It’s 16,000 years ago. You just crossed the little stream that runs beneath the rock shelter in what will later become western Pennsylvania. Your clan is the first to inhabit the shelter other than animals that roamed the area long before the great ice sheets covered the land just a few days’ walk to the north. There is no door. It’s not a cave. It’s an overhang of rock that intercepts the snow that often falls. It’s a place of relative safety, but there are dangerous carnivores about. Your people keep a fire going to ward off the beasts; it’s tedious, but necessary work. Dying embers do not a good firewall make. In the absence of fire beasts approach to threaten the individuals in the shelter.
 
It’s today. Can you explain to one of those rock shelter dwellers what it means to forget a password? Say you live in Avella, Pennsylvania, the site of that ancient and long inhabited rock shelter. Even though it is a rural community, Avella is fully steeped in modernity. You have access to everything civilization offers: Food from distant lands, electric and mechanical power, superfluous duplicates of various clothing items, transportation on paved roads, land lines and cell towers, radio and television, nearby airports and universities, and medical care. Of course, you also have passwords for home security systems, financial accounts, computers, tablets, and smart phones. Oh! The passwords. Today there are layers of protection for devices undreamt of in the rock shelter 16,000 years ago.
 
Most of the wild animals are in zoos or reserves, but, depending on location around the planet, a few remain to threaten: An alligator here, a spider there, sharks in the water, snakes in the rocks. Most Northern Hemisphere residents aren’t too concerned about those ancient threats though injury and death by beasts are both possible. No, probably more are concerned with firewalls and passwords. Why? Unlike our ancient ancestors, we now have extensions of ourselves in devices. Our identities are diffuse. We don’t have cloned people yet, but we do have cloned identities that we now have to safeguard. In a sense, we have achieved being in more than one place at a time, not just bilocation, but multilocation, and we have to protect all those locations where our multiple “selves” live.
 
Ah! Civilization. Ah! Modernity. Ah! Technology. Those poor ancient ancestors! They had to maintain a single fire at the entrance to the shelter. We, on the other hand…Sorry, gotta go. I think one of my fires is going out.

Figaro introduces himself in the Barber of Seville as the city’s factotum. He calls himself fortunate, and he declares, “Bravo, bravissimo! Ah, Te Fortuna non mancherá.” Fortune isn’t going to leave him. Shouldn’t he feel that way? He’s a factotum, the guy to go to because he can do everything from cutting hair to curing people with leaches.  
 
You know that the more you can do the better your chance of having Fortuna by your side. You also know that the more you can do the better your chance of having Fortuna fail you. Well, come to think about it, I guess Fortuna can either stay or go, and we have no complete control, regardless of what we are or do in any single venture.
 
However, I recommend your being a factotum. Keep Fortuna busy. Maybe she leaves here, but not there. Maybe she fails in one segment of your life, but she doesn’t in another. You might have a failure here or there, but given that you are a factotum, you have plenty of chances for ups even in the presence of downs. As I have said elsewhere, your successes outnumber your failures. The problem with most pessimists is that they focus on that one failure in the midst of successes.
 
Do more, fail more. But do more, succeed more. In the midst of failure, do more. You can sing with Figaro, “Bravo ____________________ (your name here)! Bravo bravissimo! Ah, Te Fortuna non mancherá.”*
 
*In case you feel like singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bQ3rhottqI
In case you need a translation: http://lyricstranslate.com/en/largo-al-factotum-make-way-handyman.html
Or: http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/classicalmusictips/qt/Largo-Al-Factotum-Lyrics-And-Text-Translation.htm

As we all know, perceptions are, important to us. Perceptions, as we also all know, are often faulty. How ironic!
 
The English word perception derives from the Latin capere, “to grasp” or “seize.” It’s the same root word from which we get capture, entering the language through an intermediate word, percipere, “to seize entirely” or “to take possession of” and Anglo-French derivatives. The per, for “thoroughly,” adds the sense of completeness that perceptions rarely have.
 
Our indefinite access to daily happenings through computers, radios, and TVs exposes us to more information than we have time to—or desire to—fully process. In defense against an overwhelming attack by information, we rely on perceptions as guards protecting the brain’s fortress of calm.
 
Here’s the hypothesis. Perceptions were obviously important to survival, but the dimensions of modern life have changed their effect. They have always acted as early warning systems in the presence of threatening organisms or circumstances whether real or unreal. So, perceptions became part of a survival mechanism and served for most of human history as a safety function. Humans didn’t wait around to get confirmation of danger when hearing a distant pack of wolves in the woods. The perception that the pack poses an actual threat was a sufficient reason to act.
 
Then Gutenberg, Marconi, and Babbage entered their rudimentary inventions to human daily life. With increased access to information and information processors, people entered a new world. Perceptions were no longer just about local phenomena, such as interpersonal relationships and potential local wolf attacks. Perceptions became the new knowledge in the face of overwhelming information. Ironically, that meant substituting partial for full comprehension.
 
What do I mean? Perceived threats from HIV, Ebola, Zika, terror attacks on airplanes, and superbugs suddenly show up to become the new wolves in the woods of information. Perceptions that can serve as protectors suddenly become the source of attack, allowing incomplete information to enter the innermost brain, causing anxiety. “I hear a distant wolf pack. They are coming for me. Run!” We’re looking at an analog to an autoimmune disease, one that attacks mind, attacks comprehension.
 
You might not like the hypothesis that perception has become as much a disadvantage as it was once an advantage. But as you walk through the woods of story after story on the Internet, in the papers, or on broadcast news, ask yourself how much of what you receive you receive thoroughly and how much time you take to comprehend, to seize, fully. How much of what you daily receive is a distant howling that poses no real threat yet causes you anxiety because of perception?
 
Are there real wolves in the woods? Sure, they are there. Do you perceive as immediate the threats that are distant wolves whose wanderings through the forest will probably not take them across your path? Probably. You won’t stop checking the news, however. You are most likely addicted to all that information that leaves you with perceptions but without complete comprehension.
 
Insofar as perceptions serve that ancient purpose, they help us survive in the face of actual threats; insofar as they give us incomplete comprehension, they simply cause anxiety.

​“I’m sorry,” the stock boy said, “we’re out of strawberries.”
 
Really, he seemed to feel “sorry.” What did the stock boy have to do with the absence of strawberries on a cold November day in the American Northeast? The answer, of course, is nothing. Stock boys don’t generally do the ordering for the store, don’t put strawberries on trucks at packinghouses, and don’t grow or pick the strawberries. In addition, they don’t control the environment on the strawberry farms, where growth is dependent on the influx of water, the fertility of the soil, and a temperature conducive to strawberry farming.
 
There seems to be an abundance of unnecessary guilt in industrialized countries. Those with much (material wealth) feel guilty that they’ve been fortunate (or blessed). Reminds me of a story: When I was a child my mother told me to clean my dinner plate because there were children starving in China. Okay. I ate the food, but I could not understand how my actions were helping the starving children of a faraway land. The reality is that there is much that we cannot do to alleviate the sufferings of others, like providing them with strawberries out of season. When actions are out of our control, there is no actual guilt, no reason to feel sorry, no reason to be negative.
 
We also cannot make amends to the people who suffered in previous generations. They’re gone. Although there’s nothing wrong about feeling sad for the conditions of their lives, no one can change the irreversible past. No one can go back, say, to antebellum America or ancient Rome and free a slave. No one in the present generation lived in colonial or antebellum America. Better to focus on those who are slaves today. Better to focus on those who are abused today. Better to focus on those who are starving today in some place where you can actually help.
 
Even when strawberries are in season, they aren’t universally distributed. Some places are not connected by efficient transportation systems capable of delivering the fruit while it’s fresh. Some people are not economically interested in distributing perishable fruit, and others are not interested in buying something with a short shelf life. Each geographic and social circumstance is different in some way. Also,  there are some people who just don’t like strawberries.
 
If you think you owe someone an apology for not stocking the shelf with strawberries out of season, you are not facing the realities of your own limit of responsibility and your own ability to change the world. Of course, there will be others constantly pressuring you to feel guilty about those empty strawberry shelves. You don’t need to listen, and you don’t need to apologize.

Ph.D.s, AI, and cephalopods are proliferating. More than 50,000 doctoral candidates recently finished their degrees and entered the workforce. The number of octopuses, according to marine biologists, has also increased. Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory scientists recently tested a 3.2-gram robot moth. According to a computer scientist in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, A.I. is a long way from human-like flexibility and learning. In Bruniquel Cave in France, archaeologists found a low stone ring, a kind of little underground Stonehenge, that Neandert(h)als built 175,000 years ago. Is there a connection? Let me think.
 
Let’s take cephalopods first. They can adapt, solve problems, and learn. They can even move stones to build a wall at the entrance to their hideouts. They can do this with a mental and physical flexibility that derives from not only a central knot of neurons, but also from neurons throughout their tentacles. They can even control their individual pincers, doing with them what humans do with an opposable thumb.
 
Second, our ancient relatives from the Neander Valley just west of Düsseldorf: More than 350 yards from the entrance to the cave in south France, Neandertals—let’s finally get rid of that “h”—used stalagmites they felled to make a low circle. There they were, living and building a structure in a naturally dark environment to which they had to have taken fire. So much for the old “dumb-as-a-Neandertal” theory. They had some smarts, at least as much as an octopus. They could arrange stones for a purpose. Well, maybe a bit smarter. By using fire to light a cave and by felling stalagmites to build not a nest-like structure that a solitary octopus can build from readily available materials, but rather a ring for some likely social purpose, they showed a high level of cooperative activity dependent upon flexible intelligence and physical dexterity.
 
Third robots: I love Gort. Remember the giant robot from the original The Day the Earth Stood Still? Not as chatty as C3PO, but definitely an imposing robot that was capable of restoring life to Michael Rennie’s Klaatu and, in the words of Klaatu, capable of destroying our planet, Gort foreshadowed the A.I. and physical power we seem to think robots will someday possess and that is partially achieved in military drones and self-driving cars. Because flying with flapping wings is difficult, Harvard’s flying robot moth is an important step toward inventing Gort and possibly a step toward duplicating the abilities of Neandertals and octopuses.
 
Fourth Ph.D.s: Like octopuses and Neandertals, doctoral students have the ability to adapt, plan, and construct. And one of the things they can construct is a robot moth with a wee bit of human-like, octopus-like, and Neandertal-like flexibility.
 
Cephalopods are “head-foot,” so described because their tentacles attach at their heads. Ph.D.s are usually above average in intelligence, but they sometimes put their foot in their head/mouth by pursuing and stating the obvious. Thus, we have an archaeologist at an American university quoted in an online article about cavehenge that it “provides strong evidence of the great antiquity of those elaborate structures and is an important contribution to a new understanding of the greater level of social complexities of Neanderthal—that “h” again—societies” and that “A plausible explanation is that this was a common meeting place for some type of ritual social behavior.” No. Really?
 
You’re not an archaeologist with a doctorate, are you? I don’t want to offend the species. But given that a ten-year-old could walk a football field into a cave with a flashlight, see stalagmites lying in piles to make a low ring, wouldn’t the child think that someone arranged them thus, maybe something like stumps and benches for a boy scout campfire meeting? It’s the argument from design, and it’s one that we use everyday to discern levels of intelligence (Why else do we include pattern recognition and imitation in I.Q. tests?).
 
We are a long way off from A.I. as flexible as human intelligence, according to those in the know. Yet, one has to ask, are the so-designated “brightest of us,” really beyond mimicking by some future Gort or chatty C3PO when there is only a “conjecture” that Neandertals were capable of the obvious? How many of the 50,000 new Ph.D.s will devote their intelligence to proving the obvious or studying what will give us a few facts but little wisdom?
 
In English Social History (1942) George Macaulay Trevelyan wrote, “Education…has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.” I know what you are thinking: “Why am I bothering with what I am now reading?” Let me come to the point: We have obviously come a long way from just arranging stones in a circle since we can now make an artificial flying moth, but none of our advances in “intelligence and learning” seem to assure us of becoming wise. Thus, as reported in various watchdog reports, we devote our brains to discovering either the obvious or the useless. The online Daily Signal reports that the NIH Center for Alternative Medicine spent $387,000 to study the effects of Swedish massages on rabbits, and it also funded a study to see if mothers love dogs as much as they love kids (another $371,026). Not done yet; hang on. The NSF spent $331,000 to give “hangry” (hunger+ anger) couples a chance to stick up to 51 pins into dolls, demonstrating that a spouse “with low blood sugar was an angrier one,” sticking more pins into the dolls.
 
So, 175,000 years after Neandertals had learned to light a cave and millions of years after octopuses learned how to build a little wall in front of a shelter, we’ve arrived at a point of purposeful education that produces people who dream of intelligent robots superior to humans while stating the obvious and studying the useless. We might know how to study and how to construct, but we seem to be a long way from knowing what to study and what to construct.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

As the story goes, there was a nineteenth-century English headmaster named Dr. Parr who insulted some visiting Americans who, with Parr, were dinner guests. The host of the dinner was angry that Dr. Parr had offended the Americans and rebuked him for his remarks. Parr left the room in ill humor and retired to his bedroom. The other guests walked outside with the Americans to ease tension by describing Parr’s blunt temperament and personality. Parr taught private students as though he were a Zeus with little patience.
 
As the group talked outside, a very dark cloud passed over them. Suddenly, Parr’s voice seemed to come from the cloud. Again they heard Parr’s voice emanating from the dark cloud. Bewildered, they asked where Parr was. They rushed back into the house to locate him and entered his bedroom. Seems that Parr, still in a huff for being ostracized by the group, sat on a fireplace grate in the room to smoke his pipe. The grate collapsed beneath him, and he had tumbled backwards, getting himself stuck in the process. His cry for help had gone up the chimney and then descended upon the group outside, his voice seemingly coming from the dark cloud.
 
Those who would be Zeus are usually those whose voices only appear to emanate from the heavens. Many are really just people stuck behind a grate.

The umpires in baseball keep, at least in theory, the game honest. Behind the catcher the home plate ump calls balls and strikes as he judges pitches relative to a strike zone that changes with the size of a player. Again, theoretically, an umpire does so honestly and accurately. Of course, the vantage from over either the left or right shoulder of the catcher is not quite in alignment with the pitch, the plate, and the catcher’s glove. So, the ump might call an outside pitch a strike or a corner pitch a ball. No one can effectively argue the matter. The ump’s on-the-spot judgment is as final as the Day of Reckoning.
 
In pick-up games, there’s no ump, so the players rely on the judgment and honesty of the catcher. Because the catcher is an opponent of the batter, the call sometimes draws criticism: “You’re just trying to help your own team. That was a ball.” Again, there’s no real recourse; a call is like stellar light. Once it leaves the star it travels through an indefinite, and possibly infinite, universe: Calls are irrevocable.
 
Trusting the catcher to make the calls requires faith, faith in the spirit of the game and faith in the integrity of the catcher. Do some pick-up game catchers cheat? We can make a guess: Yes, of course they do. Do all pick-up game catchers cheat? No, of course not.
 
Daily relationships are very much like a pick-up game of baseball. All the players on the field are aware of certain principles, the game’s decorum; all are aware of what constitutes honesty. And all catchers who are also umpires can be tempted to call strikes when they see close outside pitches that fly inside or outside or above or below the strike zone. There’s rarely a trustworthy neutral umpire to call the pitches in daily life since virtually all pitches are part of an on-the-spot pick-up game.
 
Assuming the integrity an official umpire, batters still have to deal with vantage point: Umpires have a skewed perspective by position. Umping is prone to mistaking balls for strikes and vice versa. So batters have to protect the plate. If a pitch is close, they should assume strike.
 
And that’s what people need to do in relationships: Assume that even an honest umpire might make a mistake because of vantage point. The error isn’t necessarily an intentional one. So, every catcher/umpire in the pick-up game of life, even in friendly opposition, has a difficult task in playing competitor and neutral judge.
 

You could wear some sort of collar or swallow some pill like your pet, but ultimately, there will be that bothersome critter to plague you. As Augustus de Morgan wrote long ago, “Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em, and little fleas have lesser fleas ad infinitum.” At a minimum: Temporally and spatially indefinite.
 
So, you wake up, get your tea or coffee, and glance at the news. It doesn’t stop. Each day there’s that little frustration as you whisper to yourself, “Why does the world have to be like this?” And then you realize that those who bite have their own tormentors, and they, in turn, have theirs. It’s fleas ad infinitum.
 
Have a flea that has a flea that has a flea that bites? You're not the first and not the last, but you'll be fine. And if you should de-flea yourself, I'll happily give you mine.

If you listen to the fourth movement of Brahms’ Piano Concerto in B flat Major just one time, you will hear some repeated musical themes. There’s a pattern that discerning listeners hear that the untrained and unfamiliar ear doesn’t hear. However, on a second listening, even the untrained ear will begin to sense a pattern that generally goes like this: A piano plays; the other instruments of the orchestra repeat. You stand at the entrance of a canyon, yell “hello,” but hear another voice in return.
 
How many times have you said something that returns as something else? You express, but a nuance returns. You emphasize, but the return de-emphasizes. You define, but some thesaurus version bounces back.
 
It’s a bit startling: Even when everyone seems to be in the same canyon listening to the original speaker, the return sounds all seem to vary. Sometimes it takes a trained ear to hear the subtle differences. Sometimes the differences between sound and echo are quite evident.
 
Listen for the subtle variations in the echoes bouncing off the canyon walls of your life. They play a concerto that tells how others hear you.

Long before Darwin set out on his voyage of discovery aboard the H.M.S. Beagle in the 1830s, Amerigo Vespucci traveled along the coasts of the New World, where, like Darwin, he recorded observations about the flora and fauna. The early sixteenth-century explorer disembarked, as Darwin did, to see previously unknown plants and animals, and he marveled at the numbers and variety of both.
 
Writing about his observations, Vespucci said, ”We saw so many other animals that I believe so many species could not have entered Noah’s ark.” He made that comment in 1502, 357 years before Darwin published its logical conclusion. We now think Earth houses a trillion species, including millions of animal species, and we know that no aircraft carrier or supertanker could hold and sustain all, even for a short period. Plus, we know that we could not remove many species from their ecological niches without killing them.
 
With the advantage of almost four centuries of exploration, experimentation, and discovery by hundreds, if not thousands, of others behind him, including Vespucci, Darwin had an intellectual heritage that Amerigo lacked. Amerigo also explored in an age before Galileo was put in house arrest for challenging long held beliefs. Darwin, though derided and condemned by certain groups, did not suffer the restraints of an Inquisition, surely a fate Vespucci might have faced had he declared the story of the ark a false narrative. Yet, Amerigo did mention that the story of the ark was hard to believe in light of his observations.
 
Is there a lesson in this? Maybe not, but surely an observation about our own times: All of us have hints of truth that we don’t pursue to their logical conclusion for various reasons, such as deeply held beliefs, superstitions, and social compliance. So, the next time you have an insight, ask yourself if it has meaning outside your social and cultural heritage. You don’t have the luxury of waiting 357 years to pursue and reach a valid conclusion. You could be standing in a New World looking in the face of a new paradigm.