You know how you know stuff without remembering where you learned it? Happens all the time, that is, drawing on stored information without thinking about its source or accuracy, right? All of us have garnered information from study, observation, inculcation, and experience. Among the bits of information that made their way into my brain is one about π, particularly a curious fact about the accuracy it lends to drawing a circle: With just 39 decimal places of π, I remember from an unknown source, one could calculate a circle the size of the known universe to the accuracy of a single hydrogen atom’s radius. * I just can’t tell you where I got that brain-bit; it could have come from any one of a number of sources.**
 
Now, you might say, “So? What am I going to do knowing the size of such a big circle? If I mention the fact at Starbucks, will the barista give me a discount on a cup of coffee?”
 
Actually, figuring that large of a circle with such accuracy isn’t the end point here. Instead, think of the measurements you make in your daily life, measurements like the distance from kitchen to bedroom, the size of a carryon suitcase, the volume of your glass compared to the amount of smoothie you made in the blender, or the measurement of other humans, that is, not their shape or size, but the measurement of their character and behavior. How accurate are your measurements? How accurate are your conclusions?
 
In his Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, Morris Kline write about Georg Cantor’s “law of conservation of ignorance. “A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held” (103). *** Where does this connect to the effectiveness of π?
 
It’s almost impossible to escape the barrage of accusations loosely thrown about by political enemies today. Radio news-talk shows, TV talk shows, social media’s cascade of comments, and newspaper editorials reveal our penchant to accept uncritically any accusation made against the politics and character of anyone the powers of the day deign as despicable. The product is widely accepted false conclusions based on inaccuracies. I don’t have to tell you, if you are discerning enough to seek π-like 39-decimal-place accuracy in not only your beliefs but also in the beliefs of others, what those falsehoods are.
 
With so many false conclusions out there in the world of cyberspace, print, and broadcast media, it’s difficult even for a discerning person to find the Certain. In truth, we have abandoned Doubt in favor of Comfort. We draw approximate circles, maybe even enclosed harmonic oscillators whose variations from a true circle we ignore. We accept imperfections when we generalize, and generalizing is precisely the way we help spread false conclusions.

​We simply ignore how out-of-round our circles of acceptable truth truly are.
 
As you listen to or read statements from various sides of political arguments, for example, wouldn’t a good rule of thumb be to check out the decimal places of accuracy? Now consider this. As accurate as that universe-sized circle would be as measured against the thickness of a hydrogen atom, it is still not a perfect circle. And even running the decimal places of π beyond 39 places cannot get you to a perfect circle. Try it. You can set your computer to run π from now till the Sun becomes a red giant, and you still won’t have a perfect circle.
 
So, we go on with our imprecise generalizations and false conclusions because we believe they serve us well enough. Accuracy and truth are difficult to come by because we are always in the business of converting one kind of view into another, that is, in understanding the terms of another in our own terms. For about 4,000 years, people tried to find an accurate and handy fraction for π. In those four millennia and until the rise of computers, the number seems to have bounced between 3 1/7 and 3 1/8. Try Archimedes’ 22/7. Yes, you know the 3.14 you learned in school, and maybe you kept 3.1415 or 3.1416 in your head. You probably don’t remember your first exposure to π, and you probably don’t have the inclination to spend years running π to a million decimal places. So, three and one seventh or three and one eighth, which are numbers that the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians used would suffice for your needs. After all, if the mathematicians can’t get the fraction down without arguing about their accuracy, then why should you bother? If they can’t translate decimals to a universally agreed upon fraction, how are you supposed to translate the language of your intellectual opposition into your own language?
 
Many voices out there proclaim without checking the accuracy of their accusations because they assume they have obtained an accuracy very much on the order of those 39 decimal places. Every generation has its false conclusions based on inaccuracies. And sometimes—maybe often—what is argued so vehemently in one generation becomes the acceptable “fact” in the following generation either because that following generation subjects a controversy to unemotional examination or simply accepts the inculcation as a way of the world or a cultural truth. **** An ensuing generation often doesn’t know the source of its beliefs, and it only rarely takes the time and makes the effort to find a more accurate measurement of the past and the beliefs that the past left as a heritage. It’s easier to accept than to discover, as we all know. *****
 
The past is lost quickly, so, as Georg Cantor argued and Morris Kline worded as I repeat here for emphasis: “A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held.”******  A comforting conclusion, however false, is accurate enough for most of us most of the time.
 
 
*A distance measured in picometers. We’re talkin’ trillionths of a meter here in a universe that has stretched its diameter nearly 100 billion light years. Even if my foggy memory of the 39 decimal places is incorrect on a circle the size of the entire inflated universe, it’s probably very close to what it would be without cosmic inflation in a universe 13.7 or 13.8 billion years old.  
 
**One book comes to mind, but I’m guessing: Petr Beckmann’s A History of π (Pi). However, there are other possible sources of the fact. So, anyway, that number would be: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197 (I think)
 
***New York. Fall River Press, 1980.
 
****An idea expressed by Max Planck: Something controversial doesn’t become acceptable in “its time.” Those involved in the controversy simply die off, passing on the idea to the next generation that can examine without emotional involvement. I can think of Alfred Wegener, for example. His idea of moving continents wasn’t accepted until after he died.
 
*****I’m thinking of the parallels between the creation stories of the Babylonian Enuma Elish and first of the two creation stories in Genesis. Of course, there are differences, such as the Babylonian water goddess Tiamat and the Hebrew “Formless Void” from which all came into being. The Hebrew text seems to draw on the older Babylonian model of a Hexaemeron, so my unprovable guess is that the writer(s) of Genesis did not know from where they derived the idea for a six-day creation; but they did draw a difference. The Babylonians did not conceive of a time before time, a Nothing that preceded Everything. Their cosmos was created out of Tiamat, a pre-existing entity.
 
******Here I’m thinking of the “Russian collusion” pushed relentlessly over the past two years or more and even after the Mueller Report and its mostly anti-Trump lawyers found no evidence of collusion. Once a false conclusion takes hold, it clings to the mind like a polyplacophoran on a tidal pool rock.  

I don’t know whether or not you’ve noticed, but there’s a lot of anger out there. Seems that no one can do or say anything without some angry backlasher responding on social media or on pundit shows. A bit depressing, isn’t it? Apparently, many get their blood boiling enough to seek some bloodlust satisfaction.
 
Too bad evolution’s workings are largely untraceable. It’s difficult, as you know, to pinpoint when some gene is going to change its function, be lost to the future, or incorporate itself in a future. The best we can do is to say, “Here’s a gene that functions so.” We can link gene to organism, too. Take Komodo dragons, for example. These scary creatures have anticoagulant saliva, but they also have genes that regulate haemostasis; that means Komodos can reduce blood loss after one of their kind bites them. According to a study by Abigail L. Lind and others, the dragon’s genome contains two coagulation factors as a result of positive evolutionary selection.*
 
In an age when so many are out to draw blood from their intellectual opponents, we could use a little positive selection to protect us from the cuts and bloodletting on social media. Unfortunately, evolution occurs at the species, and not at the individual, level. So, incorporating into our emotions some analog of fibrin, the clotting agent, isn’t in any individual’s future.  Yet, having such a coagulant nature seems to be a necessary protective adaptation should social media’s bloodthirst last not briefly, but through numerous generations.
 
In a society of dragons, being bitten is not just possible, but probable. History records such biting in every generation, and with the rise of the printing press and then newspapers, virtual biting proliferated. Electronic media put more dragons in contact with one another; thus, more biting. Since no emotional coagulant gene has as yet entered the human genome, the only immediate protection lies in muzzling the mouths of the dragons or in staying out of the dragons' den. Otherwise, we bite; we bleed.
 
*Lind, Abigail L., et al. Genome of the Komodo dragon reveals adaptations in the cardiovascular and chemosensory systems of monitor lizards. Nature Ecology & Evolution 3, 1241-1252 (2019) https://rdcu.be/bOmhS or https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0945-8

Maybe it’s true that Neanderthals would never have developed beyond what they were before they died out. After all, they didn’t seem to progress much over their quarter-million-year reign in Europe: Pretty much the same tools for millennia. But they did survive for a period longer than we have currently occupied their former places.
 
And maybe the reason they survived so long is that they didn’t put octopuses on their faces. Say what?
 
Live Sci=nce online has posted a story by Mindy Weisberger under “strange news.” * Here’s the title: “A Woman Placed an Octopus on Her Face for a Photo. Then It Bit Her.” Okay, I’ll spare mentioning the woman’s name, but I can’t help but comment on human folly. It’s human folly that will probably keep us from enduring as long as the Neanderthals.
 
Why would someone put a live octopus on her face? Or why would a couple of Peruvian lovers kiss while balancing precariously on a bridge over a road in Cusco? Yeah. Precariously. Maybeth Espinoz hopped onto the railing, wrapped her legs around Hector Vidal, lost her balance, and as she fell backward toward the road dragged him with her. **
 
Neanderthals lasted a very long time. True, they didn’t build bridges over busy highways. They didn’t catch octopuses as far as we know (or at least, as far as I know). In either case, I’m guessing that Neanderthals wouldn’t put a wild cephalopod with a beak and toxic saliva on their faces and wouldn’t lean precariously over a high perch just for a brief kiss.
 
Yes, the Neanderthals did die out. And maybe something like putting an octopus on a face or falling off a high rock might have done them in. But in our claim for superiority, I think we might consider the many similar instances of our folly that diminish that superiority.
 
 
*https://www.livescience.com/octopus-bit-womans-face.html
 
**https://www.ibtimes.com/couple-falls-their-death-while-making-out-bridge-peru-2811867

The headline is troubling: “With nowhere to hide from rising seas, Boston prepares for a wetter future.” But the map reveals something that mitigates some of the implied danger. The map that accompanies the article in ScienceNews by Mary Caperton Morton (August 6, 2019), shows the Boston shoreline ten years after the arrival of the Mayflower and the shoreline after the city more than tripled its land area by filling in its marshland and tidal flats. * Land at Logan and you land on what was once five islands. Visit Faneuil Hall and you stand where the Pilgrims could only wade at best. And the article cites a prediction for a rise in sea level that would submerse another meter and a half by the end of the century.
 
But alas! Isn’t the lesson one that we haven’t learned since the civilization at Ur and the pre-civilization encampments along the Black Sea? We love our seaside villages, but in building them, we risk inundation. Probably nowhere ever brought this thought home to me more than Chatham on Cape Cod. When a storm breached a narrow sandy barrier, it allowed waves to attack the “mainland” cliffs. People lost their homes as the sand beneath them washed away. But, standing on the new beach and looking at the cliff, I could see layers of sand mixed with thin layers of soil. Sea level had been both higher and lower. When it was lower, it was really lower, not just a meter or two, but a hundred meters and more. When it was higher, it was meters higher. Sea-level and near-sea-level homesites have been in jeopardy since people moved out of caves and started to build lean-tos. And this process of “filling in” low areas has a very ancient origin.
 
So, yes, Boston’s shoreline will probably undergo flooding, and that flooding might well be caused by a an influx of glacial meltwater flowing into thermally expanding seas. But in a so-called “modern age” with archaeological records of what coastal communities underwent in going underwater, isn’t there some finger-pointing to do? At? City planners, town fathers (or, to be politically correct, “town parents”). Logan Airport wasn’t built before the ancient cities were inundated. People had access to the histories of shorelines. Coastal geomorphologists work for both Massachusetts and the Federal Government. Private universities have their share of them, also. Surely, someone might have said, “You know, if you build in a marshland, you could find your airport as much below water as you hope to maintain it above water.”
 
Hubris is the first of sins as I have said elsewhere. We can declare ourselves godlike, but we are, in truth, still fallibly short-sighted. Not far from Boston one can see in the cliffs of Cape Cod the tale of changing sea level. Did no one ever look?
 
If warming continues, sea level will probably rise—though not necessarily as the direst predictions indicate. Problems will occur; new expensive remedies will be incurred.
 
Of course, one could argue that the nature of a burgeoning population and the pressure on city parents to accommodate more people and business, as well as to rid itself of unwanted fill material, demanded solutions in the moment of needs. Yet, those lessons of building on the shore and in the marsh seem somehow never have made themselves into the brains of a group of people who have a tradition of intellectualism and science, of history and research. And what of those civil engineers who reclaimed the marshland? Did they sleep through their courses in hydrology and coastal geomorphology?
 
Someone explain to me how a modern civilization repeats the mistakes of ancient civilizations and Stone Age peoples. As for me, I rest comfortably at more than 300 meters above sea level, knowing that during the night I won’t be awakened by a sudden surge of rising tides.
 
*Mary Caperton Morton’s good summary of the problem Boston faces can be found at https://novelso.com/joinnow/step1.php?lp_tweak=general&a_aid=tvnce&data1=&data2=warmer&data3=https%3A%2F%2Fsciencenews.org%2F&data4=%24%7BSUBID%7D&data5=16703
ScienceNews Magazine, Vol. 196 No. 3, August 17, p. 16.

“Rigidity increases with increasing entropy in the human. As the old timers are wont to say, ‘Just ain’t what I used to be. The old parts are wearing out. Stiff as a board every mornin’ so it takes me a while to loosen up.’ Isn’t that the case with many, and maybe eventually with all of us?”
 
“Well, maybe,” you respond, “but there are many who practice yoga. They appear to retain much of their youthful flexibility.”
 
“What you just said gives me a thought. Although I do think many are stiff and inelastic physically, sometimes the physically inflexible have very flexible minds, and, of course, vice versa. Is there a yoga of the mind?”
 
You continue, “That’s not a bad thought. We’re advised to be active and remain flexible, and yoga does that for the body, but the mind is a different matter. So, that gets me thinkin’ about what a yoga of the mind would look like. Hmmn. Reading what I would ordinarily not read might work, reading what appears to be a different point of view especially. Trying to argue from another side of an issue, but that’s really, really hard to do. I’ll bet there are more ways to keep the mind flexible. Meditating? Doing math? Leaning new skills. Mastering another language… I just need some time to think of other ways.”
 
“Now you have me goin’,” I say “especially when I look over what I perceive to be the thoughts of the young today. I might generalize and say many of them are intellectually rigidly old. It’s as though they’re being taught to practice noga, the ancient art of inflexibility and stiffness. Many of their tutors are, in fact, masters of intellectual noga. But then, maybe that’s always been the human condition. One generation affects the pliable minds of the following generation. Those minds then stiffen, and they affect the minds of those in the next generation.”
 
“You are exhibiting your own inflexibility when you generalize like that,” you say. “It’s true that developing minds can be shaped while they are elastic, but that doesn’t mean that once shaped, those minds have to be inelastic. Yet, at the same time, I think I see your point.”
 
“I realize that everyone has to deal with his or her own everyday problems and concerns, but when I look at the trends on social media and the national media, I see an insidious stiffness pervading the minds of youth,” I observe. “Forget the adults. They’ve been practicing mental noga for too long now for most of them to regain their elasticity. You can see it in the political arena, and there isn’t a mental yoga instructor anywhere who seems to be capable of loosening up those arthritic thoughts. The body politic seems to be especially the body inflexible. Likewise the Fifth Estate appears to be locked into stiffness now that news appears to be agenda-driven.
 
“But I also realize that practicing mental noga is nothing new. Each of us, however, might think of limbering up a bit, doing a little mental stretching, and bending some ideas that are becoming very stiff.”

In his book Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness, John S. Rigden writes, “A location has no meaning in the absolute sense…[It is] always relative to something else” (79). * That got me to thinking, “Will we ever resolve the designation of “relative” and “absolute” in matters human?” And that question led me to musings about identifying who we are, where we come from, and what we do in terms of relativity and absolutism.  
 
We all know that Einstein is most famous for “Relativity,” a theory that can be broken into two explanations that tie first space to time and second space-time to gravity. Since his 1905 and decade-later papers on “special” and “general” relativity, the term relative has oozed its way into the everyday vocabulary and found its application in psychology, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and artistic and musical expressions. In fact, “relative” has come to dominate absolutist Either/Or arguments that run from universities, to churches, to office spaces. It is the basis, ironically, for positions on individual autonomy. I say “ironically” because having a relative value has become an absolute for many. **
 
And so it is with place, one of the key themes running through articles on this website. We know that there is a mutual influence, as place defines us and we, in turn, define place. We become carriers of place, recognizable as individuals from either “side of the tracks,” from Walmart and Dollar General to Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue, and from the Occident to the Orient, and so on. We define other people as relatively the same or relatively different, and we associate them with places of work, worship, or whereabouts that differ from or equate to our own places. But once we define others relative to ourselves, we stamp an absolute on them, and in doing so, also stamp an absolute on ourselves.
 
In fact, we want both relativism and absolutism in matters human. We know, for example, that even those who subscribe to a “moral standard” do so with some reservations when faced with personal decisions in isolated circumstances—giving rise to situational ethics or morals. Take the position of many on murder. Killing is “immoral,” but killing killers isn’t. Interestingly, we hold ourselves as absolutes against which we can judge the behaviors of others, much the same as we can judge the movement of the moon against the background of the seemingly stationary and absolute positions of the distant stars. We might, however, remember that even the background is in motion, imperceptibly so, but moving nonetheless. Those situational variations in our own lives should indicate that we also move like the distant stars. Our ethical and moral places also move imperceptibly, but we still use them as stationary absolutes.
 
Anyway, maybe it would behoove each of us to ask ourselves every so often whether we are acting out of or thinking out of relativistic or absolutist terms. Maybe we should each consider whether or not we apply relativistic thinking to our own lives and absolutist thinking to others’ lives. And maybe we should ask whether or not we ascribe absolute identity to others because of our relative understanding of the places—both figurative and literal—we associate with them.
 
If some alien space craft should land at your place and aliens to step out to speak, would they say, “Ah! You Earthlings! You’re all the same”? “Everywhere we observe you, you think your place is the absolute upon which all others can be judged. You tend to think of your place—home, neighborhood, town, workplace, and church—as the center of the universe unless you have widely traveled or lived in multiple communities and tested multiple ethical systems.” And finally, “You Earthlings just can’t decide whether or not your thinking derives from an objective Absolute or a subjective Relative. And that intrigues us because in our understanding of the universe, which seems to mimic that or your late Albert Einstein, we think the relative IS the absolute in transforming one’s frame of reference into another’s.”

We might think we stand on a moral high ground from which we can view the surrounding terrain, but the shroud of Ego prevents us from seeing higher elevations. 
 
*Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. 2005.
 
**Like the claim by some that “gender” is whatever one wants it to be and is dependent on culture, but once declared, it is irrefutably absolute. 

“Am I,” I ask in all sincerity, “a mindless member of a crude crew, a group that some find an easy mark for their pandering? Am I simply looking for panderers when I read the news, just looking for gratifying statements? I’m beginning to think that when a headline in the news or title of an editorial catches my eye, I am just looking for psychological security in confirmation and promise. Am I not, for example, like some inexperienced youth listening to promises of utopian politicians?”
 
You say, “But aren’t all of us like that, even the panderers, the con artists, the conspirators? If there isn’t anything new under the sun, then those who manipulate were at some time also manipulated. None of us was reared in a vacuum. At the beginning, we’re all mindless and crude, pliable and impressionable, and definitely ignorant as a block of wood. Don’t we initially feel more than think; guess more than reason, and accept rather than experiment?”
 
“True,” I return, “but I’m concerned that having passed through that early stage and having gained a little knowledge, I’m still a relatively mindless crudity of sorts; only now I seek out what previously I had not sought because I’ve been whittled into shape, made into someone or some group’s puppet, to seek whatever and however I was told to seek. It’s as though and at times I am a puppet asking the puppet maker to further refine my form. And the carving tools are the headlines and editorials I read.
 
“What is imposed upon the infant, the infant cannot judge. But reaching an age of judgement after babyhood, I probably gravitate toward that which makes me feel secure, that which I have framed in understandable terms and emotions because of some group’s influence. The raw block of wood I was as a baby the grownups around me chiseled me into a basic shape, and in doing so, shaped my initial understanding of humanity, that is, my understanding of human affairs.”
 
“If I understand you correctly, I surmise you want to be an independent thinker. Noble goal, but think of the difficulty of difficult thinking,” you suggest. “Any attempt by any of us to strike out on our own intellectually requires a paradigm shift, and that means breaking from long-standing traditions, even personal traditions. Paradigm shifts are changes that are truly hard to effect. So, maybe you are a bit mindless and crude because you find comfort in panderers, and in finding such comfort, you are no different from most people. Panderers know how to get to you on some basic level, a level of weakness. Panderers, for example, will say, ‘If you’re in debt, we can alleviate the problem.’ They tell you what you want to hear, which, by the way, is what you were told you wanted to hear.
 
“Trying to understand the workings of a complex being like a human, even the one you call Yourself, doesn’t lend itself to some beautiful simplicity. So, since human things are complex, you prefer the simplicity at your fingertips, the guidance of those who can manipulate you by playing to your desires and to the beliefs that conform to those desires.
 
“I have to ask why you brought this up in the first place.”
 
I reply, “I was watching the pandering pundits attempt to explain the mass shootings of August, 2019, when I questioned what I was with respect to those who confirm views that simplify not just with respect to atrocities, but also with respect to any behavior or intellectual position. The ‘larger’ issue for me became in a moment one of asking whether or not I could ever achieve a paradigm shift or whether or not I might remain a crude puppet of my times. Right now, I believe psychological inertia keeps me crude.”
 
Then a thought strikes me, “You might not be old enough to remember the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (born Berggren) and his top-hatted puppet Charlie McCarthy. You can probably find videos of Bergen’s performances on YouTube, but suffice it for me to say that during the performance, the audience couldn’t wait to hear what Charlie had to say, to hear his clever splinters of thought. Bergen also chiseled another piece of wood into the puppet Mortimer Snerd. Mortimer was essentially a mindless crudity. I sometimes ask if I am Charlie or Mortimer, both puppets that some Bergen gives voice to and controls.
 
“Even when I’m clever like Charlie, I remain shy of that intellectual paradigm shift that seems so elusive because, in truth, I speak the words of the cultural ventriloquists who hold me in their lap. Maybe appearing to be Charlie McCarthy rather than Mortimer Snerd is my only consolation: Being a seemingly clever puppet rather than an obviously dumb one appears to be the best I can do since I have not realized some paradigm shift that sets me apart from the masses.”
 
“You’re being hard on yourself,” you offer. “It is true that people keep arguing the age-old problems and philosophies, and it is also true that others have offered what they believed to be new paradigms regarding human interactions only to find later that they have merely voiced the words of ventriloquists past. 
 
“None of us might ever get past the puppet stage in matters human. But we can look at others as a lesson for ourselves. We can look to see whether or not those who figure so prominently in our society are sitting on another’s lap when they write or speak. We can look for the whittler in the wood. We can see the worker in the work. And when we recognize a puppet in the making or in the acting, we can look to see who plays the ventriloquist behind the voice. Understanding how others might be puppets won't change them or the generational process that produces puppets. With regard to that 'paradigm shift' you seek, you might consider asking whether you have not done a little whittling yourself. Maybe your paradigm shift lies in the puppets you have sculpted in part or in whole. Maybe someone else has a moving mandible through which you project your voice.”