​“Hey, Joe, I just went to the Italian grocery store in my neighborhood to buy some garlic.”


“Why are you telling me, Brandon? Are you making some special recipe?”


“No, no. I’m making a garlic necklace. Supposed to keep me safe from deadly diseases.”


“Are you a fourteenth-century alchemist? Isn’t that what people did in the 1340s to ward off the plague?”


“Yep. That’s where I got the idea, that plus what the government told me.”


“But there’s no evidence that wearing a garlic necklace offers any protection.”


“People say…”


“Whoa! People? What people? You realize that there’s never been a study that demonstrates the effectiveness of garlic necklaces in combating diseases. Sure, garlic is known to have antibiotic properties if you ingest it, but even that won’t protect one agains a virus. It’s possible, I guess, that garlic chases away some insects that carry disease, maybe ticks, fleas, and flies, but to what extent? What if the wind wafts the garlic volatiles away from the body? I remember being in the Adirondacks during black fly season. I had eaten a garlicky pizza the night before, and the black flies seemed not to prefer biting me rather than my companions who had eaten burgers and fries. So, I can see by anecdotal evidence that garlic might keep disease-carrying bugs away. But as for the airborne viruses and bacteria…well, that’s another matter.”


“But there’s a chance that it might work.”


“Sure, and a garlic necklace also protects one from an incoming asteroid. Drop the idea until you run a series of double blind studies of the necklace in a virus-infected society. Wearing one makes as much sense as wearing a permeable mask with no repulsive properties, such as negative charges that might repel negatively charged virus particles. Wearing one makes as much sense as the ‘six-foot rule.’ Where did that originate? Who put that principle to a rigorous test?”


“Well, distance makes sense. Surely, you understand that.”


“Not five feet or five feet ten inches? Heck, COVID crossed continents and oceans. How far is the right distance? Have you ever seen someone sneeze against a background of light in an otherwise dimly lit room? Particles spew out and linger. Six feet isn’t protection. It’s an arbitrary number. Six feet even with a mask offers no guaranteed protection. Yet, the public follows along as though these two practices, wearing masks and standing six feet apart, are written in the annals of science. Here’s what bothers me. We have a bunch of government officials and uneducated reporters advocating behaviors that have no scientific proof of efficacy while claiming they are following ‘science.’ We have politicians demonizing those who question their ‘science.’ And all the while they keep saying that expression over and over, ‘Follow the science’ that is little different from advocating the wearing of a garlic necklace. Go ahead, Joe, wear the necklace if it makes you feel better or helps you avoid ostracism. And wear it indoors and at family gatherings; wear the necklace to bed; wear it in the shower. It might not ward off any diseases, but it will ward off criticism by politicians and pundits with journalism degrees.”


“Well, the government says I have to wear a garlic necklace, so I’m wearing one.”

The comedian Brian Regan has a skit about losing luggage at the airport, going to the luggage claim representative, and receiving a little bag of “essentials.” Regan asks (my words, not his exactly), “So, these are the essentials? If I had known that, I wouldn’t have packed all that stuff.” Recently, I landed in Philadelphia for a connecting flight to discover that my next flight was cancelled and that my luggage had already been lost. The representative in the lost luggage office gave me one of those essentials bags for my overnight stay. Whew! Problem solved. So, these are the essentials?

You’re familiar, I suppose, with the expression sine qua non. No doubt you’ve used it in an argument for your high school debate club. Consider the expression and the lost luggage joke to ask yourself what, beyond self-awareness, is essential to your identity.

You’ve packed much into the suitcase of your life, including “nonessentials” that you carry wherever you go.

What are the sine qua nons that make you an identifiable individual?

Beware perceptions from any inner circle. They are just perceptions.


No need for a science history lesson here, but I’ll remind you that Ptolemy believed Earth lay fixed in the center of the universe. He thought all the other planets revolved around it. To account for their seeming reversals of motion, he drew epicycles (little circles) on orbital circumferences. The circles on circles accounted for the ostensible changes in direction he observed during a year. For him and those he influenced for a millennium and a half, the planets moved “forward” and then “backward” before resuming a “forward” motion. Think “eastward” and “westward.”  *


The same apparent reversal of motion appears from a moving Earth, which lies on an inner circle compared to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, three of the five “wanderers” known to Ptolemy, their positions marked by movement against the farther, and seemingly fixed, stars and constellations as the illustration shows.


Of course, the retrograde motion is, as we know, just an illusion. Planets don’t switch directions  in their orbits. The views from the inner circle and false assumptions create the illusion.


Put Washington, D.C. in the place of Ptolemy’s Earth. Or put it on an “inner circle.” What happens? Those in Washington believe they are, if not the center of the universe, at least very near it. And for them, the people outside the inner circle just can’t keep pace and actually travel “backward.” Such is the view from the inner circle. Such is the view from any “inner circle,” political, social, organizational, religious, financial, cultural, and, unfortunately for many outside its mind-shaping circle, editorial.


Thus, small-government conservatives appear to be “backward-moving” from the perspective of big-government progressives. Social conservatives appear to move backward from the perspective of anarchists. People in the “flyover” section of the United States appear “backward-moving” to those on the two coasts.


Just keep in mind that retrograde motion is an illusion. Unfortunately, those in the “inner circle” won’t learn from a Copernicus or Galileo that their perspective is, in fact, an illusion. It took more than a millennium to educate those adherents of Ptolemy in the inner circle that their world did not stand in the center of the universe. Let’s hope that their twenty-first century counterparts don’t take as long to recognize those “planets" outside their elite inner circles aren’t moving as they seem to be.

Notes: See. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Mars_Loop.gif. for an illustration.
Figure below: Earth = T; Mars = P; "fixed stars" or constellation = A

Egg and Nog talk about climate over a traditional Christmastime drink.


Egg: “Here’s an idea. You know how volcanoes throw sulfur into the upper atmosphere and how that sulfur in the form of sulfur dioxide goes through a couple of reactions to turn into sunlight-blocking sulfuric acid aerosols?”


Nog: “Yeah. Learned that in two different college classes and saw it on a Nova special—or was it a National Geographic special? I can’t remember.”


Egg: “I got this idea. We send rockets into the stratosphere, mesosphere, or thermosphere,  where they can spread sulfur or sulfur dioxide. The stuff will eventually become sulfuric acid. It’ll block sunlight. Earth’s temperature will drop. Walla! End of global warming. Problem solved. I’m a genius.”


Nog: “Not so fast, Einstein. How would you ensure that we would’t turn Venus-like with a sulfuric acid rain. I don’t have much hair to protect my scalp, and even umbrellas couldn’t withstand the acid attack unless they’re made of molybdenum stainless steel. You want us either to wear steel hats or to suffer burned heads? What about all the plants and animals that don’t have protection? And didn’t we go through a clean-air era when we made coal-fired plants install sulfur scrubbers? Everything we do to the planet has a downstream effect. So, now, in a panic over climate change, you’re thinking that we could bring back acid rain that will necessitate our spraying the troposphere with an alkaline mist to neutralize the acid falling from the stratosphere. We’ve been through this kind of conversation before, and every time we talk, I have to tell you that your cure is often worse than the disease. Reminds me of those TV commercials for drugs that end with the statement, ‘may cause death.’ Hey, i guess itchy skin is worth the risk.”


Egg: “No, we’ll figure how to balance the sulfur distribution. Make sure it doesn’t alter the chemistry of the atmosphere.”


Nog: “You mean the way we ensure that pollutants don’t enter soils, rivers, lakes, and oceans?”


Egg: “But if we’re under the threat of climate change, shouldn’t we be willing to chance any stop-gap measure, anything that might work?”

Nog: “So, let’s look at your assumptions. First, you think you can control the chemistry of an atmosphere that took billions of years to evolve. B, you think you have the money to launch the sulfur into the atmosphere on a scale larger than that of single volcanic eruptions. And next, you think that the climate will change in a predictable manner enabling you to inject just the right amount of sulfur dioxide. So, let me get this straight. You have yet to produce a reliable set of predictions on climate…

Egg: “What do you mean? This climate change stuff is serious. We need to do something. Look, here’s what one website says: ‘Nothing good can come out of global warming.’” **


Nog: “Nothing? Really? Nothing? This is where extremism meets hysteria. Nothing? So, when the last large continental ice sheets melted under global warming, exposing the land of Canada and the U.S. and the lands of northern Europe, nothing good happened? You think the farmers of the upper Midwest would agree? You think the whole country of Canada would agree? You think even the Left-leaning professors at the University of Wisconsin would have offices on the ice sheet that covered Madison? Maybe lecture while ice fishing year round? Where’s the proof that your past predictions have come true? Check out the temperature patterns in most places. Except for the city heat-island effect, can you honestly and objectively say that the patterns of warming and cooling indicate an unshakeable knowledge of atmospheric chemistry and physics? Show me the website.”


Egg: “Here it is. Look. It says here, “According to a continuous study conducted by the NASA’s Goddard Institute the Earth’s average global temperature has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius or 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880.”


Nog: “And?”


Egg: “And? What?”


Nog: “Read the rest of the paragraph. “Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the thermometer readings have risen continuously.”


Egg: “Reason to panic.”


Nog: “But not true. So, over the course of, let me do the math; 2021 minus 1880 equals 141 years the temperature of the planet has fluctuated by less than a degree Celsius. Seems pretty steady to me, not a definitive ‘continuous rise,’ especially in light of the records we don’t have over the same period and the so-called hiatus of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Those people at The World Counts website would have gone crazy with the temperature change that occurred in the same duration or shorter period following the Little Ice Age or with the change that occurred prior to the Medieval Warm Period and the rise of the Vikings. What if the Vikings had the technology to pump sulfur into the stratosphere 1,000 years ago? Would that have been wise? Would they have stopped the global warming of their time without consequence to the planet or its inhabitants? Would they even have thought that ‘nothing good’ had come of the warming they experienced? I can hear Sven say to Leif, "What are we going to do with this ice-free margin of Greenland? We need some global cooling.' And would the Europeans have thought that the end of the Little Ice Age was a bad thing? I think your panic is unwarranted. I think your solution to spray sulfur is silly. I think your noggin is cracked, Egg.”


Egg: “Now, let’s not get personal. Isn’t that one of the complaints you have, getting personal, arguing from ad hominem attacks?”


Nog: “Sorry. It’s just frustrating to see that people are willing to jump to radical changes or experiments with both technology and social structure on the basis of 0.8 degrees change over 141 years, a change, by the way, that hasn’t been ‘continuous,’ as that website claims and that hasn’t been definitively demonstrated to result in ‘nothing good.’ It’s frustrating to see how emotions have played a role in decisions, emotions of kids like the famous Greta who said adults have robbed her of her childhood. What the H does that mean? Did adults keep her from skipping rope, playing with dolls, going to Disney movies, playing catch in the school yard, or eating ice cream? Look at the reactions of fawning adults when she said that. Geez. The kid got to sail across the ocean. Sorry I didn’t think of such an easy way to get an experience like that in my childhood. I think I was on a rowboat in an amusement park once, but my memories are vague; might be false memory.
    “One hundred forty-one years and less than a degree Celsius, and you’re ready to throw sulfur into the atmosphere, the same element your predecessors wanted to eliminate from the atmosphere during the era of the Clean Air Act. Sorry. I have little response to your logic other than to suggest that your shell might be a bit cracked. Is this sulfur stuff really your idea?”


Egg: “Well, I have to confess, I read it in ACS Publications. It was in an article by Javier Carmona-Garcia and others and published just this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.” ***


Nog: “Whoa. You’re telling me that ‘real scientists’ are actually toying with the idea?”

Egg: “Yeah. So no more name-calling. You might think my shell is cracked, but these are real eggheads. They know what they’re talking about.”


Nog: “Show me this article.”


Egg: “Right here.”


Nog: “I see that the authors deal with the photochemistry of sulfur compounds. But look here. I see that a guy named Joe Francisco, well, Dr. Joseph S. Francisco, one of the chemists who was a co-author, says that the process they examined was an important step in understanding how ‘geoengineering’ the atmosphere might work. That’s all we need. Geoengineers. No danger there, right? What's next? Keeping the moon in a retrograde orbit for a continuous solar eclipse?   
      “Well, at least Francisco has scientific questions. Look, here he asks, ‘Will the atmosphere find a way to get rid of the SO3 or will it collect and start initiating new chemistry elsewhere?’ That’s a statement in an article about the original study. **** He asks the question I would ask, ‘If we put the sulfur dioxide in, can we get it out of the stratosphere without some dire after effect?’
    “Yet, we have people around the planet who probably would, just like you Egg, jump on Apollo’s chariot and race across the sky spewing sulfur into the stratosphere on the grounds that they and you know the precise way to control the atmosphere and the precise quantities of stuff that will do the trick you want. They and you with your limited understanding of the complex processes that interact to make Earth what it is, would decide to experiment on the world and people. And on the basis of what? A 0.8 degree change over 141 years?”


Egg: “I think it’s worth a try. What can we lose?”


Nog: “Egg, you guys wanted to clean up coal burning, and you did. You reduced acid rain. Now, you want to use the very element you insisted on scrubbing from the coal to be put back into circulation. Why not just remove the scrubbers from the coal-fired power plants and go back to the happy days of acid rain? This is what I mean about toying with the planet as a whole when the people ‘in charge’ can run from one end of their logic to the reverse end of it, when what's condemned becomes what's condoned by the very same people. Make up your minds, please. Is sulfur pumped into the atmosphere good or bad? What can you lose? What can you lose! Egg, do you want to spend virtually all your personal resources to maintain the easy lifestyle that fossil fuels gave you? Have you been to the gas station recently or looked at your electric bill? But, let me guess. You would prefer to have some anonymous ‘they’ solve the dire problem of a zero point 8 degree Celsius rise over 141 years. What could go wrong when the ‘they’ is composed of non-scientist politicians and in-the-know entrepreneurs? Their motives are pure and logical, aren’t they? I can see the business end of this already. Musk, Bezos, or Branson getting contracts with governments to launch sulfur—good business plan, I think. Gore and Kerry will invest. If a little global warming is bad, then a little global cooling should be good, right? I believe you think the political and financial people who control the planet’s destiny know exactly how much to add or subtract from the atmosphere. 
   “Pass me the brandy, rum, AND whiskey. I think the best thing I can do is just over-spike my eggnog. After all, if a little alcohol makes an eggnog good, why not put more in the drink?”


Notes:


*https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.1c10153


**The World Counts. Online at https://www.theworldcounts.com/stories/temperature-change-over-the-last-100-years   Accessed November 21, 2021.


***Carmona-Garcia, Javier, et al. Photochemistry of HOSO2 and SO3 and Implications for the Production of Sulfuric Acid. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2021, 143, 44, 18794-18802. Online at https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.1c10153  Accessed November 21, 2921.


****https://phys.org/news/2021-11-geoengineering-mitigate-climate-fundamental-chemistry.html

Although there’s some question about the conclusions, the study of selection pressures in the European genome makes sense to me: Europeans have undergone some evolutionary changes just in the last couple or three millennia. As one with European ancestry, I wonder, “In what ways am I different from, say, Europeans from the Apennines to the Alps, the general region from which I assume my ancestors originated? Do I differ from them in skin pigmentation, dietary traits, and body measurements as hinted at by Weichen Song and fellow genetic researchers?” *


Song writes that his group found changes in 88% of 870 polygenic traits. Surprising? No. Look at all the possible genetic influences. Look at them in your own genealogy. I think of the historical interactions among migrating, warring, and what I call Montague-Capelet matings, that is, matings across cultural barriers, you remember, the Romeo-Juliet-type relationships. As anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn argued later in his career, there are apparently no “pure races,” and people reflect the properties of their gene pools. All the historical mixing of peoples in Europe over three millennia has had an effect: It produced me, an embodiment of appearance, physical strengths and weaknesses, resistances and susceptibilities, potential talents and noticeable limitations.


I cannot, of course, undo my genetic inheritance. No one can. Little but idle speculation can come from asking, “What if?” I am what I am; you are what you are; both of us are susceptible of and resistant to polygenic conditions, such as arthritis, or diabetes, or high blood pressure. We were born with stamps of resistance or susceptibility. We were all born with a skin color and a programmed set of body measurements (unless someone administers growth hormones artificially). So, biologically, we’re predetermined in such polygenic traits that might have originated in some unknown set of ancestors. For some, even dietary traits reveal a distinct heritage as alcohol or milk intolerance can indicate. Those nineteenth-century statements about Native Americans and “firewater,” bespeak a polygenic truth. Just as some people have little tolerance for milk, others have little tolerance for hard liquor. Throw in the pressures of culture and walla! Tempting advertisements for ice cream and whiskey and the easy availability of both prove to be roads to suffering.


The study of European polygenics by Song is a rudimentary step toward understanding the roles played by cooperating genes. But there’s a danger in taking too much from such studies. Nevertheless, I’m going to go full hypothetical here and in the process maybe explain why in African countries the COVID-19 pandemic has not devastated populations. I might mix and match info here, so recognize that in hypothesizing I’m only guessing, but sometimes, as we have all discovered, guesses, even bad ones, can lead to discoveries of one kind or another.


Here’s my hypothesis in the form of a general question: Is there a polygenic protection against severe or deadly COVID in some populations? The hypothesis emerges from my having read “A version of this gene doubles the risk of dying from COVID-19,” published in LIVESCIENCE.COM. The gene, designated as LZTFL1 regulates lung cells’ reaction to infections. The presence of the gene lowers the defensive response of the cells. Now, this is where the hypothesis comes in: “The gene version that raises COVID-19 risk is present in 60% of people of South Asian ancestry, 15% of people of European ancestry, 2.4% of people with African ancestry, and 1.8% of people with East Asian ancestry.” ** Born to be vulnerable to the ravages of COVID infection? Not so much in the African genes, it seems.


Now, I’m not proclaiming that I have a causal link between one gene and COVID susceptibility. Rather, I’m suggesting that an explanation for the low numbers of deaths in African nations might derive from the absence of that gene or from its inability to work in a polygenic group to the detriment of the gene holder. Unfortunately, I have neither the wherewithal nor the expertise to pursue the matter scientifically. So, my hypothesis will probably die like wild grape on a vine in the Pennsylvanian forests. It’s not going to be turned into a fine wine.


And I know the objections you will raise: 1) the average age in Africa is lower than the average age in Europe and North America; 2) as a consequence of a younger population, fewer people are severely affected or even infected, as was the case in, for example, the American population that had over a half million deaths, mostly in the older population; 3) in general the African population spends more time outdoors and indoors, one of the drawbacks or advantages, depending on a perspective of one’s economic assessments that separate First and Third Worlds—those who spend more time outside have the distinct advantage of more Vitamin D in their bloodstreams, a vitamin that appears to protect against severe COVID reactions; and finally, 4) maybe the data on African COVID cases are erroneous; maybe the cases are underreported.


If you are a medical researcher, I just handed you a possible topic to pursue. It would be a complex task because it would entail trying to connect lifestyle to an individual gene and to a group of genes that might work in unison for a single effect. I happen to think there’s much to come from polygenic research. But it won’t come from me. This is where I meet my genetic, mental, and psychological limitations, and those, in turn, meet my life choices. I never particularly cared much for staring down microscopes even when I learned micropaleontology or eventually had to teach the subject with, I now admit, feigned enthusiasm. I might not have had the interest, but I could see the value and I could see that others did, in fact, have genuine interest in little things. That I never pursued the subject of microbiology beyond micropaleontology—which is more descriptive than experimental—doesn’t mean I haven’t asked a good question about the predisposition of a population to withstand the ravages of a disease that killed so many. The follow up question would be: “Is there a gene therapy for COVID that one could derive from an African immunity?” We know, for example, that sickle cell anemia seems to afford a protection against malaria, though in the long run, does little good in other biological interactions. There are many lessons to learn about who we are and how we got to be where we are today.


If COVID-19 and other pandemic diseases were not so tragic, we might say like a comedian opening his gig, “A funny thing happened to me on my way here today.”


Notes:
*Song, Weichen, et al. A selection pressure landscape for 870 human polygenic traits, Nature Human Behavior (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01231-4


**Pappas, Stephanie. Online at https://www.livescience.com/covid-gene-death-risk?utm_source=SmartBrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=368B3745-DDE0-4A69-A2E8-62503D85375D&utm_content=AFB6D9DE-4D5E-4C6E-92F1-00E6B6414E83&utm_term=b84f2fa7-0d47-430c-a9c6-894ced980d93   Accessed November 20, 2021.  See Downes, Damien J. Et al. Identification of LZTFL1 as a candidate effector gene at a COVID-19 risk locus. Nature Genetics 53, 1606-1615 (2021). Online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-021-00955-3?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=3_nsn6445_deeplink_PID100052172&utm_content=deeplink   Accessed November 20, 2021.

Crossing by small launch from Miami’s busy cruise ship harbor to Fisher Island one day, I felt a bump. I asked the pilot, “What did we hit?” He replied, “Maybe a manatee.”


Poor critter. Slow as plankton for most of its life, a manatee munches on greenery found below the surface. Unfortunately, when manatees eat near the surface or seek air, these cows of the ocean succumb to numerous boat collisions. Under pressure from human activities, manatee numbers continue to dwindle in Florida’s shallow waters. Many have died. In 2021, some 1,000-plus have gone to that big algal pasture in the sky.


It’s a sad story. Seemingly helpless and harmless critters have been undone by what we do. We humans run a rather cruel and merciless world that seems to have little room for other species. Just ask the dodos. But then, we, too, are subject to interspecies harm.


I suppose that only those with a “heart” find extinctions worrisome. I also suppose that those with “hearts” think our species has never lived harmoniously with other “Earthlings,” and it's time for a change to some "natural state" that sustains life in balance. But life’s been tough all around. The Romantic Period’s myth of harmonious oneness tying humans and the rest of the animal kingdom lies in stark contrast to reality. Tigers in the Sundarbans, where they kill an average 20 or more people per year, and in other locales in India are the fast motor boats, and humans are the slow manatees. I think of lines in William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”: “What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry.” In a paraphrase of Blake’s words, the “hand” that made the tiger also made a lamb and the manatee—and the human. Tough world. No room for foolish error. And yet…


Given the plethora of YouTube videos that show bad outcomes during encounters between beast and human, just about every human should be aware of the potential for personal extinction during an interspecies encounter. Yet, the YouTube videos of bad encounters keep popping up, eliciting in viewers statements like “What an idiot!” “What was she thinking?” An example lies in a video of a Chinese man who, in attempting to bypass paying for a ticket to the zoo, climbed into a tiger’s enclosure. The “attack was captured on camera and shared on social media, with one video showing a tiger gnawing on the man's body as people screamed."*



So, what made so many who are no longer with us think they could, like the late Steve Irwin, play with dangerous animals with impunity? What makes some still long for gentle moments on a picnic blanket amidst waving grasses and flowers as the unicorn stands peacefully nearby? Is it the mistaken notion that human attributes are also animal attributes, that feelings are universal? Is it a belief that risk is a myth inapplicable to daring individuals? Are we under the illusion that like some “dog whisperer,” all of us can “whisper” to dangerous animals, especially when we’re filming the whispering for a YouTube video?


There’s no love lost when there’s no love involved. Hunger drives wild carnivores to eat what is available, and large herbivores defend themselves against perceived threats. A bison in Yellowstone is not a family pet; it has speed, mass, and horns, all lying in front of an instinct to undo threats by tourists in search of personal fame.


What leads some people to a premature personal extinction is the belief that they can, in fact, read the personalities of wild animals, that belief, and of course, the drive to make a name for oneself on YouTube. Once posted, forever remembered, right? The “famous” live forever. That’s why you know the names of Mayan, Aztec, and Inca heroes. No? Who was that guy who got chased by a bison in Yellowstone?


If social media have taught us anything about our species, it is that we are unlike any other critters with which we share the title “Earthling.” Other animals might be imbued with an unconscious drive to survive; some humans, in contrast, seem to be imbued with a conscious desire for reckless endangerment. And this latter flippancy with risk occurs in spite of numerous lessons folly has taught throughout our history and still teaches us via YouTube and other media.


Living the life of a slow organism subject to random collisions, manatees reveal that their very nature incorporates a weakness that evolutionary changes could not, to speak teleologically, anticipate. Humans, supposedly endowed with a “better nature” that can overcome weaknesses born of phylogeny, demonstrate that no amount of technology can prevent injury and death by folly.


And because there have been so many humans, maybe in excess of a hundred billion since our species arose, the loss of many to folly makes a forgotten list. That every generation has its folly practitioners indicates that in spite of a “better nature,” humans choose to take their place among the weakest of Earthlings, choosing danger under multiple motivations, as though they were manatees purposefully looking for waters where boaters spin their propellers. Homo sapiens sapiens, or “wise wise man,” the only remaining species of genus Homo, might be better labeled as Homo sapiens fatuus stultus, or wise unwise foolish man.


And that brings me to news reports in recent years. Driven by social media, members of Homo sapiens fatuus stultus have gathered in great numbers called mobs to ransack, destroy, injure, and even kill one another. Joining under the influence of media a mob, any mob, is like swimming in the midst of mindless propellers.


Is it possible that we are mislabeled? Maybe the more appropriate designation for our species should eliminate any mention of wisdom. We are, in actuality, Homo fatuus stultus, “Unwise, foolish man.” In this age of renaming everything on one whim or another, we should consider removing the term wise from our Linnaean classification. More characteristic of our species than wisdom are its folly and lack of wisdom. Having consciousness, we pride ourselves on our “better nature”; yet, among all Earthlings, only our species continuously jeopardizes and even annihilates itself in both small and large numbers. Only our species seems to risk making a short life even shorter by swimming slowly in a fast-paced world that will take only temporary notice before speeding off to encounter another fool floating near the surface of imbecility.

Note:
​
*30 Jan 2017. See story, but not video, online at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-30/man-mauled-by-tiger-after-climbing-to-fence-avoid-buying-ticket/8225016  Accessed November 18, 2021.  The same story links to a story of two women who at a Beijing safari park exited their car in the presence of a tiger that killed one and mauled the other woman. Homo fatuus stultus.

The chief premise I employ on this website is that place has a primacy over time, which is often irrelevant to our lives.


Sure, you’ll probably note that much of our “emplacement” derives from a schedule. We find ourselves, for example, in bed “at night,” at the lunch table “at noon,” and on the beach “during summer,” all time designators and all inextricably tied to why we find ourselves where we do. You, for example, have set aside reading this blog until time afforded you the moment to sit before a smart device or computer screen. Yet, there are those conditions in your life that are not time-dependent, but are, rather, place dependent. How time passes for you—not how a clock turns—might best be exemplified in “a watched pot never boils” or in “the accident seemed to take place in slow motion,” or even in “I can’t believe how fast the year went.” All these demonstrate that regardless of the aging of your cells, the biological clocks that determine your often fluctuating circadian rhythms, and your meeting schedules, that time is malleable, not just in an Einsteinian sense of dilating, but in a meaningful way in your personal living. It is malleable as a product of both conscious and unconscious brain activity.


If I had to choose a chief reason that time plays second fiddle to place, I would note that time always occurs in a place, and that ultimately, there was no time until there was a place—call it the Cosmos—for its “unfolding,” as we are wont to say. And as we know from the late genius, time changes under the influence of both gravity and velocity, demonstrated in a number of clever experiments with clocks on Earth and in orbit, near sea level and on mountaintop. Time isn’t really “keeping time” as our underlying Newtonian selves want us to believe. It isn’t absolute.


Of course, you might argue that place, too, is malleable. With that I have no argument simply because by being in a place, I alter it. Examples abound, but let me note that you have been in many classrooms, the nature of which appears to be affected by the occupying populace. As a former professor, I experienced “the same” lecture hall or lab only to discover that it was only in superficial appearance identical semester after semester, the nature of it as a “place” having altered with the subject, the sometimes fully occupied but often less so with empty seats representing “blown off” attendance, and the collective interest, disinterest, or ability of the students. The same place, a lab, for instance, took on one character for dedicated majors and graduate students that it did not take on for general education 100-level freshmen (Oops! Sorry, freshhumanbeings).


Place, the universe in general or your living room in particular, does not, like time, constitute an Absolute. But it is the entity that for us personally shapes time. It is for us “where time occurs” in its slow or fast manifestations. We might see that as matter clumps or de-clumps, place changes, but it frequently maintains a rudimentary and recognizable sameness that emerges from our mental mapping. And when the brain finds itself in the midst of unfamiliar matter in unfamiliar arrangement, it goes into Amerigo Vespucci mode, it becomes explorer and cartographer. It marks territories like other animals, committing to memory not just the “arrangement” of objects, but also their character. Place is infused with personal meaning.


It’s in the context of the foregoing that I read with interest an experiment by Zheng, et al. on the phenomenon of “neural repulsion” and spatial memory. * Neural repulsion is a process by which the brain experiences similar environments differently, even more differently than it experiences dissimilar environments. You have experienced such “repulsion” when you have gone into a chain grocery store that differs in some details from the store where you usually shop. The term repulsion has nothing to do with your attitude, but has everything to do with your brain’s ability to retrieve the details of a place and to make comparisons with similar places. The researchers found that the hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex interact when the brain attempts to retrieve spatial memory in the context of discovering differences between two similar places. The role of the hippocampus appears to be “involved in detailed and differentiated memory representation to resolve interference when encountering multiple similar environments” [the two different grocery stores, for example]. The medial prefrontal cortex appears to represent “a common spatial scheme across different learning environments to facilitate spatial memory retrieval.” Both brain regions play specific roles but seem to work in unison when we shop in a different store and find ourselves a bit disoriented because the products displayed in the more familiar store aren’t displayed exactly similarly in the unfamiliar, but somewhat similar, other chain store.


Now, I’ll leave you to consider the neurological ramifications of the process (see article) while I note psychological and philosophical ramifications.


Yes, place can change. And yes, it can change, in fact, will change with the passage of time. As in Ella Winter’s expression that Thomas Wolf turned into a title, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”
Although it is true that every time you reenter your abode, familiarity suffuses you—your brain might pick up a subtle differences, such as the presence of cold air or smoke from a neighbor’s charcoal fire that wafted in through a window you forgot to close upon leaving. But places as we come to know them, to map them, remain in memory. In that sense, you might not be able to go home to the exact place you left, but you will always be in the mental neighborhood. And just as place imbues in you an attitude, so you imbue in place a character, an ambience.


There will be places that will engulf you in what seems to be, ironically temporarily, a lasting oneness, that again, ironically, transcends time. Sea air on a warm summer day during a beach vacation, all the details of place more significant than time. Your favorite chair in your most comfortable spot. The colors into which you walk as you return to a familiar place.


Why not end with an anecdote?


After spending a sabbatical leave studying oceanography and living in Miami with my young family, I returned to our house in Pennsylvania. The condo where we temporarily lived in southwest Miami was, as so many such places are, rather colorless and unadorned. In a temporary dwelling there’s no call for wall hangings for which one might have to pay for nail holes. We lived in a world of white paint on wall surrounding a nondescript, though new and clean, carpet. When we returned to our home in Pennsylvania, the children, excited to be in what they remembered, all remarked almost simultaneously, “I didn’t remember how colorful our house was.” The familiar place—though soon to become familiar again—was seen through both their hippocampi and medial prefrontal cortexes as retaining some features remembered and some features seemingly new. I’ll bet you have had similar experiences with spatial memories of place. In fact, the very nature of memory, in my view, is that we don’t, in fact, remember time except in the context of place. I’ll ask you as I ask on the frontispiece of this website, to remember time to the exclusion of place. Think of ten minutes ago without thinking of place. You see, the primacy of place reveals itself in that we spend our variable-speed time in some place. Thus, waiting in a long line in the grocery store drags on; searching for products in an unfamiliar, but similar store, seems to take a long time; driving to the vacation takes longer than driving home—anticipation making the difference in time’s passing, but always passing in a place.


So, why not another anecdote, one that I told elsewhere? I think of an old priest who taught in the private high school I attended. He was a well known translator with a reputation for understanding, if not speaking, more than twenty languages. Every time I saw him enter a room regardless of the number of times he had been in that room, I saw him look around as though he were entering it for the first time. In retrospect, I now wonder whether or not his hippocampus or his medial frontal cortex was dominating the interaction in his brain’s perception of place. I’m wondering now, also, whether or not his apparent enthrallment with every place into which he walked wasn’t his way of living in an Eternal Present that all of us probably experience whenever we encounter a new place. Why were even supposedly familiar places so seemingly new to him? Is it because time freezes as we map new details or previously undetected details?


No more anecdotes, just a request: Ask yourself two questions. How does place, that combination of matter, energy, and character, affect your perception of time? How do small differences in places that are largely similar affect your attitude?


Note:
*Zheng, Li, Shiyao Gao, Andrew S. McAvan, Eve A. Isham & Arne D. Ekstrom. Partially overlapping spatial environments trigger reinstatement in hippocampus and schema representations in prefrontal cortex. Nat Commun 12, 6231 (2021). Online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26560-w#citeas   Accessed November 17, 2021.

Adumbrate Foreshadow and Herald Harbinger converse about the future.


Adumbrate: “Would be great if we could actually see the future.”


Herald: “Or around corners. Maybe ‘around corners’ would be all we need to see. If we could see around a corner, we would avoid many accidents, not just at crossroads, but also on every big city intersection and in every home hallway with running kids. Can’t tell you how many times I crashed into people at 34th and Broadway during lunch hour. The city should put up those convex mirrors on traffic light/walk sign poles.”


Adumbrate: “You think small.”


Herald: “No, I think practically.”


Adumbrate: “But you’re just focusing on small collisions that can’t change the world. I’m thinking of the unknowns that are headed our way, or rather, toward which we are headed on the bases of the smallest clues and the largest assumptions.”


Herald: “But small tends to grow. Say I collide with a guy on his hurried way to an important meeting, say, an interview for a new job, and I knock him down and scatter his papers in that accidental collision. He gets dirty, the papers get tramped on at the busy intersection, he breaks his glasses and scuffs his shoes. Poor guy. He gets up, races off in a bad mood, gets to the interview a few minutes late, loses the opportunity—not to mention the shine on his shoes. Now, what if that guy had the potential to turn the company into the next Amazon or Tesla? He’s out of a potential job. The company is out of a potential growth and remains on the periphery of great success. And all this because neither he nor I could see around the corner of the building at 34th and Broadway.”


Adumbrate: “Okay, I get your point. It’s that chaos theory stuff, the initial condition setting up a cascade of events, butterfly’s wings flapping in Brazil causing a tornado elsewhere. But I was thinking not about the little things around the corner though you make a good point about someone’s changing the course of a company. I was thinking about see the big events around the corners of our, not just individual lives, but collective lives, as in a whole country. I was thinking of non-line-of-sight imaging. You know, that’s a tech that will become a thing—that I CAN foresee. I just read about the technology tweaked by Ji Hyun Nam and others to make ‘seeing’ around a corner closer to practical reality. Nam, Brandt, Bauer, Liu, Renna, Tosi, Sifakis, and Velten were able to image an object by its reflection off barely or even ‘non-retroreflective’ surfaces, basically, they captured the image of something casting a shadow on a wall, not just the shadow, mind you, the 3D object itself—and its motion.” *


Herald: “Tell me a bit more, but keep it simple.”


Adumbrate: “These people were able to make monochrome but still fuzzy videos that captured motion and distinguished objects in 3D in real time—well, with a one-second delay— around a corner. Still, even with a one-second delay, not bad, right? I mean, think about it. If you had an extra second’s warning as you approached the intersection, you could avoid the collision. Their technology, if wearable, would reduce the chances of that collision on the sidewalk at 34th and Broadway. Your device would show you someone’s coming simply by using light bouncing off a pole or newspaper dispenser on the sidewalk.”


Herald: “What’s this tech?”


Adumbrate: “NLOS, non-line-of-sight.”


Herald: “Oh! Like Einstein’s gravitational lensing without the gravity.”


Adumbrate: “Not really; there’s no bending of light, no refraction, but in a way yeah. Gravitational lensing lets us see a galaxy hidden by another galaxy. But there’s no light-bending going on in NLOS. It’s a matter of reflection from a low-reflective surface. The software takes what it can get from a reflection and images the object hidden around the corner.”


Herald: “I see the practicality. I could know what’s around the corner. No more surprises.”


Adumbrate: “You can also see why the military threw some money behind it. Pretty soon there will be no place to hide unless there isn’t a reflection. It would be an advantage in daytime and low light urban warfare. Police would want it also. But then, I suppose criminals could use it to ambush people. There’s always a potential downside to any tech, and as we know, if there’s a potentially malicious use, some bad guy will exploit it.”


Herald: “But now I see why you brought up the subject. Of course, but a tech that works with objects around corners doesn’t tell us where we’re headed very far into the future.”


Adumbrate: “No, that tech works only on the order of a few meters though the developers say it could extend farther with technical advancements. And no doubt it will become the next sought after tech for your smart phone. People will be holding up their phones as they approach corners because the camera systems will incorporate non-line-of-sight images. Paparazzi will hide to capture the antics of unsuspecting celebrities. People will take pictures of people they can’t directly see. Won’t be any hiding places, as I said.”


Herald: “But of course we really can’t see much into the future. It’s actually seeing what’s going on in the present, but out of direct line of sight. Tech can’t see into the future, can it?”


Adumbrate: “People think so. Thus, people make computer models of what can happen, and supposedly, with good modeling, produce a clear picture of an actual future is supposed to emerge. I guess that’s what the climate modelers and city planners are supposed to see. We’ve always been obsessed with seeing the future, thus soothsayers, fortune tellers, forecasters, the whole lot of predictors, including Harold Camping who erroneously predicted the end of the world several times. And back to those climate modelers upon whom all those politicians in Glasgow followed, can’t anyone learn the lesson that the future of a complex world is just as complex as the present world? After thousands of years of failed soothsaying, people still believe they can produce accurate 3D constructions of the future. Generation after generation has to learn that all such ‘seeing around the corner of time’ usually yields an image as fuzzy as the non-line-of-sight images that Nam’s group produces. Think of what all those past climate models told us about temperature and sea level, predictions that were close range, on the order of twenty years, from say 2000 to 2020. Seeing around the corner through models hasn’t worked very well because, like the guy you hypothetically bumped into at 34th and Broadway, his individual future couldn’t be known. Remember all those dire predictions about the effects of global warming that have as yet to become reality? And remember the specific predictions and projections? The past failures at seeing the future, seeing around the corner of time, now make me think of the other kinds of predictions, such as the ones voters make when they buy into the promises made during political campaigns. Yeah, I wish I could see round the corner of time and down the road to future bad decisions, not just for me personally, but for the country, for the sake of…”


Herald: “I’m not going there. How could you turn a conversation on non-line-of-sight imaging technology into something about climate or economics or whatever?”


Adumbrate: “I want what you mentioned on a different scale. I don’t want to run into someone at the intersections of my life, of course. I don’t need collisions with people hurrying off to some special future they believe only they can see. You know, if you hadn’t had that hypothetical collision and the guy made his interview and got the job, he might have been the catalyst to destroy, and not to build, his company. I just don’t want to crash into a group that can’t see around the corner to avoid hurting me or millions of others, so rushed are they and so obsessed with what they believe they see that they rely on the blurriest of images. The complex Earth systems that interact to shape climate are like the complex economic vicissitudes that interact to drive the stock market up or down, that drive market crashes. Many images of the future are blurry. They have only a few pixels. They might reveal general shapes, but not sharply defined objects.”


Herald: “I agree; we might be able to develop a see-around-the-corner tech, but humans will never have a clear picture of the future. We’ll always just have good guesses and bad guesses. I know, for example, that at noon at 34th and Broadway, there will be a crowd rushing who knows where with collisions likely at the corners. That’s a relatively easy thing to predict. But maybe those modelers believe they have a good chance of seeing the future based on big numbers like noontime crowds.”


Adumbrate: “Except the future isn’t just about the normal crowds. It’s about the unexpected complexities. Construction crews doing work on the sidewalk change the traffic flow; spills make pedestrians alter where they step. And to use your example, I’ll say that just as there was an avalanche of events after your hypothetical run-in with a stranger on his way to an interview, so the little decisions—and the big ones—that politicians are making today based on previously faulty models of economics and climate will also result in an avalanche of unintended consequences and bad results.”


Herald: “So, then, what’s the best we can hope for?”


Adumbrate: “I guess just seeing a fuzzy image of something that we would discover in a second or so when we rounded the corner. I guess what we can hope for is that we can react to avoid collisions.”


Herald: “But surely, there are cues and clues about what’s to come.”


Adumbrate: “Some. But remember that complexity abounds. People and planets are known for doing the unexpected. Ask anyone who lives near a volcano or in an earthquake zone. Ask anyone who thought American economy was great before a pandemic struck and a politician shut off oil independence. Sure, around the corner is the next eruption or earthquake, but exactly when and how intense is a different matter, a matter that counts. A slight bump into someone on a sidewalk at an intersection is different from a knockdown, and a warning of a few meters and a second isn’t always enough to prevent a disaster of large proportions.”

Herald: "As I said, maybe all we need to see is around the closest corner. Maybe all we will ever really see is just around the closest corner."


Note:


*Nam, J.H., Brandt, E., Bauer, S. et al. Low-latency time-of-flight non-line-of-sight imaging at 5 frames per second. Nat Commun 12, 6526 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26721-x ;

I wear three different pairs of prescription lenses. No, not all at once, though before I went to prescription lenses, I did put sunglasses over reading glasses when I read at the beach. Yeah! Goofy. But when lying on a chaise lounge on a distant island, who cares? Beside, I saw some people from other countries who wore some strange stuff on the beach—and some who wore very little stuff. Two pairs of glasses? Not a biggie.


I do have three different sets of prescription glasses. The first is a set of bifocals, pretty much my everyday, everywhere glasses. With them I can see the road and the speedometer, the nav map, and the coins in the cupholder. And they, like my prescription sunglasses, are Transitions sensitive to variations in light intensity, photochromic. The third set has a focal length of thirty inches and has blue-blocker, not Transitions, lenses. I am wearing them now as I write this, my head—you guessed it—about thirty inches from my computer screen.


That I use three different sets of glasses is probably analogous to my seeing the world through three different perspectives, two of which are also “bifocal.” The first set of lenses, my goto everyday perspective is psychological/social; the second, philosophical/theological; the third, rational. I confess that I do sometimes simultaneously wear two sets, and when I do put a second set over the first set, I get a different perspective, sometimes a clearer view, but sometimes a more fuzzy one.


But before I say more, I should note that over the years, I have developed cataracts that the eye doctor says have to be removed before she’ll give me a new set of lenses. Yes, there’s a bit of blurriness regardless of the glasses I don. And interestingly, the development of cataracts coincided with the historical development of my psychological/social, philosophical/theological, and rational perspectives. In short, I don’t see the world as clearly as I think I see it.


Think about my learning that the very biological lenses through which I see the world have cataracts. The slight blurriness through which I viewed the world motivated me to schedule the long overdue appointment, which I had postponed because of COVID. Remember all those admonitions about “social distancing.” No one sits six feet away from the optometrist in that little room with the letters that don’t spell any words. “Tell me what you can read on the chart?” “Whoa, I could, if I knew the words.” Anyway, think of my sitting with my face behind that alien spaceman’s multi-lens contraption, trying to read letters that made no coherent message, bytes of info not strung together as they are in the words you now read. [If you want to cheat, by the way, the sixth line is “E D F C Z P” and the seventh is “F E L O P Z D”; I won’t reveal any of the other lines because, well, you need glasses, and you need to get over your vanity] Anyway, there I was, my face just inches away from the optometrists masked face. And imagine my hearing from a masked woman that I wasn’t seeing things clearly because of a faulty prescription as much as from an innate defect.


There was something wrong with me that no corrective lenses could correct. I had incorrigible eyes! Okay, not incorrigible. I need the cataract surgery, which the optometrist assured me, was an in-and-out ten-minute procedure. “Get it done, and then will talk about new glasses.”


So, I needed another person to tell me that I wasn’t seeing the world as it is. I thought my view was normal, the slight blur I noticed just an unimportant anomaly, but in looking through my own eyes I had a distorted perspective that developed so gradually that I ignored it.


Now, I have to admit that I did have an inkling that I had cataracts. My parents had them. And then there was that incident when a granddaughter said, “PapPap, why are your eyes wavy?” Out of the mouths of babes, as they say. But “they” also say, we don’t listen to those closest to us when they give advice; thus, the need for unrelated and objective mentors, counselors, and psychologists. When I think not of my physical lenses in my current prescriptions and my intangible lenses through which I understand the world, I realize that maybe both have cataracts. What if my psychological/social, philosophical/theological, and supposedly rational lenses are slightly blurry—or worse, very blurry? Would I be able to tell without help from the outside? And if someone did point out the reason for the blurriness could be taken care of through a simple operation, would I schedule the appointment to get those intangible cataracts removed? And if not, why would I postpone something that would help me see more clearly? Am I addicted to fuzziness? 


And what about your own lenses, the intangible ones through which you see the world? What if someone close to you asked, “Why are your eyes so wavy?” Or said, “I don’t think you are seeing clearly.” Would you take steps to correct your flawed view that might need only a tiny bit of tweaking or removing a thin blurry layer? And if you discovered that a full cataract operation was the only solution, would you submit to removing the blur on the good chance that you might see the world clearly, that you might see as others see?


Going to the eye doctor can be an eye-opener.

“If you order now, you get not just the 20-day program, but an additional 20-day program.
Double your self-reliance for only the cost of shipping and handling.”


Would that there were an infomercial for a cheap, rapid, and surefire self-reliance program. Alas, there really isn’t, but the Russians have recently run an experiment that hints at how such a program might work.


Give an isolated group people some tasks with a common purpose. Initially provide some help, as much help as the group might want. Then decrease the amount of help by decreasing the communication between an outside authority at a “Mission Control” and the isolated group. With time, the group will become more autonomous, seek less help from the authority, and make decisions to solve immediate problems. In short, as outside help decreases, the group becomes more independent, more self-reliant. This isn’t really anything new, however.


I think of an earthbound model of this earthbound experiment, one that played out historically in North America in the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. The American colonists were initially reliant on their European benefactors, but in time became not only more self-reliant, but actually adverse to advice from a distant authority. That psychological process, when tied to economic and political separation, led to the American Revolution.


Of course, centuries ago, any messages from Mission Control, say the English Parliament or the King, took weeks to months to travel across the wide expanse of the Atlantic. Isolation had its effect. The isolated group in the New World had to become self-reliant to solve their immediate problems. Autonomy seems, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, to have been inevitable. The immediacy of survival on a new continent left little room for any “woe is me” or “victimhood” personalities. So, with time, the colonists took charge of their own lives.


In our age of instantaneous communication, it’s difficult to think of the isolation that space travelers would experience by living in a Martian colony. The communication lag time would in itself be an obstacle to seeking help from people back on Earth. And that’s about what the experimenters found. In the first ten days of the experiment, the communication between the isolated crew and Mission Control was frequent and virtually instantaneous. As the hypothetical ship got farther from the home planet, the time delay in communication was increased on purpose. From the eleventh day on, the crew made fewer attempts to contact MC. After all, they had problems to solve that they knew directly, whereas MC officials knew about situations only indirectly, that is through what the crew could explain or describe. The only exception seems to have been during the mock “landing” on Mars, when the crew, during the process, sought help from MC. We can imagine that any crew that became a Martian colony would find itself responsible for its survival since any physical help would take months to arrive.


That Russian experiment was recently explained in “External Communication of Autonomous Crews Under Simulation of Interplanetary Missions” by Natalia Supolkina and others. * To me, the experiment provides a mechanism for stamping out the current milieu of “victimhood” in an American society that has seen an increase in numbers of people seeking “safe spaces” and blaming society “in general” for “systemic ills.” We have become dependent and co-dependent to the extreme. Such dependence is, of course, the antithesis of self-reliance. Such dependence favors blaming others or society in general for perceived ills suffered by individuals.


Personal responsibility is not easy to come by in an age of blame. But it is the ultimate survival mechanism. Maybe a bit of isolation and independence would serve as a way for modern wimps to become masters of their own universe. I believe that only as we increase self-reliance will we be able to decrease the perceptions of victimhood.

Note:

*Frontiers in Physiology. 9 Nov 2021.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2021.751170. Summary at
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-off-world-colony-simulation-reveals-human.html  
Full article at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.751170/full    Accessed November 9, 2021.