Don: “I just realized that I’ve written over 1,300 of these blog entries.”
 
Reader: “You should make your essays shorter to save the planet.”
 
Don: “Why? Some ideas require more support than others. Essays should be as long as they should be, each one its own length. How am I endangering anything? Should Dostoyevsky have written a short novella called Crime and Punishment? Hmnn, when I think about it, do I really need to go into such detail about the tortured mind of Raskolnikov? Fewer pages might have saved some trees since that novel's publication in 1866 and its subsequent status as required reading in university literature courses.”
 
Reader: “Actually, that’s a different, but related, matter. Yes, his works appear in books; books are made of paper; paper is made from trees as you note. Dostoyevsky, aided by literature professors, killed a number of trees, but they don’t come close to what you are doing online. Go ahead; your verbosity is changing the planet. You don’t know what you’re doing to the planet, but every long blog diminishes the planet, bit by byte, atom by atom.”
 
Don: “The planet? Or should I ask, ‘What planet?’ How do my essays affect the planet? They’re on the Web; they don’t consume paper. I should put a disclaimer at the head of every blog entry: No trees were killed in the production of this essay.”
 
Reader: “I know you think a paperless world has little effect on Earth, at least, not the effect books have. That’s understandable; look at your personal library. You have hundreds of books. What’s that in trees? Gotta be the weight of a Mini Cooper at least? A stand of trees was destroyed just so you could have a personal library, but...”
 
Don: “Those trees were destined to die anyway. Now they’ve been preserved, possibly through my great, great, great grandchildren’s lifetimes or longer. So, in a sense, I’m preserving the planet, or at least, the trees, by buying, reading, and storing books.”
 
Reader: “Really? You think they’re going to keep those books around in a digital age? In an age of Kindle, it’s kindling status for most of those books, or landfill fill, I’m thinking. But I digress. Your digital footprint is changing the planet, and that’s what I’m getting at. Your blogs are devouring Earth atom by atom.”
 
Don: How, may I ask, does the writing of a blog diminish Earth and change atoms?”
 
Reader: “Hasn’t it dawned on you, Don, that your blogs require both storage hardware AND energy? Every digital bit is a conversion of physical Earth into information. And I’m not just talking about hardware, servers, and stuff like portable hard drives and CDs. According to Melvin Vopson, we are just a little under a century and a half from needing all the energy we currently produce to sustain our digital information.* And he says that by 2245, one half our planet’s mass might be converted into digital information. Of course, that’s hard to comprehend, but Vopson works on the assumption that information is the fifth form of matter that accompanies solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Information. Yes. Information. We just don’t think of it as something like the matter with which we are so familiar. But think about one of the points made by the late Stephen Hawking who said that black holes remove information from the universe, so, an in-falling star is more than just a bunch of matter as we ordinarily think of it. It’s information. Vopson argues that there’s an information catastrophe a-coming and that according to the mass-energy-equivalence principle, in five centuries the digital content we produce will surpass half Earth’s mass.
 
“You watch YouTube, you alter Earth. You read your newspaper online, you alter Earth. Vopson says that in ten years, global communication technology might use as much as 51% of the global electricity production. If growth continues at the current rate, there won’t be enough energy to sustain the information exchange. Think about it. You have a few readers; some people have millions. Some YouTubers get millions of hits. And that’s in a world in which not everyone has a computer. What happens when denizens of the deep Amazon and those of the Namib become a daily online presence? What happens when the billions of people who don’t have personal computers get one?”
 
Don: “Oh! Now I understand. I suppose the ideal is for me to just shut up to save Earth, but it’s so hard to be silent when my computer makes it so easy to produce digital bits that add up to bytes. I think; I write; and now I know I turn Earth into information.”
 
Reader: “Vopson quotes from an IBM estimate of 2.5 quintillion digital data bytes per day. You have to multiply that by 8 to get the number of bits. Global energy consumption is currently measured in Terawatt hours or in million tons of oil equivalent. That’s with only part of humanity online; only part living digital lives. What do you think will happen when population expands beyond eight billion, ten billion, or more, and a greater number of people are digitizing Earth?”
 
Don: “I’m getting a bit dizzy over the bits. Should we blame Gutenberg? He advanced what medieval monks did in copying manuscripts. And, now someone can go to Project Gutenberg to see more of those hard copies turned into digital books. I should just shut this conversation down before I use up too many atoms and actually become some denizen of a Tron program, living in a virtual world that now appears to be the destiny of my great, great, great grandchildren.”**
 
*Vopson, Melvin M. The information catastrophe. AIP Advances. Vol 10, Issue 8. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0019941  Online at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0019941
Accessed August 12, 2020. Vopson’s abstract begins, “Currently, we produce about 10^21 digital bits annually.” He further writes that the total number of atoms on Earth are, give or take a couple, 10^50, but with a current 20% annual growth rate in digital bits, after three centuries, the power required to sustain digital information will be greater than 18.5 x 10^15. Five centuries from now “digital content will account for more than half Earth’s mass, according to the mass-energy-information equivalence principle.”

**Of course, I couldn't leave this without drawing some analogy: Is it possible that many young people want socialism because they know more about virtual life than they know about real life and about the impoverishment, imprisonment, and murder justified by socialist regimes over the past 103 years? When people live in a digitized world, they take bytes for reality.  

Disclaimer: No hexapods were injured in the writing of this blog.

Whew! I was worried for a while. When I heard that insects were undergoing an extinction, I thought, “Woe is me. What am I going to do in the summertime or in subtropical climes for exercise? Swatting bugs keeps the muscles active especially on a hot humid night.” Well, now I—and maybe you—don’t have to worry about our six-legged friends. At least that’s what I understand from an article published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.*
 
Yes, I know insects are important. Bees and pollinating, for example. But creepy crawlies of all kinds just don’t interest me. I think I’ve been at war with all sorts of ant species for most of my adult life, probably because of those childhood “experiments” my cousin and I used to conduct on the sidewalk. I know it’s revenge they seek.
 
So, now I’m worried. I recently read about the insect apocalypse, but apparently, that’s not in the picture for North American humans. Are there lucky people where the insect Armageddon is occurring in other parts of the world? Well, maybe not so lucky. Have you seen those swarms of locusts?
 
Insects. Can’t live with them. Can’t tramp on enough of them.
 
*Michael S. Crossley et al, No net insect abundance and diversity declines across US Long Term Ecological Research sites, Nature Ecology & Evolution. (2020) DOI: 10.1038/s41559-020-1269-4 Online at https://phys.org/news/2020-08-insect-apocalypse.html  in a report by Joshua Paine.

We really can’t win in this game with the environment. We acquiesced, saying, “Okay, we’ll do everything we can to eliminate acid rain by reducing sulfur emissions from coal-fired power plants.” And now, we find out that agriculture has become the biggest anthropogenic source of sulfur. So says Eve-Lyn Hinckley, whose research identified a large quantity of sulfur released into soils, water, and air through agricultural practices.*
 
It appears to be another doomsday scenario. Remember the terrible affliction known as Minamata disease associated with fishing villagers and wastewater released from the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory? No? Terrible disease that affected fetuses in the womb, causing gross deformities. Well, there’s a potential for the same kind of neurotoxicity of water polluted by mercury sulfate. That compound can be altered to methylmercury by bacteria and then passed on to those who consume food that contains the organometallic cation.
 
We just can’t win. We need both energy and food. And we need shelter. We need power plants and farms and houses. Solving one problem simply shifts our attention to another, sometimes one arising from a solution, sometimes one we were never aware of. Just when we think we solved that troubling acid rain problem associated with power plants, we find out that our farms are also leaking sulfur compounds into our environment.
 
For almost every human action, there’s an unintended consequence. For almost every human discovery, there’s another unknown. Life’s just that complex.
 
You might look to your own relationship with the environment. Think you’re doing your part by driving an electric car? Do some research, and you’ll find that the rare earth materials in electric vehicles require mining and disruption of some environment. And they require transport to a factory via ships that spew enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and pollutants into the air and water through which they sail. It is only this year that the International Maritime Organization (sp.: Organisation) has imposed a low-sulfur requirement for ship fuel. They will still emit sulfur, and, as you can guess, there will be many shipowners seeking to skirt the “law” by burning the cheaper bunker crude until they are forced to change their fuel to one that will increase their costs by a third. But let’s say that the shipping cleanly gets the rare earth metals to the factory. There, the manufacturing process for most electric vehicles produces a larger “carbon footprint” than the manufacture of gasoline-powered cars,** and the waste from a single year’s production of a million electric vehicles could amount to a quarter million tons of toxic substances with no recycling process on the immediate horizon when those batteries die.
 
Here’s the dilemma. When we take stuff out of the ground, eventually we have to put stuff back in the ground. Fertilizers into depleted soils, for example. There’s no free ride. Whatever we do disrupts something big or small. We’ve been changing environments for millennia, and we will continue to do so, even as we applaud ourselves for “saving environments” by living so-called sustainable lives.
 
Sure, I want to minimize my effect on the planet, but no matter what I do to meet some environmentalist’s ideal, I’m going to affect Earth somehow—just as the well-meaning environmentalist can’t avoid altering the planet. But as I have noted elsewhere, life does that, and that’s natural. There were no burrows until there were burrowers, no nests until there were nest-builders, no decimated forests until there were blights and insects. We fall into that large category of organisms that change the planet, a category that includes all organisms. I say we stop using the word artificial. If other organisms could do what we do, they would. What rabbit wouldn’t want a field of carrots instead of an occasional wild tuber?
 
Selling our souls to the environmental devil? Maybe a statement by Pennsylvania Justice Musmano in Versailles Borough v. McKeesport Coal and Coke Co. is germane here. The judge wrote about living with the hazards of pollutants that was the center of the complaint:
           
             The plaintiffs are subject to an annoyance. This we accept, but it is an annoyance they have freely assumed [by choosing              to work for the coke plant and to live next to it] Because they desired and needed a residential proximity to their places of                employment, they chose to found their abode here. It is not for them to repine; and it is probable that upon reflection they                will, in spite of the annoyance which they suffer, still conclude that, after all, one’s bread is more important than landscape               or clear skies. Without smoke, Pittsburgh would have remained a very pretty village.***
 
I guess we all would like to live in pretty little villages—or on a farm in the middle of a city, giving us the best of worlds. Simple living, right? But we are where we are in the evolution of civilization. Villages are great in the ideal, but very difficult to maintain in the real. Do you want to grow your own food in ample supply? Manufacture all the objects you need? Get your energy from the local waterfall? Turn the local trees into paper? Make your own textiles? Turn sandstone into computer chips? Are you tired of electricity because it requires the destructive mining of copper and aluminum for wiring?    
 
In living civilized lives, we find ourselves having to solve problems of our own making, many of them byproducts of all that fills our needs. One of those byproducts is methylmercury, a danger to us and to our offspring. Going to do something about it? Going to change the world? No? Maybe Musmano was insightful when he wrote that “one’s bread is more important than landscape or clear skies.”
 
* https://phys.org/news/2020-08-agriculture-fossil-fuels-largest-human.html
 Accessed August 10, 2020.
 
** https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a1709966/will-some-gas-and-diesel-cars-still-produce-less-pollution-evs/
Accessed August 10, 2020.
 
***Versailles Borough v. McKeesport Coal and Coke Co., 83 Pittsb. Leg. J. 379.  By the way, for those not familiar with Versailles, the locals pronounce it “ver- sales.”

Before widespread media began to envelop human minds, thinking and behavior, except for innate human processes, were local. Family and village kept us tribal. As the Tim Rice lyrics state, “Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.”* Spreading messages today is easier than it was two millennia ago—or even a half century ago. Widespread media have, however, expanded tribal geography and “normalized” thought and behavior on a grand scale.  
 
Of course, humans have always been in a process of normalizing thought and behavior to conform to tribal practices. That process is especially obvious today when we look at toddlers wearing masks in public places. Too young to know differently, they see their public world as one of masked individuals. In the home they see whole faces; on TV, also. But when they venture into that outside world…
 
Pandemics have periodically ravaged human populations and changed the thinking and behavior of the times; now, COVID-19 has even altered fashion. Half faces are the sign of the times. We’re in the process of shaping future “normal” behavior and thought.
 
Today’s tribes are extensive and geographically separated but brought together through ubiquitous media. The new tribal normal will also reach the very young. Imagine being that first-grader or kindergarten student entering the world of masked classmates for the first time. “Billy, put your mask on properly.” Imagine going through your early years seeing in person only half faces, many of them covered by masks with cartoon animal mouths thought to be “cute.” Imagine hearing the constant corrections from adults to wear the mask properly, to never touch the face, to avoid all physical contact (not that that hasn’t already occurred as society has become paranoid about fraternizing children), and to ostracize oneself if a tickle in the throat elicits a cough. (Or imagine flirting with only eyes and forehead, only to discover later a toothless mouth)
 
Today, tribal thought and behavior can ravage free minds just as a pandemic can ravage bodies. We are being told that COVID-19 is a serious threat to the tribe. And, indeed, it seems to be one. But the same media that tells us that also avoids telling us that for the seven-month period between October 1, 2019, and April 4, 2020, the CDC estimates roughly between 24,000 and 62,000 deaths from the “ordinary” flu. That disease also caused between 410,000-740,000 hospitalizations, 18 to 26 million medical visits, and 39 to 56 million flu illnesses.** The same media makes little to no mention that the less deadly 2009 H1N1 pandemic killed between 151,700 and 575,400 people worldwide with 60.8 million cases; and 274,304 H1N1 (maybe up to 402,719) hospitalizations, and 8,868-18,306 deaths occurred in the United States, those deaths that can be added to the “ordinary” flu’s toll.
 
Now, I’ll admit, any statistic that ranges from 24,00 to 62,000 or from 8,868 to 18,306 makes me think the CDC doesn’t really have a handle on sicknesses and their effects. That makes me wonder how the COVID-19 is actually affecting humanity.*** And I wonder more so when I hear anecdotes about false positives and ineffective testing.
 
Of course, once in the mind, any thought is difficult to extract.**** Once in a behavioral pattern, any practice is difficult to change. That people are more aware of how a disease spreads is probably a good outcome of this pandemic. That the tens of thousands of yearly deaths from flu and other communicable diseases have largely been ignored by those who have the power and ability to convey news is probably bad. So, I have to ask, is all this focus as much about politics as it is about an actual and real threat? Where, for example, was the media outrage over the government’s lack of coordinated response to H1N1 or to the tens of thousands killed by the flu? Was the silence a matter of conditioning to that “normal”? Have we become accustomed to deaths by flu? Ho-hum. Or, was the media’s lack of outrage a matter of supporting a political position by omission?
 
And for you? How have you “normalized” your thinking and behavior over the past half year?
 
 
*Jesus Christ Superstar. Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber; lyrics by Tim Rice.
 
**CDC. You can search the CDC’s website for statistics on illnesses and deaths.
 
*** That millions of people have contracted the disease and that many have died is a hard reality and a cause for behavioral changes. That some—no one knows how many—deaths attributed to the disease were actually mislabeled is a fact. Here’s the CDC guideline on reporting the cause of death:  Vital Statistics and Reporting Guidance https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf
In the document, you will find this paragraph: “In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as “probable” or “presumed.” In these instances, certifiers should use their best clinical judgement in determining if a COVID–19 infection was likely. However, please note that testing for COVID–19 should be conducted whenever possible.”
 
****Remember that any repeated message soon makes the brain accept that message as true. Not my thought, but I accept it because I heard it more than once.

 
Remember way back to the outset of the pandemic and the panic over toilet paper? Do those days seem like ancient history in light of all you have experienced in the intervening time as a survivor—or should I say “masked survivor”? Oh! The hardships you faced and still face. The disruption of your life and the fear that the grocery store will no longer have any toilet paper!
 
There’s nothing insightful in pointing out that we live relatively soft lives, but that thought of our softness came to me recently as I walked the towpath of the old C & O Canal just outside of Hancock, MD, and then proceeded to the old rail line turned paved bicycle path. Along the way there’s a parallel dirt farm road that runs past the site where an old farmhouse once stood. Still on the land and not far from where that house stood is the old outhouse, now missing its door. Inside, the seat has collapsed. Neither privacy nor function now available to the needy cyclist along the bike trail.
 
As I was saying, hardships like a resupply of toilet paper aside, we live relatively soft lives for the most part. In an age before Charmin, people lived differently. Take the lives of the men who dug the canal. During the “Big Dig,” laborers were hit with cholera—a number of them died and many ran off the job. Digging a 185-mile-long ditch in the second quarter of the nineteenth century meant standing in puddles while shoveling, living along a progressing canal, and having no modern conveniences, probably not even an outhouse. That one in the picture above post-dates the canal dig.
 
Yes, life was harder in general during the nineteenth century. I recall James Burke, author and narrator of the books and series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed, pointing out that the nineteenth-century folks had about 500 foods available to them, whereas you and I have about 50,000.* Just look around the grocery stores (they sell more than toilet paper). And I think about how his pointing out the difference in variety and abundance affects what we believe to be important. Take tea time, for example. Er, rather, think about making tea.
 
Feeling the pressure of your fast-paced world even during times of shutdown and quarantine? Worried that researchers won’t find a cure or a vaccine for COVID-19? Depressed to the point of wandering around unshaven or without makeup while saying, “Woe is me”? Prohibited by your city, county, or state government from going to a bar? How tough are these times?
 
Not to worry. There are researchers researching everywhere. It’s just that some of them aren’t researching a cure for a virus. No, some of them, notably and maybe even ironically in China, are looking into the difference between boiling water on the stove as opposed to boiling it in a microwave. I know. This has been a problem front and center in your frontal cortex for years. Sure, those guys digging the canal while mosquitoes and cholera plagued their hard labor might have had some problems, but they never had to concern themselves with how they would use the electromagnetic spectrum to boil water for tea.
 
Who wants to watch a pot of water boil? The process is notoriously a long one, and even the added pressure inside a tea kettle doesn’t make the shortened boiling time an acceptable duration for the impatient tea drinker. “I want my tea…now!”
 
So much for relaxation in a fast-paced world. Seems that we want instantaneous respite from daily concerns and activities; we want a fully stocked grocery stores with shelves and shelves of both food and toilet paper. What do you say? “Stick the cup of water in the microwave. Two minutes, tops, maybe less, depending on the microwave and the size of the cup. And, hey, since when did the tea cup become a giant Starbucks mug? Isn’t the typical image of tea time a tiny cup too small for swigs? Are little triangles or squares of ‘sandwiches’ that don’t satisfy hunger not your ‘cup of tea’? Give me a MUG,” you say, “and give it to me fast. I have only a short time to spare. Heck. I’ll drink the tea while I work or while I binge watch something until this damn pandemic is over.”
 
But now, thanks to researchers, at least we know that old-fashioned boiling water in a pot or tea kettle is different from boiling it in a microwave. This is the science we needed in these trying times of our fast-paced world and suddenly dangerous and inhibiting world. And where better to experiment with boiling water for tea than in the University of Electronic Science & Technology of China? Tea from China and getting a “cuppa,” as the English say, well, those two go together like horsepower and race cars or shovels and nineteenth-century canal digs. The problem the UESTC researchers addressed is the way the water boils.** Put a pot of water on a stovetop and you get boiling from the bottom up, convection at work. Put a cup of water in the microwave, and you get nonuniform heating, no convection cells. The top of the water can be hotter than the bottom of the water. Now there’s a problem no one considered while sitting in that old outhouse along the canal.
 
Does heating liquid foods in a microwave make a difference in your life? Well, I guess. Think of heating something like a bowl of chili or some leftover soup in the microwave. Gotta go into the liquid with a spoon to stir it about halfway through the heating process. Otherwise, the top’s super hot, and the bottom’s still cool. The same thing happens to that cup of water for tea.
 
Lessons? Sure. Some I see; others, you see.
 
I think of the technology difference between my ancestors and me, between those canal diggers and my contemporaries. Microwaves? What happened to burning wood? Iron pots? Pretty heavy, especially when filled with water.  And then there was that process of cutting and hauling in the firewood. But when life was harder, people were probably harder. Had to be to survive. Doesn’t mean their lives were better, just different, though definitely, in daily activities, slower in some ways. If you’re used to watching the pot boil, then what’s the problem? If you’re used to one-minute-forty-second cups of tea, that’s what you expect. No slow sips, either. And multiple flavorings in exotic teas named after colors, black, green, white, all coming from lands far away, and all coming, if you desire, not as loose leaf, but in neat little packages for single cups—or mugs. What’s one of those little bags cost, anyway? At Starbucks, they appear to be as valuable as semiprecious gems when one works out the cost per cup.
 
Definitely, my life isn’t as hard as my ancestors’ lives, and definitely not as hard as the lives of those canal diggers or the farm family that had to go to a little building when Mother Nature called. And my impatience over boiling water, the impatience the extends to the number of clicks on a website, simply makes me a product of my times. So, from this, I take the lesson that I am truly a product of my technological times. And that makes me wonder how I am the product of influences other than technology. That canal, for example, gets numerous visitors each year as people ride canal boats in a recreation of olden days.
 
And my mind wanders in a stream of consciousness that includes other ways I’ve adopted a “microwave mind for speed and convenience.” I think of those long paragraphs in the essays of nineteenth-century writers, extensively developed and often for the twenty-first century reader, somewhat sleep-inducing. I think of ordering on Amazon and receiving the package in a couple of days. I think of flying from, say, Chicago to D.C., while riding in relative luxury, but occupying my mind with a book or magazine or a game or a movie or a quick nap or an observation about the physiography and that old canal over which I pass at 35,000 feet. I think about the flight attendant’s bringing me a cup of hot water and a teabag and imagine men in 1830 eating little that we would find appetizing and enjoying no toilet paper.   
 
 
*Burke’s stuff is available online. Just search Connections by James Burke. Season 1, Episode 1 can be found at. https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-iba-syn&hsimp=yhs-syn&hspart=iba&p=connections+james#id=1&vid=a58b4ce0999c567c3adc58e6d99ff9e5&action=click
 
**https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200804111516.htm   Accessed August 8, 2020.

History is always “in the making.” That means you are part of a future’s history. The Great Pandemic Era. Doesn’t really matter what we call it. People will designate our times as they designated other times, The Renaissance, for example, or the Middle Ages. Looking back is different from looking around. We can’t see our entire contexts. That’s a limitation on all generations, of course.
 
But in looking back on our times, those who write the history books will do what we have done to our ancestors’ lives: Simplify them. Look for causes and ramifications. Argue about what “really happened.” Think about it. You are going to be the center of future disagreements over how you lived, what you thought, the manner in which you were influenced. And it doesn’t matter how you or anyone else tries to shape how people in the future will view our times because no one now living sees the entire context, and all historians will interpret today within future contexts they cannot entirely see.

Almost every dwelling has some version of the “junk drawer.” It’s the place where both useful and useless objects lie in semipermanent repose, the “semipermanence” lasting years and decades. The drawer includes tools, and…. Why should I bother with a list? You need only open your own junk drawer to inventory objects lying helter-skelter. “Oh! I forgot I had this.” Or, “I wondered where that went. Geez, never can find it when I need it; I have to get my life organized.”
 
Government agencies are often the junk drawers of political ideas become expensive tax-funded duplicate and arguably frivolous programs. Take Nigerian agencies, for example. A report in 2019 found that of 719 Nigerian government agencies more than 100 do what other agencies do.* That’s the junk drawer of government redundancy. “But if you had just looked in the junk drawer, Mr. Politician, you would have seen we already have one of those agencies.”
 
Why mention Nigeria? Because I don’t want to become frustrated by naming all the redundant and wasteful agencies in the United States, agencies that have spent money on studies that connect drinking alcohol and visits to the ER, funding Serbian cheese (You read that correctly), paying for a Bob Dylan statue for the US Mozambique embassy, or addicting zebrafish to nicotine in the UK. The economic junk drawer of a big government is filled with a surprising number of superfluous objects.** It’s as though your own junk drawer reproduced another one, and another one, and another one, all accumulating from you more and more, all demanding more from you. And what will we do with this junk? And what will we do with redundant agencies to which we give little by little all our wealth without a return?
 
But forget the personal and community expense for a moment. Instead, think of the personal and community control lost to hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations written by the denizens of the redundant junk drawers. The accumulation of programs and regulations requires more junk drawers, more caretakers of the junk drawers, and more caretakers requiring more caretaker-assistants, all of who must justify what they do by adding more to the junk drawers in which they thrive.
 
*The Citizen. 18 Oct 2019. Online at https://thecitizenng.com/redundant-agencies-the-nation/
 Accessed August 1, 2020.
 
**Schow, Ashe. Dailywire. 27 Nov 2019. Here are the most wasteful government projects in 2019. https://www.dailywire.com/news/here-are-the-most-wasteful-government-projects-in-2019
Accessed August 1, 2019.

What if your great, great great grandparents could observe the world as you observe it? Would they have that jaw-dropping, wide-eyed expression of surprise that you lost long ago to a jaded response to visual stimuli? Face it. You’ve seen a lot: Much of it second hand via photos, images and videos on the Web, and in movies. And you have travel experiences because of a mobility unavailable to most great, great great grandparents. Sure, many of them emigrated to find new lives and had those personal jaw-dropping moments, but once settled in, they pretty much stayed settled in, their new neighborhoods replacing the ancient ones they left in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, or Asia. Many settled in ethnic neighborhoods, different geologically, geographically, climatologically, yes, but after a while, basically just more of what they left.
 
I think of my own limited experiences as a child in the context of how I now view the world. On occasion, you probably also reflect on your changed perspectives. Each of us became a bit more jaded as our real and virtual experiences widened. Tough to overload senses that have been exposed to so many overloads, to things we’ve allowed ourselves to see, like TV series about detectives solving murder after murder after murder. Each episode dulling us just a bit more.
 
So, it’s with a little joy that I remember one “virtual” experience that dropped my jaw and opened my eyes. It was the opening scene of the story proper of Goldfinger, the scene filmed from a helicopter flying over the Fontainebleau Hotel off Collins Avenue in Miami. As a kid, I had never been to a grand hotel and had only seen the beaches of Lake Erie and New Jersey. I had no idea such grandeur existed. Sure, I had been to Pittsburgh, at that time a city of about 650,000, bustling sidewalks, tall—not in the NYC heights—buildings, and large department stores and to Cleveland, Detroit, and the then farm city Columbus. But a luxury hotel? I had never stepped into one. The Fontainebleau blew my mind. The hedonism of the scene briefly overwhelmed me. “Silly,” you think, “what a hick. How sheltered was this kid?” In a word: Sheltered. Not by anything other than relative poverty, I suppose. A hard-working father had little money for frivolity. And why spend hard-earned wages on luxuries? Especially if one survived the Great Depression and WWII. Thus, modest vacations in modest accommodations line my childhood memories.  
 
Now, you might have little in common with my childhood limitations. You might have traveled more, seen more, and stayed in more luxurious accommodations than some seaside motel or home with a rental room. If so, I’m happy that you had your Fontainebleau experiences in person. I never saw the Fontainebleau in person until I moved to Miami during a sabbatical.
 
You will, of course, ask why I should entitle this piece with the names of great scientists. No, I’m not going to place myself among them. Rather, I want to note that like my great, great great grandparents, they would have a jaw-dropping, eye-widening expression if they could see an image captured by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. The image above shows two planets orbiting the relatively young star TYC 8998-760-1, some 300 light-years away (The two large planets are identified by arrows, and the sun they orbit has a halo of debris. The other bright spots are stars.)*  

Think now of the reactions that Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno, Brahe, and Kepler might have if they were alive to see the VLT image. Dropped jaws and opened eyes no doubt. I’d venture to say they would each fall into their seats.
 
But for you and me? Maybe just another blip in our otherwise jaded perspectives. “Ho-hum. Yeah, I’ve seen Hubble images. Heck, I just saw a video of Comet Neowise taken from the International Space Station—saved me the effort of trying to see it with my own eyes by waking up before sunrise or waiting for a cloudless night to see it just after sunset when the mosquitoes are out and hungry.”** Supersaturation of imagery from personal experiences and virtual experiences has dulled us (Though you might be an exception).
 
Recapturing and maintaining your childlike sense of wonder and amazement are challenging processes. The reason is simple: Both jaw-dropping and eye-widening reactions are spontaneous. You don’t plan them. And the moment after the jaw drops and the eyes widen, the dullness sets in, just as the olfactory senses dull with prolonged exposure to a scent.
 
And eventually Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno, Brahe, and Kepler would respond similarly. I suppose it’s human nature to become jaded. There is, after all, an evolutionary advantage to becoming so: Discovery is driven in part by boredom, by the attitude that “been there, done that, so what’s next?”
 
I want to leave you with another of my personal experiences, my observation of an old priest who taught at the private school I attended. He was a relatively renowned translator familiar with and literate in many languages (word was: 22 of them). Every time I saw him walk into a place with which he was familiar, he looked around as though he was seeing it for the first time. And I’m not just talking about some spectacular building, some Fontainebleau, some giant cathedral. It was even the plainest of rooms, an old classroom, for example. It’s that sense of wonder that I wish for you. Not just over an image no one has ever seen before, like planets orbiting a distant star, but over what you daily see—even though you have “been there, done that.” As you go through your day, look around. You think you’ve seen it all before, but I guarantee you missed something, and in discovering that or in rediscovering it, you will regain that spontaneity you lost.  
 
*Grossman, Lisa. This is the first picture of a sun-like star with multiple exoplanets. ScienceNews. 22 Jul 2020. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/first-picture-sun-like-star-multiple-exoplanets-astronomy-planets  Accessed August 3, 2020.
 
 
**https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-iba-syn&hsimp=yhs-syn&hspart=iba&p=youtube+video+of+comet+neowise+from+ISS#id=2&vid=9ffbacde71cd4e1148ba465feb1ae9ab&action=click  Accessed August 3, 2020.

Walked into a room I remodeled 15 years ago and reached for the light switch. OOPS! Wrong side of the doorway. I had changed the light switch’s position 15 years ago, but my brain sent my hand back to the former position. Sometime after 1958 my dad bought a Mercury that had push buttons instead of a gearshift. I drove that vehicle until I got my first car, a VW Bug with a stick shift on the floor. After driving that vehicle exclusively for about a year, I had occasion to drive that Mercury, automatically reaching for and pushing the buttons as I had before. When I got back into my VW, I reached to push the nonexistent buttons. Conditioning. Plain and simple. It’s tough to overcome. The brain likes what it’s used to liking. Patterns persist. Habits form. Repetition is a mode of existence. *
 
So, think carefully before you try to dissuade someone from a long-held political view. Conditioning applies there, too. Breaking a conditioned response takes time and patience, and there’s no guarantee that a person will not return to the former conditioned state.
 
*See an interesting YouTube video entitled “The Backwards Brain Bicycle: Smarter Every Day 133” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0&t=418s  Or read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess or see the movie for an interesting take on conditioning.