Archaeologists can use dendrochronology and carbon-14 analysis to identify the ages of some prehistorical human structures and activities. The first methodology, counting tree rings, is a simple task, one even children can do accurately, so there’s little question about conclusions, as long as one knows the time a tree stopped growing because of a disease or a chainsaw. Anytime you encounter a felled tree, you can become an instant dendrochronologist—no advanced university degree required. But for trees whose death date is unknown, there’s another method dendrochronologists use for dating. Carbon-14 age-dating, or radiocarbon dating, is a bit more involved and is necessary in the absence of knowledge about the actual date of a tree’s natural or human felling. Wish we could apply the same analysis to feelings that we can apply to fellings?
 
Right now, you and living trees are incorporating two kinds of (isotopes of) carbon. Upon your death or the tree’s, the ratio between the two will change as carbon 14 decays to become nitrogen 14, in a process that changes half the carbon to nitrogen in that felled tree over 5,780 years. Because we know that rate of change, we can “radiocarbon” date the time of death. The coupled methods can take archaeologists back about 80,000 years, give or take a week. Through this method even seemingly insignificant tree stumps can tell an accurate tale of the past.
 
Your personal history is easier to know because there’s a paper or data trail that includes, for example, your birth certificate. Of course, if you were born deep in the Amazon rainforest, you might not have such a trail. And as you know, there are people around the world who have no precise date for their births and no precise calendars of their activities and growth. But if you are a member of an advanced, record-keeping society, you can look up just about every major social step in your life, and you might even be able to see a date on that picture of you sans clothing that your parents took because you were such a cute baby splashing in the tub.
 
The point is that you can date fairly accurately stages in your life because of objective documentation. Your “tree rings” and “carbon ratio” are exposed, and we don’t have to cut you in half or throw a piece of you into sophisticated analysis to know about stages and events. We just read the date on your high school diploma. Think of that. With the advent of such record keeping, we can lay out your life for anyone, current or future, to know. And even if you choose cremation as your final, though passive, behavior, someone in the Office of Records at your local courthouse will have access to that information, though your ashes might themselves have been spread by winds or water. Semi-permanence lies in all those records. You get to live on in accurate or, because of clerical errors, inaccurate data, even though you might be a minor character among the seven billion current members of the human family and a more minor character among the 100 billion humans that have preceded you over the course of the last 300,000 years or so.
 
Why “minor”? I certainly don’t want to minimize your worth, but only a very few humans get to the relative level of “semi-permanent immortality” of Ramses, Homer, Caesar, and those other people you studied in history class. In fact, we should all realize that if it were not for the efforts of some to preserve records of those historical characters, their lives would be as substantial as their scattered ashes. Since Herodotus and the like, we’ve been a history-minded people, and going back farther than Homer, we’ve had human idols whose stories we keep retelling. Maybe, though unlikely, a couple or three thousand years from now someone will read about Kim Kardashian or Kim Jong-un. But in reading about either Kim, that future reader will no doubt apply an attitude shaped by personal and cultural changes that are for us unpredictable possibilities.  
 
Since the time when we first became a history-minded people, we have also been a history-revising people. Past human lives are subject to current human ideas and feelings. We just don’t have the objective accuracy of radiocarbon dating or dendrochronology, especially when we try to retell accurately past behavior and events. Seems there’s always some new interpretation based on current intellectual and cultural trends. Intervening contexts make the original context of a life difficult to ascertain.
 
Unless we are locked into some loop of memory about our own lives, we, too, interpret our personal past on the basis of our personal present. Revising personal history is common because it allows us to write a narrative that fits current mores and metaphors and to satisfy our current desires. Yes, you have an objective record of major events, but in analyzing feeling and assessing detail, you apply today’s subjectivity and today’s standards.
 
That brings me to ask myself (as it should bring you to ask yourself), “What influences am I currently under that affect the way I now see my past?” Is my introspection as good a guide to my past as tree rings and radiocarbon dating are to a tree’s past? You might think the question is silly, but it involves that aspect of me which cannot be objectively recorded: Feelings.  
 
Changing feelings change how each of us views the past. We don’t have anything in our psyches that is a perfect analog of tree rings and carbon ratios. Once a tree ring forms, it remains a permanent record of the year of growth, indicating drought or abundant rain by its thickness. Unlike us, tree rings don’t undergo changes after their formation. We, in contrast, continuously alter our “tree rings” on the basis of new feelings and altered mores and standards.
 
That’s why introspection without the context of outside influences isn’t completely reliable. But there’s another problem with a “human dendrochronology.” We don’t always record the effects of our personal and cultural contexts. Take oaks, for example. Dendrochronologists know that oaks produce a ring every year. We’re more like alder and pine: Some years they don’t form rings; some years they form two rings. That’s us.
 
We know from personal experience and from those who study the human psyche that introspection has some value. It certainly can keep us from repeating mistakes, and it can reveal, if only partly, our motivations. But to be truly indicative of who we were, introspection has to include an assessment of who we are.    

Wisdom isn’t easy to come by. If it were, we would all be King Solomon. It isn’t; we aren’t.
 
Why should I bring this up? At a lunch, someone asked whether I would set free a murderer who had served 35 years of a life sentence for two deaths, but who had become during those decades a “different person,” a reformed person, even a remorseful person. I could ask you the same question. In fact, here it is: What, dear reader, would you in your wisdom do with someone who had changed in behavior and character but who still had to serve in prison whatever years he had left? Would you offer parole?
 
I suppose perspective tinges response. What would I think if I were someone who loved those who were murdered? My argument would probably be based on those deaths and my loss. The dead won’t return. Isn’t life in prison still life? The murderer continues to live. From the perspective of the “victim,” the punishment doesn’t really equal the crime.
 
Of course, there are those who are full of mercy and forgiveness, even though they might be victims. From such a perspective, the punishment might be an objective form of justice. Anything short of the death sentence would demonstrate mercy. The punishment doesn’t have to equal the crime because the death of one won’t equal the death of two. Death sentences still don’t return the dead victims to the realm of the living.
 
Then there’s the perspective of the courts; the “blind” justice system metes out what the law requires, though a judge can push the punishment to the allowable limits. The same justice system locks in an initial sentence that lacks a provision for parole. The justice system has its hands tied in the matter. The sentence once set, remains set and does so in the absence of any emotion.
 
What, however, if culture changes? And what happens when a culture moves from an absolute to a situational ethics, from, for example, an eighteenth-century Calvinist rigidity to a Hobbesian relativism? What if that which once seemed unforgiveable becomes slightly forgivable—especially when no one from the original victims’ families, neighbors, or otherwise personally concerned individual remains alive? Thirty-five years impose forgetfulness, if not of intellect at least of emotion, on everyone except survivors.
 
Hmmn. Thinking…
Sill thinking…
 
Are you weighing your Hobbesian and Calvinist tendencies to resolve your dilemma about releasing a reformed murderer who hasn’t served his complete sentence? If you were in seventeenth-century Edinburgh, Scotland, there would hardly be a question. Keep the guy in prison and tell him he’s lucky to be alive. If you were in eighteenth-century Scotland, well, there might be some doubt, especially if you were falling under the influences that led to literary Romanticism and humanism. Why Scotland?

​In How the Scots Invented the Modern World, Arthur Herman discusses how the natural philosophy of Samuel von Pufendorf influenced the thinking of Scotsman, clergyman, and author Francis Hutcheson. Not long after the Salem witch hunt, Hutcheson, having been influenced by Pufendorf’s thinking, argued against the persecution of witches, a process that also occurred in Great Britain—as it occurs in Sub-Saharan Africa today. Now, I’m not saying that our murderer is a witch, but rather that many people today might apply principles of natural philosophy that have streamed to us from Hobbes through Pufendorf through people like Hutcheson. Anyway, here’s how Herman explains the matter germane to our murderer:
 
     "Man in nature carries with him the spark of divine reason, Pufendorf argued, allowing him to grasp nature’s governing laws. This includes the moral laws. As human beings living in society, we have certain rights that we bring to the table with us from our natural state, such as the right to our own life and our property. But there are also certain obligations we have to observe. One of the most obvious of these is obeying the laws established through common consent. But the other is the moral law governing our private conduct toward others. Without a moral law, no community is possible."*
 
In his book against persecuting witches, Hutcheson makes an argument that we might extrapolate to today and interpret as a plea for mercy for our long-imprisoned murderer:
 
     "Virtuous persons, that judge of others by themselves, can never imagine, what Wicked Wretches, or Humoursome People, or those that are secretly encouraged or managed by others, will do."**
 
You’re thinking, “Yes, without my being directly involved in lives of the murder victims, I “feel mercy” these 35 years later for the imprisoned murderer. Who knows what motivated him at the time? Maybe it was a stupid gut reaction driven by some temporary physical or psychological influence. I can’t relive the tragedy. I really can’t ‘feel’ for the victims, but I can feel for the reformed murderer before me. If the murderer was in his twenties, he’s spent his adult life behind bars for an act that took, at best, less than a minute.”
 
But what about Pufendorf’s argument that society is held together by “laws established through common consent”? Aren’t jail terms legally defined? To answer your unspoken question: Yes, there are laws enacted without majority consent.***
 
At the time of the murders, laws governing the punishment and sentencing were in place for all of society. Regardless of the feelings associated with the crime, the common consent had been codified. So, if you “feel” the murderer has served enough time, do you also “feel” that the laws governing the murderer’s punishment were closer to the witchhunt mentality of the seventeenth century than to Hutcheson’s more psychological outlook in the eighteenth? If you’re for mercy, then you belong to the Hutcheson school of thought, and you believe there’s an innate goodness in humans worth salvaging. Reform. Release. Rejoin.
 
Both Hobbes and John Knox believed in an underlying depravity that had to be reined in, the former through the state and the later through religion. As Herman points out in his book, there’s an irony that both the relativist and the absolutist came to the same conclusion. Hutcheson believed that there was some middle position. That middle position has led us to our modern “psychologizing.” We believe we see the gray where Hobbes and Knox saw only the black or white. And, in that, we have come a long way from absolutism undisguised or absolutism disguised as relativism.
 
I still come back to that common consent, however. If we keep changing it—and we do that regularly—we end up with a dissolution of that which binds us. Now, maybe you prefer to have no societal binding—facing the reality that all such bindings are loose, at best. But in the short term, in the span of a generation or two, untied bindings make any justice system unjust.
 
As much as I “feel” for the murderer (I assume that only the most hardened among us would have no “feelings” for the incarcerated), I would keep him in jail, possibly with an ameliorating adjustment of his conditions within the prison system. Now, what do you think?  
 
 
 
*Herman, Arthur. New York, MJF Books, 2001, p. 72.
**Hutcheson, Francis. “A Dialogue betwixt a ClergyMan, a Scotch Advocate, and an English Jury-Man,” in An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft, etc. London, 1718, p. 7.
***Apparently, California’s “sanctuary state” law isn’t backed by the majority of Californians, and some state laws legalizing pot also lack majority support. But all laws are subject to re-examination and modification in democratic societies (an indication democracies don’t have an unshakeable John Knox Calvinist foundation). 

Huckleberry Finn: “I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary.”
 
Huck begins the narration of his story with an account of Tom Sawyer, noting that when Mark Twain told the story, “There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” Twain’s tale would have been more than a “stretch” since fiction, though based on some truths, isn’t by definition fact. But give any author of fiction some credit when he or she makes make-believe believable. Stretching the truth is a way of life for many, if not for all, of us, particularly since stretching the truth can be effective.
 
Not that we are intentional liars. But we use modifiers when we speak. Trying to capture reality for another never quite achieves perfect objectivity unless we rely on math; or, at least, that’s probably what most of us believe. We can trust those who support what they say with numbers, right? So, when someone like Morris Kline questions even that ostensible objectivity, we have to ask ourselves whether or not any truth embodies Truth.
 
In Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, Kline writes, “The current predicament of mathematics is that there is not one but many mathematics and that for numerous reasons each fails to satisfy the members of the opposing schools. It is now apparent that the concept of a universally accepted, infallible body of reasoning…is a grand illusion.” As many have noted, so Kline also notes Gödel’s attack on proof. Kline writes, “…even the axiomatic-deductive method so highly regarded in the past as the approach to exact knowledge was seen to be flawed.”* Axioms are underlying assumptions, the ground on which we build our edifices of knowledge and “truth.” Among modern axioms is one that says a mathematical model can convey reality truthfully.
 
Out of questions about truth a few paradoxes arise. “I always lie,” someone says. Is that a truth? “Achilles can never reach the finish line or catch a tortoise with a head start because to reach either, he must first cross half the distance between them, then half that distance, and then half that distance, and so on, ad infinitum.
 
Now you interject, “But these are just mind games. They have nothing to do with everyday reality and its expression. And they certainly don’t call into question the ultimate nature of truth or even the truths about our current reality.”
 
Maybe, but then maybe such paradoxes hint at an underlying problem about our conveying, if not our full understanding of, reality. So, Kline then addresses the “effectiveness of mathematics.” He suggests that “effectiveness can be used as the criterion of correctness.”** To adopt such as position is a form of utilitarianism. If something is useful, it’s effective; if effective, then useful. Yes, it’s a bit circular, but that circularity seems to be the way we approach conveying “our” individual realities or any group’s realities to others.
 
Parents often use the “what is effective” approach. Politicians and propagandists, also. And those under their influence have little to rely on for some ultimate, unshakeable, perfectly logical objectivity. That leaves us all with one principle that overrides exact truth: Trust.
 
When “scientists” tell us, for example, that the world is warming even though we might have experienced a particularly cold spell in a specific region, we have little to go on personally except trust. In our complex individual lives, we don’t have time to review all the data that the scientists fed into their computer models. That’s where we have to trust, but trusting is difficult, especially when every so often we find that some information has been corrupted either on purpose or through error, causing trust to crumble and uncertainty to increase.
 
You live in a very complex world, one far more complex than your ancestors' world because your relatively highly educated brain has dabbled in matters previously unknown, matters that continue to accrue from research of all kinds. Almost daily, you receive reports on environmental, psychological, and biological research. That’s a lot to handle even though you are exceptionally bright. At some point you have to trust and hope the person conveying information is like Aunt Polly, the widow, and Mary. You want to know that people don’t “stretch” the truth.
 
Thus, when someone like Nils-Axel Mörner, a sea level expert who once served as chairman of the International Commission on Sea Level Change questions the dire predictions about sea level change, should we trust what he says? Should we trust the “scientists” sponsored by the United Nations? Why the fuss? Well, as you probably know, the International Panel on Climate Change has models--mathematical models—that predict a 17-inch rise in sea level in a relatively short time, that is, within this century. Dr. Mörner, however, hasn’t relied on models like the IPCC, but rather on worldwide in situ measurements—35 years of measurements.
 
For example, Mörner and colleagues visited the Maldives six times to measure sea level, finding that no sea level change had occurred over a fifty-year period. When he wanted to show an educational film to the inhabitants to explain why they didn’t have to worry about inundation, the government officials refused to let him show the film. Mörner also discovered that the IPCC’s mathematically predicted annual worldwide 2.3 mm sea level rise was unprovable and unsupported by its own satellite-based sensors. However, the Commission used a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong Harbor they extrapolated to a worldwide reading because, as the IPCC scientists said, they “needed to show a trend.”***
 
Holy Poseidon! What are we to believe? Whom are we to trust? Are we simply the recipients of effective communication?
 
Truth. Trust. Effectiveness. Correctness. Where are Aunt Polly, the widow, and Mary when you need them?
 
 
 
 
*Kline, Morris. New York, Fall River Press, 1980., pp. 4,5.
**p. 6.
***Booker, Christopher. Rise of sea levels is ‘the greatest lie ever told.’ The Telegraph, 28 Mar 2009, online at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html   

Evolution. Makes you think “progress,” doesn’t it. There’s that famous drawing of silhouettes that show “progressive” stages of human development: From a hunched over knuckle-walker through Neanderthal, to Cro-Magnon and modern human. Maybe that last silhouette should have a turned head, one looking back on those “more primitive” forms. As you know, there is a DNA connection between earlier and later primates, just as there are connections among modern primates, from Howler monkeys to chimpanzees to you.
 
Howler monkeys dwell in the rainforest trees high above the dark ground below. The forest canopy keeps the forest floor shady, preventing light from reaching the ground except in spotty locations. Darkness prevents lush growth below the treetops. Near streams and on hillsides oriented toward the sun, however, more light penetrates and plants become a tangle. Bathed in a little more sunlight, coppices and jungles grow to masses of leaves, stems, and woody stalks impenetrable without a machete. Great apes seem to prefer this lush environment.  
 
Without the tree cover, by contrast, the glade is a bright place of grasses and flowers. Stand up. It’s your bipedal inheritance to look over the low vegetation to check that the environment is safe from creeping predators. You’ve emerged from the forest and coppice. Or have you?
 
Do you picture yourself as the Glade Runner? That bipedal sophisticated right-side-of-the-silhouette-drawing at the “final” stage of primate evolution, the one that came out of the trees and jungle to emerge into a sunlit life? Life in the glade?
 
Where are you? In the darkness of the forest floor? The tangled jungle of the coppice? The sunny glade of grasses and flowers? “Depends,” you say.
 
Yes, “it” does depend on what aspect and phase of life dominates your existence at the moment; you know that at any one time, you can simultaneously experience all three environments mentally and emotionally. You think, “Long ago my ancestors left the forest and coppice to roam the glade. Yet, they really never quite left them, did they? In some way, they carried both environments with them during the so-called progress of evolution.”
 
Walking through shadows cast on sidewalks by skyscrapers or dwelling and working in the canopy of towering buildings, our species finds itself in a new kind of forest, with dangers lurking in the darkness below. If we emerge to head toward the glade, we pass through the thicket of highways, strip malls, and seemingly endless suburbs, the coppices of the modern world. In farmlands, where we have denuded the landscape, we find the anthropogenic glades. But regardless of the environment in which we find ourselves, we all carry the potential for emotional forests, coppices, and glades.
 
Remember that old biological principle that befuddled you when you first heard it? The one that goes “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? Does it not as an analogy capture our relationship with those stages of evolution from forest-dweller to glade runner? But, as all analogies fail, so, too, does this one. Yes, we are glade runners, but we often choose to dwell in dark emotional forests as frightened tree-dwellers or as coppice-dwellers hacking our way through one human problem after another, our emotional machetes becoming dull as we work our way toward the bright sunshine of the glade.
 
Look at any person’s life to see that recapitulation of the struggle to stay in the glade, where running free from darkness and obstruction makes us glad that regardless of our seeming penchant to return to the dark forest we can, at times, step or even run into the light. 

“Separate from that which stirs the inner brain to frenzy, but join that which stirs the outer brain to reason.”
 
“Easy to say, hard to do. And maybe some frenzy is good,” you say. “Look, there are causes worth defending, worth getting worked up about. There are offenses that can’t be ignored. There are people who just don’t respect other people. We just can’t say, ‘I just want to say—you know—can we all get along? Can we, can we get along?...We just gotta, we gotta. I mean we’re all stuck here for a while let’s, you know, let’s try to work it out….’”
 
“I get it. You’re repeating the words of Rodney King, the taxicab driver who was assaulted by the LA police in 1962 in an incident that kicked off six days of frenzied killing and mayhem, leaving 63 dead, 2,393 injured, 3,100 business damaged, and about a billion dollars in financial loss. Yes, Rodney asked a reasonable question in his personal attempt to stop the rioting. Why, just why can’t we all get along? Why do we turn to frenzy when we have the ability to reason?
 
“Maybe my request to separate from that which stirs the inner brain is one of those idealistic propositions. Maybe it’s just an empty, though nice, thought, something like a birthday party balloon that makes airiness seem at least temporarily possible, even though all the party-goers know that the balloon, if not refilled with helium, will eventually succumb to gravity.”
 
“Yes, and that’s why I say turning to the cerebral is not always easy,” you reiterate. “Even I get flustered. Even I get caught up in public frenzy—not that I would participate in a riot.” You continue, “No, I would never have joined in any of those historical riots just as I don’t join in any current riots or frenzied public displays. But, look, I’m just trying to say that it’s almost impossible to avoid at the very least the ‘feeling’ of frenzy. I can get away for a little while, read a book, sit in meditation, take a yoga class, get a massage, float on a raft, but I always have to return to the daily world and exposure to everyone else’s frenzy. Frenzy has a gravity of its own. Every time I get away, I return, as some might say, by hitting the ground running. I can float for a short time, but I weigh too much for any balloon of reason to keep me suspended—even if I ride in a blimp, I’ll need to return sometime. The destiny of every floating balloon or parachute is a collision with a spinning planet. And way up in ethereal outer space, without intervention by the continued expense of energy, even satellites fall. Floating in air or in space is a nice image, but our emotional world has a gravity that is unavoidable ultimately. The inner brain is the center of that gravity. The outer brain does what it can to stay in the air, but there’s an inevitability to the pull from the interior.”
 
“Okay, you win. I see that my initial statement is mostly wishful thinking. But like so many before me, I have an outer brain that tells me to resist that gravity of the inner brain—for my own and for others’ good. I understand your point, however. Staying afloat in cerebral bliss, in airy debate sans emotions, requires the expenditure of rational resistance. Just as gravity is a universal force, an enveloping ‘field,’ so the inner brain exerts a field, a field of frenzy. And just as standing on Earth is easier than getting above it, so frenzy is easy.
 
“In a way, humans have long tried to defy the gravity of the inner brain. I'll draw from something someone famous once said. Think of President Kennedy’s call to reach the moon in 1962: ‘We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win….’”
 
You respond, “Noble, but still a bit too idealistic to apply here. Let me see whether or not I understand you. So, are you comparing the escape from the inner brain to Kennedy’s call for an escape from Earth?”
 
“Hey, why not? Think about the key word in his speech at Rice University: ‘choose.’ All of us use the outer brain to make mostly conscious choices, that is, choices governed by reasoning. Yes, before you tell me, I do know that all the parts of the brain work somehow in conjunction and that not only does emotion tinge reasoning, but it also serves as the underlying ground upon which all reason rests, since, as Gödell basically let us know, no system, mathematical or otherwise, can ultimately prove itself. Nevertheless, in many daily matters, we can choose rather rationally to defy the force of frenzy. My recommendation? When upon reading or hearing a call to frenzy you ‘feel’ yourself becoming a bit frenzied, think of powering that satellite to stay up in space or refilling that balloon of reason to keep it afloat in defiance of the inner brain’s incessant pull. You’ll choose reason, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Making that choice is what separates you from the field of frenzy in which you live. The effort will, to use Kennedy's words, 'serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.'”
 
 
 

Because evil’s easy, good’s a struggle. 

You’ve heard the expression “We don’t know what we don’t know.” It makes sense. Here’s another: “We don’t know how to know what we don’t know.” Or, to modify it, “Whatever we learned, we learned on the basis of a way of learning we accepted as valid.” Of course, what we seem to learn every so often is that the way we learned what we know can be invalidated when we stumble on a new way of learning. Say, what?
 
Mollusks. Fast Radio Bursts. Nerves. Now there’s an interesting combination. Here’s another: Conchologists, radio astronomers, neuroscientists, and YOU. Yes, there’s a common thread, and I, like you, am also tied to it.
 
Mollusks, or more specifically, the cephalopod called the chambered nautilus. You’ve seen them whole and in sections, the shells carefully cut to reveal the chambers that conform, supposedly, to the golden ratio of 1.618.* But just as you differ from other humans, chambered nautiluses also differ as individuals, some a little closer to the golden ratio, some a bit farther from it, mathematically speaking. Still and generally, the nautilid (nautiloid) shells exhibit a very similar spiraling that doesn’t seem to have changed much since nautilids first roamed the seas hundreds of millions of years ago. That seeming lack of evolutionary change is what brings me to mention the smooth spiraling shell of the chambered nautilus here.
 
When paleontologists and conchologists identify stages of mollusk evolution, they do so on the basis of shell shapes. The spiraling smooth-shelled nautilids seem to have undergone zero evolution for 200 million years. But is that really the case? Remember that I started this out by saying how we know something might change, and with that change can come a change in knowledge and understanding. According to Derek E. Moulton, Alain Groiely, and Regis Chirat, the “smoothness of nautilid shells is merely a mechanical consequence of rapid aperture expansion. The nautilids’ lineage may have evolved more than their shell morphology suggests….”** Hundreds of years of examining shells have imprinted a single way of looking at the evolution of nautilids. We look at the shell, and that tells us that evolutionary change in these organisms is small at best. But what if we could see a new way of seeing? What if we were to look at nautilids from a perspective that ignores the shell? The “how” of knowing about nautilid evolution hasn’t, itself, evolved!
 
Fast radio bursts are somewhat mysterious emissions of radio light from the distant universe. One of these bursts was detected by undergraduate David Narkevic in 2007, and, upon further analysis, the burst seemed to originate from an object only 3,000 km in diameter; yet, it gave off in an instant the amount of energy our sun releases over a month.*** That’s a bunch of energy. In fact, the energy of the burst led astronomers to doubt it was a real burst, noting that it could have been an artifact of Earth’s noisy inhabitants fond of gizmos like microwaves and smart phones. Duncan Lorimer and Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University further researched the burst, now dubbed the Lorimer burst, and they have demonstrated that the burst was real. What they have not demonstrated beyond question is the cause of such bursts. There are hypotheses, of course. But why is this a big deal in the world of astronomers?

The bursts of radio waves don’t travel through a complete vacuum. There are electrons out there, electrons that get in the way of the radio light. As the energy from the burst bursts through these electrons the longer and shorter frequencies separate, arriving at Earth’s radio telescopes at different times. That’s the way we detect them. There’s matter between the source and the receiver, and if we can identify the sources of the fast radio bursts, we will have a better knowledge of the distribution of matter in the universe. We’ll know more than we currently know. Fast radio bursts provide us with a new way of knowing, a way of knowing what we don’t know. Thanks, David. And Duncan and Maura.
 
One doesn’t have to be neuroscientist to know that we’re electrical. We’ve all seen the videos of people being tasered. They lose control when the electric shock runs through them. They fall. They convulse. Who wants to sit in the electric chair that the justice system used to kill killers? Scary thought. Like thinking what would happen if lightning struck you on the top of the head. The National Weather Service says an average of 47 people die from lightning strikes annually, and that’s just in the USA. Definitely, we’re electrical, and electrical systems can shut down with an overload.
 
So, apparently, our nervous system works by electrical impulses. But, again, the way we know what we know might keep us from knowing what we don’t know. What if, just what if, your nerves work not only by electrical impulses, but also by compression waves? That would make you a mechanical being. Douglas Fox reports an experiment by Thomas Heimburg that suggests our nerves fire mechanically.**** As Heimburg says, “The things that are written in books, they are in contradiction to this [his experiment].”
 
Whoa! The things that are written in books are in contradiction to his experimental results. Maybe. Maybe not. But here’s the significance. If Heimburg is concluding correctly, we have to rethink what we know about neurons, nerves, and what we are physically. We might argue that his finding is debatable, but until someone can disprove his mechanical hypothesis, we have to doubt our understanding of how our nerves work.
 
Now, YOU—and me. We are confident of what we know because we are confident about how we know. Change the how, however, and you change the what, the what of shelled animals, the what of the distribution of matter in the universe and the cause of fast radio bursts, and the what of neuroscience. Think carefully now. How many “hows” do you rely on? How many “hows” have you even attempted to question? What you don’t know depends on how you know what you know.
 
Recall what Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his poem “The Chambered Nautilus”:
 
            Still, as the spiral grew
            He left the past year’s dwelling for the new.
 
As the nautilus leaves a smaller chamber for a larger one, so you and I might think to leave a smaller compartment of knowledge for a larger one. Holmes continues:
            Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:--
 
            Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
            As the swift seasons roll!
            Leave thy low-vaulted past!
            Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
            Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
            Till thou at length art free,
            Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
  
 
*https://www.goldennumber.net/nautilus-spiral-golden-ratio/
** Moulton, Derek E., et al., How seashells take shape. Scientific American, v. 318, no. 4, April, 2018, pp. 69-75.
***Lorimer, Duncan and Maura McLaughlin. Flashes in the night. Scientific American, v. 318, no. 4, April, 2018, pp 43-47.
****Fox, Douglas. The brain, reimagined. Scientific American, v. 318, no. 4, April, 2018, pp. 61-67.

For cyclists to technicians to gamers, augmented reality glasses promise enhanced performance, guidance during tasks, and holographic thrills. Don’t have a pair? Not to worry. Your perception of reality is okay—in a human way.
 
Augmented reality glasses are the physical version of some mind-opening drug. They can superpose an image on the environment, allowing the wearer, for example, to see a blueprint of a machine that needs some fixing. “Oh! I see what I need to do. This is the part in need of repair.”  In video games they can also superpose a false reality on the environment. “He’s crouching behind the couch. Shoot before he does.” But note, augmented reality occurs in present reality.
 
You really want to augment reality, make a pair of glasses that shows all the consequences of present actions. See the future. Augment the present with the future.
 
Making a pair of glasses that reveals the future is beyond our capability. Even if we could get a pair to show some consequences, we can’t show the infinite variations of consequence. That’s our human problem. We can account for the obvious; the more insightful among us can account for more than obvious ramifications. No one, however, can definitively account for the reality of future reality.
 
“What you anticipate is rarely a problem,” I usually say. But note my use of rarely. Yes, you’re better off anticipating than not anticipating. Robert Burns phrased the problem of unknown consequences when he wrote in 1785 his famous poem “To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With a Plough”:
 
            But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
            In proving foresight may be vain;
            The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men
            Gang aft agley,
            An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
            For promis’d joy!
 
We all learn that our best laid plans often go astray. Oh! For a pair of augmented glasses, what wouldn’t many of us give? But then, if we saw the future, not all possible futures, but the defined future, the future as it turns into past, then we would probably ask, “What’s the point?”
 
So, if some company invents augmented reality glasses that can show me my future as it inevitably must be, I’ll probably use my money on something else, maybe something frivolous, something that throws my future into some doubt. I’ll try my human anticipation, flawed as it is. Having no guarantee is a gamble, of course, but it’s also a bit exciting, maybe more exciting than any virtual reality game can ever be. Anticipate, but don’t be surprised like the mouse in the poem; expect, as the saying goes, the unexpected. 

Looking around, you might conclude that you live in an Age of Exacerbation. Certainly, you can see evidence in social and main-stream media that numerous people add fuel and air when social fires start to smolder. Over the TV and radio airwaves we also hear sounds that stir fury.
 
Your peace is under constant attack even when you ignore the media’s soundbites. Unless you live in a vacuum, you encounter tension that others impose upon their surroundings because, unlike you, they succumb to the media-driven exacerbation. Lots, as we might say, of negative energy in the air and on the airwaves: Fires of distress and fury are fanned over airwaves.   
 
Even those who would ride a “peace train” can exacerbate. Take Yusuf Islam, aka Steven Demetre Georgioiu aka Cat Stevens, the British singer-songwriter of 1960s and 1970s fame, a man who voiced some antiwar feelings in one very popular song. Recipient of peace awards and singer of the popular “Peace Train,” Yusuf apparently then supported the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against author Salman Rushdie. At Kingston University, the singer said “He must be killed” though he later said his statement was based on a dictum of his religion and was not a personal call for Rushdie’s murder. The problem is, as you know, once “it’s out there,” it’s out there wafting about until it blows into the “wrong ear.” World peace, the universal goal of the stereotypical beauty queen contestant, just ain’t gonna happen if the one who sang “Peace Train” at a Nobel Peace Prize ceremony supports a killing.
 
Protecting yourself from exacerbation is, sorry to say, a full-time job nowadays. You need to work at finding peace. You need to ask yourself what you really deem to be bothersome and what you really deem to be someone else’s concerns. There’s some justification for individual isolationism with regard to hysteria, mob action, and controversies that don’t directly affect you.   
 
Unfortunately, all of us get drawn in at times. There’s a powerful gravity in making everything grave. And widespread media, echoing and amplifying, can exacerbate the slightest offense, making it a noisy earworm that disturbs peace.
 
Repeatedly, the wise have told us that at times we need to step away from the fray, to withdraw for a bit. And the reason for isolating ourselves every so often? To paraphrase Macbeth: Many in the media tell a tale of sound and fury that upon deep reflection really doesn’t signify anything. Windstorms over airwaves come and go just as tornadoes do their brief destruction in the affront of a front, sounding as they approach like a train.
 
But not all exacerbations are quiet breezes. Some are insidious, daily enveloping us in restlessness and anxiety. As past exacerbations crept toward meaninglessness, so today’s exacerbations “creep in their petty pace from day to day,” again to quote Macbeth. “To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,” to borrow from Shakespeare, will see continued exacerbation. That’s a given. Maybe Cat—sorry, Yusuf—should reword his famous song’s title as “Exacerbation Train.” It seems to be the one that many people currently ride.

Almost everything we do is in some way incondite, but every once in a long while, we do something, and then turn around, look at what we’ve done, and say, “Hey, ‘that’ wasn’t so bad. In fact, I might deserve a pat on the back. The more I think about it, I think ‘that’ might have been nearly perfect.”
 
In fact, you do have many successes and many accomplishments that are nearly perfect. You just have a tendency to say, “Ah! I could have done this or that better.”

​So what? Overall, you did something well. Perfection is more of a goal than an achievement for members of our species. As long as one strives for the goal, one can look back to say, “Okay, I know I’m not perfect. I know I could have done some things differently, but, hey, I truly did what I thought was correct, and I truly applied my energy. Maybe I missed perfection, but only the most critical out there will both note and comment on my imperfection. Why do I need to dwell on what is minor when I accomplished what is major?”
 
This is not, however, a justification of failure. Nor is it a justification of merely trying. I don’t want to sound like Yoda, but the screenwriter had a good point in writing the oft-repeated line from Star Wars (“Do or do not; there is no try). We can’t equate trying with doing. We do measure ourselves by our accomplishments. We just need to know that sometimes, no matter how much or how well we do, we will find in critical retrospect our work to be incondite.
 
Critical retrospect is the way of the world because we can’t be aware of all perspectives when we are in the midst of doing. Every future manifests perspectives not available in the present. So, few human accomplishments stand the test of hypercritical hindsight. Note, however, that very few hyper-critics apply their standards to their own history.
 
There will always be someone out there to criticize our work, and maybe some of that criticism is deserved. But every once in a long while, regardless of failures and outside criticism, we can look back on what we did and say, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was pretty good.”