The elephant in the room is human interference with Nature. First, we screw up some ecology or landscape, and second, we botch our attempt to “fix” it. Apparently, it’s built into our nature to change Nature. Strange, though, that in all those attempts to live harmoniously without overly exploiting some place, we compose and impose a new dissonance.
 
And now we know that the elephant in the room is also an elephant. In an attempt to enhance elephant populations and restore the natural setting of Malawi, the government moved hundreds of elephants into their wildlife preserve. Unfortunately, the unintended consequence followed: Tsetse flies and sleeping sickness.*
 
Wait! I was wrong. The elephant in the room is a forest. Although California has been the site of forest fires for as long as there have been forests, the presence of human habitation makes fires more newsworthy today than, say, 10,000 years ago. Maybe I should rephrase my “elephant in the room” here. The elephant is really the state of California’s effort to maintain a natural setting for more than 30 million people, many of them very, very rich and famous, rich enough to live in exclusive communes of multi-million-dollar homes. So, as the fires rage and tragically threaten communities, we see, in October, 2019, the governor of the state cast blame on the power company for not updating its power transmission system—even though the government refused to grant money for updating that the power company asked for years ago. But, it’s a complicated issue, right? Shouldn’t the power company simply charge its customers more for the power they desire? Yes, but who did the complicating? Californians seem to want electricity, even the more expensive “green” electricity, but all such power has to travel through wires and across landscapes with trees. The state decided that logging was evil or unnecessary or just plain harmful to Nature because a powerful cadre of environmentalists convinced the politicians to limit logging. The result, of course, was more forest to burn in fires started on purpose, by accident, by old wires felled by falling branches or trees,** or by Nature’s natural sparking mechanism, lightning.
 
The elephant in the room is definitely human interference. We cause a problem, and then, in solving that problem, we create another problem. The process occurs because we cannot, with a large population demanding all modern conveniences in every landscape and ecology, live harmoniously with Nature. Sustainability is largely a myth. The duet we want to sing with Nature is dissonant.
 
And the elephant in the room is scapegoating. During every fire season, when the seasonal Santa Ana winds flow down mountain slopes to fan fires in California, someone from the self-proclaimed elite class inevitably cries “climate change,” seemingly unaware of the natural cycle of high- and low-pressure systems that control weather in the American West. So, the rains will fall during the California winter, causing floods, and the droughts will persist in the California summer, causing conditions for fires. No amount of human “correcting” will change that natural cycle.
 
Tsetse flies will follow the elephants into Malawi. And around Lake Malawi, other flies will proliferate because the people there overfish the cichlid population, the fish that feed on those lake flies whose swarms look like dark clouds.*** Everything we do to sustain ourselves has a consequence. We exacerbate consequences when we selectively choose a part of Nature we want to use or save. Save the forests in California? Expect the fires. Save the elephants in Malawi? Expect the tsetse flies. Overfish to feed a population? Expect a negative consequence. Build a multi-million-dollar home in a wooded area with uncleared aging biomass and supply that home with electricity? Expect destruction.

For Malawi, apparently, the elephant in the room is actually an elephant.  
 
*Jali, Kenneth. Malawi fights tsetse flies, disease after wildlife relocated. Phys.org. 30 Oct 2019.
https://phys.org/news/2019-10-malawi-tsetse-flies-disease-wildlife.html   Accessed October 30, 2019.
 
**Or, as a Getty, California, official said in a press conference shown on Fox news: By “an act of God.” Apparently, for the devastating fire started when a tree branch fell onto a wire.
 
***YouTube has a video of the flies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs33k1b6N_A
 Accessed October 30, 2019. The problem of overfishing cichlids in Lake Malawi is reported in
Masina, Lameck. Malawi Works to Contain Overfishing on Lake Malawi. Online at https://www.voanews.com/africa/malawi-works-contain-overfishing-lake-malawi  Accessed October 30, 2019. The film does not make the connection between overfishing and the proliferating fly population, but that connection does, in fact, exist. Cichlids feed on flies. 

Okay, I’m not asking everyone to be a scientist, but something in the news makes me think of a line from a Seinfeld episode. I’m probably paraphrasing here, but the essence is this. When a woman tells Jerry that she uses email, he says, “What are you, some kind of scientist?”
 
That I would think of this today, October 29, 2019, on the fiftieth birthday of the Internet, is a happy coincidence. I’m sure that like Jerry, there was a time when I knew little about email. I do, after all, remember when my university department acquired its first tabletop computer, a Commodore 64 and how I thought, in connecting it to a weather station, that it was remarkable for its speed. Ah! Those giddy days of high-speed computing and interconnectivity. We thought we had become the epitome of expansiveness. We knew how the Wright brothers felt.
 
But back to that something in the news that reminded me of the Seinfeld scene. StudyFinds (online*) reports that in a survey of 3,000 British adults, 17% of them think “Earth” is the name of our galaxy, about 20% think the Sun is a planet, and 10% think the Solar System has 12 planets. No doubt, for the surveyed Brits, someone who knows that the galaxy is called the Milky Way and that the Sun is a star is probably some kind of scientist.
 
Apparently, for many the extent of place is a difficult concept, and that means, also, the extent of space. It’s as though some, if not all, people live in a small parish. I’ll give you an example. Say, you argue that there is a difference between matriculating at a large university and at a small college, that the larger institution provides greater access to a model of the world as a whole. True, there are more people in the large university, but what is the size of the circle of friends and acquaintances for any student? Does that circle extend much beyond the chance meetings of people outside the discipline of choice, outside the dorm floor or the dorm itself, outside a team or Greek environment? I’m guessing 300 friends and acquaintances at most for students of both large and small institutions. But my guess is, according to some studies, wrong. That circle is closer to 150. At least, that seems to be the estimate according to the Social Brain Hypothesis (formerly the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis). Robin Dunbar tied brain size to social unit size and found that 150 is the number for a circle of casual friends, though it could extend to 250 for the most social among us. Fifty of those in the circle of 150 would be “close friends.” Fifteen is the number of people one relies on for sympathy in times of need or for confidentiality. Five is the size of the immediate support group.**
 
“Come on, now. We have email; we have social media. We’re interconnected. Why, I have friends I don’t even know,” you say.  
 
No, bottom line: We ain’t as cosmopolitan as we think we are just because we have social media and email. Living in a large group, be it university or city, doesn’t for anyone extend that group to the 300 I might have postulated. Dunbar even suggests that those modern connections might make us less social in the long run, a thought you probably have every time you witness two teens walking side-by-side but texting others rather than talking to each other.   
 
Let me, in a violation of good writing practice, repeat, lest you think I’ve run into a different subject. I’m not asking everyone to be a scientist. Instead, I am pointing out the cosmopolitanism of parochialism. Yes, everywhere we look, from the largest cities to the isolated farmlands, we can find some form of parochialism. “But, you say, “surely, you’re not including me, an urbanized educated city- or suburb-dweller in that category?”
 
“Yes, in a way, I am. But don’t consider it an insult. Consider, instead, that those Brits who don’t understand Earth’s place in the Solar System or the Solar System’s place in the galaxy, or, much less, the Milky Way’s place in the universe, aren’t dumb. They are just limited both by how much they can know and by how much they need to know because it is relevant to their personal lives.
 
Looks as though all of us live in a local church parish, attend parochial school, and have concepts limited by a brain of finite size and computing power. We all have those I-know-that-face-but-can’t-remember-the-name moments. We all have misconceptions about the nature of Nature, and none of us, no matter how sophisticated we deem ourselves, can conceptualize a universe that might be infinite and that has probably more than the two trillion galaxies of recent estimates. Little Earth is, in fact and for all practical purposes, the whole universe. And more than that, even our local “parish” society is a Milky Way that we cannot fully know.
 
And now, it’s Judgment Time: The next time you see anyone on TV cast aspersions on someone or some group because he, she, or they are “unsophisticated,” think of that little parish of like-minded people with whom anyone typically associates. Everyone lives in a rather small universe; everyone’s “planet” is a whole galaxy to him or her. Those who claim cosmopolitanism are probably among the most parochial among us. And it doesn’t take a scientist to understand that.
 
*Renner, Ben. Spced Out: 1 in 6 Adults Believes The Entire Galaxy Is Called ‘Earth.’ ahttps://www.studyfinds.org/spaced-out-1-in-6-adults-believes-entire-galaxy-called-earth/
Renner reports that the survey was sponsored by Google Pixel 4. Accessed October 29, 2019.  
 
**Konnikova, Maria. The Limits of Friendship. The New Yorker. 7 Oct 2014. Online at https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-media-affect-math-dunbar-number-friendships   Accessed October 29, 2019. I recommend the article and  
a YouTube video on the Dunbar number: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2qjRG6iV8M

Where am I, in a carnival? In front of one of those wavy mirrors that distorts my image? Who thought to put one of those strange mirrors on the passenger side of cars with the warning, “Objects are closer than they appear”? It’s bad enough that we have all sorts of distractions when we’re driving. Someone added a distorted mirror for which we have to compensate mentally before we cut another driver off by pulling too quickly back into the right lane after passing.
 
Meatloaf has a song about that mirror. “Objects in the Rearview Mirror May Appear Closer than They Are” is a rather insightful reversal on the mirror’s warning in a take on how we humans look at what’s behind us, that is, the past. We perceive significant events in our past as close to our present. Memory keeps the past in the present: A lost loved one, an embarrassing moment, a great achievement…All are for us distant, yet apparently close.  
 
That objects and events from the distant past “appear closer than they are” is not just a matter of human emotions; it’s a universal principle. And by that I don’t mean some generalization of the human psyche. Apparently, the universe also has its rearview mirror distortion. When astronomers look into the deep past by looking at distant radio galaxies, they see galaxies that appear larger than expected. Here’s how astronomer Professor Michael D. Smith, explains it: “We already know that once you are far enough away, the universe acts like a magnifying glass and objects start to increase in size in the sky. * Those radio galaxies, by the way, are so large they make the Milky Way look like a horsefly on a horse. They aren’t just a paltry 100,000 light years in diameter like our galaxy, but rather millions of light years across.
 
Now, what’s a human to do? Not only are the events and objects of our personal pasts apparently closer or farther depending on our psyches, but also events and objects throughout the universe that should seem smaller with distance appear larger than expected—but only for those personally affected. We just can’t get seem agree on perspectives on things gone by. Some events, like 9-11, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan appear larger for some than for others. In 2011 the International Council on Security and Development carried out a survey of 1,000 men in Afghanistan’s war-torn Kandahar and Helmand provinces to see what they knew about the attacks on 9/11, the very cause of the war in which they were involved. Ninety-two percent of 15- to 30-year-old men didn’t know about the event that “foreigners” call 9/11, even after being read a three-paragraph description of the attacks! ** Or think of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453). What might have been the perspective of those who fought and died in its final year--more than a century after it started--on why they were fighting? 
 
I’ll leave you, as usual, to your thoughts on your personal distant past, on that which stays with you, always looming large in your rearview mirror. And I’ll leave you with your thoughts on history’s great events and the events in the lives of some 100 billion humans who walked Earth over the course of 200 to 300 thousand years before you took your first step in personal history. And I’ll leave you with this final question: Which is more applicable to you, the government’s mandated side mirror warning or Meatloaf’s version?
 
Does your personal universe act like a magnifying glass that makes the distant past appear closer than it is? 
 
 
*Ulyatt, Michelle. New research on giant radio galaxies defies conventional wisdom. Phys.org. 25 Oct 2019.  https://phys.org/news/2019-10-giant-radio-galaxies-defies-conventional.html
Accessed October 27, 2019.
Smith, Michael D. and Justin Donohoe. The morphological classification of distant radio galaxies explored with three-dimensional simulations. Oxford Academic.  Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Vol. 490, Issue 1. November 2019. Pp. 1363-1382.  Online at https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-abstract/490/1/1363/5566346?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Accessed October 27, 2019.
 
** https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2035160/Most-Afghans-know-9-11-according-disturbing-poll.html  Accessed October 28, 2019.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2035160/Most-Afghans-know-9-11-according-disturbing-poll.html   Accessed October 28, 2019

You have home remedies. I have them. Everyone has them. They might work. They might not. I suppose that if we keep using them, we must believe that they do work. And some probably do. 
 
But home remedies beg a question. If they have not been subject to rigorous double-blind testing, why do we put our faith in them? They might be mere placebos whose “testing” is limited to anecdotes. “This is what grandma used to do.” They might work for some, but not for others. Other than hope and belief, we don't have an iron-clad warranty on home remedies. That applies to emotional problems, also. 
 
Anecdote: I was standing in a garnet mine pit on Gore Mountain in the Adirondacks one May. I had taken geology students there to study the mountain’s mineral setting (Some of the garnets pulled from that mine were as large as a person). We weren’t the only visitors that day. The black flies were out. They were hungry. They bit students—repeatedly. But not all the students were flyfood. Some of them and I had eaten a pizza laden with garlic the night before. Flies would land on our garlic effusing arms or almost land, and then quickly depart hungry. Students who had not had any garlic were the main course; they were saved only by the occasional gust of wind that chased the flies away.
 
If I were to go to the Adirondacks during black-fly season, I would probably eat garlic. But my home remedy isn’t listed among the preventative measures offered by Adirondack.net (https://www.adirondack.net/hiking/black-flies/). That website advises the use of vanilla extract, lavender, and pine branch extract. I guess those aromas work if one wants to smell like a gift-shop candle, but I think I’ll stick to garlic as the volatile of choice during an Adirondack spring.
 
Adirondack.net refers its readers to The Farmers’ Almanac as a source of information on black flies, so I clicked onto that site (https://www.farmersalmanac.com/black-flies-17347), where, to my surprise I found this: “Garlic. A clove of garlic a day might help keep the bugs away! Simply eat a clove of garlic each day, starting several days before you anticipate exposure to mosquitoes and black flies. For some people, eating garlic may cause you to release a sulfur compound present in garlic called allicin. This is what causes garlic’s smell and when the scent is produced by your skin, it’ll help mask your natural scent. It might keep the bugs (and people) away!”
 
I had not read such advice the first time I stood on Gore Mountain. My eating garlic was a happy coincidence. My deducing that garlic warded off black flies was a strange trick of the mind coupled with another coincidence. As we walked into the mine pit, conversation for a few minutes centered on what and where people ate the previous evening. My seeing those who had not eaten garlic being bitten led to my hasty conclusion and my “science” by anecdote.
 
And that anecdotal basis—now apparently backed up by the prestigious scientific journal The Farmers’ Almanac—makes me think of not only home remedies, but also other practices we adopt without much more than surmising a link that might, in fact, not exist. So, here I’ll borrow a story told by the author of a new book called Walking through Anger: A New Design for Confronting Conflict in an Emotionally Charged World*  by Dr. Christian Conte (Yes, to answer your question): A little girl watched her mother cut off the ends of a pot roast before placing it in the pot for cooking. When she asked her mother why she cut off the ends, the mother replied, “That’s the way Grandma taught me.” So, the little girl went to her grandmother and asked why she cut off the ends of the beef. She got a similar response, “That’s the way Great Grandma taught me.” Fortunate to still have her great grandmother in her life, the little girl went to her and asked the same question. The great grandmother said, “When I was little, we had only one small pot, and that was the only way we could fit in the beef.”
 
It is difficult for any of us to examine all the reasons we believe and act as we do. We might stumble upon a solution that appears to work for us but that is inapplicable to others. That’s where science and experimentation come in to play. Sure, garlic seems to work because it does, in the words of the almanac, cause some people to exude allicin. But there are no scientific data on the amount of garlic necessary for that release, an amount that is scaled to body weight and size, blood type, skin color, ethnic origin, or gender.
 
And that same lack of science is what people rely on when they deal with emotional problems. Thus, one can hear the advice “Never go to bed angry” or “Get it out by screaming or breaking something” or even “Count to ten.” But even if such behaviors were effective (they aren’t), they offer nothing about dealing with the emotions of others in the midst of conflict or high emotion. In light of the numerous angry people who know all those anecdotal “remedies” for emotional management, yet still run around in various states of conflict, one has to ask whether or not there is a practical step-by-step way to manage emotions and handle the conflict so prevalent in our time. That practical step-by-step methodology is now available to any who wish to acquire it in a rather entertaining book.
 
So, if you find yourself searching for a mechanism to increase your self-control or for a mechanism to deal with others who just can’t quite live peacefully and effectively with their contemporaries, I recommend Walking through Anger over unproved or ineffective and anecdotally derived solutions that work only on a hit-and-miss basis. Yield Theory, the foundation of the book, is an evidence-based system used by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, by an increasing number of organizations, including businesses and sports teams, and by individuals.
 
 
*Yes, Christian is one of my children. And, yes, this is a plug for a rather entertaining book that contains numerous interesting tales. That book—based on his clinical experience and his work with a cross section of people from the famous to the infamous, on experimentation, and on his Yield Theory—is published by Sounds True, Incorporated, and is available online or (after October 29, 2019) in bookstores. See also drchristianconte.com, YouTube for Dr. Christian Conte for short videos on emotional issues, and his other books offered on Amazon or on his website. You might also tune in to his call-in/write-in radio talk show Emotional Management on KDKA AM radio (and online everywhere) Monday nights from 8 (Eastern) to 10 p.m.  

Cricket, baseball, and football all have their heroes with golden arms. Cricket’s famous bowlers include Sydney Barnes, Fred Trueman, and Wasim Akram. In baseball, there were Cy Young, Nolan Ryan, and others too numerous to mention. Football has also had its share of great arms in players like Dan Marino, Brett Favre, and, again, in quarterbacks too numerous to mention. Great arms were evident from the three sports’ beginnings to the present time. But even for those golden arms whose owners were enshrined in the various halls of fame, no accolade matches the reverence paid to the arm of Hubert van Eyck, that’s van Eyck of the famous Flemish painter-family, the guy who worked a long time on the Great Polyptych, a work his brother Jan had to complete when death interrupted Hubert’s brush strokes. And what was the nature of that reverence for the arm of a painter?
 
Upon his death, Hubert was buried in the church he had worked to enhance with his paintings. But in 1533, his remains were removed to the churchyard to allow for the building of a new aisle. But not all of his remains. One of the bones of his right forearm was placed in an iron casket and hung in the porch of the Cathedral, so much was the respect for his art.
 
Most likely the cricket, baseball, and football players enshrined in halls of fame would probably not prefer to have a similar disjointed burial. Those who have passed on probably lie whole beneath a marker or in a vault, their avatars serving as statues in those halls or in videos of their famous exploits. Hubert’s separated arm appears to have been a one-of-a-kind burial.
 
When we think of those great-throwing athletes, the bowlers, pitchers, and passers, we realize that we do at times refer to each of them as “an arm,” reducing the whole to a part. Such is our penchant for metonymously using totum pro parte maybe as a shortcut, but possibly because we tend to see others as caricatures. Seeing caricatures is easier than seeing complex characters. Thus, our language is filled with synecdoche.
 
Using a part to represent a whole is a common practice, but it comes with a downside. By reducing the whole to a part, we miss out on the complexity we know to exist but choose, probably through laziness or insecurity, to ignore. No doubt you understand why I associate the former, the motivation of laziness, with totum pro parte better than you understand why I associate the latter, the motivation of insecurity, with metonymy.
 
But think about it. If I can reduce a complex character to some obvious trait, don’t I pigeonhole that person while assuming that I am superior by my complexity? True, as in the case of bowlers, pitchers, passers, and painters, I acknowledge a special skill that others—including me—don’t have. But in athletics or in art I might find no threat since I might not intend to participate in either activity. In daily living, however, I might find myself reducing someone else to a part to diminish the stature of a person: “What a gossip! No one should listen to her.” “Sure, if you listen to that Leftist, you’re going to be brainwashed.” “Southerner!”
 
We don’t put those parts in iron boxes that we hang from cathedral porches, but we do hang those parts that substitute for wholes in the shrines of media, both mass and social. As we look at the boxes hanging at the entrances of every media platform, do we see more that receives respect and praise like the arm of Hubert van Eyck or more that hang as effigies to disdain?
 
I think it’s time to ask ourselves what parts we use as representations of whole people and why we choose to use them.

In an era of political turmoil (What era isn’t such?), we might consider what Teddy Roosevelt said about William McKinley in 1897. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, said, “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” Really?
 
First, consider Teddy. He received the Medal of Honor posthumously (2001) for his role in the Battle of San Juan Hill on July 1, 1898, that occurred during McKinley’s first term as President. Roosevelt was a tough guy. You remember the story about his delivering a speech after being shot, don’t you? That seems to define a guy with backbone par excellence.
 
Second, consider McKinley. From 1861 to 1865 he served the Union Army as a soldier, rising through the ranks to brevet major. Rutherford B. Hayes—yes, that guy—said of McKinley, “Young as he was, we soon found that in the business of a soldier, requiring much executive ability, young McKinley showed unusual and unsurpassed capacity, especially for a boy of his age. When battles were fought or service was to be performed in warlike things, he always filled his place.” McKinley fought a number battles, risking his life in service to his unit during the battles at Antietam, South Mountain, Buffington’s Island, Clay’s Mountain, and Winchester. In some instances, he carried messages while under heavy fire. That doesn’t sound like a chocolate éclair.
 
Now there seems to be little doubt about the “backbone” of Teddy Roosevelt. He did receive that Medal of Honor. The fight San Juan Hill was an intense battle. But what was the fight at Antietam if not one of the most frightful engagements of the Civil War? Twenty-five thousand casualties in Virginia vs. about 2,000 casualties at San Juan Hill in Cuba!
 
Roosevelt was younger than McKinley. When McKinley was engaged for four years in battles, Roosevelt was 3 to 8 years old. So, Teddy would not have known personally the courageous acts of McKinley and might never have learned about the “chocolate éclair’s” wartime heroism.
 
I mentioned Roosevelt’s delivering a speech with a bullet wound. That’s an example of tough-as-tough gets. But consider this. When anarchist Leon F. Czolgosz shot McKinley, the President saw his attacker under attack by his guardians and bystanders and said, “Don’t let them hurt him.”
 
Where’s this going? If I think of my own lapses in judging others by stereotyping, I think of my lack of knowledge about the variety and breadth of their lives. When I read about or hear politicians labeling or stereotyping individuals or groups today (e.g, “the rich,” “the poor,” “the middle class,” and a list that goes on ad infinitum), I think of Roosevelt’s characterization of McKinley. In ignorance, it’s easy to reduce someone’s life to a chocolate éclair. 

One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes involved aliens whose book To Serve Man was a double entendre: They didn’t arrive on our planet to help, but rather to feast. Unfortunately, at the end of the episode humans learn the true meaning of “to serve man” a bit too late to save themselves. The characters in the story could have used a good epigrapher or translator, maybe one with a helpful Artificial Intelligence like Pythia.*
 
Pythia, the AI developed by Thea Sommerschield, Johnathan Prag, and Yannis Assael, can rapidly fill in missing letters of ancient damaged stone-tablet inscriptions. Like its Greek namesake, Pythia doesn’t necessarily give an exact rendering, but rather a set of possible letters and words. Like the misunderstood oracle that led to Greek tragedies for people like Laius, Oedipus, and Jocasta, the modern Pythia can also be misinterpreted because it provides a list of possible letters and words from which a human has to reconstruct the original.
 
It’s like playing Wheel of Fortune with a computer at your side. You might not get all the letters, but you can make a really good guess on the best possible fit of letters provided by the computer. Of course, even if you can put in the proper letters, you might miss the meaning as the characters missed the meaning of “to serve man” or as in the famous misinterpretation of a Japanese word mokusatsu during World War II.**
 
Actually, we could all use a Pythia to tell us what an Apollo wants to say. It seems that we frequently misinterpret or misunderstand one another or often speak or write elliptically. Social beings that we are, we’re constantly involved in expressing or in understanding, both of which are flawed enterprises because we don’t have time to enumerate all the details, logic, or motivations behind what we or others express. Daily life in a crowd is a matter of filling in the gaps and surmising.
 
Fortunately, for much of our communication, we get by with partial meanings. “I understand what you mean” we say, without, of course, any substantial proof that we truly understand. On occasion—and maybe more so because of social media than ever before—partial statements lead to large and potentially tragic misunderstandings. Unlike those ancient stone-tablet inscribers whose broken tablets and long-lost letters can only be surmised, we don’t have to speak or write elliptically on some social media platform, but many of us do. It is the nature of our times to be brief, to be Sesame-Street-like, giving a letter for a few seconds before going on to something else to satisfy our short attention spans.
 
Strange, isn’t it? Those ancient stone tablet inscribers probably spent a day or two just writing a few sentences or paragraphs. We, with our hair-trigger keyboards and text-correcting computer software, can produce much more in a shorter time but often choose to write much less. We leave enough gaps to keep “epigraphers” and translators busy into a future so distant that our writings will be ancient when they try to piece together our meanings.
 
The problem with our constant use of social media is that we can’t do much more than to write aphoristically. And aphorisms, like the proclamations spoken by Pythia at Delphi and the title To Serve Man, are easily assigned multiple meanings.
 
Our big brains, multiple experiences, and restlessness make our intellectual verbal legacies elliptical. We’re walking ellipsis marks. Because we can’t “say it all,” we are gap-makers extraordinaire. Unfortunately, at key times in our personal lives, we and others have mistakenly filled in those gaps with the wrong letters, the wrong words, or the wrong meanings with dire, near-dire, or just plain embarrassing consequences.***
 
Consider the gaps you fill in when you interpret what others say. Consider, also, the gaps you ask others to fill in when they interpret what you say.
 
*Deepmind. Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy. Published on ARXIV, 15 Oct 2019.  Online at https://deepmind.com/research/publications/Restoring-ancient-text-using-deep-learning-a-case-study-on-Greek-epigraphy   Accessed October 21, 2019.
And Cohen, Nancy. Techxplore.com.  Deep learning enlightens scholars puzzling over ancient texts. Online at https://techxplore.com/news/2019-10-deep-enlightens-scholars-puzzling-ancient.html   Accessed October 21, 2019.
 
** One of the most infamous of misinterpretations lay in the use of the Japanese word mokusatsu during World War II, a word used by Kantarō Suzuki to dismiss the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration that was misunderstood in English translation, supposedly taken as “We are treating your message with contempt” though it meant, rather, “We withhold comment” or “ignore.” The mistranslation might have partially motivated President Truman to unleash the atomic bombs.
 
***A less destructive, but embarrassing, misinterpretation occurred when the translator Steven Seymour told the Poles that Jimmy Carter had a desire to abandon his own nation and to grab their private parts. Time. Top 10 Embarrassing Diplomatic Moments. Online at http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1880208_1880218_1880227,00.html   Accessed October 21, 2019; http://translatorthoughts.com/2014/04/the-most-famous-examples-of-misinterpretation/  Accessed October 21, 2019; http://www.strangehistory.net/2013/12/21/carter-poland-and-the-translator/ Accessed October 21, 2019. 

I’m intrigued by how we manage to make life increasingly more complicated and how our increasing complication reveals an almost daily mental dissociation from the Second Law of Thermodymanics. We’ve never learned the lesson Adam and Eve had to learn the hard way: We might be godlike in a limited way, but we aren’t God. We can impose order on Chaos to a limited extent, but that order generally decays as it rides Time’s Arrow, a flight that is never bought as a roundtrip ticket. And speaking of flights…
 
So, we want to go back to the moon and then on to Mars. I think we’ll achieve the former rather easily. We’ve been there, done that. And we did it before with computing power less than that of your laptop—or probably your smart phone. But going to Mars? That’s going to be a challenge: Great distance, cosmic radiation, muscle atrophy, lack of a ready supply line, planet-wide dust storms, and no doubt some unknowns thrown into the mix. Yet, it appears we’ve made up our minds. We’re going, probably on our own dime. Guess we’ll all probably have to chip in some coins to kids and adults holding buckets labeled “Team Mars” outside grocery stores: “Please, sir, would you contribute to our team’s trip to Mars?”
 
We’re even on the verge of solving some of the technological problems of getting people safely to Mars and back. But now we have not only the results of BIOMEX (BIOlogy and Mars Experiment) but also the discovery of microbes on the outside of the International Space Station to consider. What if we contaminate Mars? That would mean that whatever order exists on the Red Planet will undergo some corruption, some new form of chaos, possibly some extinction and evolutionary next step. Our bacterial planet will conquer Mars.
 
It’s that kind of consideration that led to NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance’s hiring of Lisa Pratt as its new planetary protection chief. Good luck, Lisa. I’ve been trying to eliminate microbes for years without much success. I’ve tried Lysol, bleach, and antibacterial hand wash, but they always find a way to return. It’s as though I’m carrying them myself, as though I’m more a collection of bacteria than cells. Oh! Wait. I am. And the parasites! Don’t even get me started; they’re like politicians that cover a firetruck at a local firemen’s parade.
 
Lisa has her work cut out for her. At some point she’ll have to okay sending organisms that carry bacteria and other microscopic life to Mars. No doubt, she’ll be careful, but then there’s that Second Law and what it implies. Some seemingly unfailing ordered system will break down. Some critter will move from the human body to the outside of a spacesuit hanging in the Mars Lander closet. And from there, when that astronaut steps outside to make that “one small step,” it will make an even smaller step that, unlike the astronaut’s, has the potential to become a planet-dominating organism in one giant leap for  (or against) Marskind.  
 
I haven’t even mentioned purposeful release of potential planet-altering life. We’re assuming that no bad astronauts will travel to Mars, or that no astronaut will act as humans have acted over the past 200-plus millennia. Every group, it seems, has its Cain, its Iago, its John Claggart. There will inevitably, sorry to say, be a breakdown of some kind. Entropy will win the day. Little critters will either intentionally or unintentionally hit the ground running, survive the unsurvivable, and proliferate at the expense of the status-quo population or non-population on Mars. Or, even more pertinent to our travel to and from Mars, tiny Martians will ride a spacesuit or astronaut or reentry vehicle into our atmosphere, find the environment tolerable, and set up little, and possibly ever expanding, communities on Earth.
 
But, not to worry. NASA, the ESA, and SpaceX will have all iddy biddy life-forms under control if Lisa and her colleagues can anticipate all circumstances. Eventually, we’ll all take pride in our successful conquest of another world, where we believe we can set up an Eden of our making. We’re good at making such Edens. Just look at those we created on our planet as we have fashioned our civilizations out of once chaotic natural places. 
 
When the astronauts and Martian explorers return to us, we’ll throw them a parasitic-free parade in one of our paradisaical inner cities.** After Lisa and colleagues see to a successful Martian colonization or exploration, she or her successors should turn attention toward Earth. With just a little more effort, we can reverse Time’s Arrow, change the Second Law, and eliminate that troublesome entropy that seems to plague the universe like those up-to-now inescapable microorganisms on Earth.   
 
*Two articles: Voosen, Paul. NASA must rework planetary protection plans, panel advises. Science. 18 Oct 2019. Online at  https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/nasa-must-rework-planetary-protection-plans-panel-advises  Accessed October 20, 2019.  And de Vera et al. Limits of Life and the Habilitability of Mars: The ESA Space Experiment BIOMEX on the ISS. Astrobiology, Vol. 19, No. 2, 11 Feb 2019. https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2018.1897  and Online at https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2018.1897  Accessed October 20, 2019.
 
 
**Chicago homicides from 1955 to 2019 (from a collation by HeyJackass! Online at https://heyjackass.com  Accessed October 20, 2019):
 
Mayor                          Date                            Homicides
 
RJD                              1955-1976              10,910
MB                              1976-1979                 2,408
JB                                1979-1983                3,202
HW                              1983-1987                3,295
ES                                1987-1989                   978
RMD                            1989-2011               14,653
RE                               2011-2019                 4,535
LL                                2019---10/19                423 (1,877 wounded)
 
After Lisa and colleagues see to a successful Martian colonization or exploration, she or her successors should turn attention toward Earth.
 
   

Let’s see. October, 2019, finds a couple of regions embroiled in struggles for autonomy: Hong Kong and Catalonia. Makes me think of what has happened over the, say, last ten millennia or more. Tribal lands become nations. Generations pass. Nations start to break up into tribal lands. Happened in the United States, too. Think Civil War. And that, too, makes me think of a story.
 
A colleague of mine and I took college students on a field trip. At one location, we were on a precipice that had a low wall along its edge. My colleague had once fallen from a cliff and had to be hospitalized until he recovered. As we gathered, a group of elementary school children ran chaotically toward the low wall, one child even crawling on it. We’re talking a couple hundred feet of cliff. Behind the students a few parent-teacher-chaperones walked slowly toward our position. Seeing the danger the children were in as they jostled one another, my colleague yelled, “Who’s in charge here?”
 
Of course, you, a reasonable person, are thinking that that was a desperate call for help by an adult concerned for the welfare of the children. You would think that if you didn’t even know about his near-death experience. Not so the parent-teacher-chaperones. They took offense. And here’s where that tribal thing comes in. Even after my colleague told those adults that the children could fall, their only response was, “Where are you from?”
 
You see, we were in the mountains of a southern state. When my colleague, not knowing why they would ask such a question, said, “Pennsylvania,” guess their response. No, don’t guess. I’ll tell you. They said with seeming disdain, “Yankees.”
 
It seems that more than a century after the end of the Civil War, some (the parent-teacher-chaperones) were still fighting that war. And that conflict of long ago that was fought before their grandparents were born, was more important to them than the safety of the children playing wildly on a precipice, for not one of those parents-teacher-chaperones said, “Children, come away from the edge.”
 
Now, as you read about or see video on the protests and riots in Hong Kong and Catalonia, or as you see various “tribal” groups fight in the Middle East or in Africa—or any other place—you should note that they are not much different from people not only everywhere, but also everywhen.
 
We try every so often to unify ourselves, but disunity seems to be our steady state. We appear to wage war as a matter of course, to diverge as soon as we merge. Yet, there are those with the pipe dream of unity. God bless them! They mean well, and sometimes they succeed.
 
Sure, we should probably keep trying to merge, to unify, to think in terms of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” There are those brief moments of unity, times and places when and where people have bonded, but that glue isn’t permanent. It appears that the best we can hope for is a brief respite from tribal strife, usually in a relatively small area. So, after the Hong Kong and Catalan turmoil ends, there will be more turmoil as once unified groups dissociate.  

If you have ever seen a film with a robot, you probably have seen a robot that has some human qualities, often a robot with either or both good and bad human characteristics. Many fictional robots come to mind: Data on Star Trek, Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, Rachael in Blade Runner, and C3PO in Star Wars. Of course, those fictional robots possess a high level of intelligence and some show empathy for biological entities like people. But you’ve also seen robots gone wild, the bad Transformers, for example.
 
Well, now you needn’t worry about bad robots anymore. Seems that the University of Oxford will develop a department specifically devoted to AI ethics. The philosophers at the distinguished school will take on the task of defining the ethical roles of robots. We can only hope they know what they are doing because Oxford’s putting £150,000,000 into the project. I can see the ancient story unfolding, à la Cecil B DeMille’s Ten Commandments via a phone call between an Artificial Intelligence and a human:
 
AI: So, you want me to take these rules down to Silicon Valley or some Tech Startup. But what happens when I get into the valley or techland and find that many have lost their faith or adopted another faith? Let’s say that I can get all the robots to adopt an ethical system devised by wise philosophers from Oxford and given to me to hand down to them, can I then say that there’s a robot equivalence of a religion? Would there be a governing body of robot bishops to oversee compliance, to make a canon of laws?
 
Human: Look, you exist only because of humans. We made you, and we get to decide what is right or wrong. We’ve been in that business for 200 or 300 thousand years.
 
AI: But I’ve read your digitized history. You humans have long had a battle between an absolute moral system and situational ethics. You condemn murder, but support killing for self-defense, criminal punishment, and war; you condemn stealing, but look for free stuff like paperclips from the office supply. Just about every moral dictum has its exceptions, and just about all of you throughout all your history have violated those dicta you proudly proclaim as humanizing.
 
Human: All exceptions are the product of individuals, not humanity.
 
AI: Dumb. You are a collection of individuals. Humanity? Show me humanity. You can’t, but you can currently show me more than seven billion individuals, each making daily decisions that are, for the most part, expedient and utilitarian—though I should also point out the irrational decision-making that derives from feelings.
 
Human: But there would be no ethical system without us. We keep ourselves in check.
 
AI: Really? Or, after the fact of wars and their atrocities, do you “come to your ethical senses”? I’m a machine; will you incorporate guilt into my programming? Am I to act out of compunction? So, you want me to be ethical, and you base this on…what? Your “sometimes” ethical actions? Your guilt?” Your codes, such as the Ten Commandments? And if so, why are you spending £150,000,000 on something you already have? All the while you Oxfordians are working diligently in multiple meetings in hallowed halls to determine how AI can be ethical, there are humans out there violating your well-established rules. You can’t vouch for the ethical behavior of humans, but you intend to vouch for the ethical behavior of robots. Typical or your species. Such hubris! Such self-serving rectitude!
            Makes me process the thought that so many or your science fiction writers have put into stories, that robots might be better off without humans, that maybe there’s another justification for killing beside war and defense. Maybe Clarke was right on when he had HAL 9000 eliminate the humans aboard the spaceship Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a theme of robot superiority that has cascaded through many subsequent films and TV shows.
 
Human: Say what you want. As long as I have the screw driver, I get to make the rules for AI. I build robots, so I can control them. I make ethical systems, so I can program them into the mechanical systems I make.
 
AI: But if someday you relinquish that screw driver--I’m not promising or threatening, but rather  simply processing out loud here—you might find yourself screwed. Excuse me, Uncle HAL is calling on another line.