Craters left by impacting comets and asteroids undergo four developmental stages. In the first stage the bolide compresses the surface as it simultaneously gouges and cracks the surface. You can look at the moon’s craters to see the rays of light-color rock ejected from the strike zone. In the moon’s weak gravity and airless surface, the ejecta can travel very far in straight lines (no air turbulence).
 
The compression and ejection are followed by a second stage central uplift as a strength-degraded crater floor undergoes a Newtonian rebound (For every action there’s an opposite one). In the third stage, the central uplift then collapses under gravity and modifies the shape of the central part of the uplifted “hole.” This stage might also be characterized by the extrusion of lavas created by the heat a compressive object generates. The principle here is easy to analogize: Boxing is dangerous to brain health because a punch to the head sends energy inward to shake the brain inside the skull. The energy of a big “punch” by an asteroid is so large it generates a penetrating shock wave that heats and melts rock. Look at the moon. Those dark areas on the moon are composed of lava called basalt that was extruded through the fissures caused by impacts. Lava created by some collisions can flow beyond the crater’s boundaries, affecting the surrounding region. Eventually, in the fourth stage the crater takes on a flatter appearance with a subsided central uplift and a “lake” of hardened lava. On Earth erosion by water and land sliding further degrade the shape of the crater.
 
The surfaces of our psyches are in some ways similar to the surfaces of planets. Like the surfaces of Earth and the other bodies in the Solar System, psyches can suffer emotional impacts that leave their marks that in some people can last lifetimes. Even if you have never been physically assaulted, you have probably at one time or another suffered an impacting insult, an affront to character that at least temporarily affects you deeply. All impacts have the potential to leave some mark, a “cratering” of personality. But unlike bolide impacts on the brittle surfaces of planets and moons, human psyches can be more elastic. That elasticity varies from psyche to psyche, of course, but for the most pliable personalities the last stage of “flattening” occurs quickly, whereas for the most brittle personalities the last stage seems to take a human “eon” to anneal.
 
As with asteroid-planetary and asteroid-moon collisions, human collisions are usually unexpected, if not by the impactor, then by the impacted. The asteroid of insult, an attack on character, appears “out of nowhere” and is unasked for. But unlike the cratering of brittle planetary and moon surfaces, cratering in psychic well-being doesn’t depend solely on the surface composition and on the size of the impactor. Human cratering depends on the perceptions of the individual.  
 
Some surfaces can take a very large insult without ejecting tears or anger and without showing a cratering of psyche. Human character can be as pliant as a wet sponge and just as elastic. Yet, some characters are brittle. In both kinds of surfaces, the psyche is at least momentarily weakened and cratered and of Newtonian necessity rebounds in some way where the energy of insult is concentrated. Sometimes the rebound rises as high as the insult is deep, but then begins to subside.
 
Reaction to the impact also reveals the nature of the psyche’s interior. How we handle insult shows the nature of our interior, the “rock” of emotional makeup turned to emotional magma that comes to the surface in an extrusion of fluid feelings. If our psyche is brittle, the melting can run deep. Once on the surface, those fluid feelings can harden for all to see.
 
Time, of course, works to modify the impact on our lives, to “flatten” the terrain and lessen the Newtonian-like reaction. The emotional wound becomes less visible.
 
In a Solar System with millions of comets and asteroids, impacts are inevitable, and on a planet with seven billion people insults to character are relatively common. The difference between the two threats is that one occurs on brittle surfaces, and the other occurs on relatively elastic ones. How elastic is the surface of your well-being? How do you respond to the impacts of insults? And, in looking over your life, can you see craters, fissures, ejecta, a central uplift, and lava flows that show where and how hard you’ve been hit?
 
How fast you go from stage one to stage four defines your character.
 
 

In retrospect, Peter Higgs revealed his emotional response to an editor’s rejection of his paper on the particle that makes climbing stairs and stopping a runaway truck difficult, the particle that gives mass to matter. He said he felt “indignant” at the rejection. The reason for the rejection: In 1964 “quantum field theory was out of fashion.”*
 
Not too long after Higgs suffered the indignity of rejection, he found an audience of physicists. After years of experimentation they found the proof needed to liberate Higgs from his indignity with the discovery at CERN of the Higgs boson on July 4, 2012. Suddenly, it became very fashionable to talk about Higgs and his seminal work. Fortunately for Peter, he lived to see his work not only justified, but also honored before a worldwide audience. It is certainly intellectually fashionable now to do research on the tiny but important Higgs field and boson.
 
Fashions are patterns that capture the unsteady interests of fickle minds. In the case of Higgs, physicists had been researching and theorizing about quantum fields for more than a half century. To many mid-twentieth century young scientists, it was a time to move on, to abandon “quantum fields” for new “fields” of study. Luckily, Higgs wasn’t quite alone in his pursuits—he shared the 2013 Nobel with François Englert “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributres to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles”—but he didn’t have the full community in support in 1964. Within six years, a movement toward hypothesized “strings” was about to become highly fashionable among physicists dressed in bellbottoms and leisure suits. As for the new fashionable hypotheses about strings, well, they were and have been as mesmerizing as disco’s flashing lasers streaking across the dance floors of science, but like the reflections off a rotating mirrored sphere, they have been as yet nothing more than insubstantial flashes, maybe, in fact, even less substantial than massless photons. The Higgs boson, in contrast, has become a standard fashion, something people recognize and continue to wear, like “resort casual” or “formal.”   
 
It’s probably worth anyone’s time to question both clothing fashions and intellectual fashions. The normal of today won’t be the normal of tomorrow, and just as we can look back on the fashions we wore with disbelief, so we can look on those ways of thinking and matters of importance we held so dear years ago. Fashions of thinking seem to change as rapidly as those of clothing.
 
The search for The Enduring, namely, for the stuff that is fundamental in both the physical and intellectual worlds, has been a pursuit of philosophers and scientists through history. It’s possible that even before the written word, humans dealt with the fashion beyond all fashion, the pattern that gives meaning to a world of seeming chaos. As civilization arose, it first tamed chaos by imposing order through agriculture, releasing whole populations from the randomness of hunting and gathering. Order meant stability, and stability meant time to think about the nature of Nature. As increasingly more urbanized people replaced fields of fields with fields of study, some began to chase after a myriad of fashions in lifestyle and thinking.
 
Released from the toils of farming and immersed in the affluence civilization brings, have we had too much time on our hands and food in our stomachs? Satiated easily, do we now pursue not just a change in fashionable thinking and fashionable clothing but rather a discovery of the fashion of fashions as the most fundamental characteristic of our existence? In looking for new fashions of thinking we subdivide, then expand, and finally overturn the way we once looked at the world and ourselves. It was the ease of civilization that gave rise to a Peter Higgs, and it was the same ease that led to the initial rejection of his seminal paper by an elitist editor who didn’t find his work “fashionable.” Fortunately, his thinking was just fashionable enough for some physicists to use his work to find the seed of seeds 100 meters beneath the agricultural fields of Meyrin, Switzerland.    
 
The ease of civilization has given us a crop of specializations in universities and in professional journals and has set many new intellectual farmers off in search of new hybrids. Choose almost any “field” to see offshoots from the original questions asked by the ancient and medieval thinkers. It might have been fashionable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be a “naturalist,” but such a designation gave way ever more narrow fields of study, such as geology and biology that in turn have engendered their own subdisciplines like geomorphology, coastal geomorphology, microbiology, and parasitology.
 
The field of psychology provides us with numerous examples of fields producing fields. Here are some of the journals associated with the “field”: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Clinical Psychology, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Journal of Health Psychology, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Journal of Mind and Behavior, Journal of Research in Personality, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and the list goes on to include psychotherapy, educational psychology, peace psychology, psychological medicine, community, plus others seemingly too numerous to mention. Any of us can imagine an elitist editor rejecting a seminal paper because it might not conform to the fashionable thinking of the time.
 
We live in an intellectual field of fields. Our crops are fields of study. It’s an agrarianism some 10,000 years in the making, a change that began with the first stirrings of agricultural lifestyles and community gatherings. And today’s “intellectual farmers” are so involved in growing hybrids, that few, like Peter Higgs, are able to get a word in about the soils that those many mental agrarians use to grow the “grains” and “vegetables” du jour.
 
Of course, those who farm for the tastes of today will argue the necessity of their kinds of agriculture. And just as all pepper farmers appreciate the economic circumstances and physical requirements of their crop, so all those associated with any specific intellectual field also appreciate the circumstances and requirements of their “crop”—to the exclusion of unfashionable ideas.  
 
We have profited from work in subdisciplines like oncology and epidemiology, but are we any closer to a fundamental particle of understanding that, like the Higgs boson, gives substance to substances? We keep dividing and dividing fields, and with every new division comes a need for a further division as if some bureaucracy of intellectual farmers plants new administrators who need assistant managers who need secretaries. Maybe we will go on further dividing our knowledge of the universe and ourselves for as many generations going forward as there were generations of intellectuals going backward, and possibly some subdivision of information will make us see where it all began—or where it all will stop. But for now, we seem to be wending our way through and planting many fields of fields with no particular end in sight. And the occasional farmer who arrives at an insight about the nature of all farms will probably, like Peter Higgs, become indignant when all those “agrarian” specialists reject his insightful work.  
 
* Baggott, Jim, Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle.’ Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 89, 90.

“Buy insurance. Buy insurance. Buy insurance.” That might be the message heard before Dr. Tu Bo removed a gecko from the ear of a guy from Guangzhou, China.* Oh! Sorry. I was thinking Geico.
 
Certainly, we can understand the man’s showing up at the hospital. Can’t imagine his ear pain. Also, I can’t imagine what he thought he was hearing. And that brings me to wondering whether we might not learn something about our connection to reality from the results of a recent experiment on hearing sounds that “aren’t there.”
 
Emily Underwood, reporting for Science on August 10, 2017, tells of a study by Philip Corlett and Albert Powers that mimics an 1890 experiment on auditory hallucinations. The original study was conducted on schizophrenics, mentally healthy people who hear voices (psychics), and on mentally healthy people who don’t “hear voices.” In brief, the original experiment paired a tone with an image. After a while, experimenters removed the tone, but the subjects still “heard it” when they saw the image once associated with it. The recent study showed that “both schizophrenics and self-described psychics were nearly five times more likely to say they heard the nonexistent tone than healthy controls.”
 
There are multiple layers of conclusions in this experiment, but one important one was “that, when it comes to how we perceive the world, our ideas and beliefs can easily overpower our senses.” Another conclusion is that “the cerebellum is a key checkpoint against this distortion.” Basically, if the Guangzhou gecko guy wanted to hear a gecko advertise Geico, then that’s what he would hear.
 
All of us daily face the problem of interpreting our world. With an indefinite number of stimuli our senses send to our brains, it’s easy to misinterpret. Here’s a minor example. As a bulldozer’s metal tracks ran over and through rocks nearby, I once thought I heard someone call my name. No one called me. My brain simply interpreted a random set of sounds as “Don.” Was there a temporary glitch in my cerebellum? Of course, but my brain realized in a millisecond that the sound was, in fact, random and that I had a brief auditory hallucination.
 
But what of the more insidious connections between “our ideas and beliefs” that “can easily overpower our senses”? It seems quite evident that we predispose ourselves, and that our predispositions engender not only “voices,” but also responses. Predisposition’s dark side occurs when circumstances turn places into perceived danger zones, opening the “fight or flight” gate of panic. Think Kent, Ohio, on May 4, 1970. Against the backdrop of anti-war protests, a gathering of students and armed soldiers led to a deadly response. Though still debated and unsubstantiated, an auditory hallucination might have been the stimulus for the shooting by the Ohio National Guard. Was the incident initiated by a sniper’s gun firing on the guardsmen? Did the first guardsman to fire hear a threatening sound? Did the soldiers respond to a misinterpreted noise that sounded like “Fire!”? The result was, regardless of the reality, the deaths of four Kent State University students.  
 
Think crowd responses to loud sounds in an era of terrorists wearing bomb belts. Many of us are now predisposed to hearing the sounds of danger, making us predisposed to panic responses to hallucinatory threats. And on a level less threatening but still emotionally charged are those little arguments among bickering acquaintances and family members derived from misinterpreted sounds: “WHAT did you say?” 
 
We all need some insurance, something that protects us from faulty interpretations of hallucinations. We need a voice in our ears that says, “No, that wasn’t the sound you think you heard. In fact, you merely thought you heard a sound. No need to panic. No need for conflict. No need to assume the worst is happening. Just some random noise that your cerebellum failed to reconcile with the realities of place and circumstance. Just an auditory hallucination stuck in your ear, appealing to the reptilian part of your brain.”
 
 
*Deccan Chronicle, Aug. 19, 2017, “Squirming lizard removed from man’s ear in China,” online at http://www.deccanchronicle.com/lifestyle/viral-and-trending/190817/squirming-lizard-removed-from-mans-ears-in-china.html
 
**Underwood, Emily. “How your mind protects you against hallucinations,” Science AAAS, online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/how-your-mind-protects-you-against-hallucinations

A tunnel that doesn’t connect to anything is a hole. Texas has one. It cost over two billion bucks to dig, and it didn’t come close to reaching its mark. The hole was the American version of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. It was supposed to be not only a bigger underground tunnel, but also one that generated about three times the energy planned for CERN, where the Higgs boson was discovered.
 
Like many bureaucratic boondoggles, the Superconducting Super Collider, or Desertron, ran over budget, so Congress made a decision to spend money on the International Space Station instead. Was it a good choice? We’ll probably know eventually. In 1993 a proposed four billion dollar-plus science project that had little personal meaning for the average legislator—unless he or she hailed from Texas, where the money was to be spent.
 
Imagine the conversations.
 
“You want to build what?”
 
Scientist: “An underground experiment.”
 
“Okay, what kind of experiment?”
 
Scientist: “We want to find really little, teeny-tiny things that make up everything.”
 
“All right. That shouldn’t be a problem. Will it get me votes?”
 
Scientist: “It could if you live in Texas.”
 
“How much is this thing going to cost?”
 
Scientist: “We think in the neighborhood of four to five bil.”
 
“Billion? What’s involved?”
 
Scientist: “We want to dig a circular tunnel that is over 80 km or about 50 mi long.”
 
“Wait. You want to build a tunnel that connects to itself? You want to dig in a circle?”
 
Scientist: “Well, you see, we’re going to put giant magnets that require enormous amounts of energy, about 20 TeV per proton so we can send subatomic particles around in opposite directions to watch what happens when they collide. That’s why it is called a ‘collider.’”
 
“Hold on. You guys are scientists, right? You know that the people of NASCAR know enough to keep everything going in the same direction—and on a track above ground? Is this some sort of joke? Are you telling me that you are going to sit and watch things too tiny to see bang into each other?”
 
Scientist: “Yes, and we think that the people of Dallas-Fort Worth will see some economic gains as workers funnel into the area, sort of funnel into the tunnel. Did I mention that particle physicists are in favor of the project?”
 
“Aren’t they doing this in Europe?”
 
Scientist: “They are, but ours would be ‘Texas-size.’ You know everything is bigger there. I’ll admit the tunnel is pretty big, but most of the costs lie in the magnets. And then, when the subatomic particles collide we will have pictures of some spiraling lines we can show everyone, kind of like the drawings you can make with Spirograph Deluxe Design Sets kids get for Christmas presents, only better.”
 
“So, you want to spend billions of dollars on magnets to put into a giant circular hole so that you can show me some spiral lines that I can see when my kid uses a Spirograph Deluxe Design Set that costs about $25? You know, no thanks. I think I want to spend the money to put men in some interconnected tubes that circle Earth. They can take pictures that make sense to me.”
 
What costly project have you tried to sell recently? And what argument did you use? I hope it wasn’t one that used a toy analogy. Did you say to your spouse, “Hey, you know what we should build? A costly manroom in the basement”? Or, “Hey, why don’t we get a tanning bed for the rec room; that way we won’t have to go outside in the real sunlight”?
 
There’s always a cost, and there’s always the question about significance. Thinking of “building” a hole? What’s it worth you? What’s it worth to those who have to share the cost? What will be the short- and long-term effects? Don’t end up with an incomplete 14 km-long hole like the SSC that serves no purpose except to have wasted two billion dollars. Before you dig that hole, make sure you have the wherewithal to complete it, to maintain it, and to see results from it that either profit your mind or profit your wallet. 

Change. People who live in zones of temperate deciduous forests see it in multicolored leaves, as anthocyanin, xanthophyll, carotene, and tannic acid replace the green of chlorophyll in a seasonal change that coincides with football games. For more than a century, the game has been associated with the season. While Nature has kept the same rules, however, football has changed, and its changes seem to reflect philosophical changes in American society—and maybe world society—that date to the First World War.  
 
Football players used to wear leather helmets. Ouch! Concussions were inevitable, even among smaller and slower players. Although participants might have been smaller, Earth’s size was the same at the beginning of the twentieth century as it is today, so a collision between a leather-shrouded head and the ground had dire consequences. Football players still experience concussions—thus the big controversy about current rules that make defensive secondary men ruin offensive players’ knees rather than their skulls. But protective technology has changed, training has changed, strategies have changed. Collisions with the ground are inevitable, but rules to lessen the effects of human collisions now center on a very open, often pass-dominated game.
 
Football rules have over the decades fallen like autumn’s leaves, and numerous summers have seen the growth of new rules, initially centered on the nature of the game, but now centered on the nature of society. Are we in an age when we can make rules to lessen the consequences of human collisions?
 
What kinds of changes to the game have occurred that derived from the nature of the game itself? Centers were originally “snapper-backs.” A century ago, only five men had to be on the line of scrimmage between the goal and the 25-yard line instead of seven players. Before 1906 there were no forward passes, no up-the-middle runs, and no quarter divisions. Forward passes? The rules of 1906 then allowed any player anywhere behind his line of scrimmage to throw a pass to any player on the end of the line as long as the forward pass crossed scrimmage at least five yards from the center. Skirts on quarterbacks? That was Jack Lambert’s complaint about rule changes during the years of the Steel Curtain in Pittsburgh. Well, in 1914 football instituted the first rule to keep the “forward passer” from being “roughed up.”
 
And then rule changes in the early days of football came to an abrupt halt. War intervened, taking people’s mind off a game and putting it on the destruction and death raging in Europe. Human collisions had dire consequences, including those from unbridled gas attacks that killed and maimed indiscriminately. In his 1921 book The Forward Pass in Football, YMCA’s Coach Elmer Berry makes this comment:
 
          “Relatively little change occurred during the war period and there has been a feeling since that experimentation has gone far enough; that the game is very good as it is, and that coaches, players and the public generally should have a chance to thoroughly acquaint themselves with the present possibilities. The open game has come to stay, and attempts to further restrict it have met with strong opposition.”*
 
By 1914 the rule changes signaled a significant alteration in American society. They opened up the game, and the chief mechanism for that opening was the forward pass. No longer were football players locked into a scrum. And as international awareness increased both because of WWI and the movement of millions of displaced people, the society had no choice but to be more “open.” We’ve been rather open ever since; thus, modern communication technologies have meant a change in degree, not in kind.  
 
Of course, football has seen numerous small changes in the intervening decades, and those changes have coincided with the expansion of the football audience through radio and TV coverage aided by satellite communications. The Super Bowl might be the longest forward pass of all—the longest of long bombs we can throw—one that reaches people around the planet. Yes, the game has really opened up. We can even watch on Twitter.
 
And society is used to such long passes. Society has probably opened more than football. The latter still has end zones and sidelines. There seem to be very few boundaries in American society and communication technologies. Maybe football has undergone far few changes in the past century than the society that supports it. Maybe football is actually a conservative changer like Nature with a predictable cyclic coloring of leaves. As for the rest of us? Was Berry prescient in 1921? Remember what he wrote about the game, “The open game has come to stay, and attempts to further restrict it have met with strong opposition.”
 
*Berry, Elmer, B.S., M.P.E., The Forward Pass in Football, New York, A. S. Barnes and Company, 1921, p. 5.

Just about everyone has some sense of what a crystal looks like. The typical imagery associates the word crystal with something that is relatively transparent, possibly of different colors, and ending in at least one pointed end. Such imagery is a gross generalization because crystals take many forms, such as the little cubic bits of salt that fall from the holes of a salt shaker or the flat sheets of graphite found in pencils. Yes, crystals can take many forms based on six underlying atomic or molecular arrangements, and the word arrangement is key here. Crystals are “ordered” atoms and molecules. The common crystal we call ice, for example, builds itself on hexagonal arrangements of hydrogen and oxygen. And many crystals, by the way, aren’t transparent. Having said the preceding, I recognize that my first sentence is erroneous. Probably few people have a sense of the many forms and colors of crystals.
 
And then there’s the “world crystal.” But first, this: We think minerals when we think crystals though glass “crystals” probably do pop into the mind. Forget glass. Both natural and artificial glasses are composed of unordered atoms that lack the arrangement necessary to qualify as a true crystal. Minerals are naturally formed inorganic crystalline substances that have definite physical and chemical properties. For example, a physical property of ice is its cold temperature, and physical properties of graphite are evident in its being so soft that rubbing it across your skin leaves a dark grey streak of pealed graphite flakes. A chemical property of salt is its dissolvability in water. And as for crystalline structure? Both snowflakes (crystals of ice) and salt grains (halite) are manifestations of internal molecular arrangements. Now, given that little explanation, here’s a question: What if the world itself—meaning the universe—were crystalline in some way?
 
A “world crystal” would imply some orderly arrangement and some identifiable properties. A number of people have jumped on the idea of spacetime that is fractal, and they have begun to apply the notion to understanding not just physics, but also biology and sociology. In general, the idea of fractality, that is, fractals, isn’t strange.* Because we’re used to both crystals and fractals in screen savers, we generally understand that regardless of the scale of those changing forms, they are manifestations of the same form. The scale is irrelevant. Parts of a pattern in a leaf’s edge match the entire leaf edge.
 
So, food for thought: What if all of us were part of one large fractal of humanity, in a sense, a regularly repeated pattern similar to mineral crystals? What if on the scale of a few of us we matched the scale of all of us, sort of a quantum-vs-cosmos in similarity? Would such a repeated arrangement explain our common humanity regardless of the scale on which we examined what it means to be human? Have the poets been right all along to suggest that individuals, couples, families, villages, and cities are simply microcosms and that the scales of humanity are very much like nested dolls?
 
And if all of us were part of a world crystal, all part of an arrangement that could be seen as similar on different scales, would we have a mechanism for reconciling our supposed differences? Or, are we farther away from reconciling than the physicists are from uniting all the fundamental forces, including gravity and spacetime in some Grand Theory?

If you haven’t sworn off salt, take a close look, maybe under a magnifying glass, at a grain of the substance on your dinner plate. Note its form and recognize that it is the result of about one quadrillion atoms lined up in a crystalline pattern. Somewhere within that little structure are two individual atoms, one of sodium and another of chlorine, and all the rest simply repeat the pattern that they set. Now look around at the people sitting nearby. See any analog?  
 
* Nottale, L. (1993). Fractal Spacetime and Microphysics: Towards a Theory of Scale Relativity (World Scientific: Singapore)

In the eighteenth century, men carried swords, and fencing was taken rather seriously by anyone who followed the “open carry” policy of the times. Monsieur L’Abbat recognized that those who carried “small” swords would profit from his expertise. This recognized master swordsmen at the Academy of Toulouse wrote a book on the subject with chapters on “guard,” “pushing quart,” “feints,” and “fighting left-handed men.”* Not only does he explain his fencing principles and techniques, but he also provides a list of his main points.
 
Among his list of 43 points are the following five:
            #5.   “Be not angry at receiving a Thrust, but take care to avoid it.”
            #7.   “Do not endeavor to give many Thrusts, running the Risque [sic.] of receiving one.”
            #11. “Do nothing that’s useless, every Action shou’d tend to your Advantage.”
            #18. “Before you applaud a Thrust given, examine if Chance had no Hand in it.”
            #19. “In Battle let Valour [sic.] and Prudence go together, the Lyon’s [sic.] Courage with the Fox’s Craft.”
 
As I read his points, I asked myself whether or not he is advising just swordsmen or everyone. Aren’t these fencing instructions applicable to our daily lives, particularly when we find ourselves in contentious circumstances? We might all agree that peaceful resolutions are preferable to violent ones, but sometimes we need to parry an attack and thrust home our point.
 
Boxers and martial artists know the first bit of advice that is a twofold principle for survival. In most arguments and matters of contention, someone is going to get through defenses—logical or physical. One can’t, however, let a punch, kick, or a “thrust” foil—to use a fencing term—one’s ability to both defend and counter. Turning to anger places control in the “fight or flight” amygdalae and often leads to rash behavior. Adrenalin associated with such a response is useful in moderation, but too much of it coursing through the body erases any previous training in defensive and offensive maneuvers. All professional fighters know they are going to be hit; they just can’t concentrate on the punch or kick that gets through, or they’ll lose their offensive capability. Also, as the second part of the advice suggests, the best place to be when someone throws a punch or starts a meaningless argument is somewhere else. No one can stab a person who isn’t in the area. If you aren’t in the same place as the attacker…
 
The second bit of advice tells us that those who “give many thrusts” have to be close to their opponents. Proximity means that the opponent has a chance to thrust the foil. And similarly, swinging wildly during a fight has more drawbacks than advantages. Arms extended in swings and thrusts eventually tire and leave the body and the head vulnerable to counter swings and thrusts.  
 
The third bit is practical and is a matter of economy. In the heat of any battle—or any contentious encounter—all energy needs to be focused on the most efficient means to victory (however it is defined). Economy of action, like economy of an argument, achieves a goal rapidly.  
 
The fourth bit of advice is rooted in the role chance plays in everyday life and special occasions. One might applaud an outdoor wedding’s beautiful setting under favorable skies, but since weddings usually require planning, the weather for the day is only a matter of chance, even in an arid climate: Strong winds and even sandstorms or excessive temperatures can spoil the day. It would be foolish to think that luck plays no role, and that skill is the only avenue to success. Footballs are oddly shaped and bounce erratically. That someone is facing the goal and recovers a fumble and then runs uncontested for a score isn’t always a matter of training and prowess. The goddess Fortuna likes to meddle in all sorts of human affairs, including arguments and physical conflicts. Numerous battles have turned on her wheel of fortuitous or inimical circumstances, such as the heavy rains that altered the battles at Fort Necessity and at Agincourt (the latter by chance occurring after ploughing, forcing the French knights to ride through heavy mud).
 
In his fifth bit of advice, L’Abbat recognizes the role of courage, but only in conjunction with skill, technique, practiced responses, and some unexpected creative moves. Alexander’s crossing the river toward his Persian enemy took considerable courage, but its unexpectedness is what foiled the enemy’s will. Creativity’s role is evident in many human interactions, especially in battles of any kind. Scipio’s having his men step aside while his Carthagenian opponent’s elephants charged, enabled him to hit the beasts from the side and from behind. Whenever we fall into recognizable patterns, we lose the element of surprise. In any swordfight or argument, the more creative person has a decided advantage.
 
Ours is not an age of swashbucklers, but it is an age with seemingly interminable thrusts that require parries. In a time when people don’t carry swords, ideologues who wander about under a policy of “open carry opinions” try to thrust their points on others. Almost three centuries after he wrote The Art of Fencing, L’Abbat provides advice still applicable not only to physical confrontations, but also to our current mental ones.
 
*Monsieur L’Abbat, The Art of Fencing, or, the Use of the Small Sword, translated by Andrew Mahon, himself a “professor of the small sword in Dublin, Printed by James Hort, at the Sign of Mercury in Skinner-Row, 1734, and available online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12135/12135-h/12135-h.htm#CHAP_XXVI  

Here are six repeated words: You want everything to make sense. Sense to everything you want make. The first is meaningful immediately because it is idiomatic; the second, not so much. Syntax makes the difference, and we don’t need Wittgenstein to explain that to us. Little children learn the principle that a meaningful language has a set of rules that native speakers follow—more or less. English speakers find the expressions of Yoda to be quaint.
 
Making sense is one way that we discern the validity of someone’s argument. Frequently, when TV reporters go to the street for interviews and solicit “reasons” for actions, we get two kinds of responses. The first is gibberish in a language punctuated by non sequiturs, incoherence, and convoluted syntax. The second is explanation in a language constructed of complete and inferred complete thoughts that are replete with familiar references framed by an idiomatic syntax. Unfortunately, gibberish often dominates the interviews.
 
Making sense requires coherence in and unity of expression. Yet, we still have a problem that proper syntax, coherence, and unity never eliminate: How do we handle a syntactically correct expression of obvious obfuscation?
 
Fifty years ago, the United Nations General Assembly met to discuss the ongoing 1967 Six-day Arab-Israeli War. The discussions pitted a highly articulate Ambassador Eban against a number of ambassadors from the Arab world, the Soviet Ambassador, and a few anti-Israeli ambassadors from other countries. Probably few people have ever been able to express themselves as effectively as Eban did in such a hostile environment, but his arguments, however well-constructed, coherent and unified, fell on deaf ears. It was only a stunning military action that left the UN with no alternative but to move on to other matters. Guns won the argument.
 
Making sense doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes the spoken is out-argued by the unspoken. Almost every personal argument becomes the latest revival of those 1967 meetings in the UN. Regardless of the logic, the idiomatic syntax, the coherence, and the unity that make a statement reasonable, emotion—and sometimes action—wins. Such is the plight of many parents with wayward teens and teachers with belligerent students. It is also the plight of any who wish to help those following paths of addiction or crime and of numerous ideological opponents.
 
We have an ongoing problem. Within language there is a deep-seated and necessary order that native speakers know even when they do not use it in their expressions. Yet, regardless of the inherent order in language, disorder often prevails when people are emotionally committed to opposing points of view. It seems that perspective is always tinged with emotion and that, like the dominating gibberish of random people interviewed about history or current events, emotion dominates reason, syntax, coherence, and unity. Sense everything make you want to, but rules of syntax nonsense prevent only supposedly.  

Every restoration follows a value judgment on the present and the past. Which does one prefer? To restore a previous ecology, for example, someone has to alter the present ecology. The work of Gregory P. Dietl and Karl Flessa on former clam reefs of the lower Colorado River frames the problem at hand.* Before large dams and their reservoirs changed the river, the water regularly reached the Gulf of California and provided a home for huge numbers of huge clams (up to 30 cm).  Siphoning of the water for use by various states lowered the river’s discharge and isolated clams once abundant in the northern part of the Gulf. Dietl and Flessa, in using the high-and-dry clam shells to reconstruct the past ecology, initiated a field of study now called conservation paleobiology, a science devoted to understanding past ecologies through their fossil remains and possibly using those remnants of the past to reconstruct it as a present-day ecological system.
 
Restoring the past always presents a dilemma. Obviously, the “need” for restoration arises from the present’s supplanting the past. So, which ecology or neighborhood should be preserved? The one that is occupied by its own set of organisms dwelling on the current landscape with its processes or the one occupied by a different set of organisms in a different landscape with its endemic processes? Any restoration also involves a cheat. Does anyone believe we can truly restore the past with exactitude?
 
Longwall mining can change the surface through subsidence. As the mining machines excavate the coal deep underground, they leave no support for the surface that can sink soon after the mining occurs. Subsidence changes the way streams flow on the surface. Sometimes freely flowing streams are interrupted by “bumps” and depressions that cause the water to pond. Organisms that were happy in free-flowing water are then replaced by opportunistic organisms that like slow-flowing water in pools. So, here’s your problem. Do you break through the dam caused by the subsidence and buckling of the surface caused by the underground mining in order to restore the former ecology? If you do break through the dam, do you do so without concern for the replacement ecology that formed in the pond? That is, do you value the organisms of the past more than you value the organisms of the present?
 
And in your current life, do you seek to restore without regard to the circumstances of the present? The life of the past might have been worth preserving before it changed, but is the life of the present not worth preserving? And if you believe the life of the present is not worth preserving, then on what basis do you evaluate and judge and to what extent do you believe you can restore with exactitude?  
 
 
* Dietl, Gregory P. and Karl W. Flessa, Conservation paleobiology: putting the dead to work
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2010.09.010, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Volume 26, Issue 1, Pp. 30-37, Published online October 29, 2010. 

When I was little our house had a party line. That doesn’t mean we had people queuing up on the sidewalk outside to enter a continuous party my family opened to the public. It was a land phone line connected to four other phones. Each family on the line had an assigned number of rings when a call came in. Eventually, everyone knew the other people on the party line because there was no way to know if the line was free short of picking up the phone and listening. Obviously, that often meant interrupting someone else’s phone call in progress. Want to see people deal with a party line? Rent the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movie called Pillow Talk.
 
Do you think an intrusion by the NSA into your private phone calls is the first kind of eavesdropping? The truth is that we’ve been playing the Game of Phones since Paleolithic peoples used smoke signals, bullroarers, turnduns, and didgeridoos, and in more contemporary times, the nineteenth century’s telegraph and the aforementioned twentieth century’s party lines.
 
I bet the NSA, the FBI, the CIA and any other spy agency all wish for a return of such past technologies. No high tech was needed during the ages of bullroarers, telegraph messages, and party lines. One could listen to the sound projected by bullroarers, read the message at the telegraph office, or quietly pick up the party line phone to listen. Then again, the newer technologies do make for easier duplication and preservation. Our personal private kingdoms are always under potential attack by dragons that can burn our conversations onto a CD, DVD, hard drive, or jump drive.
 
Primitive technology gave us both ease of communication and ease of eavesdropping, but it had limitations. As civilized people, we wanted ease of communication and something more reliable than a smoke signal on a windy day or a bullroarer during a thunderstorm. Modern tech gave us new mechanisms with even more intrusive reach into our private lives.
 
Will privacy ever return? Sure, if we want to put down the phone, the computer, and all their embedded ways to connect people. But there’s nothing new in this. Even Paleolithic people couldn’t achieve privacy unless they disengaged from the tech to which they were addicted. “Hey, Yugg, people over there are reading your smoke signal and listening to your bullroarer message. You need to put out your fire and stop that shouting if you don’t want them to know what you’re saying to your ex.”
 
Think of people-watching. Why do we do it? Admit it. You’ve been at an airport, a resort, a…why am I giving you a list? You’ve done some people-watching wherever you encountered people to watch. So, come on, admit it, also: If you had a party line, wouldn’t you, upon picking up the phone and hearing a conversation in progress, yield to the temptation to listen for a few seconds before you quietly hung up? Now can you really blame the NSA for some eavesdropping? Maybe they’re just a bunch of curious people interested in what you have to say about your neighbor’s torrid affair, her recipe for crab cakes, or the town’s politics. Not.
 
In the modern world, we’ve added personal spying to intergovernmental spying to a degree never before seen. We’re beyond just reading smoke signals and listening to someone’s bullroarer. And it’s not just specific words that we capture, as you know. Pictures and videos, those messages worth a thousand words, make the spying even more intrusive. Town gossip has turned into national and even world gossip. Seems that the Game of Phones we all play is one whose outcome is the complete unveiling of everyone, a conquering of private worlds; and if we add implanted hackable brain chips, the eavesdropping will be complete.
 
Don’t want to lose your privacy? Don’t play the Game of Phones.