending to the heavens in their spaceship.
 
Nothing changed. That is, nothing changed in real life. We built more, not fewer, atomic weapons in the 1950s, going from 299 the year the film was made to more than 18,000 by the end of that decade. Apparently, not even the threat of a destroyed planet keeps us from doing whatever we want to do.
 
Right! It was just a movie. No Gort has come to threaten us from afar. But the film has a message about reality: If we keep playing with matches, we are going to burn something, possibly ourselves. 
 
Almost every alien Gort turns out to be an empty threat. And that’s the way it is with almost all threats over human vices. Oh! Yes. We are afraid when Gort’s threat seems immediate. But when the robot leaves, the threat leaves. Was there ever a time when humans heeded warnings of dire consequences for their actions? Look at history, and look around now. I don’t know where you live, but in a large city near me there appears to be a murder just about every day. Drug arrests, too. Gang wars and family wars. Abuse and indignity. Where’s an objective Gort to stand over us when we need him? If he could only threaten us with a power capable of stopping everything we do that poses or actuates harm, maybe we would come to our collective senses and stop our destructive behavior. 
 
Alas! Gort always leaves us to our own doings. Klaatu and Gort can’t save a world that doesn’t want to be saved. Buddha tried. So did Jesus. Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., also. Many unknown others. Still, here we are, a world of countries making weapons of terrible destructive power and a species that harms itself, one by one, neighborhood by neighborhood, all working on extinction.
 
Even if a Christlike Klaatu arrives to warn us, most likely we’ll shoot him. And even though he rises from the dead and ascends to the heavens with important parting words, we probably won’t pay much attention. Maybe the only way we’ll change personally and collectively is by threat. Apparently, a Klaatu can’t accomplish much by sending a Helen with a message that will prevent a Gort from destroying. Barada nikto appears only to postpone the inevitable as history seems to verify; we are our own Gorts unleashed upon ourselves. In wars we ironically seek peace by destroying.
 
Nevertheless, it might be wise for us just to consider the parting words of Klaatu in the cult B-movie, “Your choice is simple: Join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration.” After millennia of Cains v Abels and wars, is there any indication that humankind will listen to those who advocate peace? If human history is our guide, then in every generation there will be some who inevitably choose self-obliteration. 

Fossils are autobiographical. They shamelessly reveal much about their lives without saying a word. But they have help.
 
If you want to find a fossil, you go where fossils are found. They are not ubiquitous, and there’s a reason for their distribution over the planet. They lie in rock where or near where the organisms lived, and they exist only in so far as preservation has occurred. Some places are not conducive to fossil preservation. It’s tough to become a fossil. Many variables disrupt the process. Let’s hypothesize.
 
You live in a humid climate with many other organisms. You expire, fall into the humus, and lie there exposed to consumers and scavengers: Crows, mice, fungi, and bacteria see you as a source of energy. Pretty soon, you’re bones. Then a dog or wolf takes a bone or two. Rain falls. Land floods. Scattering occurs. You are not going to become a unified fossil though your hard parts might be isolated remnants of what you once were, but only so if they are removed from further disintegration and consumption, say by burial. New waters bring sediments. Your parts get covered. The process repeats. Deep burial occurs. Your bones are replaced by precipitating dissolved minerals; okay, now you’ve been fossilized.
 
There are many rock units that bear no fossils. The lithified sediments of fast-flowing streams, for example, indicate an environment of high energy, where light bones might have been destroyed by collisions with rocks in white water and then washed away. Lava flows are also usually devoid of fossils because temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Celsius destroy life’s products. So, low energy, cool environments are a bit more conducive to fossil preservation, especially when they have an influx of burying sediments and a low oxygen content to prevent oxidation. Swamps are great places for fossilization as coal deposits attest. Muddy areas where fine particle clays settle out are also great preservers, and, as the Burgess Shale in Canada indicates, rapid burial by an underwater turbidity flow also works.
 
It’s tough to become a fossil, but should you become one because your surviving parts made it through the gauntlet of destruction, then a future conscious being, bent on understanding the past, might dig you up or find you exposed in an eroding landscape. And then, the autobiography your parts tell reveals itself not only in those preserved remnants, but also in the environment of their discovery.
 
In other words, someone learns about you by your associations. Find lots of fossils together? Two possibilities stand out: Either many organisms got washed into a collecting basin or many organisms lived together in an environment that provided sufficient food and shelter for their lives. Bunch of similar fossils? Colonial animals, right? Or animals or plants that thrived under similar environmental conditions. Rare specimen? Probably a solitary critter or maybe one that just happened by luck to be preserved out of a sparse population. Possibly too, an instinctive choice to isolate.
 
Now here’s the question: When the future paleontologist or archaeologist finds your fossilized parts, what will he or she discern about the way you lived? The environment of preservation will be as much a clue to your lifestyle as the remnants of your body.
 
Look around at your environment. What does it say about you? Place itself might become your biographer. In fact, it’s writing your tale as you read this.   

Depression is a juxtaposition of focus and blur. The focus is inward; the blur, outward.
 
The depressed need a new lens, one that like the Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) gives a sharp view of all that is out there in the distance, that which is beyond personal. Perspective changes as lenses change. Fuzzy stuff at a distance can be clearly seen.
 
It’s all about perspective, isn’t it? I’m talking about your life—and mine. You and I can, of course, focus on the “inward” universe of our personal lives. At times that might be good, but good for us only insofar as we can also clearly see the encompassing “outward” universe and the places through which we move. The dual view is necessary for healthful living. Ironically, those who “focus” their attention inward when they feel depressed rarely have a clear view. The inside, without that balancing external perspective, is an engine clogged with carbon deposits, a cloudy drink, or a seedless melon with nothing on which to focus, some vague malaise as difficult to define as jello is, in John Candy’s words, “to nail to a tree.” Clarity comes only when the view inward occurs in the context of some wide field, the “out there and all around.”
 
Don’t feel bad if things aren’t quite in focus. Hubble was in the planning stage for decades and took many people to design, build, launch, repair, and improve. You might think that with all those bright engineers and skilled technicians that constructing a flawless telescope was a fait accompli from the start. Not so. The Hubble Space Telescope had to be repaired because its first images were blurry, and the Wide Field Camera 3 now in use is a later-generation instrument that was installed in 2009, nineteen years after the Hubble first reached orbit.
 
There’s a parallel here. The distant views provided by WFC3 have enabled astronomers to see the early universe. Looking outward gave them a view of our universe’s origin and nature that an inward perspective could never have provided. That outward view took us inside our very beginnings. Could an outward view do the same for us personally?
 
Getting the right lens and finding a precise focus is not an easy task for any of us. The goal of a healthful perspective is, however, worth the effort. It is also achievable only when we balance an inward perspective with a clear outward view. 

Poor Winstanley! He had grandiose plans. Then, literally, everything got washed away. It was worse than accidentally pouring bleach into the colored load.  It wasn’t just the color that washed away, it was Winstanley and his work, both never to be seen again. Not a hue was left in the crashing white foam of the surf as the Great Storm of 1703 destroyed the lighthouse on Eddystone Rocks.

Building a lighthouse on isolated rocks in a sea subject to gales is a formidable task. In the seventeenth century Henry Winstanley undertook the task, drawing both fame and criticism for his work. According to Adam Hart-Davis and Emily Troscianko, authors of Henry Winstanley and the Eddystone Lighthouse (Sutton Publishing, 2002; and The History Press, ebook, 2013), the elegant, tall structure was supposed to be a testimony to Winstanley’s engineering genius. Unfortunately, as Winstanley and five others were making repairs to the lighthouse, they and it were hit by one of the worst storms in English history.

Lighthouses have to be strong. Those built within tidal ranges are subject to wind and surf, both capable of exerting powerful forces against a standing structure. The people who build and maintain lighthouses have been rather unique. They risk injury and death at the worst, and at the least, they undergo isolation for long periods, but their efforts have saved ships and lives. Unfortunately, the need for a lighthouse is always an “after the fact” requisite: Some ship or ships had to be damaged or destroyed and some lives lost to emphasize the need for a lighthouse on a particular coast and to warrant the cost of its construction and maintenance to save future lives.

Henry might have been guilty of some pride in his architecture. That seems understandable because he did garner the admiration of a king, and he did become a bit famous. If only that storm hadn’t hit, his lighthouse and he might have been around through many seasons. Storms are unpredictable both in occurrence and in strength. People are always being caught off guard by their ferocity. Well, not all people. Some know that humble vigilance is necessary for survival.

​In life everyone is a sailor on a ship that passes dangerous rocks. Navigating safely through the occasional storm requires some trustworthy light, one that will be there regardless of tide and surf. All of us need someone who builds and maintains a warning light, even the people who build and maintain the light. Humility in the face of potential storm waters near dangerous rocks requires that we know we are vulnerable, that we can be blown off course and onto sharp rocks, and that even the
For 200,000 years humans have put up warning lights for their progeny. What “lighthouse” did your cultural ancestors build to warn you? Is it still there, and can you see it? Before an unexpected storm forces you onto sharp rocks, humbly scan the horizon for a lighthouse, and, if you can in turn, build a sturdy one for your friends and descendants.

Are you someone’s muse? You are? That’s great. You aren’t? That’s not good. Each of us has a chance here. Inspire someone. Go a-musing.
 
Inspiration is strange, isn’t it? Putting a spirit of creativity into someone makes the muse godlike. Muses don’t have to create businesses, works of art, literature, or music. Muses create creators. They set in motion that which goes beyond their proximal bounds. They influence the distal in space and time.
 
Think of what you can do by inspiring others. The inspired transfer your influence to others; they, in turn, transfer it farther. You don’t have to be famous to change lives; you just need to inspire someone. Yes, those whom you influence from afar might never know your name or your work, but you know. You can serve as an earthly prime mover. Shove that outer sphere, and all the concentric inner spheres will turn.
 
Inspire one person. 

In the early years of the thirteenth century soldiers of the Fourth Crusade acquiesced to demands by Venice to attack Zara (currently called Zadar in Croatia) as payment for the use of Venetian ships. Zara was a Christian city, once part of the Venetian republic, but it had rebelled. It was a highly fortified city, too well fortified for the Venetians to retake their possession. Thus, the deal with the crusaders who didn’t have the funds to pay Venice: “Help us take Zara,” the ship owners said, “and we will transport you to the Holy Land.”
 
They did. That is, the crusaders helped the Venetians; Christians attacked Christians. Now for those promised ships. Oh! Another negotiation. What about Constantinople? Hey, it’s on the way to the Holy Land anyway. Another attack on another Christian city, and another victory for the crusaders—against Christians. What choice did they have? They wanted ships for transport.
 
Too bad for the residents of Zara and Constantinople that Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t around. As he once said, “No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.”
 
Maybe not evil, but haven’t many of us done something that compromised our principles or intentions? I’m not accusing us of being thirteenth-century crusaders who broke their pledge to do no unnecessary harm on their way to, at, and from the Holy Land. Just little things for the sake of expediency.
 
I’m not making a checklist for any of us. It’s just that, in review, we might see something regrettable that we did on our way to accomplishing some presumably noble goal. I’m also not casting blame. Actions borne of the moment don’t have the advantage of moral oversight that hindsight brings.
 
Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima supposedly saved a million casualties. That is, of course, an arguable statement. Would the Japanese military have surrendered had the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on the top of Mt. Fuji just as a demonstration? Maybe no one at the time either thought of that option or considered anything less than destroying an important military target, regardless of the civilian casualties. Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was, as those in charge might have argued, the lesser of two evils.
 
Now, I know that you weren’t the one making the expedient decision to drop the bomb where it was dropped. So, let’s take it down a notch. What, we can all ask ourselves, have we done for the sake of expediency regardless of the cost, large or small, to others? If we can truly answer “nothing,” we’re living an ethical life.

In the Second Punic War that Rome and Carthage fought, the Roman general Scipio defeated the Carthaginian general Hannibal. The victory saved Rome and decimated the Carthaginians. Hannibal had been fighting in Italy and had caused Rome considerable grief over the years, but Scipio took the offensive, traveled to North Africa, and marched on Carthage. The move forced Hannibal to sail back across the Mediterranean to defend his city. The two armies were relatively equal, but Hannibal also had trained war elephants. Scipio, however, panicked the elephants, outmaneuvered Hannibal’s men, and routed the Carthaginians. Hannibal, seeing his army in retreat and defeat, fled.
 
The two generals met on neutral turf (or sand) years later in Syria. Scipio asked Hannibal to name the greatest generals. Hannibal ranked Alexander the Great first, Pyrrhus, one of Rome’s previous enemies, second, and himself as the third greatest general. In his ranking, Hannibal sang his own praises by listing his many victories.
 
The Roman general then asked Hannibal if his opinion might be different had he defeated Scipio in their epic battle. In a subtle compliment, Hannibal said that had he won that battle, he would rank himself first over all other generals who ever led armies. Scipio must have been pleased. 
 
A compliment in any form is still a compliment, but one grudgingly given speaks more of pride than praise. You might not win every battle, and one that you lose might be more to the credit of your opponent than to a weakness on your part. Sometimes you run into someone who is, at least for a moment or in a particular situation, better than you. Give praise where praise is due.  

In the movie 50 First Dates, Drew Barrymore’s character wakes each day thinking that it is October 13 because she suffers from an ailment called anterograde amnesia. When she meets Adam Sandler, she builds a first-time relationship repetitively. Although there is some question about the nature of this memory ailment, there are some anecdotes that show real parallels in actual people. But that’s not the point here. Barrymore’s character starts each day as October 13 as though all intervening previous days never existed. Her daily life is based on zero, that is, nothing from the previous day spills into the next.
 
The theory of zero-based budgeting that was introduced to the U.S. economy in the 1970s required agencies to justify expenditures in a succeeding budget. Each budget year was supposed to be a totally new event in this economic system. Unfortunately for taxpayers, those spending others’ money define “justification.” So, big bureaucracies easily fall back into the cycle of carryovers because of running programs, and projects go into budgets beyond initial allocations.
 
Like agencies, we also run extended projects in our lives: Thus both love and hate.
 
50 First Dates makes the prospect of having to start over each day seem to be, in the end, a romantic idea. Yet, in our personal experiences we know that infatuation is a short-term state, whereas love is more long-term, though it certainly can develop from those first hormonal stirrings. In our popular way of thinking as expressed not only in fiction, but also in horror stories of stalking, a persistent infatuation seems counter to a healthful relationship, often because it is one-sided: Someone keeps spending like some government agency drunk on tax dollars. However, we might acknowledge that though infatuation is not the path to sustainability in love, it is a great initial motivator.  
 
We almost universally acknowledge and justify running expenditures in love, carryovers from one day to the next that are based on the previous emotional expenditures. A zero budget, though a romantic notion in a movie, eliminates all the connections made and keeps memory from participating in the relationship.
 
But with hate, the budget is a mix. Hate is a carryover budgetary item reborn with a DNA that mirrors infatuation. And, as long as the budget supports the overrides, it maintains its power. To eliminate hate we need a zero-based life budget. Take memory out of the mix. Budget each day anew.
 
Of course, the theory of a zero-based budget is easy to promulgate, but hard to practice. By what theory are you running the economy of your life?