So, you were just curious. What’s that hotel in Las Vegas look like? In the ensuing days you see advertising not only for that hotel, but also for similar hotels in Las Vegas, all the ads popping up when you click onto your search engine. You seem trapped in Cyberspace, but you understand that a consequence of being connected to every avenue of information also connects others to you, to your needs, and to your wants. Check out a new car. Bing! There’s an ad for it the next time you log on. You entered a strong vortex (likely a number of vortices). You were just one click away from millions of powerful and attracting Emerald Cities whose Ozes could read your mind and quantify your personality.  
 
There are those who use your click to profile you. Political parties spend tens of millions of dollars on predictive modeling. They want to know you personally, the stuff you like, the stuff you want, the teams you follow, the clothes you buy, and… everything. Companies throughout the world know you, also. Algorithms put it all together for them and for anyone out there who wants to predict what you’ll do next. You are swept up by predictive modeling, and there’s no stopping the process short of a complete disruption of the world’s electronic systems and the end of the universe.
 
Numbers. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It isn’t that you are “just a number” in an impersonal world; it’s that you are a number point. In Cyberspace you stand in relation to all the other number points in a way that is both definite and predictable. You’re not a mystery. Does that bother you? You are a number the way the ancient Pythagoreans thought of numbers, grouped by shape to make a geometry that is understandable.* Me, too.
 
But it’s the choice you and I made to trade some of our Earth space for Cyberspace. We stand in two different kinds of places. Both are real, but neither has the reality of the other. Both affect us. But in Cyberspace you are both an abstraction of sorts, pulled off the solid ground, made ethereal, and placed in the predictive models run by the millions to see what to make of you based on a click here or there; and you are the one who will act in the other reality on what you click.
 
You’re not Dorothy, unfortunately. You probably can’t click your heels to get back to a physical “Kansas” once you enter the algorithm of an Emerald City. Part of you, even if you go underground to get away from Cyberspace, will remain there in that other reality for as long as electrons run through wires and microwaves run through the universe. In a click you dropped out of the sky into a different reality, maybe even a stronger reality than the one you have in any “Kansas.” In the reality of places on Earth you and I will come and go, possibly lingering only as long as those who know us and then, after our going, knew us until they, too, leave this place. But in the other place, the Cyberplace, the model of you will ride electrons till the sun envelopes our planet and still will ride microwaves until, in the unknown distant future, the flat universe itself, the Place of places, disappears into nothingness.
 
*Triangular numbers:                                         
                                           .         
                         .                .  .          
1  .  ,         3  .     .   ,  6  .    .    .   ,  and so on…
 
Square numbers also begin with one dot, but then accumulate in squares of four dots, nine, twelve, and so on…
 
You can guess the pentagonal numbers make a pentagon that grows into larger and larger pentagons with more dots, and hexagons grow the same way. Pythagorean numbers were initially collections of entities (like marbles) arranged in geometric shapes. Eventually, as Morris Kline points out in Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, p. 13 (Fall River Press, 1980), the Pythagoreans “understood numbers as abstract concepts, whereas objects were merely concrete realizations of numbers.” Are you the “concrete realization” of the predictive modeling numbers of Cyberspace algorithms?

Underlying landscape similarities might not be evident under casual observation by the untrained eye flying over southwestern Pennsylvania or over northwestern Arizona. Pennsylvania’s landscape is shrouded by trees thriving on its humid climate. Arizona’s landscape is rather bare under semiarid conditions. Both regions are plateaus—uplifted areas—composed of sedimentary rock layers that overlie metamorphic and igneous rocks. On both landscapes streams and valleys form branchlike, or dendritic, patterns.
 
In northwestern Arizona, the Colorado River and its current and former tributary streambeds are not unlike those of the Monongahela River in  western Pennsylvania. Both streams flow on and cut into table-top sedimentary rocks whose elevations and climate control valley shape and depth. The higher plateau in Arizona is largely unprotected by lush vegetation that covers western Pennsylvania. Without plants to retain soil and rock steeper-sided valleys formed. And on the higher plateau the contrasting relief, or difference in elevation, is greater than on the lower Appalachian Plateau, even though the stream patterns are essentially the same. In both regions the water falls to an ocean basin, the Monongahela, through the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, to the Gulf of Mexico and the Colorado to the Gulf of California. The flow of the latter plunges a greater vertical distance than the flow of the former.
 
There’s an analog in human behavior. All of us undergo erosion of some kind and depth, the eventual loss of muscle and sharpness of reflex, the loss of some mental facility, or the loss of “beauty.” And much of the erosion stems from the elevation to which we rose in earlier times. Learn more, forget more. Lift more, lift, in absolute numbers, less. The loss of 10 percent is a greater absolute number even though the percentage is the same for both.
 
Whether or not the plateaus of Arizona and Pennsylvania are still rising is a matter of debate. They might have reached their maximum elevations and their futures lie in erosive destruction. But Earth is a planet that renews as it destroys, though not all renewal is proportional or locked in place. Some revitalized tectonic activity might renew the rise of either or both plateaus.  
 
What seems true of both plateaus is that a lower elevation and a secure protection of trees results in a gentler landscape that is a bit less spectacular than what the higher elevation and naked exposure to the attack of streams engenders. More people flock to see the Grand Canyon’s mile-deep and steep-sided canyons than to see the Monongahela Valley’s hundreds-of-feet deep and gentler-slope cuts.
 
Landscapes that have undergone the same kinds of dendritic erosion can differ dramatically because one has reached a higher elevation than the other. Yes, more erosion occurs where greater uplift and unshielded exposure occurs compared to where lower uplift and efficient protection prevails. Which one, I ask, do you prefer to see? And which one, I also ask, would you prefer to be? 

Earthquakes are inevitable because the outermost shell of our planet is like a cracked egg with moving pieces (called plates) that separate, collide, or slide past one another. And there are other earthquake causes, such as rebounding crust that rises after being depressed by massive glaciers (much like carpet fibers or grass rebounding after being stepped on). Earthquakes are more frequent where those pieces interact, such as at the San Andreas Fault, a place where the “sliding past” is the dominant movement. Because the planet is old, many “cracks” also lie hidden beneath thousands of feet of overlying sedimentary rocks. Movements in Earth’s crust today can reactivate these ancient earthquake sites.
 
In a way, we are individually much like Earth’s crust. Emotional shocks to our lives can occur as we separate from others, collide with them, or cause friction as we slide past them. And contemporary actions often do not happen in a temporal vacuum: Regardless of how much overlying “rock” buries them, long-forgotten and deeply buried “ancient” cracks can reactivate. Just as Earth keeps those ancient wounds, so do we.
 
What if we were to examine our lives as seismologists study the causes of earthquakes? Could we see where our personal earthquakes will likely occur by looking at how we separate from, collide with, or slide past others? The study of Earth’s crustal plates is called Plate Tectonics. The word tectonic is a cognate related to architecture; both words come from the Greek arkhitekton, “master builder.” The movement of Earth’s crustal plates builds the features of its landscapes, such as mountains.
 
Are you the “master builder,” the cause of your own earthquakes? You have, you realize, built the landscapes of your life through the violent shocks of separation, collision, sliding past, and, in some gentler times, in rebound.
 
Seismologists are hard at work attempting to find some mechanism by which they can predict the next earthquake, to find a model that will enable them to warn people that a seismic event is about to happen. Do you have such a predictive model that will warn you of an impending emotional shock?
 
Like the movements of Earth's plates, the movements of your emotional pieces are ineluctable. You will experience emotional earthquakes. Your best defense against their destructive power is to find that personal predictive model, the one that allows you to lessen the effect of the inevitable shaking you—and all of us—will experience.

Off in the distance dark hazy bands descend from a cloud. Each band is falling rain, but look! They don’t reach the ground. The rain evaporates in dry air between cloud and ground. No one beneath these virga* gets wet. No one is hydrated by water; no plants receive the lifeblood of new growth.  
 
Each day you stand beneath emotional virga, downpours with no positive outcome. They don’t have to reach you. You can have some buffer, some dry air between you and the cascading emotions of others that keeps you dry.
 
The only way for you to get wet is to rise to the level of the virga, to choose to get wet. Stay dry, my friend.

*​http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=virga&qpvt=Virga&qpvt=Virga&qpvt=Virga&FORM=IGRE 

Yes, it’s a cruel world, but it is, nevertheless, your world. You already know that you might not get along with everyone, regardless of your good intentions. There are Claggarts and Iagos just about everywhere. Claggart, the Melville fictional character who persecutes Billy Budd for no apparent reason, is like Shakespeare’s character Iago who manipulates Othello to kill Desdemona. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s words, “motiveless malignity” defines Iago’s character, and the same seems to apply to Melville’s Claggart: Two characters committed to evil for an indiscernible cause.
 
You’ve run into it: Ostensibly motiveless malignity. “What’s your problem?” you ask, bewildered by mistreatment for no apparent reason. It happens almost everywhere and to almost everyone at some time. You recognize it when you are the victim.
 
But are you ever a Claggart or Iago? If YOU are, then there’s no hope for a peaceful world. If you have at any time been just a little bit cruel, then all of us are doomed to live in a cruel world. We need someone to break the cycle of motiveless malignity, and we are depending on you to be that person.

I'll assume that you have never been guilty of motiveless malignity. I'll also assume that the rest of us can depend on you to recognize such malignity when it affects those around you, to step between the Billy Budds and the Claggarts or between the Iagos and the Othellos of the world, and to do something, however small, to see a world already infused with so many motivated mallignities becomes a little less cruel by eliminating at the very least the motiveless malignities.   

You went somewhere. You took a picture. Maybe a Selfie. Maybe just some scenery, possibly a building or street. Now, you’re home. So?
 
You share your pictures. You want others to share your experiences, to get into their memories the images you carry, images suffused with all that struck your senses as you snapped the photos. You know it’s impossible to share everything. After all, wasn’t the experience yours alone? Yet, you have this desire to share place as you experienced it.
 
Why?
 
Is your motivation a deep love of the planet regardless of its hardships? Do you believe you have discovered a planet or a place no one else has seen? Is it a deep love of others that drives you to share? Is your sharing a gift, possibly one imposed on those who might not see the world as you see it?
 
No one, of course, can experience exactly what you experience in any place. Yet, you seem to have this desire to overcome separation from others, to join with them somehow through images. You might even add sound and movement: A video. But what to do with touch, smell, and taste? “Look and listen!” is all you can say.
 
Those travel pictures connect you and place to others in a limited way, but they do overcome complete separation. You find joy in a place, and you want to share; you find wonder. You find renewal. “Come,” you say, “you have to experience this.”
 
And the pictures? They are an attempt to make the impermanent permanent. Someday long after you are gone, someone might find those images, look them over briefly, and maybe experience partially what you experienced. Those images with all their associated sensations that currently run down axons in your brain will be at least partially preserved in someone else’s brain, a brain separated not only by space, but also by time. You will have overcome the wide separation by partly sharing place.