The Caucasian child was young, just a toddler, and someone in the room was asking about a TV star. The child asked, “The one with the brown face?” There was no judgment in the question, just a point of identification. The point is that the child could recognize color differences in faces as surely as it could recognize colors in a crayon box. Not knowing the person, the child searched for a means of identification. Now tell me, given ignorance of a name or a behavior associated with a person, do you do the same? Probably, but not for someone of similar skin color. If there is no exception, there’s nothing to point out. What would you identify in an empty room of uniform color? 
 
We’ve found out that Denisovans and Neandertals had offspring. The Max Planck Society press release of August 23, 2018, confirms the genetic finding. The leg bone of a young teenage girl found in Denisova Cave bears the genetic trace of a Neandertal mother and Denisovan father. And the father seems to have had “at least one Neandertal ancestor further back in his family tree.”*
 
If you are an anthropology inexpert like me, your knowledge of Neandertals is somewhat limited and filled with low-browed, wide-nosed facial images and a stooping posture. See. I just did what the child did. I picked out a feature (the face) and used it as an identifier. I made no judgment. Obviously, unless it was a matter of rape, some Denisovan guy, a very close relative of yours, found some Neandertal girl in a bar and had at least one night of abandoned willpower driven by hormones. And someone in the Denisovan’s past had done the same, maybe even his great grandmother. Apparently, as Clyde Kluckhohn pointed out in his studies, there isn’t such a thing as a pure race, especially outside Africa, and there really never was.** 
 
Enter political correctness. I don’t have any hair on top my head. So, given that you don’t know me, what feature might you use to identify me? Should I be offended if what you say is true, “There’s a bald guy over there.” The feature is what it is. No offense taken. But enter another problem. At what level of variation do you distinguish a “brown” or “black” or “white” or some other color face? Was the girl in the Denisova Cave more Neandertal than Denisovan? Would it make a difference to you? If someone is more Hutu than Tutsi, does it make a difference? “Well,” you say, “it obviously made a difference during the genocide of the 1990s.” Yes, to Hutus and Tutsis, but if you are neither, could you tell one apart from the other? 
 
How does that age-old definition of a species work? A species is a group that can produce fertile offspring.*** Neandertals and Denisovans appear to have done that. All humans currently on the planet have a reproductive potential that matches those ancient humans. I wonder what the girl in the Denisovan cave had to say about her “race.” I wonder whether her nose was a little wider and her brow a little more pronounced than the other people in the cave. I wonder whether or not she was ostracized because of her mother’s Neandertal genes. Or did the mother live in harmony with her in-laws as so many people of mixed backgrounds have done and continue to do?
 
But we still have people like Hitler and Goering arguing for “racial purity” as though they themselves lack the diversity that Clyde Kluckhohn says pervades humanity.**** How far back can you trace your ancestry? If you are of European descent, you possibly incorporate Neandertal ancestry. And for others, even into southeast Asia, it is possible that the Denisovans left their genetic mark. That means that Melanesians have continued the Denisovan biology into today.
 
Anyway, here’s the suggestion. At birth everyone should be given the results of a genetic test and those results should be posted over the crib, then beneath a refrigerator magnet in the kitchen, then in the first-grade classroom, and in every subsequent classroom with everyone else’s genetic background. “Oh! No!” you say. “That would be an invasion of privacy.”
 
Yes, it would be for a bunch of people, but it would also be a check on anyone who claims “racial purity.” Let’s have a genetic background posted online. We might also incorporate in the educational system those anthropological realities that Kluckhohn and other anthropologists and geneticists have uncovered about our common humanity. We currently live with hypocrisy in those who would arbitrarily condemn others over who they are physically. Couldn’t we try something different to diminish both that hypocrisy and the racism with which it is associated?*****
 
 
 
*Max Planck Society (MPG) Press Release, 23 Aug 2018, online at https://www.research-in-germany.org/news/2018/8/2018-08-23_Neandertal_mother__Denisovan_father_Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF): Research in Germany. Study by Prof. Dr. Svante Pääbo et al. of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.
 
**Achenback, Joel. Study Finds Africans More Genetically Diverse Than Other Populations, Washington Post, Friday, May 1, 2009. Online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/30/AR2009043002485.html
 
***As Merriam-Webster defines it: “comprising related organisms or populations potentially capable of interbreeding”
 
****Like you, I have memories that I can’t precisely reference, including the lines Kluckhohn wrote in Mirror for Man, a book I read for a college class and the copy of which I cannot find in my library at this time. I know his point was a simple one: After years of studying the Navajo and other peoples, he had drawn the conclusion that there was no pure race. I remember his mentioning the predominance of dark-haired people in Scandinavian countries stereotypically described as lands of light-haired people. And then I think of my own children and grandchildren, all blond through childhood and some blond or light-haired into adulthood, and all but one blue/green-eyed, in spite of my brown eyes and childhood brown hair (before I lost it). Are those physical characteristics the result of my wife’s northern European and Russian background? Did I marry a Viking? We all have a tendency to generalize based on a single or few characteristics. Are there some characteristics associated with geography and genetics? Yes, probably. But the mix of humanity continues, also probably at an accelerated pace thanks to greater mobility and some breakdowns in cultural taboos. What the Denisovans and Neandertals started no doubt continued with the Neandertals and modern humans, and from then on among humans across the planet. Unfortunately, there will always be those who believe there’s irrefutable purity in their genes. Maybe a good practice would be to give a genetic heritage summation to everyone upon birth, a summation that would include Neandertal and Denisovan genes. With such knowledge of genetic diversity, could anyone claim “purity”?
 
***** I’m not very realistic, am I? As soon as we eliminate one distinction among humans, we’ll find another, maybe culture, religion, politics, or even athletic ventures: Are you an avid fan of curling or football? I’m not opposed to birds of a feather flocking together, but I am opposed to birds of a feather thinking all other birds are ugly ducklings.   

You might think that after uncounted, but maybe trillions, of trips and falls and maybe trillions more drops and stumbles, humans might have a handle on the value of the gravitational constant. Not so. Researchers keep revising the numbers. Like you, I’m going to ask, “Who does this for a living?” I can hear the conversation now.
 
“Honey, I’m off to work. I’ll see you later.”
 
“Don’t forget we need to pack for the Disney trip.”
 
“Right. I can’t wait to ride the Tower of Terror. Nothing like a good and unexpected drop for a gravity scientist.”
 
“Be careful at work, dear. Don’t drop something on you. I haven’t paid the health insurance bill yet.”
 
“Me. No, the only thing I’ve been dropping is the value of the gravitational constant.”
 
About two centuries ago, the reclusive Henry Cavendish measured the gravitational constant, not a small accomplishment in an age preceding modern lab techniques and lasers. Ever since, some people have focused their careers on experiments that measure gravity, both for practical and for theoretical purposes. (Yeah, somebody comes up with the money to pay them) Anyway, in their continuing attempts to refine the constant, Gravitoners (I don’t know what to call them, and maybe that name makes them sound like 1950s rock group or an 80s heavy metal group) keep giving us new numbers.
 
Five years ago this week, French gravitoners measured the gravitational constant and found it to be 21 PPM lower than their previous measurement. The drop in measurement supposedly reflected better science; that’s what they (gravitorners) said about their equipment and their results (some gravitoners found the value 241 PPM lower). So, the 2013 value was set at 6.67545(18) x 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^2. Who am I to question a figure that seems so precise?
 
Drop into 2018 for yet another refiguring. Groups of gravitoners in China and Russia have experimental results of 6.674484 and 6.674184 yada yada yada with exponents.** What the heck is going on? Does this mean that our falls are a bit less violent and that our scales are making us think we are losing more weight than our diets promise? 
 
You know we all love constants. But the value in a constant is, well, CONSTANCY. Now, every time I step on a scale, I have to wonder whether or not I’m not actually losing or maintaining weight, but rather simply applying a different value to my mass. If the value keeps dropping, I’ll soon weigh the same as I currently would on the moon. Of course, the good news is that I won’t fall as hard, won’t get hurt as much by a falling object, and won’t get as much of an inverted stomach during a fall on the Tower of Terror. Wait! That might not be good news for amusement park owners and their customers. “We tried the new ride, but it wasn’t very exhilarating.”
 
Then, again, maybe I’ll walk with a more sprightly step, jump 21PPM farther, or keep my breathing steady during a climb up steps or hills. 
 
Constants. They make us feel secure. Love is the one constant that binds, right? Peace is the interrupted constant most humans have sought since Cain killed Abel. Evenhanded justice is the constant constitutions are supposed to guarantee. Any challenge to constants challenges our sense of stability and security. Of course, we have no standard quantitative way of agreeing on the value of any “human” constant. The Constitution, for example, undergoes alterations through legal precedents that turn a general concept into a set of very specific nuances. 
 
What’s next? Some researcher telling us that after examining all constants, he found that the only constant is the constantly changing nature of constants? The good news is that all dieters have lost weight effortlessly.  
 

* Yirka, Bob. New measure of gravitational constant higher than expected. Phys.org. September 9, 2013. Online at  https://phys.org/news/2013-09-gravitational-constant-higher.html  Yirka writes, “This value is 21 PPM lower than the last time they ran the experiment (measurements by others have ranged as far as 241PPM lower).” So, the measurement is higher than the last measurement that was lower than the previous value by 221PPM. Thus, still lower. 
**Yirka, Bob, Two new ways to measure the gravitational constant. Phys.org. August 30, 2018 online at https://phys.org/news/2018-08-ways-gravitational-constant.html

“What’s on your mind today? You’ve been wandering around wondering, apparently, probably because you’ve written 1,000 little essays, and your brain is empty. After all, how many thoughts could you possibly hide in there, that is, how many thoughts that would inspire essay number 1,001?” you ask.
 
“This is where I am, somewhat lost in a field that is full of fields,” I say. 
 
“Okay, I see you haven’t stopped thinking. I can sense the birth of a little essay. You’re going to make me think just when I thought I might get a rest. This better be good.”
 
“Physicists tell us that we should abandon our notions of solidity, that we aren’t composed of matter as we have understood it. Think the force between north ends of two magnets and Faraday. There’s evidence of the magnetic field in that force. And when physicists look more closely at the subatomic world that makes up the atomic world that makes up the world, they say they are looking at fields and that I should abandon my long imagined atoms as little building blocks of solid matter. Electrons and quarks, baby; that’s it; that’s everything in the world we deal with daily. That’s me. That’s you. Somehow, ‘fields.’ Neither electrons or quarks are solid as we like to think of solids. And that’s the universe in which we live. Impossible to imagine, the composition of everything can be reduced to fields. The protons and neutrons we see in our elementary school textbooks are just models without substance as we normally define ‘substance.’ 
 
“Could someone please show me a quark? No, I don’t want a graph or diagram of some kind. I want to hold a quark or see one under some microscope. I know they are little, but don’t we have some kind of technology that lets us see them? Otherwise, what am I supposed to think when I look in a mirror? That I’m not really there as I see myself? That I’m composed of ‘particles’ that aren’t really particles, that ‘wave functions’ and ‘fields’ are my composition? That I am more emptiness than non-emptiness because the electrons orbit or shroud a nucleus of up and down quarks so tiny that much of what we call atoms is empty space? The diameter of an ‘atom’ some 100,000 times larger than the nucleus of quarks, a pea in the middle of a football field. 
 
“This is very disheartening. I’ve been working all my life to understand myself, and now I realize that the ‘myself’ I want to understand can only be understood physically as it is understood mentally, that is, that my body is as fluid as my mind. Is this the endpoint of knowledge? Am I a set of fields in a larger set of fields? Isn’t all matter the same fundamental composition? Even two magnets themselves are composed of the very kinds of fields to which they respond with resistance or attraction. Am I living in something akin to virtual reality? Am I a fractal? Should I start looking at everyone and everything as though they are screen savers?
 
“Or, should I do what I have always done? Ignore matters I can’t resolve to concentrate on matters that I can resolve? Isn’t everything in our lives a matter of context, anyway? What difference does it make if I merely assume that I am solid and the world I deal with is also solid? What difference does it make if I don’t dwell on touch as a product of the electromagnetic force in action? Don’t I already do that? After all, how can I account for my feelings? They certainly can’t be the same as touch and sight, can’t be mere products of overcrowded electrons resisting one another like similar poles of two bar magnets. And what about consciousness? How does a physical body that is composed of fields make a brain capable of coherent thought or consistent self-awareness? How is my identity derived from fields interacting through forces? Seems strange, but I guess my identity is the same as the identity of any field I see: ‘Look, a field of flowers. There’s a corn field. The cows are in the field. And there’s a field of Donald.' 
 
“Maybe I should ignore the physical fields althogether and just concentrate on the social ones. All those people out there are also a combination of fields interacting through just four fundamental forces (weak, strong, electromagnetic, and gravitational), and the only reason they have mass is the Higgs field through which matter wades like a senior citizen in an exercise pool. 
 
“Those people out there, those other ‘fields’ which they represent (or parts of fields of which I am also a part—or particle), all together make social, religious, and political fields through which I wade. Are they my Higgs fields? Sometimes the walking is difficult; I acquire more mass, becoming something like a heavy metal because of the resistance of the fluid, the field, almost as though I am walking through mercury instead of water or less dense air. Yes, maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the reason that we have the problems we have. We move sluggishly because of the ‘mass’ we acquire when we move through certain social fields. We plow through social, political, and religious ‘fields,’ meeting various degrees of resistance.  
 
“I don’t really need to prove that I am ‘solid.’ Physical mass isn’t what occupies my mind. I’m always wading in fluids of different densities, always encountering various levels of resistance in my interactions with others. Occasionally, I move through the fields of human interactions with little resistance, and life becomes exhilarating. I can move as a glider through air, seeming to defy all forces of society, politics, and religion, or maybe even aided in my flight by them.”
 
“This is it?” you ask. “This is what you want to give me to think about?”
 
“Look about. You are acquiring some mass by some field. You can abandon your walk through the resistant fields, the ones that slow your progress. The physicists tell us that the Higgs field, for example, is what gives matter mass and that things with more ‘mass’ are simply interacting with the field more than things with less mass. We all have some choices here. No, we can’t eliminate our moving as fields through fields, but we can sometimes choose the fields through which we wander. I’m just wondering which field to wander today. Do I pick one through which I can move easily or one through which I must struggle?”

The “millennium” was a big deal for millions—maybe even for billions—who found something significant in the year 2000. What would happen? Could it be the year the world ended? And what about all those projected computer crashes of Y2K? End of the World! Stock up on toilet paper. The late Prince told us to “party like it’s 1999.” 
 
Reaching age 40 seems to be a big deal for millions, maybe even for billions. Being married 50 years is also something noteworthy for many. Why? What’s so significant about any number that ends in a zero? What was so significant about 2000? Remember, the count of years is based on Dionysius Exiguus’ determination of Christ’s year of birth. Di is the guy who replaced the Roman numbering of years. He might have made a mistake by four years or so. That would make this year 2022. But does that make any real difference? 
 
So, this is my 1,000th little essay on this site. Significant? Maybe for me, but not really. Just another posting, just as the day before someone turns 40 is as significant as the actual birthday or the day after. Significance is a personal matter. Choose to make each day significant, and you will think 39 years 264 days is worth celebrating as much as exactly 40 years.  
 
For me, reaching 1,000 essays is hardly much of an achievement in that during the time of their appearances, they were merely other matters to which I attended. And that’s the way it is with all of us in all our so-called significant moments. We don’t have to be defined by a single episode or a single moment. There’s no vacuum in our lives that is punctuated by “something.” There’s always something in a continuum of thought and activity. We choose to recognize certain of those “somethings” as significant, but on what grounds? The year 2000, for example, ends an artificial construct, our reckoning of time from a moment considered to be special for the West, for Christianity, and for political entities that formed under the aegis of that system. Our math is a base 10 system, so the zero became significant, a place to end and a place to start anew.
 
Writing 1,000 little essays on sundry topics has been fun, and I will continue to write other such essays. It’s my way of exploring, and I’m happy that others have thought to explore with me. The goal in my exploring is to open a path for your path-making, not to lead you to any specific temple of knowledge lost like a pyramid in Mayan or Aztec lands. Sure, I might stumble through some thicket to see the steps laid long ago, but you can explore the jungle adjacent to the path I cut. I might find an isolated temple. You might find an entire city.
 
One thousand? Not too significant. Think about your current year. The Romans began counting from the founding of their city. The Soviets tried to make 1917 the year one. Everyone remembers Rosemary’s baby, born, as they say in the film, in Year One. Why shouldn’t we start the counting with Earth’s formation 4.6 billion years ago, or with the universe’s origin 13.8 billion years ago? Why not start our counting with the year of your birth? And why not judge any specific essay of mine as being one that led you to your own significant insights whereas many of the 1,000 I wrote seemed, at least to you, rather silly and inconsequential ramblings. 
 
Till our minds meet again in the next posting…

We have this thing about wanting a stable environment. Makes us feel secure knowing that there are checks and balances and that nothing is running amok, nothing is sweeping through the world like some unchecked plague. We like that sense of control even when we aren’t the agents of control. A world in equilibrium frees us from worrying about potentially inimical excesses. And, to use the old expression, Lord knows, we certainly have many of those.  
 
Invasive species have been a problem since life evolved. Some happy group of organisms sits in place, using its environment to its advantage, balanced between too much and too little: Just the right balance between resources and their use. And then, bang! Along comes some invader to eat the stuff that supports the endemic population or to attack that population. “Bummer.” Bet that’s what the Neanderthals thought when humans invaded Europe. 
 
So, we find ourselves trying to rebalance Nature gone out of kilter, to put things back the way they once were and the way we preferred them. But disequilibrium is the way the world changes, the pendulum of any environment, social, biological, physical, swinging between extremes and rarely dead downward and motionless. Too many herbivores? Add some wolves, or lions, or hyenas. And what about those pests so many of us try to avoid. The insects. Geez, they’re everywhere, aren’t they? Underfoot and overhead. In areas where we keep food. Invading our gardens and farms. Sometimes carrying diseases like Lyme or West Nile. 
 
Enter the stinkbugs. Really, enter almost everywhere. In southwestern Pennsylvania, for example, they start looking for residence in homes in August and appear unannounced inside during the winter. “Oh! No. There’s another one. I’ll get it.” And the critters damage fruit, apples and peaches. What’s a human society to do? Science. I know. We’ll try science. We can get things under control because we’re intelligent. We can reset the equilibrium. Balance things through purposeful biocontrol.
 
Of course, we have to be careful. The cure, as we all know, can be worse than the disease. There are many instances of human intervention in Nature that resulted in disastrous consequences for endemic organisms that weren’t the object of biocontrol efforts. So, there are government officials who oversee any purposefully introduced biocontrol agent, and one of those is the samurai wasp, an agent that can destroy stinkbugs by laying its eggs inside stinkbug eggs. But bugs have never obeyed the dictates of bureaucracies nor the boundaries of countries. Trying to make a careful effort to study whether or not the samurai wasps could be imported to kill stinkbugs, entomologist Kim Hoelmer at the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in Newark, brought the wasps to the USA.* And then, to his surprise, found that the wasps had arrived on their own, invaded, so to speak. There appears to be an Equilibrium Principle at work: Stinkbugs invade. Stinkbugs harm fruit. Wasps invade somehow on their own. Wasps begin to cull stinkbug population. Hmm. 
 
True, the new equilibrium that wasps might establish will be different from the old equilibrium that persisted before the stinkbugs invaded. Nature adjusts. We will adjust. The pendulum will hang vertically for a brief time. But no place remains the same, and the very act of preservation results in some change.
 
*Servick, Kelly. Scientists spent years on a plan to import this wasp to kill stinkbugs. Then it showed up on its own. Science . August 9, 2018, Online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/scientists-spent-years-plan-import-wasp-kill-stinkbugs-then-it-showed-its-own

Did you know that lack of glycogenin causes glycogen accumulation and muscle function impairment?* Neither did I, but maybe that indicates something about us. In a study by people associated with the University of Barcelona, mice that were glycogenin-deficient gained more glycogen in their striated muscles, and they did poorly in endurance and strength tests. Analogously, lack of knowledge appears to increase our level of ignorance and negatively affect mental function.  Duh!? Yeah, you read me correctly. 
 
Ignorance has a way of multiplying itself just like cells. From one “dumb thing” we get more dumb things. From lack of knowledge we get unsubstantiated and often wild hypotheses. And the process interferes with how we interact with others and with our environment. 
 
So, as ignorance engenders more ignorance, we find ourselves in a constant state of confirmation bias with little chance of gaining the intellectual and emotional strength we need to pursue unadulterated truth. We become lethargic and weak mice.  
 
 
*Testoni, G. et al., Lack of Glycogenin Causes Glyogen Accumulation and Muscle Function Impariment. Cell Metabolism, Vol. 26, No. 1, July, 2017.

Some people love them; others, don’t. Crowds. You belong, but you’re separate. You feel the energy, but you also fear it. There’s just a precariousness to being in something that can morph like some alien monster in a film, a crowd turning into a mob. And it’s not as though we haven’t had incidents.
 
So, as the Notting Hill Festival draws crowds, a look around the neighborhoods reveals that some residents and shop owners prepare for crowd-turned-mob by boarding up their properties, substituting plywood for glass, putting up a fence or gate. Shame, isn’t it. Humans can’t gather without somehow becoming a bit “nonhuman.” What is it about us that turns identity into anonymity? Is behavior, thinking, and attitude imposed from without or driven from within. Is it Id or Superego?
 
If it is the former, the Id, don’t we have a question? Is the Id a personal reality? Is there a personal drive that is instinctual? And why does something instinctual have to be destructive? Or, is the Id simply a mechanism that both ensures and uses anonymity? 
 
Crowds and mobs. Festivals and riots. Why does a crowd in a church not turn into a mob? Why is a festival crowd somehow different from a church crowd? Is it the environment or some hidden drive? If either, the Ego dictates. I impose either order or disorder. I perceive and direct unless there truly is some anonymous source of chaos inside that is uncontrollable except through the dictates of the Superego and the desires of the Ego.
 
“Well, that’s all gobbledygook,” you say. “Don’t individuals determine how and when a crowd turns into a mob?”
 
“Yes, and in that case, we could all argue that some individuals have taken what they are deep down and imposed it either directly or subtly on a crowd. Opportunists, for example, might see a crowd as a great avenue into a liquor store or pharmacy for some looting or as an avenue to political power, à la Hitler. Some insidious motivation could drive any of us if we give up self-awareness. Maybe jumping up and down with a group celebrating a home team’s victory could be seen as an initial form of mob action, possibly leading to some exacerbation during which the mob destroys shop windows and overturns cars. And then there are the individuals who can use the media to incite for specific purposes.
 
“Or think of paparazzi all individually competing for that special photo to sell and, in doing so, chasing a Mercedes with a princess and her boyfriend through a tunnel until they crash. Or, again, think of a scandal, any scandal, and how it has been handled by the crowd in control of the press. If one isn’t a member of the favored group, then the crowd turns into a mob seeking ‘blood,’ destroying first and then publishing a sentence-long retraction in a corner of a back section. Don’t we all, at times, act like that? Don’t we all have some agenda that leads us to either incite or join a mob? Just as loose rumor has through the ages, so published and broadcast tales can turn crowds into mobs.
 
“That brings me to ask myself, ‘How do I know when I am being carried along by a mob mentality? How can I maintain personal control when I’m being pushed and pulled by so many groups?’ True, I’m not going to attend any Notting Hill Festival that attracts hundreds of thousands of people, so I won’t be around if a mob action occurs. I’m not agoraphobic, but I’m reticent to put myself in a circumstance where personal control can be overwhelmed by an uncontrollable crowd. I remember once being in line for supper when the college dining hall opened. As the crowd moved forward, it became a mass that began to crush me—and the crushing began to exceed my strength to resist. I was not in control. Fortunately for me, the doorway was large enough so that people began to flow into the room, but for a while, everyone near the door was like mashed potatoes passing through a funnel. We know what happened at the Who concert in 1979, when eleven people were crushed to death outside Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum, don’t we?
 
“So, I keep asking myself, is there an analog in the life of the mind? Are we through social media and news and opinion outlets just like the people carried along by the crowd turned mob? Are we to some degree like those Germans pre-World War II? Every time I see the national political conventions of the Democratic, Republican, Green, and whatever parties, I marvel at the seeming unbridled enthusiasm exhibited by throngs of people. Surely, some of them are individuals just swept up by something irresistible as I was physically on the day outside the dining hall.
 
“Really, all of us face that dilemma between belonging too much and isolating too far. All of us live in a crowd to some extent. It might not be a physical crowd, but it’s certainly an attitudinal and intellectual one. Let’s hope we can foresee the moment when the crowd starts to become mob. Recognizing that moment gives us time to escape before being crushed.” 

In writing about anxiety and worry, I have previously said that if one is nearly in accident nothing happened. In fact, that’s partly true. For the one who suffers a “near-accident,” the heart might beat a little faster, adrenalin might be coursing through the body, and emotions might be running high. But the accident was “near.” It didn’t actually happen. Even if one is in a “near-accident” during which two cars miss each other by only a millimeter, nothing happened physically. The cars could just as easily have passed an infinity apart. Perception makes the difference. 
 
What doesn’t happen is for some people “something that happened.” And it’s not just some physical accident that is the focus here. Encounters with others that “missed by a millimeter” also didn’t happen: Avoided or imagined arguments, for example. The problem for most of us is that we often pay attention to what hasn’t or won’t happen. It’s as though we seek anxiety, worry, and a rush of adrenalin. We can be addicted to nonevents that have no consequences.
 
Think in terms of measurements, real physical measurements, the next time you perceive a nonevent to be an event worth your concern. Missing by a millimeter is the same as missing by infinity.

Because mass warps space, light from behind distant galaxies bends under strong gravity. The product is “lensing” or “gravitational lensing.” Distant galaxies hidden behind closer galaxies can appear as two or even as four mirror images on either side of or surrounding the nearer galaxy or galaxy cluster that exerts the gravitational “bending.” The lensing can also magnify light from distant objects. Now we can see a star called Spock that lies about eight billion light years away and another, even more distant, star called Icarus at nine billion light years’ distance. Understand me. We’re not talking galaxies composed of hundreds of billions of stars, but two individual stars isolated for viewing thanks to lensing by a galaxy cluster four billion light years away. Take a look up at Andromeda, a nearby galaxy, and show me an individual star. Yes, that’s the significance of Spock and Icarus.*
 
The twinkling stars appear within the smeared and curved images of lensed galaxies. Even though they are large stars, their visibility astonishes astronomers because of their great distance. Who woulda thunk it? Seeing an individual star some 9 billion light years away can astonish almost everyone. That’s nine billion times almost six trillion miles. That’s lots of zeroes: about 5.4 times ten to the twenty-second power. 
 
It is possible, of course, that Spock and Icarus no longer exist, their light happily traveling along the country-curving two-lane road to strike our telescopes and astonish us. Their light left them four to five billion years before Earth was a twinkle in the eyes of the Sun’s nebula. The twinkling of Spock suggests repeated eruptions from its surface, but that’s just the leading hypothesis. 
 
Now think of your deceased ancestors, those long gone before you were a twinkle in your parents’ eyes. Occasionally, you might come across something reaching you from their time. Of course, they left you some physical traits—and maybe some behavioral propensities. Generally, you know them through the intervening lens of their children and grandchildren, or maybe even from farther back in your family history. How much like a fuzzy, indistinguishable smearing of their being like some fuzzy smeared shape of a distant lensed galaxy is their appearance. But imagine that your distant relative is someone like George Washington. Now, regardless of the temporal separation and the bending through the lens of historians, you do have a glimpse of the individual in your background. So, who in your distant history might be your Spock or Icarus, your George Washington? And how much, beyond hypothesis, do you really know about what made them act as you see them through the lens of intervening humans?
 
And now the future: It’s true that most of us will simply be fuzzed-out in the population of our time as seen through the lens of the ensuing generations. Maybe some of us will, for whatever reason, twinkle through, live long, and appear visible to future generations as an isolated, maybe a bit mysterious human entity. There will always be some lensing of a life as seen by those who follow. 
 
For you my wish paraphrases the Vulcan wish expressed by the character Spock on Star Trek: May you live long and twinkle.
 
*Selsing, Jonatan, et al., Dark Cosmology Centre. The Most distant single star ever detected. Online at https://dark.nbi.ku.dk/news/2018/the-most-distant-single-star-ever-detected/  also
Kelly, Patrick L, Jose M. Diego and 43 others. Extreme magnification of an individual star at redshift 1.5 by al galaxy-cluster lens. Nature Astronomy, 2, 334-342 (2018), online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0430-3

Recently, I stood by the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. As any topographic map will reveal, the river lies about a mile beneath the canyon rim, and the canyon stretches nearly 300 miles, at times reaching a width of 18 miles. At the bottom of the canyon, one can see sides either impossible for any inexperienced rock climber to climb or too steep to climb without great effort. The canyon walls dwarf any individual. It is truly a great hole. And it took a considerable time to make as rivers, mostly the Colorado, washed away trillions of tons of rock* over the past five or more million years. Although the front part of my brain knew that getting out of the the bottom of the canyon would be difficult, it wasn’t until I was standing in that great hole that I actually “felt” its depth, the steepness of its walls, the mercilessness of a white water river, and the great length of the chasm. Fortunately, for me, it was a matter of a pleasant helicopter ride both into and out of the Grand Canyon. In spite of the canyon’s beauty, I am not inclined toward living in a hole, regardless of its grandeur.  
 
Is it a bit curious that we think of a big nothing, a place that was once solid rock but is now an emptiness, as “something” significant? Maybe not. We’re used to seeing human erosion as acquaintances, friends, and family members suffer from depression, economic problems, addiction, and chronic illness. Those “big holes” mostly occur little bit by little bit just as the Grand Canyon underwent grain-by-grain erosion. But, as we all know, sometimes both geologic and human erosion occur catastrophically: Rock falls and landslides in the canyon and broken relationships and financial losses in human affairs, for example. 
 
Changes in circumstances, losses of any kind, and bad health and addiction can erode any psyche into a canyon. And like being in the Grand Canyon, those who are suffering see the only way out of their personal holes is by climbing towering steep canyon walls or riding a long and sometimes violent white-water river.
 
For those in the depths of personal canyons, there are usually no easy helicopter rides to the plateau above. What took a long time to dig isn’t easy to get out of; and even when there are mechanisms of extraction, the distance out is the same as the distance in. As we all seem to know either from personal experience or from what we’ve read or studied, getting out of our human canyons requires effort. Each person is like John Wesley Powell, the famous explorer of the Grand Canyon because every human chasm is, for that person, a new experience with the unknown. Powell provides a model for anyone who enters a human canyon. Having lost an arm during the Civil War, he explored the canyon in wooden boats. He made the journey into and out of the canyon in spite of his handicap and the rather crude materials available in the nineteenth century. We might say to ourselves, “If Powell could do it with one arm, then I can.” 
 
Apparently and regardless of hardships, humans have the capacity to enter seemingly inextricable places and with effort extricate themselves. Remember that when you find yourself in a canyon of your or some accidental making. Just like the Grand Canyon, there is a way out.    
 
*Grand Canyon: Length 277 river miles (446 km); cubic yards removed: 5.45 trillion (4.17 trillion cubic meters); average gradient of Colorado River, 7 feet per mile (1.3 m per km), obviously, in some sections greater and in other sections less.