A Good Day, a Bad Day. Let’s Ask Winnie. 
 
“Have a good day” is a frequently uttered American wish with similar expressions in at least 100 languages. You might have wished for “a good day” numerous times for others and even for yourself. I hope you haven’t wished its opposite on others—or on yourself. But there might have been those angry moments…
 
So, with worldwide use, the expression “Have a good day” deserves a little socio-psycho-philosophical inspection. Is there something in the nature of humans that drives them to say the expression in almost every culture? Is there such an entity as “a good day.” 
 
Let’s start with the concept of its antithesis, that is, the notion of “a bad day.” Certainly, you have heard—if not said—“I’m having a bad day.” That anyone thinks a day can be bad can imply a philosophy and psychology of fate. “Bad days” appear to occur to others or to oneself. They arrive unannounced, thrown upon the hapless by some force of Nature or Deity. For the ancient Greeks that force lay in the actions of the Three Fates. Whatever the modern counterpart of the Fates might be, it lies in the minds of those who believe there are controls on life external to the actions of the individual. One might begin a day with good intentions, high energy, purpose, and the wherewithal to carry out that purpose, but Fate, Nature, the gods, or God intervenes, throws the proverbial monkey wrench into the machinery of life, and imposes a “bad day” on what began with hope and promise. Yes, for those who think blind Fate plays a role, “bad days” seem to occur regardless of human energy or free will. It is naïve to think that anyone can live without encountering at least occasionally the “bad day” just as one can’t avoid bugs hitting the windshield in summer as car and bug attempt to occupy the same spot at the same time, an impossibility in the universe of Pauli’s Exclusion Principle. Yes, bad days are bugs crossing the highways of life, intersecting an individual’s worldline. Apparently, the only way to keep one’s windshield clean is by keeping the car in the garage—or in not having a car at all. But that’s hardly a realistic choice. Why then, have a car? Anyway, everyone knows that the garage itself might lie in the path of a flood, a tornado or hurricane, earthquake tremors, or even a meteorite. In 1938 the Benld Meteorite crashed through Ben McCain’s garage, through the roof of the car, and the passenger seat. “Bad day in Benld?” “Bad day in the McCain house?” “Bad day for the McCains?” Or what of the Chevy Malibu owned by Michelle Knapp? The Peerskill Meteorite that struck her car on October 9, 1992, crushed the back of the vehicle. “Bad day for Michelle?” 
 
Or “good day for Michelle?” A meteorite enthusiast bought her car for $10,000. It had a value of $300 before the impact. And then she sold the meteorite for $69,000 to a group of meteorite collectors. Is it possible for a day to be both “good” and “bad”? Keep that question in mind.
 
There’s also the matter of defining “bad day” and “good day.” They appear to be relative terms, don’t they? And they also appear to be mutually exclusive until one takes Michelle Knapp’s experience into account. In retrospect, Michelle’s October 9, 1992, experience indicates that both kinds of days can coexist as closely as bosons in a Bose-Einstein Condensate, possibly in defiance of Pauli’s Exclusion Principle.  
 
Does a bad day imply some immorality or amorality? It can, but then doesn’t the psychological reality lie not in the passage of time—i.e., the day itself—but rather in the evil or apathy of an individual or group? Is “Bad Day” just a synonym for encounters with “Bad People” or “Indifferent People”? 
 
Days are indifferent entities without purpose, call them motiveless unaware passages of events dilated by human concerns. People, by contrast, determine the nature of each day on the bases of cultural values and personal well being. Bad days are not entities independent of human consciousness but are the products of individual decisions and the outcome of willful or careless behavior. Are good days similar? People can be good, and their actions can precipitate a rain of at least temporary good fortune and well being on themselves and others. Should we replace “Have a good day” with “I hope you encounter good people today”?
 
Are both good and bad days merely the product of attitude, the half empty, half full glass perspectives we associate with pessimists and optimists? If both kinds of days are the products of perception, then in the midst of what seems to be bad for one person another person sees some good. Take Winnie the Pooh as an example.
 
In Pooh’s Best Day: A Book about Weather, the narrator asks Pooh about the kind of day that he likes. The toddler’s cardboard-stock booklet of ten baby-proof colorful pages capable of withstanding chewing by a mouth full of baby teeth, progresses through different kinds of weather, showing Pooh and gang enjoying activities associated with snow, rain, and sunshine. The last two pages show Pooh having a picnic with the lines, “Pooh’s best day may be hot or cold, with rain, wind, or even snow/Because the very best day for Pooh is a day with friends, and honey, too!” * That message for toddlers tells them that as long as they are surrounded by those they love and that love them in return, any day, any weather, any meteorite impact that hits the car is just one incident among many incident that occur in every day. 
 
Of course, it would be naïve to think that the appellation “bad day” isn’t sometimes appropriate. The people of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, London, Dresden, Stalingrad, and many other cities certainly experienced undeniable “badness” during World War II, a badness foisted on them by outside forces. The people who lost loved ones during the 2020 pandemic also experienced “bad days,” the memory of which infuses ensuing days with “badness.” Even in the twenty-first century we rue those 2,194 days of World War II. Yet, when we look back, say through a 1940s newspaper’s articles, we find that while more than 50 million people were losing their lives during those days of terror, other people were going to movies, to dances, and to parties; babies were born, and toddlers heard Winnie the Pooh stories.  
 
Are we foolish in reading a book to toddlers that suggests one take an optimistic view of life regardless of the nature of days? Is that an acceptable and healthful child, or even human, psychology? Are we giving them false hopes that we can, like Pooh and Friends, weather any storm? Are we like Dr. Pangloss in Candide, arguing that this is the “best of all possible worlds” regardless of events like earthquakes and wars that disrupt and take lives? 
 
Should we, instead, read toddlers A. E. Housman’s poem “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff,” which contains the lines:
 
            “Therefore, since the world has still
            Much good, but much less good than ill,
            And while the sun and moon endure
            Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
            I’d face it as a wise man would,
            And train for ill and not for good.” **
 
The pressure falls on every generation as it welcomes the next generation. What do we teach those who know nothing of bad days about bad days? What do we offer them by telling them about good days? The lesson in Pooh’s Best Day seems to be that phenomena that originate outside the individual should have little or no effect on the social-psychological-philosophical perspective of the individual. Each of us has days with dual natures. It’s up to us to dissociate who we are from what happens to us. 
 
Maybe there is an easy takeaway from this. Even on days when you focus on failure, there are successes. Even on “bad days” good things happen, or should we say, good things are made to happen through human control.
 
Notes: 
*Mexico. Groiler [Press]. Disney Enterprises, Inc. 10 pages. No copyright date shown. The first publication date of a Winnie the Pooh book by Milne and Shepard was 1926. 
 
**Opening of third stanza.

Turbidity currents are underwater flows of sediments (muds, silts, sands) that begin as a slope fails. You’ve seen an analog in the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, when the side of the mountain failed and the turbulent pyroclastic flow cascaded down the volcano’s flank. Eventually, the turbulence ceases under gravity’s pull and friction with the surface over which the flow runs. The sediments (or ash in the case of the volcano) settle in a fan-shaped deposit with the larger particles (boulders) closer to the base of the slope and the progressively smaller particles (clasts) farther away where they make the edge of the “fan.” If you’ve flown over Nevada, you have seen from the air similar fan-shaped deposit called alluvial fans—though they originate from erosion mostly, rather than from catastrophic slope failure.
 
Turbidity currents have triggers. One is the movement of denser water into less dense water, a process Forel observed in the nineteenth century as Rhone water entered Lake Geneva. In 1929 the Grand Banks Earthquake triggered a turbidity flow that broke transatlantic undersea cables in sequence, those breaks giving researchers an idea of the flows speed and extent (60 mph and 400 mi). Slope failure caused by an overloading of sediments on an inclined surface is yet another kind of trigger. And turbidity currents have occurred almost everywhere on the planet as tectonic plate movements have created a bathymetry (undersea topography) for them. A half billion years ago a series of turbidity flows in what is now C anada’s Yoho National Park in  British Columbia. The turbidites of those flows buried animals of the Cambrian Period’s “explosion” of life-forms. Their forms and lifestyles preserved by rapid burials, the Burgess Shale fossils give us a look at what life looked like before turbidity flows overwhelmed and destroyed it.
 
And so, as I always do, I look for a human analog. 
 
Because the future is hidden until it becomes the present, we only rarely know what today’s actions will engender, much like that proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon Basin causing a tornado on the Great Plains. We can through the efforts of historians sifting through the debris of the human past discover part of a way of life that some turbulent events destroyed, the burial sediments serving as the base for an ensuing but different mix of life. We don’t have prognosticators or soothsayers upon whom we can rely for a look into what is to come. 
 
Take a seemingly innocent butterfly wing flap called E=mc^2 that triggered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; those blasts changed the relationships among adversarial nations and changed a previous non-nuclear way of life with a threat of nuclear annihilation anywhere and anytime. You don’t live the same way as people did prior to those atomic attacks that wiped out general security just as the turbidity flows wiped out life now found fossilized in the Burgess Shale. We live on the turbidites of those nuclear bombs, with some, like the residents of those Japanese cities, closer to the point where a previous way of life collapsed, the effects of them larger and more proximal, like the boulders in turbidite deposits, whereas the rest of the world lies on the edge of the fan, aware, but not intensely so because of their distal location, that in a moment a cascade of debris can destroy everything in its path. 
 
In a human analog, there’s another kind of turbulent flow, one that buries ways of thinking under a cascade of popular movements or insidious propaganda. 
 
Should I be specific? I know you want me to be so, however, I prefer to ask you to look around. Life and ways of life are always on a slope with a potential for failure. Turbulence and turbidity flows interrupt the calm, with the triggers the slides unaware of inescapable consequences. The animals in the Burgess Shale—a turbidity mud deposit once underwater but now raised tectonically to the Canadian Rockies—could not have known that the Earth today is different from the Earth they knew.  
 
Okay, since you asked, let me offer a few generalities: Media, political parties, groups, bureaucracies, religious leaders, and even individuals with an agenda initiate the self-propagating slides that like avalanches of snow are unstoppable and that result in burial of all in their paths. And when the accumulations of Big Government sit at the tops of slopes, the inevitable slide awaits the trigger that usually comes when political parties acquire unchallenged dominance. Just note that once a slide begins, nothing save friction and gravity can stop it. Think cascades of governmental regulations under which so much of free society lies buried and on which current society resides. Think of the world prior to Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, all of which covered vast swaths as they flowed over the human landscape. Think also, that like the turbidites that lie at the bases of continental slopes, those religions were not the products of single events, but rather of multiple events of varying intensities and masses. And like the turbidity flow of the Grand Banks earthquake, all the aforementioned flows cut the communication cables that had been laid down by a previous generation. 
 
Not much to advise here. Simply this. Ask yourself where you are relative to a slope. Are you part of an accumulating pile of sediments at the top of a slope that will yield to a trgger event? Are you lying at the base of the slope looking at a mass with a potential to bury you as the slope fails? Or are you in the midst of a turbulent flow that is distributing downslope particles of varying sizes, the larger ones settling out first and the smaller ones settling out far from the site of disturbance? Finally, ask whether or not in this last case that the turbulent flow in which you find yourself is, in fact, a single event or instead a merging of multiple flows caused by several trigger events. 

Note: Image from Conte, Thompson, Moses. Earth Science: An Integrated Perspective. William C. Brown Publishers. 1997, p. 358. The turbidity deposit is shown in yellow as a "sedimentary fan deposit."

“Are you coming to my grand opening.”
 
“What? Are you telling me that you finally opened that business you always wanted?”
 
“Yep. Don’s Tea Room and Bait Shop.”
 
“What?”
 
“Got some nice round tea tables with a flower vase on each and those little curvy icecream parlor chairs with decorative wire backs.”
 
“But you said ‘bait shop.’ Did I not hear you correctly?”
 
“No, you heard me. Tea tables and chairs on on one side near the gingham-curtained windows. Got boxes of dirt with worms in them on the other side of the room away from the sunlight by the windows. You know, gotta keep the worms in the dark. That’s why that side of the room has black paint on the walls.”
 
“Where is this business?”
 
“I found a place to rent next to Ben’s Flowers and Ammo shop. He has a booming business. I figture I’ll get some of his customers.”
 
“Who’s going to sit for tea in a room with boxes of dirt and worms?”
 
“You’d be surprised. Besides, they aren’t right next to each other. There’s a separation. As I said, the tea tables are by the windows with the panes. Got fresh flowers in little pots on the window sills and flower boxes on the outside of the windows. I get the flowers from Ben next door. He gives me a deal on flowers that have a day or two left in them. Sometimes I find flowers along the road. You know what Chris Browne has his comic strip character Hagar the Horrible say, ‘Sometimes it pays to stop and steal the flowers.’ Anyway, got flowers on one side of the shop and bait and flies on the other side. You can’t imagine how many fishermen I lure in because of the tea. Must like the exotic flavors and the printed tea cups and saucers.”
 
“This has to be a joke, right?”
 
“No, come to the shop. Here. If I’m not there when you go, give this gift card to the girl behind the counter. It’s good for either tea or worms.”
 
“But where did such a crazy idea for a business come from?”
 
“Humanity.”
 
“Huh?”
 
“People. I mean, look around. Can’t you see the tea room side of individuals? And then there’s that bait shop side. People want others to know them by the side they choose, but every tea drinker has a box of worms somewhere. Both kinds take pride in their choice, in tea or worms, in the manners and fashion of one or the other. But some people are willing to let others see both their sides, like wearing hip boots with suspenders while sitting in an icecream chair sipping tea. Some people aren’t hung up on one or the other. Everyone has at least two sides, tea cups and fishing lures, tea and worms. Only the proud limit themselves. At Don’s Tea Room and Bait Shop I provide a venue for people to express their complexity.”
 
“Okay, you got me. I’ll be in next Saturday.”
 
“Should I tell the girl to reserve you a chair or a bag of worms?”
 
“Well, you have me thinking. Tell her to reserve one of each.”

You know that “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that scares us every year as its hands tick closer to midnight? This year it has just under two minutes left until the bell tolls twelve. Humanity, beware. Put your ear on the ground. That thundering noise you hear comes from the hoofs of four horses. 
 
If you’re concerned about humankind and the arrival of the Four Horsemen, relax those shoulder muscles a bit. Chill. Humanity can take heart that it will survive, probably for thousands of years. And why? Time itself will save the species though time is, itself, the notorious path to personal midnight. 
 
I don’t expect the lyrics of most songs to make much sense. The composer/lyricist has to balance music and thought, a task so difficult that one or the other takes precedence. Since we listen to music more for the sound than for the thought, many composers repeat phrases or write esoteric gibberish that just seems to fit the notes that evoke emotions. 
 
Thus, songwriters can thrive on nonsense. Take some lines from the powerful “Now We Are Free” by the talented composer Hans Zimmer in collaboration with singer/lyricist Lisa Gerrard. Gerrard sings the tear-jerking song as the slain Maximus, the hero in Gladiator, walks through a field of wheat in the Afterlife to join his departed wife and son. Here are some of the lyrics:  
 
La la da pa du le na da na
Ve va da pa do le na da dumda
La la da pa da le na da na *
 
Amazing in a way. Not Shakespearean, right? The syllables make no sense; yet, they move audiences to tears. Without the Zimmer’s music that accompanies the lyrics, those syllables are no more meaningful than early rock-n-roll’s “Doo wop” music. Yet, the song was powerful enough with those meaningless syllables that it earned Zimmer an Academy Award Nomination for Best Music Score and both Zimmer and Gerrard a Golden Globe Award. Gerrard wrote the lyrics for “Now We Are Free” in her idioglossia, a language she invented at age 12.   
 
But what do music and lyrics have to do with that Doomsday Clock ticking toward midnight and the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Certainly, there’s no stopping their ineluctable arrival. No, not for individuals as everyone learns in time. Each of us will take that same walk through the field of wheat that Maximus takes in the film.  
 
But for the species? Isn’t that what the Doomsday Clock is all about? Not an individual’s clock striking twelve, but a group midnight predicted in the downward-spiraling pessimism of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to be just 100 seconds from now? Are they speaking gibberish?
 
Is there another song those esteemed scientists might hear or sing that could, possibly, rewind the clock or set its hands back? Maybe a more optimistic set of syllables? 
 
I’m thinking here of “Save You” by Turin Brakes. ** I like the song, and I think I get his gist, something along the lines of a person asking another person to “come back,” I suppose, from a breakup possibly caused by emotional wounding. Anyway, in the song Brakes sings “Time will save you,” a thought that might be as applicable to our species as it is to an individual. 
 
Will it? Will time save us? Or should we look for a religious or political savior. Is there evidence that in time’s passing, there’s hope for humanity if not for individual people? Surely, for billions of individuals, a religious savior is cause for optimism, but billions more seem to rely on the promise of political saviors, those people with a supposed power to stop the Doomsday Clock’s hands from reaching midnight.   
 
Except through faith, we cannot know from the perspective of being alive what the effect of a religious savior will be on the ultimate destiny of individuals. Religious saviors are saviors for individuals who hope to take that walk through a field of wheat in the Afterlife. But we do have a history of political leaders that rise in societies quite frequently as group saviors.  Unfortunately, past experiences tell us that such saviors offer false hope. Their promises have never been met for more than brief moments; thus, the hands of the Doomsday Clock keep moving with only temporary pauses. At 100 seconds before midnight, those pauses seem to be getting shorter and more intermittent. 
 
But maybe time will save us. Consider what happened in East Asia and Europe between 19,000 and about 45,000 years ago as summarized by Ann Gibbons for Science. * Based on research done by David Reich of Harvard Medical School and China’s paleogeneticist Qiaomei Fu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and others, the humans who inhabited the China Plateau and Europe 40-45,000 years ago disappeared sometime during the Last Glacial Maximum. When it ended, the hunter-gatherers more directly related to people today repopulated the landscape. 
 
So, fossil DNA gives us evidence that a Late Glacial Maximum Doomsday Clock actually reached midnight for modern humans. But it also gives us evidence that the clock restarted, probably, we might speculate, on its own. No individual rewound it or pushed the hands counterclockwise. There were people, and then there weren’t people, and then there were people again, all this ascribable to the passage of time. And sure, this was, in fact, a process covering millennia, but there’s evidence on different continents that the same peopling, de-peopling, and re-peopling has occurred numerous times, cyclically with devastating diseases, supervolcanic eruptions, and glacial maxima. Just as life recovered after the so-called Five Major Extinctions, those major Midnights, so human life will most likely survive the next Midnight. And though morning’s light might be a long time in coming after the predicted modern Midnight, it will shine again even over once de-populated landscapes. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists might be right for parts of the planet, but as our species has survived in the past, it will do so in a future running through millennia. Granted, that’s not solace for individuals, but it is so for our resilient species. 
 
Time’s always there doing its work, its unstoppable passing, its moving toward a Doomsday’s Midnight and an ensuing Dawn. Time will save us.
 
Notes: 
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYZvoFAEuSc 
 
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wupg6FzqYMM 
 
**Gibbons, Ann. 27 May 2021. Last ice age wiped out people in East Asia as well as Europe. Online at    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/last-ice-age-wiped-out-people-east-asia-well-europe  Accessed May 27, 2921. 

Convergent evolution, that process that makes the Australian marsupial Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus) look like the placental gray (timber) wolf (Canis lupus), has paired us with army ants. No, we don’t look alike. We don’t pair up the way those two “wolves” pair or the way a wombat (Vombatus ursinus) and a woodchuck (Marmota monax) pair in appearance. Nothing in our appearances makes us, the self-proclaimed apex of social mammals, look like ants, those joint-legged social insects. But we seem to have evolved a similar behavior in our penchant for acting and thinking en masse. 
 
You might be thinking, “This guy’s sitting on the branch he’s sawing between him and the trunk of sanity. Ants and people. No way. Army ants are famous for their mass raids in which thousands, even tens of thousands of ants, go off to find and devour anything and everything edible. That’s why they are nomadic. Once they clear an area of its edibles, they move to eat. Some of those colonies have as many ants as there are people in big cities. And look, people in cities aren’t nomads. They’re pretty much fixed in place because food comes to them.”
 
Yes, food does go into human colonies with millions of residents. But that doesn’t stop local mass raids on grocery stores, gas stations, and hardware stores in times of crisis. Did you try to buy toilet paper at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic? Have you tried to buy food or generators just before a hurricane hits? Did you wander down aisles of empty shelves in the local grocery store? 
 
Army ants (genus Dorylus, for example) just clean out the local “grocery store” and move on; they don’t have the wherewithal to create a worldwide supply chain that fosters a stay-at-home human colony. So, you’re probably having difficulty seeing much similarity in humans and ants. But what if we take away the mass raids for food and supplant them with mass raids for thinking, for thoughts, for ideas? 
 
Look how people respond to any bit of news and rumor. En masse thought raids occur almost daily in social media. They are the essence of chat rooms. And those thought raids can manifest themselves in ant-like actual raids, the mob violence that periodically disrupts societies, now much of it promulgated by some “scout” that carries a message to a Web-colony. 
 
Isn’t there a hint of convergent evolution in episodes of looting? Aren’t the human army ants making the local area untenable for further habitation? Isn’t the ultimate result an abandoned neighborhood, a slum, an economic death zone? 
 
And isn’t the mass behavior also responsible for disrupting and even destroying the lives of the local human organisms? Aren’t relentless social attacks by the masses responsible for ruining lives? And don’t many of those attacks stem from something a single person says? Army ants in the genus Dorylus send out scouts that return with a pheromone trail to the food they found. The colony then follows that trail en masse. The raid begins. There’s a parallel, if you want to look. There’s a convergence, also. Want proof? Read the tabloids. Listen to the politicians. Watch the pundits on TV. Look for those instances in which not only the thoughts but also the very language in which they are expressed are as uniform as a colony of foraging army ants. 
 
Mass raids are mass raids. Our physical mass raids don’t differ in kind from those of the ants. Our mental mass raids might differ in kind from those of the army ants, but they are still mass raids that destroy everything in their path. We don’t just clear the area of food; in a convergent or parallel behavior we share with army ants, we destroy all the food for thought in our paths.  

Panda sculptures in eye of needle by Chen Forng-Shean/2011. Credit: Xinhua.
 
Apparently, we live in a macroworld that differs greatly from an underlying quantum-microworld. If you are like me, you might think of both worlds as encompassing ranges of size, something scalar. The Macroworld’s entities exist ostensibly on a scale that spans sizes from super groups of galaxies down to you and me, and the critters that live on and in us, plus those minerals that are left after a cremation. All those littlest of macro-things are visible under powerful microscopes, and they, like us and the giant galactic aggregations, belong to the Macroworld. And then, no matter how small you get with the Macroworld, you encounter a division, a break, a gap on the other side of which entities become so super small that they don’t even appear to be “things”: The atoms, for example, and their subatomic components in their nuclei, the protons and neutrons that have their own “parts,” those Up and Down quarks that are members of a secretive quantum population now numbering about four dozen “particles.” And the leptons? Don’t get me started on electrons, muons, and their like. No, there’s no real continuation of the Macroworld that joins the Microworld on some sliding scale that we can see. Here’s a bag of photons, don’t open it until someone says, “Turn on the light.”
 
There’s no transitional point: Macroworld and Microworld, though somehow mysteriously connected because the latter is the ultimate constituent of the former, appear to be separate. We jump from one to the other, intellectually bouncing from the visualizable to the unvisualizable, from the variably sized particles to the unimaginably small and strangely dual particle-waves. The universe seems to break into two discrete universes at that gap with no discernible transition form. In the Macroworld, we can imagine a sliding scale, a continuum of sizes. But what of that strange Microworld, in which electrons, muons, and tau “particles” have widely different masses with no “particles” of transitional sizes lying among them? The gaps conspicuous by the absence of any intermediate forms distinguish the Micro from the Macro worlds.  
 
Have you ever seen the artwork of Taiwanese artist Chen Forng-Shean? * He can draw on a grain of rice, and so can Vladimir Aniskin, the guy that Pringles hired to paint landmarks—like the Taj Mahal—on rice grains. ** Reportedly, there are about a dozen such “micro-artists” capable of picturing the big on canvases of the very small, objects that are so small that seeing them requires a purposeful hard look. Work like that must be tedious. Forng-Shean supposedly spent some months painting a portrait of a Taiwanese political figure, and he reportedly painted the faces of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky on the tip of a matchstick, their affair being “hot” news at the time. 
 
Now, one might ask why anyone would jeopardize painstaking work by placing it on a grain that an ant can steal or on a flammable—indeed purposefully flammable—stick. Stop here for a joke I heard as a kid. A prisoner spent years in solitary confinement, but he wasn’t alone. There was an ant in his cell. As they bonded, the prisoner began training the ant to do tricks. The ant responded so well that the prisoner said to himself, “When I get out of here, I’m going around the country to do shows with you, my little friend. We’ll make a fortune.” On the day of his release, he took his pet ant and went to a bar not far from the prison, sat down, ordered a drink. Placing the ant on the bar as the bartender served his drink, he said, “You see that ant?” The bartender, seeing the ant, crushed it with his thumb, and asked, “Yeah, what about it?” Whereas many in America were scandalized by a President having sex with an intern in the Oval Office, many were like the bartender, squashing it as a tiny nuisance. 
 
But there’s more to consider. More like the sculptures placed inside the eye of a needle. *** Ever thread a needle? It’s not an easy job to make a sculpture that fits inside a hole so small that seamstresses and tailors don their reading glasses when they thread the needle. The Met or the Smithsonian wouldn’t need big rooms to display such tiny sculptures that the janitorial staff might mistakenly throw into the trash. “I did? Sorry. I was just dusting.” Perspectives on the big and the small are highly variable.   
 
The big and the small. Let’s ponder, and let’s let our pondering start with Bill and Monica portrayed in miniature on a matchstick. Two ideological sides debated the significance of that political “scandal.” On one side: “It’s just sex.” On the other side: “It’s a defilement of the Oval Office.” One side minimized; the other, maximized, and the gap between the two sides was as wide as that between the Macro and Micro worlds, un-crossable, a division in kind as well as a division of sizes. Sex in the Oval Office was for many just particle-waves, quite fuzzy, an analog of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Like an electron whose position and movement cannot be simultaneously known, Clinton’s presence in the Oval Office was known, but his movement? Heck, we have his own words: “I did not have sex with that woman.” 
 
Miniaturizing or Maximizing. Ideologues see no transitional stage. All minimizing relies on discrete entities, unconnected except that they fall into the Microworld. And fuzzy entities at that, wavelike just like electrons, muons, and their sundry quantum friends. One sees no details, nothing to hold on to, sees waves whose function never collapses into a discernible point. A sex scandal centered in the Oval Office? Nothing to see here. Move along. It’s a minute and morally fuzzy occurrence at best, fuzzy like images of electron clouds. But for those living in the Macroworld even details so small they fit on the tip of a matchstick or inside a needle’s eye are objects with size, so they ask, “Are you having trouble seeing the details that we see? Here’s a magnifying glass; here’s a microscope. You can’t deny they are there. Just look. They’re both visualizable and visible just like those tiny eye-of-the-needle sculptures.”
 
Is this difference between maximizer and minimizer just the difference between absolutist and relativist, the former seeing a continuous world and the latter, a discontinuous one? Or does the difference lie at an unbridgeable gap between dogmatic and situational ethical systems? Is it ironic that those who see Moral Macroworld identify a sliding scale of “sin” whereas those who live in a Moral Microworld see unconnected particles that unpredictably become waves so small that they are insignificant even though such waves are the underlying fields of all existence?
 
Of course, that question means little in the abstract. It does, however, become meaningful when we ask it with respect to ourselves. Are we like Forng-Shean and Aniskin? Are we micro-artists? Do we sculpt or paint our representations of the world in forms so tiny they can fit in the eye of a needle or on a grain of rice? Do we have to offer special lenses to others if we want them to see what we see? 
 
 
Notes:
 
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZdyMaA2Fdo 
 
**https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/pringles-commissions-artist-to-paint-the-taj-mahal-on-a-grain-of-rice-/
 
***https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrDQryp7qtgXEcAKAUPxQt.;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzIEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=sculpture+inside+a+n+eye+of+a+needle&type=asbw_8923_CHW_US_tid1304&param1=9pmwKAmHAwUYOZqhXRlOsPi0A5nvGG3aDS7HcsILbFdSzB0OzJKF4MhPbfSw0dwG&param2=9dUI1n2R0BLDxNuWfiP4aWyjOZc2NBa%2Bx2opBYQCDMSB7nBAfwbAzkkglZNKi5o21u72Jm8TatlnU7NDGbP7F8Lft0aXvravgWuUt1wLTDRGoZDy1s38eFH2mqhQf7J35YCbQdFh0U0Q40PE25%2BEeG%2Bt%2By660cfFWnTypqgOdcCh6oeUKommRcasmvm8lFwkEnSQF0mdjDREWaDEylpBCR6opzVl9tWDsitQ3lxkkt5XAWlgIdbOwLtQmRO37FMzX7zK%2B8A9aPEYz%2Fks8LYCoaaNxbbX727LR85B7aTpArI%3D&param3=NwVEMR%2FzKcG52XsVBYEh2zk2Yklq85vdfspZPoqz2M1qypHRDDTed5vIiOf0QJloIYNIhURx5ygk43IbuWBmnSO6VJi0Lg%2BHXK15j4L%2FFbtWkrI4tZva2CSdO%2BO8zcxNbLhvWNCxu7qqZlXKkcHyRMxTbDmIz%2FQSaXI6BhFbS7u1h8SHx6xNUode3q0bwwW15lyOrPltOAQ1NF3RFwaPKJpjw0aPZymrr4n3k760BU6XrRc2OetVsw4Wyxu%2BHrg%2FTzMaL%2FOFUwIqnyf5n8PZ4zrWs2x7rc7JosTr%2F4Le3G9h122GIo7kFbpTklRUmOH47hs4M3SE1UquvZaKiWVwhnyhFdTQ5wepwSAJNX3ePbc3D40RwEWmA6o94GXj5oiV&param4=hCnqV8iYhcxJ8iNIX4W0h5lX%2BTiGVQRFr9QrJ7mD9OE%3D&hsimp=yhs-syn&hspart=iba&ei=UTF-8&fr=yhs-iba-syn

“I’m sorry, I can’t resist. The guy’s name is Mark Drinkwater.”
 
“Who?”
 
“Drinkwater, Mark Drinkwater. He’s a serious scientist. It’s just that his science is related to water, to fresh water, to, get this, potable or drinking water in the form of ice.”
 
“Okay, I’m caught in this whirlpool of elliptic comment. What’s this about?”
 
“All right, I’ll go upcurrent a bit for you. See, there’s this giant iceberg, really big, called A-76. It broke off from Antarctica.”
 
“Wait a minute. Why ‘A-76’? What’s the designation mean?”
 
“The United States has a ‘National Ice Center’—yeah, I know, is there a phenomenon on the planet for which a giant government doesn’t have an agency?—so, the Ice Center that is operated by the Navy, the Coast Guard, and NOAA, divided up Antarctica by longitude. Any iceberg that falls in the first quadrant, that is from zero degrees longitude to 90 degrees west longitude, is an ‘A’ iceberg. That means any iceberg from the Bellingshausen/Weddell Sea area. Obviously, A-76 originated there. And it is big. It’s 1,668 square miles of floating ice island. That’s bigger than Rhode Island—but then, what isn’t bigger than Rhode Island?”
 
“Okay, so this A-76 is a big iceberg from the Weddell Sea. Don’t big icebergs break off from Antarctica all the time?”
 
“Yes, they do. Not too long ago there was A-68, it floated around for the past three years oer so, but it’s gone now, melted. Some of these giant icebergs can last a couple of decades if they stay in the cold water around Antarctica, but when they escape the cold currents, they part rather fast. That melting makes the scheme of towing one to parched countries like Saudi Arabia a difficult, if not impossible, task though towing icebergs has been done on small scales, like in the Arctic, where they can crash into oil rigs. And supposedly, even in the nineteenth century people in Chile got some fresh water from towed icebergs though I have my doubts on that. But I digress, as usual.
            “Since I don’t go sailing through the Weddell Sea, I have no ice tray to fill in this iceberg news, but I got into the story because of Mark Drinkwater’s name. He’s probably a legit scientist, and I know that icebergs can be a real problem and a hypothetical problem at the same time. Think Titantic. And that iceberg was like a chip the size nurses put in a cup to give to post-operative people when they can’t drink a whole glass of water but their mouths are dry…sorry, digressing again, a chip, as I was saying, off the giant A-76. So, yes, icebergs pose threats to ships, and they even pose threats to penguin colonies. A-68 threatened a penguin colony on South Georgia Island that way.”
 
“You’re brain is like an Antarctic iceberg. You go wherever the currents of thinking take you from one digression to another. Freeze the point, man, stick to what you want to tell me.”
 
“So, this Mark Drinkwater says that the breaking off of these icebergs is related to climate change.”
 
“Oh, here we go again.”
 
“No, really. If someone works for NOAA and is part of the National Ice Center in an age when the mythical 97% of scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change, what else should I expect. I guess as giant glaciers moved toward the sea over the past millions of years, they didn’t break off by virtue of their massive size and weight, by a cracking of a brittle mass too big to remain whole. Sorry; I’m sarcastic. Calving ice has been floating around as long as there’s been ice. And ice sheets come and go, build up and melt down. Do A-68 and A-76 make me worry? Not really, but all those Antarctic icebergs definitely make work for people at the National Ice Center. ‘Where’s A-76 today?’ I can hear them ask over morning coffee and satellite images of ice islands. ‘Is it hot in here? Someone turn on the AC. It’s broken? Well, then get some ice in a pan and turn on the desk fan.’ Working at the National Ice Center doesn’t sound like a high pressure job though I’m saying that out of ignorance. Maybe they have their tense moments like the guys at their sister agency, the National Hurricane Center. Have you noticed how many centers the government has? Certainly, working at the National Ice Center doesn’t sound like a job that makes one sweat. I mean, what are they going to do about A-76 but track it? What did they do about A-68 except worry it was going to devastate penguins on South Georgia Island or disrupt the food chain, or whatever? It’s like trying to stop the seasons. We can observe when, as the medieval composer writes, ‘Sumer is icumen in,’ but remember the rest of that song. ‘Sumer is icumen in/Lhude sing cuccu/Groweth sed/and bloweth med/and springth the wde nu/Sing cuccu.’”
 
“What? What?”
 
“Well, in the medieval song the words say that summer has arrived and one should loudly sing ‘cuckoo.’ We can’t stop summer from coming; can’t stop any of the seasons from coming or going. Might as well just sing ‘cuckoo, cuckoo’ because that’s all we can do. And after at least a couple of centuries of people thinking about towing icebergs for whatever reason, fresh drinking water or cleared shipping lanes, we’re pretty powerless to stop an iceberg larger than Rhode Island from moving wherever the currents take it. Sing ‘cuckoo,’ I say. By the way in the second verse, you know what the lyrics say?”
 
“No.”
 
“’Awe bleteph afer lomb/Ihouth after calue cu/Bulluc starteph/ Bucke uerteph/Murie sing cuccu.’”
 
“What? I’m not into medieval English.”


“’The ewe is bleating after her lamb/The cow is lowing after her calf/The bullock is prancing/The Billy-goat farting/Sing merrily, cuckoo.’ Yeah. Good luck with that. Let’s see some scientists stop the Billy-goat from farting.” Maybe everyone who works for the National Ice Center should know that song since they, like the cow in the second stanza, ‘low after’ the calved ice. And probably everyone who is worried that calving ice in Antarctic waters spells doom for the planet should also learn those lyrics.
 
“Your point?”
 
“Okay, several points. it’s all right to monitor big icebergs, but you can’t do anything about them. And you can’t ascribe many inevitable and natural events to some exclusively anthropogenic cause. Look, wasn’t there a study done by some researchers from the University of Texas at Austin that the Thwaites Glacier of the West Antarctic Ice sheet was being melted from below by geothermal heat? ** Who’s going to stop that? If I remember correctly, those researchers said that the geothermal heat was a big-time contributor to the melting of the glacier’s underside. And like an ice skater’s blades melting the ice beneath the skater to facilitate movement by reducing friction, so the geothermal heat reduces the friction between the Thwaites Glacier and the underlying rock. Melted beneath, the glacier can slide. It becomes unstable.
            But, no, everything has to be seen through the officially adopted language of climate change, of global warming, everything, especially ice sheets like Greenland’s and Antarctica’s. What’s next? Manmade magma chambers? Manmade geothermal heat? According to the article I read on A-76, Drinkwater says that climate change is responsible. Okay. He could be right, but what is he going to do about it? What are the Navy, the Coast Guard, and NOAA going to do about it? What can the National Ice Center do other than simply monitor the giant ice islands? Worried about climate change? Isn’t methane a problem there? Don’t we need a National Billy-goat Farting Center? Maybe with a more sophisticated name like National Flatulence Reduction Center. I can see the agency’s motto over the door. ‘Stop a fart and save a glacier.’ If climate change is ‘icumin in/Sing cuccu’.” 
 
Notes:
*Phys.org. vast Antarctic iceberg could drift through ocean for years. 21 May 2021.
 
**Texas Geosciences. Researchers find Major West Antarctic Glacier Melting from Geothermal sources. 10 June 2014. Published online at https://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/2014/06/researchers-find-major-west-antarctic-glacier-melting-from-geothermal-sources/   The research article is
Schroeder, Dustin M., Donald D. Blankenship, Duncan A. Young, and Enrica Quartini. 24 June 2014. Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. PNAS. 111 (25) 9070-9072; first published June 9, 2014; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1405184111  
Accessed May 23, 2021.

Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider seem to indicate that a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) dominated the universe 0.000001 second after the Big Bang. * If the finding is true, then we now have a “picture” of what the earliest form of our universe looked like in its finest detail before inflation (expansion) began cooling it enough for quarks to coalesce as gluons did their sticky thing. That we have achieved such a detailed look is remarkable since we weren’t present during that moment when all that came to be was becoming all that came to be. Before the LHC experiments gave us such high-def views, we had only our mathematical descriptions on the probable makeup one-millionth of a second after the Big It was born. To understand the Big Picture of the Cosmos, LHC scientists are looking at individual pixels of ever-deceasing sizes.    
 
Have you noticed that you and others rely on different levels of resolution to understand? Resolution can be coarse, fine, or any quality or quantity between. When we nitpick, for example, we use fine resolution. “You missed a spot,” we might hear or say in a criticism of cleaning prowess. “Can’t see the forest for the trees,” also. Details abound in fine resolution. 
 
We can’t, however, keep our focus on all the details in life. So, we accept coarse resolution on which to base judgments, opinions, and assessments. We prefer by convenience to see the forest that we don’t see by examining every tree, all the bark, the woodpeckers on the trunk, the insects within, the lichens in their component parts of fungi and algae, the cells—you get the picture, the fine-resolution. If you pay attention to a single tree down to its component atoms, you miss the forest that surrounds you. But missing the forest is a key human endeavor on the personal level. Seeing every tree, by contrast, is a common practice in interpersonal relationships.  
 
You’re always making that selection among levels of resolution. For those with whom you disagree, fine resolution satisfies you. For those with whom you agree, coarse resolution works.

It’s equivalent to the history of science which took us from Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, those fundamental elements of the Greeks, to hydrogen through uranium and the trans-uranium elements of the Periodic Table and from analysis to synthesis and back again. Having identified the details, we go back to seeing them as a whole when we can. The quarks become the hadrons; the hadrons become the molecules, and so on till we get to the coarse resolution that dominates our perspective. We just don’t have the time to examine everything and everyone in detail.
 
Coarse resolution saves time in interpersonal relationships. Do I know that my adversary is composed of quarks? Certainly, but I’d rather not focus on all those diverse constituents of his belief system or personality. A glance gives me the big picture I want. And, by the way, can I really tell the difference between 1080p and 4K resolution when I’m absorbed in the story? Is a refresh rate of 60 Hz going to spoil what I’m seeing? Do I need a refresh rate of 120 Hz?
 
Details of the lives of others can get in the way of my continued perspective. Do I desire to know those details? Knowing them would get in the way of my easy assessment of their personalities, beliefs, and actions. I know the story of Achilles that Homer tells. But do I need this?

​            And Iris in a race with the wind veered off as Achilles, who was Zeus’s favorite warrior, stood up. Then Pallas put the shield      over his powerful shoulder, that great storm-shield with all its tassels moving in the wind. The goddess crowned his head with a golden cloud in which she lit a blazing fire that shone across the field of battle. As smoke rises like a tower in a distant island city enveloped by a siege with enemies battling around it, the defenders all the day exchanging blows with their enemies… YadaYadaYadaYadaYada. (My translation; not literal) 
 
Call that the HD, nay QLED, resolution of Homer’s time. I imagine it served its purpose in an age without TV or movies, an age when people sat around the hearth to hear the traveling blind bard’s entertaining details. And why not give that descriptive resolution, that resolution ironically detailed by a blind poet? What profits a bard by singing a short song without details? If you’re the bard in ancient Greece, you stay around for a week or 24 weeks to sing the verses of each of the Iliad’s books. And if the audience is willing to provide more honoraria, including some wine, then stick around also to sing all the books of the Odyssey laden as the Iliad is with details like the rising of the rosy-fingered dawn.
 
Watch today as you swing from coarse to fine resolution and back according to your bias and learning, your desires and tastes, and your beliefs and perspectives. You know that you’ll never see the world as it appears in the Large Hadron Collider. Such a view has taken billions of dollars and thousands of scientists to acquire. You don’t have the resolution to break down the origin of another person or group to one-millionth of a second and an individual quark. You can’t see the details of enjoined quarks until they accumulate to the macro level of matter that makes up individuals and social groups. 
 
My advice? Before you assess, judge, or act, consider your level of resolution. 
 
*Niels Bohr Institute. 21 May 2021. Study reveals new details on what happened in the first microsecond of Big Bang. https://phys.org/news/2021-05-reveals-microsecond-big.html

Supposedly, the Mig-31 Foxhound can go 1,860 mph. Seems the tiny tardigrade can do the same. Well, tardigrades don’t fly. What I mean to say is that tardigrades shot from a “gun” can survive a crash at the Foxhound’s maximum speed. That’s faster than the proverbial “speeding bullet” that Superman could outrace.   
 
I remember a Pennsylvania State Police traveling demonstration that I chanced upon in a local mall many moons ago. It was a car seat on an incline. Released from the top of the incline, it reached a speed of 35 mph and then came to an abrupt stop to simulate a car crash at that speed. “I’m game. Strap me in for the experience” I said to the attending trooper. Suffice it to say that I hope I’m never in a car accident. The sudden stop sent me against the seatbelt with enough force to elicit an “Oh!” from me as air exited my lungs like a Foxhound on afterburners.  
 
Someone volunteered tardigrades for a similar acceleration test, * but not just at 35 mph. ** Rather, the tardigrades were subjected to a stop equivalent to a military jet slamming into a mountain. So, the little critters seem to be able to withstand impacts that would flatten a person. They also can survive extreme cold and heat, the vacuum in outer space, desiccation, and even water at the boiling point. Tough dudes, these water bears. But they do all their special survival tricks through biochemistry. Crashing? Now, that’s physics. That’s the stuff of F=MA, Newtonian. 
 
Slamming tardigrades into a barrier got me to thinking. What if life is for the most part a matter of collisions? Certainly, we can look at interminable human conflict that seems to have been with us from the beginning. Just take a look back in a framework of conflict on what you did today: Overcoming physical forces, juggling emotions to avoid interpersonal collisions, deciding between a fast-food drive-through and a sit-down restaurant for lunch. And all those mental collisions, maybe even arguments with no one because of some pundit’s comment you heard over the car radio while you jostled for position on the turning lane so you could pick up that list of groceries. Life volunteers us the way the researchers volunteered tardigrades. “Let’s slam her into this wall, but gently so, just to see how she takes it, how well she survives.” “Let’s up the acceleration for him at work today to see whether he comes out unscathed or flattened like a tardigrade shot against a wall at the speed of, say, a Sr-71 Blackbird, the fastest plane—ever. Whoa, can we capture that on high-speed video? This I have to see.” 
 
Yes, collisions. Some we choose. But some, others choose for us, slamming us unexpectedly against something immovable. I suppose the former, the collisions we choose, are those for which we brace ourselves, pumping the brake or relying on some automatic braking system to ease ourselves into the crash. But those unexpected ones? They can knock the air out. Oh! 
 
Anyway, just a thought brought on by reading about tardigrades being slammed against a wall. 
 
 Notes:
 
*I suppose most of us would say “deceleration” when we consider how we perceive stopping. That’s fine, but there’s a little experiment you can perform to indicate that “deceleration” is “acceleration.” Watch the fuzzy dice hanging from a rearview mirror as the driver presses the accelerator. The dice will swing toward the rear of the car. When the driver presses on the brake, the dice will swing toward the front of the car. Difference? I think not.
 
** Traspas, Alejandra and Mark J. Burchell. 11 May 2021. Tardigrade Survival Limits in High-Speed Impacts—Implications for Panspermia and Collection of Samples from Plumes Emitted by Ice Worlds. Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. Publishes. https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2020.2405, online at https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2020.2405 .  See also: https://phys.org/news/2021-05-tardigrades-survive-impacts-meters.html   Accessed May 21, 2021.

Every age presents challenges to integrity, but some eras appear to be times of very limited tolerance. The question for individuals in an age of critical cancelling and censorship, is whether or not they have the fortitude to self-report how they differ from the consensus when such reporting might jeopardize their status.  

Surveys. Who wants to take one? Who needs to take one? Who thrives on them? And who came up with the idea of a survey that incorporates self-reporting?
 
Forget the first three questions. My guess for the fourth question is someone in education, probably someone with a doctorate in “education.” And no, that’s not a doctorate in epistemology. 
 
Not picking on anyone here, but I just saw a study on 17 Mennonite academies, that is, private schools run essentially by and for Mennonite communities but not excluding children of different beliefs. The schools appear to have happy graduates, probably many of them successful in diverse endeavors. So, this isn’t about the quality of Mennonite curricula or their instructors.
 
What caught my eye wasn’t centered in the results of the study. Instead, I was drawn to a major aspect of the research, the source of the information. That sources was “self-reporting.”
 
Now, I don’t know about you, but in this touch-feely world of sensitivity and self-esteem, I wonder about the value of such a study. I wonder about whether we haven’t gone so far toward opinion over fact, that we cannot distinguish between them. It is, as you know, an age of widespread punditry, of editorializing, and of—dare I say it for fear of incriminating myself—blogging (gasp!).
 
It is also an age when cancel culture reigns in the public square. Like its many previous incarnations, such cancelling infuses individuals with social fear, the fear of being ostracized because of a comment or belief. That fear is pervasive among many, especially among those whose livelihoods depend on the whims of people in power, people with an intolerance for freedom of expression, freedom of difference. 
 
Thus, in a study by Andromeda Hightower, Peter D. Wiens, and Paul J. Yoder, “Participants self-reported their own abilities and perspectives in a variety of different questions regarding their faith, instructional practices, and political views” (1). * But before I comment on that, I should note that a “majority of participants identified as female.” Some 31.55% of the respondents identified as male and a surprising number—at least to me—4.4% had no response to the gender-identification question. Did they not know? Did they have no gender? Were they afraid that if they self-reported being some “nonbinary” gender that they might lose their jobs? In a question about the religion of the participants, most, as would be expected, I believe, “self-identified as Christian (97.7%)” (6). Again, surprising to me, 2.1% had no response from which I could draw no conclusion. I will note that among the Christians, the participants claimed 26 different denominations, with 51.8% saying they were Mennonites. So, apparently, Mennonite academies do not restrict their instructors to a single faith and hire those from other faiths. 
 
But the self-reporting is the focus here. Remember, it is an age of opinion. So, I have to ask whether or not you would honestly self-report on matters of belief or politics if you thought there was a potential for reprisals of any kind, large or small, from reassignment, through censorship, to dismissal. What do you think? 
 
Note:
*Hightower, Andromeda, Peter Wiens, and Paul Yoder, 2019. Survey of Mennonite Schools Council Educators Final Report. University Libraries. University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Online at https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1271&context=tl_fac_articles