The “millennium” was a big deal for millions—maybe even for billions—who found something significant in the year 2000. What would happen? Could it be the year the world ended? And what about all those projected computer crashes of Y2K? End of the World! Stock up on toilet paper. The late Prince told us to “party like it’s 1999.” 
 
Reaching age 40 seems to be a big deal for millions, maybe even for billions. Being married 50 years is also something noteworthy for many. Why? What’s so significant about any number that ends in a zero? What was so significant about 2000? Remember, the count of years is based on Dionysius Exiguus’ determination of Christ’s year of birth. Di is the guy who replaced the Roman numbering of years. He might have made a mistake by four years or so. That would make this year 2022. But does that make any real difference? 
 
So, this is my 1,000th little essay on this site. Significant? Maybe for me, but not really. Just another posting, just as the day before someone turns 40 is as significant as the actual birthday or the day after. Significance is a personal matter. Choose to make each day significant, and you will think 39 years 264 days is worth celebrating as much as exactly 40 years.  
 
For me, reaching 1,000 essays is hardly much of an achievement in that during the time of their appearances, they were merely other matters to which I attended. And that’s the way it is with all of us in all our so-called significant moments. We don’t have to be defined by a single episode or a single moment. There’s no vacuum in our lives that is punctuated by “something.” There’s always something in a continuum of thought and activity. We choose to recognize certain of those “somethings” as significant, but on what grounds? The year 2000, for example, ends an artificial construct, our reckoning of time from a moment considered to be special for the West, for Christianity, and for political entities that formed under the aegis of that system. Our math is a base 10 system, so the zero became significant, a place to end and a place to start anew.
 
Writing 1,000 little essays on sundry topics has been fun, and I will continue to write other such essays. It’s my way of exploring, and I’m happy that others have thought to explore with me. The goal in my exploring is to open a path for your path-making, not to lead you to any specific temple of knowledge lost like a pyramid in Mayan or Aztec lands. Sure, I might stumble through some thicket to see the steps laid long ago, but you can explore the jungle adjacent to the path I cut. I might find an isolated temple. You might find an entire city.
 
One thousand? Not too significant. Think about your current year. The Romans began counting from the founding of their city. The Soviets tried to make 1917 the year one. Everyone remembers Rosemary’s baby, born, as they say in the film, in Year One. Why shouldn’t we start the counting with Earth’s formation 4.6 billion years ago, or with the universe’s origin 13.8 billion years ago? Why not start our counting with the year of your birth? And why not judge any specific essay of mine as being one that led you to your own significant insights whereas many of the 1,000 I wrote seemed, at least to you, rather silly and inconsequential ramblings. 
 
Till our minds meet again in the next posting…

We have this thing about wanting a stable environment. Makes us feel secure knowing that there are checks and balances and that nothing is running amok, nothing is sweeping through the world like some unchecked plague. We like that sense of control even when we aren’t the agents of control. A world in equilibrium frees us from worrying about potentially inimical excesses. And, to use the old expression, Lord knows, we certainly have many of those.  
 
Invasive species have been a problem since life evolved. Some happy group of organisms sits in place, using its environment to its advantage, balanced between too much and too little: Just the right balance between resources and their use. And then, bang! Along comes some invader to eat the stuff that supports the endemic population or to attack that population. “Bummer.” Bet that’s what the Neanderthals thought when humans invaded Europe. 
 
So, we find ourselves trying to rebalance Nature gone out of kilter, to put things back the way they once were and the way we preferred them. But disequilibrium is the way the world changes, the pendulum of any environment, social, biological, physical, swinging between extremes and rarely dead downward and motionless. Too many herbivores? Add some wolves, or lions, or hyenas. And what about those pests so many of us try to avoid. The insects. Geez, they’re everywhere, aren’t they? Underfoot and overhead. In areas where we keep food. Invading our gardens and farms. Sometimes carrying diseases like Lyme or West Nile. 
 
Enter the stinkbugs. Really, enter almost everywhere. In southwestern Pennsylvania, for example, they start looking for residence in homes in August and appear unannounced inside during the winter. “Oh! No. There’s another one. I’ll get it.” And the critters damage fruit, apples and peaches. What’s a human society to do? Science. I know. We’ll try science. We can get things under control because we’re intelligent. We can reset the equilibrium. Balance things through purposeful biocontrol.
 
Of course, we have to be careful. The cure, as we all know, can be worse than the disease. There are many instances of human intervention in Nature that resulted in disastrous consequences for endemic organisms that weren’t the object of biocontrol efforts. So, there are government officials who oversee any purposefully introduced biocontrol agent, and one of those is the samurai wasp, an agent that can destroy stinkbugs by laying its eggs inside stinkbug eggs. But bugs have never obeyed the dictates of bureaucracies nor the boundaries of countries. Trying to make a careful effort to study whether or not the samurai wasps could be imported to kill stinkbugs, entomologist Kim Hoelmer at the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in Newark, brought the wasps to the USA.* And then, to his surprise, found that the wasps had arrived on their own, invaded, so to speak. There appears to be an Equilibrium Principle at work: Stinkbugs invade. Stinkbugs harm fruit. Wasps invade somehow on their own. Wasps begin to cull stinkbug population. Hmm. 
 
True, the new equilibrium that wasps might establish will be different from the old equilibrium that persisted before the stinkbugs invaded. Nature adjusts. We will adjust. The pendulum will hang vertically for a brief time. But no place remains the same, and the very act of preservation results in some change.
 
*Servick, Kelly. Scientists spent years on a plan to import this wasp to kill stinkbugs. Then it showed up on its own. Science . August 9, 2018, Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/scientists-spent-years-plan-import-wasp-kill-stinkbugs-then-it-showed-its-own

Did you know that lack of glycogenin causes glycogen accumulation and muscle function impairment?* Neither did I, but maybe that indicates something about us. In a study by people associated with the University of Barcelona, mice that were glycogenin-deficient gained more glycogen in their striated muscles, and they did poorly in endurance and strength tests. Analogously, lack of knowledge appears to increase our level of ignorance and negatively affect mental function.  Duh!? Yeah, you read me correctly. 
 
Ignorance has a way of multiplying itself just like cells. From one “dumb thing” we get more dumb things. From lack of knowledge we get unsubstantiated and often wild hypotheses. And the process interferes with how we interact with others and with our environment. 
 
So, as ignorance engenders more ignorance, we find ourselves in a constant state of confirmation bias with little chance of gaining the intellectual and emotional strength we need to pursue unadulterated truth. We become lethargic and weak mice.  
 
 
*Testoni, G. et al., Lack of Glycogenin Causes Glyogen Accumulation and Muscle Function Impariment. Cell Metabolism, Vol. 26, No. 1, July, 2017.

Some people love them; others, don’t. Crowds. You belong, but you’re separate. You feel the energy, but you also fear it. There’s just a precariousness to being in something that can morph like some alien monster in a film, a crowd turning into a mob. And it’s not as though we haven’t had incidents.
 
So, as the Notting Hill Festival draws crowds, a look around the neighborhoods reveals that some residents and shop owners prepare for crowd-turned-mob by boarding up their properties, substituting plywood for glass, putting up a fence or gate. Shame, isn’t it. Humans can’t gather without somehow becoming a bit “nonhuman.” What is it about us that turns identity into anonymity? Is behavior, thinking, and attitude imposed from without or driven from within. Is it Id or Superego?
 
If it is the former, the Id, don’t we have a question? Is the Id a personal reality? Is there a personal drive that is instinctual? And why does something instinctual have to be destructive? Or, is the Id simply a mechanism that both ensures and uses anonymity? 
 
Crowds and mobs. Festivals and riots. Why does a crowd in a church not turn into a mob? Why is a festival crowd somehow different from a church crowd? Is it the environment or some hidden drive? If either, the Ego dictates. I impose either order or disorder. I perceive and direct unless there truly is some anonymous source of chaos inside that is uncontrollable except through the dictates of the Superego and the desires of the Ego.
 
“Well, that’s all gobbledygook,” you say. “Don’t individuals determine how and when a crowd turns into a mob?”
 
“Yes, and in that case, we could all argue that some individuals have taken what they are deep down and imposed it either directly or subtly on a crowd. Opportunists, for example, might see a crowd as a great avenue into a liquor store or pharmacy for some looting or as an avenue to political power, à la Hitler. Some insidious motivation could drive any of us if we give up self-awareness. Maybe jumping up and down with a group celebrating a home team’s victory could be seen as an initial form of mob action, possibly leading to some exacerbation during which the mob destroys shop windows and overturns cars. And then there are the individuals who can use the media to incite for specific purposes.
 
“Or think of paparazzi all individually competing for that special photo to sell and, in doing so, chasing a Mercedes with a princess and her boyfriend through a tunnel until they crash. Or, again, think of a scandal, any scandal, and how it has been handled by the crowd in control of the press. If one isn’t a member of the favored group, then the crowd turns into a mob seeking ‘blood,’ destroying first and then publishing a sentence-long retraction in a corner of a back section. Don’t we all, at times, act like that? Don’t we all have some agenda that leads us to either incite or join a mob? Just as loose rumor has through the ages, so published and broadcast tales can turn crowds into mobs.
 
“That brings me to ask myself, ‘How do I know when I am being carried along by a mob mentality? How can I maintain personal control when I’m being pushed and pulled by so many groups?’ True, I’m not going to attend any Notting Hill Festival that attracts hundreds of thousands of people, so I won’t be around if a mob action occurs. I’m not agoraphobic, but I’m reticent to put myself in a circumstance where personal control can be overwhelmed by an uncontrollable crowd. I remember once being in line for supper when the college dining hall opened. As the crowd moved forward, it became a mass that began to crush me—and the crushing began to exceed my strength to resist. I was not in control. Fortunately for me, the doorway was large enough so that people began to flow into the room, but for a while, everyone near the door was like mashed potatoes passing through a funnel. We know what happened at the Who concert in 1979, when eleven people were crushed to death outside Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum, don’t we?
 
“So, I keep asking myself, is there an analog in the life of the mind? Are we through social media and news and opinion outlets just like the people carried along by the crowd turned mob? Are we to some degree like those Germans pre-World War II? Every time I see the national political conventions of the Democratic, Republican, Green, and whatever parties, I marvel at the seeming unbridled enthusiasm exhibited by throngs of people. Surely, some of them are individuals just swept up by something irresistible as I was physically on the day outside the dining hall.
 
“Really, all of us face that dilemma between belonging too much and isolating too far. All of us live in a crowd to some extent. It might not be a physical crowd, but it’s certainly an attitudinal and intellectual one. Let’s hope we can foresee the moment when the crowd starts to become mob. Recognizing that moment gives us time to escape before being crushed.” 

In writing about anxiety and worry, I have previously said that if one is nearly in accident nothing happened. In fact, that’s partly true. For the one who suffers a “near-accident,” the heart might beat a little faster, adrenalin might be coursing through the body, and emotions might be running high. But the accident was “near.” It didn’t actually happen. Even if one is in a “near-accident” during which two cars miss each other by only a millimeter, nothing happened physically. The cars could just as easily have passed an infinity apart. Perception makes the difference. 
 
What doesn’t happen is for some people “something that happened.” And it’s not just some physical accident that is the focus here. Encounters with others that “missed by a millimeter” also didn’t happen: Avoided or imagined arguments, for example. The problem for most of us is that we often pay attention to what hasn’t or won’t happen. It’s as though we seek anxiety, worry, and a rush of adrenalin. We can be addicted to nonevents that have no consequences.
 
Think in terms of measurements, real physical measurements, the next time you perceive a nonevent to be an event worth your concern. Missing by a millimeter is the same as missing by infinity.

Because mass warps space, light from behind distant galaxies bends under strong gravity. The product is “lensing” or “gravitational lensing.” Distant galaxies hidden behind closer galaxies can appear as two or even as four mirror images on either side of or surrounding the nearer galaxy or galaxy cluster that exerts the gravitational “bending.” The lensing can also magnify light from distant objects. Now we can see a star called Spock that lies about eight billion light years away and another, even more distant, star called Icarus at nine billion light years’ distance. Understand me. We’re not talking galaxies composed of hundreds of billions of stars, but two individual stars isolated for viewing thanks to lensing by a galaxy cluster four billion light years away. Take a look up at Andromeda, a nearby galaxy, and show me an individual star. Yes, that’s the significance of Spock and Icarus.*
 
The twinkling stars appear within the smeared and curved images of lensed galaxies. Even though they are large stars, their visibility astonishes astronomers because of their great distance. Who woulda thunk it? Seeing an individual star some 9 billion light years away can astonish almost everyone. That’s nine billion times almost six trillion miles. That’s lots of zeroes: about 5.4 times ten to the twenty-second power. 
 
It is possible, of course, that Spock and Icarus no longer exist, their light happily traveling along the country-curving two-lane road to strike our telescopes and astonish us. Their light left them four to five billion years before Earth was a twinkle in the eyes of the Sun’s nebula. The twinkling of Spock suggests repeated eruptions from its surface, but that’s just the leading hypothesis. 
 
Now think of your deceased ancestors, those long gone before you were a twinkle in your parents’ eyes. Occasionally, you might come across something reaching you from their time. Of course, they left you some physical traits—and maybe some behavioral propensities. Generally, you know them through the intervening lens of their children and grandchildren, or maybe even from farther back in your family history. How much like a fuzzy, indistinguishable smearing of their being like some fuzzy smeared shape of a distant lensed galaxy is their appearance. But imagine that your distant relative is someone like George Washington. Now, regardless of the temporal separation and the bending through the lens of historians, you do have a glimpse of the individual in your background. So, who in your distant history might be your Spock or Icarus, your George Washington? And how much, beyond hypothesis, do you really know about what made them act as you see them through the lens of intervening humans?
 
And now the future: It’s true that most of us will simply be fuzzed-out in the population of our time as seen through the lens of the ensuing generations. Maybe some of us will, for whatever reason, twinkle through, live long, and appear visible to future generations as an isolated, maybe a bit mysterious human entity. There will always be some lensing of a life as seen by those who follow. 
 
For you my wish paraphrases the Vulcan wish expressed by the character Spock on Star Trek: May you live long and twinkle.
 
*Selsing, Jonatan, et al., Dark Cosmology Centre. The Most distant single star ever detected. Online at https://dark.nbi.ku.dk/news/2018/the-most-distant-single-star-ever-detected/  also
Kelly, Patrick L, Jose M. Diego and 43 others. Extreme magnification of an individual star at redshift 1.5 by al galaxy-cluster lens. Nature Astronomy, 2, 334-342 (2018), online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0430-3

Recently, I stood by the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. As any topographic map will reveal, the river lies about a mile beneath the canyon rim, and the canyon stretches nearly 300 miles, at times reaching a width of 18 miles. At the bottom of the canyon, one can see sides either impossible for any inexperienced rock climber to climb or too steep to climb without great effort. The canyon walls dwarf any individual. It is truly a great hole. And it took a considerable time to make as rivers, mostly the Colorado, washed away trillions of tons of rock* over the past five or more million years. Although the front part of my brain knew that getting out of the the bottom of the canyon would be difficult, it wasn’t until I was standing in that great hole that I actually “felt” its depth, the steepness of its walls, the mercilessness of a white water river, and the great length of the chasm. Fortunately, for me, it was a matter of a pleasant helicopter ride both into and out of the Grand Canyon. In spite of the canyon’s beauty, I am not inclined toward living in a hole, regardless of its grandeur.  
 
Is it a bit curious that we think of a big nothing, a place that was once solid rock but is now an emptiness, as “something” significant? Maybe not. We’re used to seeing human erosion as acquaintances, friends, and family members suffer from depression, economic problems, addiction, and chronic illness. Those “big holes” mostly occur little bit by little bit just as the Grand Canyon underwent grain-by-grain erosion. But, as we all know, sometimes both geologic and human erosion occur catastrophically: Rock falls and landslides in the canyon and broken relationships and financial losses in human affairs, for example. 
 
Changes in circumstances, losses of any kind, and bad health and addiction can erode any psyche into a canyon. And like being in the Grand Canyon, those who are suffering see the only way out of their personal holes is by climbing towering steep canyon walls or riding a long and sometimes violent white-water river.
 
For those in the depths of personal canyons, there are usually no easy helicopter rides to the plateau above. What took a long time to dig isn’t easy to get out of; and even when there are mechanisms of extraction, the distance out is the same as the distance in. As we all seem to know either from personal experience or from what we’ve read or studied, getting out of our human canyons requires effort. Each person is like John Wesley Powell, the famous explorer of the Grand Canyon because every human chasm is, for that person, a new experience with the unknown. Powell provides a model for anyone who enters a human canyon. Having lost an arm during the Civil War, he explored the canyon in wooden boats. He made the journey into and out of the canyon in spite of his handicap and the rather crude materials available in the nineteenth century. We might say to ourselves, “If Powell could do it with one arm, then I can.” 
 
Apparently and regardless of hardships, humans have the capacity to enter seemingly inextricable places and with effort extricate themselves. Remember that when you find yourself in a canyon of your or some accidental making. Just like the Grand Canyon, there is a way out.    
 
*Grand Canyon: Length 277 river miles (446 km); cubic yards removed: 5.45 trillion (4.17 trillion cubic meters); average gradient of Colorado River, 7 feet per mile (1.3 m per km), obviously, in some sections greater and in other sections less.

Alfred Wegener, the “Father of Continental Drift,” which was the forebear of sea-floor spreading and plate tectonics, began his pursuit of the famous hypothesis at the beginning of the twentieth century. He had seen a “jigsaw-puzzle” fit in the coastlines of continents separated by an ocean and surmised that the fit couldn’t be coincidental. He then went on to research the possibility that the continents had formed when a larger continent (Pangaea) had broken apart. Unfortunately for Wegener, the geologic tools of his time were inadequate for his pursuit, and the prevailing view of Earth’s formation kept others from accepting his thesis. It wasn’t until after his death that geologists were able to establish the continental breakup with irrefutable evidence—though Wegener’s evidence based on petrology and paleontology was quite extensive. 
 
Familiar with puzzles because my mother worked them on a card table during the winter, I made the same observation Wegener had when I first saw a world map and the shapes of the continents. I distinctly remember saying to my father, “Gee, they look like pieces of a puzzle.” I don’t know why I remember that so clearly, maybe because I eventually became a professor of geology courses. As a very young child, I didn’t publish or even pursue my observation as Wegener had, but eventually, I learned I had acquired knowledge someone had already acquired and, also, that much discovery is rediscovery. The “nothing new under the sun” maxim is true for most of our knowledge. Occasionally, someone does something that is more than just a refinement of human knowledge, but generally, we live not as discoverers as much as we live as rediscoverers. And that’s the reason each generation faces the same problems. As each generation rediscovers, it can devote only part of its time to instructing the next generation in its “newfound” knowledge of old knowledge.
 
Today, even elementary school texts have information about sea-floor spreading and plate tectonics, but at the time of my “discovery” no such texts existed. It really wasn’t until the 1960s that information about Earth’s moveable lithosphere and crust became the facts du jour in popularized science accounts. It was about the same time that texts began to incorporate geologic information acquired after Wegener’s death, such as the discovery of the rifts that separated long, relatively young volcanic mountain chains in the oceans. 
 
But discoveries and rediscoveries in science are one thing; they aren’t apparently the same for social and psychological matters. Take, for example, the “rediscovery” of socialism that is sweeping through the current “young” generation. Now, a century after Marx’s communism was corrupted into dictatorships that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions and the impoverishment of many more, we have a generation of people who think that socialism is the panacea, the way to equality for all, for a life of ease provided for by some benevolent state. 
 
Once relatively prosperous Venezuela is the example of rediscovery without knowledge of past discovery. Dependence upon drugs is another example. And there’s little, sad to say, that any older generation can do to prevent a newer generation from its random rediscovery of what might already be available. Apparently, it’s the nature of generational gaps to perpetuate themselves. There’s an inherent rift valley that separates all generations; yet, much on either side of the rift is merely a mirror image of the other side, just as the ocean floors are separated yet the same. So, the continents of generations drift apart only to find themselves constructing a new Pangaea that will, in its time, also breakup.
 
Of course, there’s always refinement in rediscovery. THC is more abundant in marijuana buds today than it was in the 1960s. But the current generation of THC consumers believe they have "discovered" a harmless drug. Capitalism-tinged socialism and socialism-tinged capitalism are the political, economic, and social refinements of the twenty-first century. Even among geologists, there are refinements obtained from various instruments unavailable to Wegener, such as seismic tomography and ocean drilling rigs, and from formerly unknown fossilized organisms and mineral analyses. Things have remained the same with changes. Oxymoronic, right?
 
So, I like so many before me, often simply “rediscover” when I believe I discover. Am I not in this piece simply rediscovering the thoughts of George Santayana? “…When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I guess I was a little savage in looking at that map and seeing what Wegener had seen decades before I was born.
 
Wait! One more. When I was eight, I asked my dad to take me to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh to see the dinosaurs. We walked into the dinosaur hall, and I looked up at the Apatosaurus (then called Brontosaurus) and at the Diplodocus. I said, “The head on the Apatosaurus doesn’t look right. It was a plant eater, but it had elongate teeth like a carnivore.” It was, in fact, the head of a Camarasaurus. Topsy-turvy, right? I, a youth, had “discovered” what years later (1978) the paleontologists Dave Berman and Jack Mcintosh finally noted and changed (1979). The Apatosaurus has a different head today (probably not its original head, but one appropriate to the species). Just as I hadn’t published anything on continents when I was five or six, I didn’t publish my discovery on paleontology when I was eight. Had I done so, many children would not have walked around until 1979 with a faulty image of an “Apatacamarasaurus” in their heads. So, yes, every generation will have some insights, some, as in my youthful case, never acted on. And yes, every once in a long time and unlike me, some youthful Einstein will come along to change the world. But generally, we’re all about rediscovering. We’re all somewhat “savage,” to use Santayana’s term.
 
What will you “rediscover” today?

Just about everyone knows the story of Galileo’s struggle against the intellectuals and clergy of his time, particularly with Pope Urban VIII, his onetime friend. Hal Hallman points out in his Great Feuds in Science another way Galileo’s contemporaries fought his science in their attempt to preserve the intellectual status quo. He writes,
 
            “Others simply refused to look. One of the scientists who boycotted the telescope was Professor Giulo Libri. Upon this good man’s death…Galileo suggested that although Libri would not look at the celestial objects while on Earth, perhaps he would take a view of them on his way to heaven” (10).* 
 
All of us are like Professor Libri when we close our minds to new ways of looking. His refusal to look through the telescope to see, for example, that the moon was not a perfect celestial body, but was rather a small planet-like object with valleys and mountains, is much like the refusal of anyone to consider someone else’s political, economic, social, or family point of view. 
 
There are “telescopes” out there that all of us at times refuse to use. What are we afraid of seeing?
 
*Hellman, Hal, Great Feuds in Science. New York. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1998.

“The disorder that prevails is what requires my efforts,” said Confucius. 
 
And isn’t that the same with you?