If you go to Mono Lake on a clear night, you will see Castor and Pollux, the Gemini, reflected from the water’s surface so clearly that the sky appears below as well as above. You know, however, the difference between actual sky and reflected sky, between real and phantom.  
 
Mirages are common phenomena. We’ve all seen them, if not in a desert or on the ocean, then on a highway in summer, when differences in air temperature between road and air bend light to make a blue sky appear as a puddle on the road ahead. The optical phenomena fool the inexperienced brain, but not the experienced one. Image isn’t, as we come to know, always reality.  
 
Phantoms and hallucinations, however, step into the dimension of reality in ways peculiar to individuals. Amputees experience phantom limbs, and there are even auditory analogs of hallucinations. Random sounds, such as those produced by the tracks of heavy equipment running over rocks, can sometimes echo in our brains as a call of our name. “What?” we ask in the presence of puzzled companions whose brains never heard and interpreted the random sounds as language. And, of course, there are those troubling personal hallucinations in brains affected by diseases and mind-bending drugs. 
 
The brain needs to interpret the information it gets from the senses because acting on the premise that a phantom , hallucination, or mirage is real can be hazardous. Think of the lingering hallucinogenic effects of LSD on brains as an example. Years after taking the drug, a woman I knew fell down a flight of steps and injured herself because she experienced an alternate reality, a different place and position, that momentarily substituted for the stairs on which she actually stood. We’ve seen or heard of those with deteriorating brains also think hallucinations are real. For those in such degenerative states, alternate realities and dream-like brain states aren’t rectified by rationality or knowledge. Whatever appears to be real is real for them.  
 
I recall an incident during which my ninety-year-old grandmother said, “Look at the big spider crawling on the floor.” It was a bare floor; the spider was in her brain. There was no phenomenon we could share, something like a rainbow, a nonexistent puddle on the road ahead, or a lake in the desert. All of us could look at the surface of Mono Lake under the clear desert air to see the reflection of the Dioscuri; none of us can look into the brains of the hallucinating to see exactly what they see. We can share mirages, but not phantoms and hallucinations. 
 
Fleeting phantoms, hallucinations, and mirages pop into human reality, appearing suddenly like some gods and demigods in Greek mythology, as Castor and Pollux appear, for example in Euripides’ play Helene. There might be a lesson in the phenomena of unshared phantoms and hallucinations. In that play by Euripides, Helen(e), yes, that Homeric “Helen of Troy,” was never abducted by Paris. Instead, Helen(e) was taken to Egypt, and a phantom Helen fashioned by Hera went to Troy. Menelaus, King of Sparta and Helen’s husband, went off with all those Achaean warriors in those thousand ships in the wrong direction, all chasing after a phantom on the shores of Illium. Humans, it seems from the drama, will act decisively on what they think is real as much as on what they absolutely know is real. 
 
In Euripides’ play, Menelaus discovers the difference between his phantom wife, whom he rescued from Troy, and his real wife after he is shipwrecked upon the shores of an Egyptian ruler named Theoclymenus, who wants to marry the real Helen. Helen, believing Menelaus died at sea acquiesces at first, but then discovers that her husband is still alive. With the help of Theonoe, the Egyptian king’s sister, the reunited couple escape to make their way back to Sparta. Then Theoclymenus, angry with treacherous Theonoe for aiding their escape, is ready to kill her when Castor and Pollux intervene to explain that it is Heaven’s wish that Menelaus and Helen find their way back to their homeland.  
 
But what of the phantom Helen whom Menelaus rescued? She disappeared into thin air according to a report a messenger gives to Menelaus after he is reunited with Helen. Hmnn.
 
Let’s go back to that thing I wrote above, you know, about humans acting on what they think is real as much as on what they absolutely know is real. Happens to all of us, doesn’t it? Concluding and acting on the basis of a phantom, hallucination, or mirage frame much of our public passion, especially when get angry, get wrapped up in a mob, or vote under the influence of unrelenting propaganda. Often there are no Dioscuri to intervene on behalf of Heaven and reality. Our actions have detrimental and sometimes tragic consequences because the appearance of the gods on the surface of our lives is just a reflection of the sky. Castor and Pollux don’t suddenly appear to save us, even when we act compassionately as Theonoe did when she betrayed her brother in an attempt to save Menelaus and Helen. Our actions, however motivated by what is real or unreal, always have irreversible consequences.    
 
And then, finding out that the reality we thought we knew has disappeared into thin air like the phantom Helen in Euripides’ play, we take one of two paths: The first path is one less traveled because it involves admitting that we chased after a phantom, that we were wrong. The second path is more traveled because it involves continuing as though the phantom was real, the hallucination a reality, or at the very least a clear reflection of the heavens like the Dioscuri mirrored in Mono Lake at night. The former path is the road to reality or to a different future; the latter, the road to human folly that is paved in rock-hard pride. Walk down that second path, and you might find yourself, like the woman on LSD, falling and injuring yourself. 

Yes, I, too, watch TV. Sometimes binge-watch. And one TV series I watched was Billions. During one of the episodes an artist was paid by a billionaire to paint under contract. The artist, a formerly free-spirited and creative mind, found himself drawing not a picture, but a blank. He had painter’s block, the equivalent of writer’s block. Neither is an uncommon experience. The creative force is one that requires constant renewal. A new Muse has to show up in the brain to inspire. There are parallels, also. Those who meditate, spiritual leaders, and philosophers also experience occasional creative dryness. Maybe you have. Are there tricks to restore creativity? Sure. You can probably find some on YouTube, in self-help sections at the bookstore, or in seminars. Try this one:
 
Go metaphor, archetype, or stereotype fishing. Find a poem, an epic, a discipline, or foreign culture to examine for its metaphors and images. Take a metaphor that is new to you, though common to others, and apply it to a) your local society, b) your philosophical or moral system, or c) your observations of your own and others’ intensity of feeling or apathy. Now, I’m not guaranteeing the process will lead to a creative burst, but doing nothing but pining about such dryness does little to irrigate the parched brain. Read through this to see whether it opens any floodgate: 
 
If you live in the United States, you have a shared metaphorical system that distinguishes among “Northern Life,” “Southern Life,” “Southwestern Life,” “New England Life,” and among others, “Upper Mid-western Life.” You might call such designations stereotypes, but you know that almost everyone generally understands the terms and their associated images and that they have become part of the American cultural metaphor. So, how is this going to help you release those creative waters?
 
As I noted in another essay, during a field trip to North Carolina with geology students, a colleague of mine saw an elementary school group dangerously close to a cliff. Because he had fallen from a rocky precipice, injuring himself enough to be hospitalized, he shouted angrily, “Who’s in charge here.” Chaperones of the group, chatting as they walked slowly, were unaware of the dangers the children faced; but instead of trying to rectify the situation and protect the children, they defensively asked, “Where are you from?” When he said, “Pennsylvania,” their response was a disdainful, “Yankees.” Wrapped in the metaphor of Civil War mentality of their ancestral culture, they did nothing to prevent the children from continuing their chaotic play near the precipice. They were more determined to follow the dictates of their past than to act to save the children of their present. Now, you might say, “That’s not me,” but consider the universality of such thinking that prevents clear thinking about reality as it is. Take as an example the Mapuche of Chile and their thinking that runs parallel to American thinking. Mapuche is “people of the land.” Those who consider themselves members of the larger group distinguish among the Picunche (north), Huilliche (south), Puenche (east), and Lafkenche (ocean, because such people live along the coast). Although all groups in those “zones” are identified as “Mapuche,” any non-Mapuche group, that is, some group of foreign origin—not necessarily from afar—doesn’t fall into the category of “che” (people), but rather into the category of “winka” (outsider). Consider, then, the extended metaphor of this thinking. For Mapuche, all indigenous populations are “Mapuche,” and all “non-Mapuche” are winka. Winka are “colonizers.” No doubt the North Carolinians who said “Yankees” saw my colleague as “Winka.” *
 
As I said, I can’t guarantee that what I just wrote will get you thinking. But the specific tale isn’t the point here; it’s not necessarily going to flood the irrigation ditch with water for your new crop of creativity. But the methodology might. Start looking actively for metaphors, stereotypes, and cultural thinking or behavior that are unfamiliar to you. Look at them closely, and then apply them to your own thinking or behavior or to the thinking and behavior of those around you and members of your national or regional culture. 
 
In a sense, I guess I’m asking you to become a winka, that outsider who sees things differently from those enmeshed by stereotype, metaphor, or cultural patterns. 
 
*Faron, Louis C. “Symbolic Values and the Integration of Society among the Mapuche of Chile,” in John Middleton, ED. Myth and Cosmos: Readings in Mythhology and Symbolism. Garden City, NY. 1967. Pp. 180-184. 

If you are reading this, you made it through all previous filters, that is through all previous extinctions, even those associated only with humans, maybe a pandemic. Almost everyone knows about the five major extinctions or about the one that has received the most press, the extinction event that killed off the nonavian dinosaurs. But extinction is an ongoing process with untold millions of species coming into and going out of existence. And in all those extinctions large and small, that line of existence that led to you remained unbroken. Imagine a series of screens or filters stacked on a shaker, the type used by sedimentologists to obtain the fractions of particle sizes in a sample of silts and sands. Regardless of the size of the mesh, the particle called you made it through to the present.
 
You’re here. You made it. Be happy for yourself and your loved ones because they also made it through the filters of death. Think, however, how difficult your lifeline’s journey has been from the first eukaryotes to the animals to you. You’ve been either lucky or blessed, depending on your belief system. Regardless of your considering yourself the product of Fortune or Providence, you might smile today in the realization that nothing interrupted that line. 
 
Sure, it’s a reality that you had nothing to do with your ancestors’ escaping all those truncating events. And sure, it’s a bit puzzling that some of your contemporaries have chosen to do their own truncating through suicide. But surely, also, you have cause to rejoice in your living. Congratulations! You made it this far. Now don’t do anything to screw up this opportunity.
 
This is not your practice life.

Atmospheric carbon complexity just got more complex. * But what did you expect? The chemistry of atmospheres is a tough nut to crack because the main components of air 1) are invisible, 2) move under the influence of planetary rotation, density differences, and thermal radiation, 3) temporarily disappear into various "sinks," and 4) incorporate gases and particles from various sources both identifiable and unidentifiable. The reason for the added complexity lies in that last point: The recent discovery that bacteria on the ocean floor play a role in releasing carbon dioxide. Released into the water, the carbon dioxide makes its way to the surface, where it enters the atmosphere.
 
Here’s a brief primer: The ocean teems with life, much of it microscopic or just barely visible. This life does what the animals that make sea shells do, it incorporates carbon as the minerals calcite or aragonite in its hard parts, what micropaleontologists call tests that are, in fact, just tiny shells. Coccolithophores, which are single-cell algae, make beautiful little plates called coccoliths that break apart when the individual cell dies. Foraminifera, single-celled “animals,” make more robust, but still tiny, shells, visible to the naked eye, and that fall like the coccoliths to the ocean floor. Where the surface water contains abundant nutrients, such as phosphate, the tiny organisms grow, float around as “plankton,” and sink to the floor upon death. In some places, such as the north equatorial Pacific ocean floor, piles of tiny shells are tens to hundreds of meters deep, having accumulated over thousands to millions of years. It’s from carbonate sediments on the ocean floor that the newly discovered bacteria release the carbon now found to enter both seawater and atmosphere. Humans aren’t solely responsible for carbon dioxide buildup though we’ve added more of the gas in the short term than the organisms contributed.
 
Nevertheless, we now know that there’s yet another source of atmospheric carbon to consider in addition to methane releases from hydrates (ices on the ocean floor) and permafrost and forest soils, volcanic eruptions, and, of course, the anthropogenic emissions caused by burning fossil fuels. Yep, complexity just got more complex because we learned something. 
 
That bacteria play a role in atmospheric composition shouldn’t be a surprise. We do live on a bacterial planet. Heck, you have 39 trillion of the little critters living with your 30 trillion human cells. Bacteria have been found everywhere. They live in hot springs in waters above the boiling point, in deep crustal rock, in the atmosphere, and in and on all surface features and life-forms. In the time before the rise of multicellular life, Earth belonged to the bacteria; it was a bacteria planet, and it seems to still be a bacterial planet. Cyanobacteria appear to have been largely responsible for Earth’s various “oxygenation events” of a couple billion years ago and for exerting control over the planet’s variable carbon dioxide abundance. Having played a key role in atmospheric composition means having played a key role in global temperatures and in the rise of animal life, including you. See; you owe a debt to organisms, but no one expects you to thank a bacterium today. However, you might consider that this new discovery means that complexity befuddles the atmosphere modelers and models and that little surprises add up to noticeable consequences.  
 
Little surprises like the contribution of bacteria to the carbon content of the atmosphere are common. Because we tune ourselves to big events and tend to focus on the large, evident, and sensational rather than on the small and invisible, we interpret the world and life coarsely. Yes, you’ve been obsessed with a deadly virus, a form of semi-life smaller than bacteria, but that’s because the pandemic has had immediate and highly noticeable consequences. Plus, you have been bombarded by newspaper, TV, and online reports by people obsessed with sensationalizing the negative. Keeping you in a state of constant anxiety over big events prevents you from observing the little things, the tiny daily events that add up to a human and societal development. But the little surprises do have effects, usually, as in the case of the discovery of carbon-releasing bacteria, known only after the fact. Those bacteria have been releasing carbon dioxide for as long as there have been piles of tests on the ocean floor, that is, for millions of years. 
 
But what of those other numerous little surprises in your life? What of the discoveries in relationships, that, for examples, you share a philosophical position with a new acquaintance, share an ideal with another, disagree with a friend over some personal or societal event you had not previously discussed, or have a previously unknown common goal with someone you long disdained? Life’s little surprises add up like the gases produced by those tiny bacteria hidden from view on the ocean floor, but always at work.
 
Sure, we get caught up in the big stuff. We jump to conclusions or onto bandwagons of various kinds, our jumping often controlled by others with a plan of some sort. And in jumping to conclusions or onto bandwagons, we often skip over the effects of the tiny, ineluctable changes that we usually only learn in retrospect.
 
 
Note: 
*https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2021/04/deep-sea-bacteria-caught-releasing-carbon-into-atmosphere/  Accessed 13 April 2021 from E&T (Engineering and Technology)

Here is a conversation between a theist, Philosopher A, and an atheist, Philosopher B. It’s relatively short given the nature of the subject, but they don’t want to take up too much of their time, let alone your time.
 
Philosopher A: “What’s that you say? You don’t buy into that ‘deity stuff,’ as you call it, that there is a god who is a capital G God? I’m guessing that means you are either an atheist or an agnostic, or maybe a better description is that you are an apatheist or apathist. 
 
“You can tell me that I’m wrong and explain your more complex, dare I say, belief system. But I’ll anticipate that with regard to a capital G God, you will probably respond with two words: Myth and legend. Maybe you’ll say that God is the product of stories that fill in the blanks of human inadequacies or that assuage fear in the dying. I guess we’re all dying, right? You, too, but I assume you need no solace, no assuaging. Belief in God with a capital G does, I’ll admit, have a component of solace. I mean after birth, everyone has a finite life, and then everyone enters into a decline toward the great unsolved mystery, a bigger mystery than whether or not the universe stops at tiny quarks or even smaller hypothesized strings in the micro direction or at the boundaries of Infinity in the other, macro direction.”
 
Philosopher B: “Here we go again. You theists have a need to proselytize. If capital G God were so evident, why would you need to discuss the subject to prove that It—sorry, He or She—exists?”
 
Philosopher A: “Maybe for the same reason that atheists, agnostics, and apatheists need to argue against His—sorry, also, but for expediency, I’m going to use the masculine—as I was saying, against His existence. The irony, by the way, is that even so-called apatheists might take up the argument in contradiction to their proclaimed apathy. Nothing says ‘I care’ more than taking up a discussion about what one supposedly cares little.”
 
Philosopher B: “It’s just that the great number of vocal believers won’t stop proselytizng. We argue to get them off our backs. You believers need to get a life.”
 
Philosopher A: “I see you’re smirking. I hear your unspoken ‘Here we go again.’ I hear you. ‘No proof,’ you’re thinking, "but he’ll ramble on as usual."  I know the argument that there’s no way to demonstrate in a lab the existence of God. Even if there were a way, the human brain couldn’t fully comprehend the associated eternity and infinity, has no way to determine omniscience and omnipresence, and has no way to determine to the satisfaction of an unbeliever the associated reward-and-punishment system associated with a personal God. We always run up against our limitations. We all seem to be descendants of Descartes who argued that only an Infinite Being could have put the thought of Himself into the finite mind. But we also have big imaginations, maybe not ‘big,’ I should say, ‘encompassing minds,’ rather. We try to visualize the un-visualizable, and the result you complain about is the anthropomorphic forms we imagine, like a patriarch or a matriarch. It doesn’t matter which, really, it’s always some human form or a symmetrical form that grates on your brain’s corrugated or crenulated surface. I understand that anthropomorphism is a turnoff for you. And even if theists try to describe an amorphous Deity, what they envision necessarily has boundaries, has edges because of their difficulty in describing or even imagining the edgeless. We can’t draw an edgeless infinity in our minds. Or, maybe you object because you see such cloud deities as analogs of fields of some kind, maybe like pervasive gravity or electromagnetism.”
 
Philosopher B: “Yes, something like the Force in Star Wars, which I find akin to animism, thank you George Lucas. But not a conscious Force. Who knows what that Star Wars Force is supposed to be, maybe not even Lucas himself? Did he ever define it as conscious?” 
 
Philosopher A: “So, you see a problem in our need to visualize, don’t you? That’s the reason for the smirk on your face. No matter what we do argue, we always get locked into our need for analogs, for matter and life as we know it. We can’t divorce ourselves from the physical universe, from this place we call home to our collective existence.”
 
Philosopher B: “Even if your God were a pervasive presence throughout the universe, I would still have difficulty visualizing or understanding a personal God, one with whom humans could not only identify but also touch in some refined and definable human way. Take electromagnetism as a field model for God. I can run the elementary school experiment with a bar magnet, a sheet of paper, and some sprinkled iron filings to show the field, but only insofar as the field reveals itself in the shape of the limited filings I sprinkle on the paper over the magnet. Ever-weaker on its edges and impossible to show with an infinite number of tiny subatomic iron particles or even with quarks, the field we capture by its effects is only a rough or a very coarse representation; and it’s only in two dimensions. If I want three-dimensional imagery, I need to use computer graphics or holograms, or a sculpture, all of which have their own coarseness or rough resolution. Ordinary words and images fail us, thus our reliance on mathematical descriptions. So, if God were pervasive and omnipresent like a field, like an unobserved electron, I would be up against my need to collapse the field to some point or to some visualizable and bounded region by observing. As I see the problem, your capital G God is the cat in Schrödinger’s box. We look, we discover, but only after looking and only in the box. But my own analogy fails; it limps as all analogies do. You can say we know the electron or the cat by observing, but Schrödinger’s cat lives or dies in the presence of a single radioactive source, an identifiable cause for its continued life or imminent death. In your belief, you see a result, such as a person cured of cancer or the fall of the Soviet Union after years of devout praying by millions of imprisoned religious people, that prayer culminating in a Pope, a President, and a Premier that altered thinking. You can ascribe the cancer cure or the political cure to the actions of God, justifying the belief by the effect, arguing backwards, so to speak. If God fills all the universe, it’s only when He or She or It is expressed in our observing that He or She or It takes a form, usually an anthropomorphic one, and unfortunately, so the box is only a hypothetical one supported by faith in a circular argument. I assume the existence of the ‘cat’ before I look in the box. Then I see a live or dead cat and draw my conclusion.
 
“You know that common expression of Christianity, that ‘we are made in God’s image’? I suppose the atheist in me, my friend, could argue the other way ‘round, that theists make God in their image. And even if you or some other theist goes full science fiction fantasy, you still ascribe to God the familiar human properties or characteristics like emotions, for example, as in ‘an angry God’ or ‘a merciful God, and you ascribe human ways of thinking, like reasoning. You will probably say that theists still come up with a visualizable form of some kind, something to see that mimics what you already know. 
 
“You religious people are all the same, doesn’t matter the religion, not that I’m thinking religion is the ‘opiate of the people’ ala Marx. No, I think you are all guilty of wishful thinking. I realize that you rely on your argument from design and on your ‘universe fine-tuned for life.’ But isn’t that just a tautology? Isn’t that argument as circular as Descartes’ arguing that finite beings couldn’t think of an infinite God without that Deity’s putting the thought in their heads? Isn’t the argument that the universe is fine-tuned for life circular because conscious humans have determined that they wouldn’t be here if it weren’t? What if the universe is eternal? What if this universe began from a former universe? The Big Bang stuff. Everything, according to Roger Penrose and others began in a state of thermal equilibrium, and then it followed a black-body curve of temperature toward entropy. When the last black hole evaporates, ala Hawking radiation, as it must according to the most recent hypotheses, we get back to thermal equilibrium and a chance restart of the next universe.”
 
Philosopher B: “About that. Don’t you see a similar circularity in the physicists’ views. So, as I understand their position, the universe started from something that was in thermal equilibrium and unfolded according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and that since heat moves from hot things to cold things, when the universe cools off below its current 2.7 Kelvins toward absolute zero, then the remaining hot black holes will give off the remaining heat into the surrounding ‘nothingness.’ They will evaporate as Hawking argues. This universe will die. But what guarantees that such widespread thermal equilibrium in a universe that has expanded for more than a 100 trillion years will produce a new ‘singularity’ like the one that the Big Bang represents. So, if thermal energy is conserved throughout the expanded universe, how does it bring itself to a crushed subatomic size? How does it organize itself from dissipation and chaos? How does it concentrate its energy for a new Big Bang? Oh! Wait! You’ll probably say that gravity will play some role even though you cannot really explain the source, that is, the ultimate source of gravity. Is Gravity with a capital G your physical God? But then you have that other problem.”
 
Philosopher B: “What other problem? The math works out pretty well.”
 
Philosopher A: “The contradiction problem.”
 
Philosopher B: “What contradiction?”
 
Philosopher A: “Okay. Let’s say Roger Penrose is correct. Now, as he and other physicists admit and as you yourself have said, time is dependent on matter. You say it’s dependent on place, that if there were no place there’d be no time, that before the Big Bang or before Creation, there was no time, and thus, no ‘before.’ Hawking likens it to the South Pole from which the rest of the world can be said to exist in an expansion toward the Equator. The concept of ‘below the South Pole’ is similar to ‘before the Big Bang.’ But back to that contradiction. Let’s say the universe lasts 10 to the 100 power years or until the largest black holes evaporate. I don’t even know what to call that number; I don’t think it’s a Googleplex. One followed by at the very least some 64 zeroes for smaller black holes and by 100 zeroes for the really big ones, still occurs in time. In other words, if this universe is supposed to evaporate to thermal equilibrium in a supergajillion number of years, it still does so in time. And if this universe is to start another universe that would mean that there would be a ‘before.’ There would be a before, a time before the next universe began. There’s the contradiction as I see it regardless of the complex math and the great minds that state otherwise.”
 
Philosopher B: “Oh! I hadn’t thought of that. I’m sure there’s a way around that. I’ll have to consult with the Roger Penroses of the world. Those guys have the numbers.
 
“I still prefer thinking that your other argument about the universe’s being fine-tuned for life is a faulty argument. I prefer the explanation that after randomly fiddling around with the evolution of life, the universe stumbled on awareness of itself. Since we’re made of the stuff of the universe, then we are the universe conscious of itself. But I think there was no consciousness until we came along and thus no conscious deity to make it. I don’t believe the universe has been around consciously preparing for you, me, and all conscious beings. I don’t find that argument convincing. So, what you’re arguing, well, not you, but most of God’s defenders is that the universe has a plan, and the plan is you. A bit arrogant, don’t you think? 
 
“But then, I guess that’s appropriate. Wasn’t the first sin the root of all sin? You know your Adam and Eve, the couple who wanted to be like God. That’s pride, right? Eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was an attempt to be like God. And those Seven Deadly Sins, aren’t six of them just extensions in some way of the root sin of Pride?” 
 
Philosopher A: “Let’s not confuse any particular religion’s belief system with the larger question about a universe without God. How did the universe start? That’s the question that gets to the heart of a belief in God.”
 
“Philosopher B: “You’re ignoring what the physicists say about Dark Energy and virtual particles. The vacuum is filled with virtual particles in a constant coming and going. The math supports the coming and going of virtual particles, so Nothing is the creator of Something. That empty space isn’t empty is the argument; you don’t need a Creator because the universe self-creates.”
 
Philosopher A: “Got a question for you about that physics stuff, Dark Energy, and empty space that isn’t empty. What are ‘virtual particles’? I want to know if they are as real as the matter we know or see evidence of in the Large Hadron Collider? Are they a soup of Higgs bosons or some other particle or field? So, what you’re saying is that the universe created itself or that the universe is eternal or that the universe is a brane among many branes, a universe in multiverse with my doppelganger out there somewhere in a different dimension or in a bubble universe that exists in the grand Nothing, even though according to your virtual particles, Nothing can really be Nothing. It’s always producing something. Nothing is nothing because everything is Something for a human brain, even the brain of a physicist. Modern physicists are so fond of the Michelson-Morley experiment that demonstrated the absence of the Aether, but they replace the ubiquitous Aether with a field of virtual particles that they cannot show in any way other than through math. Their vacuum filled with virtual particles coming into and going out of existence is a compensation. They speak of Nothing, but simultaneously fill it with something. And how do these virtual particles reconcile with a universe in perfect equilibrium? I think the physicists sometimes feign science when they are at heart metaphysicists. They struggle like Martin Heidegger looking to explain Being and No-thingness. So, when you fault a devout believer for accepting the presence of God in the universe and for ascribing a role of Creator to God, please take a look in the quantum mirror where all these virtual particles fill the vacuum field and pop into and out of existence.” 
 
Philosopher B: “Look, I’ll admit that there are some puzzles to solve about the micro and macro worlds. Sure, I do have some reservations about virtual particles and about Nothing creating Something. But if I reject a God, I really don’t have much of a choice other than replacing all the religious explanations with mathematically sound ones and a finite universe with an eternal one, even though I know that with Dark Energy in the picture, the universe that we know will last a finite number of years counted, of course, in supergajillions of years.”
 
Philosopher A: “Eternal? The idea makes me come back to asking how that’s possible if it had a beginning? Oh! You’re thinking of eternal as in ‘if I start counting today, I’ll never run out of numbers.’ But isn’t eternal defined by no end points? Doesn’t the number line of eternal run in both directions forever? In fact, isn’t a number line a faulty analogy for either eternity or infinity. Or, maybe your eternal and also infinite universe is eternal or infinite the way the fractions between any two integers are infinite? You know, one half, one quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth, one umpteen gajillionth, ad infinitum. Is that what you envision for those virtual particles in the emptiness between That Which Is, between the bits matter or the pervasive fields that we can identify? I find your atheism filled with as much belief as any religion, with as much metaphor, and with as much need for visualizability.”
 
Philosopher B: “See, that argument about God always goes off on tangent. It’s always about a distraction. Can’t define God so you show me something I can’t fully explain or define. Can’t point to God, so you ask me to point to a virtual particle or a pervasive field that’s imaginable. Remember, those fields are describable in the language of mathematics. We have known fields since Maxwell wrote his equations.” 
 
Philosopher A: “Come on; admit it; what you hold as a Creative Force, or Dark Energy, or the Vacuum as Creator, is just your way of providing a metaphor you accept. You want to fault me for saying there is a God, but you see nothing amiss in your universe’s having a beginning or in being created by a vacuum. You see nothing wrong in saying the universe has a far-off end. Sure, your math says it, but what if your equations are based on erroneous thinking or a math incapable of capturing a supposed reality like an infinitely stretched universe in thermal equilibrium somehow becoming a singularity to start a new universe? Your universe isn’t eternal, as I understand the term. So, are we dealing with semantics? And do you believe you have with mathematics eliminated all the errors that words engender? 
 
“Sure, you predict the universe’s demise untold trillions of years hence, but you can run the numbers to 100 trillion, to a supergajillion and you still aren’t speaking in the language of infinity. The universe that ends even hundreds of trillions or supergajillions of years from now still ends. And if it is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, how does it renew itself? Does it ultimately become in the Big Rip so thin that it is totally virtual? When the argument was that the universe would end hot in a ‘Big Crunch’ because gravity would pull it together, you had some validity in a universe creating and recreating itself, but now? Now you have a universe ending not with a bang but a whimper. And even that is contradictory. If the vacuum, the Nothing, keeps producing virtual particles, then there is, in fact, no Nothing. Aren’t the physicists all over the map on this? Aren’t there contradictions? If you say the universe’s vacuum is in itself a ‘field’ of some kind that like waves in the ocean spit droplets from their crests and those droplets are models of the virtual particles that fall back into the Nothing-Field the way the droplets fall back and disappear into the sea, if that is what you are saying, are you not just giving me a universe that contains no vacuum?
 
“Your arguments remind me of two poems, one by T. S. Eliot and another by Robert Frost. Eliot wrote in ‘The Hollow Men,’ that ‘This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.” In ‘Fire and Ice’ Frost wrote ‘Some say the world will end in fire/Some say in ice.’ I suppose that the Big Rip ending of your accelerating universe will end in the whimper of thermal equilibrium or ‘in ice.’ In such a fading universe where everything is evened out by The Second Law, I see both whimper and ice, neither of which is hot enough to engender a new Big Bang.”
 
Philosopher B: “Nevertheless, you have no proof for a God. Just saying that my explanation lacks completeness isn’t a proof that God exists.”
 
Philosopher A: “Maybe not. And don’t get me wrong. I do understand the problems associated with a belief in God, especially a personal God, one that gets involved in human affairs. I know that tornadoes don’t hit some houses in the neighborhood because they are residences of the God-fearing. I know bad things happen to good people. I know evil is a persistent plague on humanity. I realize that the universe does have randomness and chaos. I know I cannot explain that evil occurs or why God would let bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. I can’t explain suffering or death. I can’t explain how a good God can allow dictators to rise and kill. But I can’t get past that fine-tuned universe in which I live. 
 
“I keep going back to John Leslie’s arguments about fine-tuning the universe.*  Take his take on gravity’s strength, for example. Leslie writes with regard to gravity that ‘it is roughly 10^39 times weaker than electromagnetism. Had it been only 10^33 times weaker, stars would be a billions times less massive and would burn a million times faster.’ (5) Ditto effect, he argues for the mass difference between protons and neutrons. ‘If the …mass difference—about one part in a thousand—had not been almost exactly twice the electron’ls mass then all neutrons would have decayed into protons or else all protoons would have changed irreversibly into neutrons.’ (5) And do you know what the effect of that would be?
 
Philosopher B: “No, tell me.”
 
Philosopher A: “Forget the periodic table. It wouldn’t exist. And that means all our chemistry and biology wouldn’t exist. Now think about that. Leslie also points out that force strengths of the so-called Four Fundamental Forces are also delicately balanced across a wide range. The nuclear strong force is (roughly) a hundred times stronger than electromagnetism, which is in turn ten thousand times stronger than the nuclear weak force, which is itself some ten thousand billion billion billion times stonger than gravity. So, we can well be impressed by any apparent need for a force to be “just right” even to within a factor of ten, let alone to which on part in a hundred or in 10^100—especially when nobody is sure why the strongest force tugs any more powerfully than the weakest.’” 
 
“I can note that if there was a single act of creation, then all forms we now see exist simply reveal the unfolding of existence. I go back to my old standby, that creating in the image means simply bearing the stamp of existence. If you and your nonbelieving friends would consider this, you might reconsider your objection to a belief in God with a capital G.  
 
Philosopher B: “Let me think about it. But you still haven’t covered that stuff about good and evil. Was the universe fine-tuned for evil, also?”
 
Philosopher A: “Let’s meet for coffee or beer sometime to discuss that.”
 
*Leslie, John. Universes. London. Routledge. 1989.              
 
 
 

​



​Greed and graft design an unsustainable economic architecture in socialist countries.   

When Egyptologist Zahi Hawass recently uncovered a 3,000-year-old “lost city” on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor, he discovered serpentine walls. When Thomas Jefferson designed the University of Virginia, he included serpentine brick walls. 
 
Snaking brick walls use more bricks than straight walls, but they have an aesthetic appeal. I don’t know why either the ancient Egyptians or Jefferson opted for wavelike over straight. I do know the walls make people feel good; and when people feel good, they often ignore costs. “More bricks! So what? Makes us feel great.”   
 
Have you noticed what socialist governments do to gain control of their countries’ hearts rather than their minds? Obfuscate and hide the purpose of their economic legislation. Want to see a serpentine wall made from gold bricks in the making? Look at the current spending legislation of the U.S. Congress. 
 
Once built, such gold brick walls last. Jefferson’s walls are over 200 years old. The pharaonic city’s walls are over 3,000. Once a brick becomes part of a wall, it isn’t used again. Once the money is spent on “feel good” projects, it’s cemented into permanence. Once a people yield to runaway spending whose purpose is to buy their loyalty, the country’s economy becomes as rigidly fixed as a brick wall that slowly crumbles over generations. When future Zahi Hawasses dig up twenty-first century economic history, they will ask whether or not there was a connection between the number of bricks a civilization used and the decline of that civilization.
 
I challenge you to count the number of extra economic bricks the US Congress is cementing into its serpentine spending legislation.

Notes:

Magdy, Samy. Famed Egyptian archaeologist reveals details of ancient city. Phys.org. 11 April 2021. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-04-famed-egyptian-archaeologist-reveals-ancient.html  Accessed on April 11, 2021. 

When cold air spilled into Valtellina Valley in northern Italy this April, the owners of apple orchards quickly decided to shower their trees with water to protect them. * The trees, covered in ice, survived temperatures below freezing by a freezing layer of insulation. Counterintuitive? The ambient air was colder than minus 3 degrees Celsius. Ice hovers at 0 degrees C. The myriad branches in the orchard were too numerous for LL Bean jackets, so the owners made them wear ice. In adopting the strategy, the owners saved thousands of tons of apples—I don’t know how many bushels that is, but my local grocery store sells Gala apples for about $1.99/lb, so thousands of tons of apples is bushels of money. But I digress.
 
If you are looking to up your creativity game or your ability to respond to challenges large and small, consider counterintuitive options.  Others might criticize and doubt your actions, but you will be the one to whom they come for apples.  
 
* https://phys.org/news/2021-04-italy-apple-trees-frozen-survive.html      Accessed April 10, 2021. 

Place is a teacher with a complex lesson. 
 
We’re a fortunate group. Those who came before us saw the indignities imposed on people by city squalor and gave us parks, national, state, and private, places where scenery, significance, and serenity prevail. The parks, as you know, range in range: Some are sprawling like Yellowstone; others, tiny like many neighborhood parks. Of course, in our inescapable marriage to entropy, we mar parks with subtle destructions like graffiti, Coke cans, and Burger King wrappers. But every park undergoes natural changes and has a lesson to teach about Earth, us, and our mutual relationship. I suppose you want an examples.
 
A tiny park near Saratoga Springs, NY, provides a lesson about time, life, and Earth’s dynamic nature. It’s Lester Park, so small that without its state marker it would be an unnoticeable patch of roadside rock, a wider berm along its namesake two-lane road. Lester Park, unlike those great national parks through which one can drive for miles, is a you-blink-you-miss-it drive-by. In short, it’s short. But it tells a long tale worth knowing.
 
People go to Lester Park to look down, not around or up. The park’s interest lies beneath one’s feet. People stand on it. Well, on “them.” The exposed rock on which one walks is a pavement of stromatolites, stony, concentrically built structures that are the fossilized ancient compositions of blue-green algae and fine sediment, both having once jointly been the floor of a shallow sea almost a half billion years old. The stromatolites of the park became fossils more than a quarter billion years before the first dinosaurs trod the land. Give or take a week, these ancient life-forms in the park are 490 million years old. That age puts them near the end of the Cambrian Period, an end associated with an extinction event of dubious nature. Was there a marine oxygen crisis, a period of glaciation, an outpouring of lavas and toxic gases on what is now present-day Australia? Whatever the cause of the larger extinction, it did not eliminate stromatolites as they still form today in other parts of the world.  
 
About halfway around the world from Lester Park, you can visit living stromatolite structures in Shark Bay, Australia. Don’t have time for a long trip? There’s always Exuma Sound in the Bahamas, obviously much closer to those ancient microbial structures. The modern mushroom-shaped stromatolites forming today will give you a glimpse of the ancient environment of Lester Park. But other than an occasional storm and the daily ebb and flow of tides, not much occurs in an environment conducive to stromatolite growth. Grass grows faster. Snails are rockets by comparison. Bit by bit, the cells grow and encapsulate sediments. The consolation prize for human visitors is basking beneath a tropical sun and wading or swimming in warm turquoise waters in which the microbes grow in thin layers interlaced with sediment. But wait a moment! If they grow in shallow warm seas, what are those old stromatolites during just west of Saratoga Springs? 
 
When the stromatolites of Lester Park were living masses of microbes, they weren’t located as they are today at more than 43 degrees north latitude. They were south of the Equator. And the North America that you know and on which those stromatolites now lie, was a number of islands, not a continuous mass that contains Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Remember those plate tectonics lessons? The sea in which the stromatolites formed was tropical; the sediments and life-forms in that sea became fossiliferous rock that moved as the various islands wandered with the wandering crustal plates and associated terranes; they smacked into one another, rose and fell in elevation at times, and became the continent you know today. 
 
Did you hear me? New York used to be south of the Equator. North America didn’t always have the shape it has. Seas have come and gone. Landmasses have altered their shapes with collisions and divergences, the former making mountains, the latter, seas. And after a half billion years, those tiny fossilized life-forms and the environment in which they lived is mirrored in microbial mats and “mushroom-structures” in an Australian bay and a Bahamian sound. 
 
Lester Park teaches us that life is an old Earth feature, that even though some of its forms die out, others persist after extinction events like the one that separated Cambrian and Ordovician periods, that the planet is still one dominated by microbes, that place changes nature and geographic position, and that the spatial and temporal scales of the planet stand in contrast to our daily lives. Even those who study stromatolites don’t stand around in shallow sea water patiently watching them grow by tenths of millimeters per year. 
 
How does one get the brain to wrap around 490 million years? How does the imagination cover the inexorable movement of a tropical bay in the Southern Hemisphere to a continental landscape in the Northern Hemisphere? Or, maybe more to the immediate concern, how does anyone maintain an awareness of all the subtle changes that a dynamic planet makes even during a short lifetime? 
 
Have you witnessed change? We might be in the midst of a grand extinction event that began with our changing environments and killing off species over the last 200 to 300 millennia. Did we have a role in eliminating mastodon and mammoth, sabre-toothed smilodon and short-faced bear? “But that was long ago,” you say. “Don’t blame me that there are no more elephant birds or Dodos. Okay, I eat a lot of fish, but aren’t they ‘farmed’ somewhere?” 
 
If you are living in the midst of a grand extinction event that coincides with the rise of our species, can you grasp it? Think of standing on those stromatolites at Lester Park. Unaware as microorganisms are, they lived at a time of extinction. They moved on crustal plates as you move today. Lester Park gives us our drive-by fleeting look at processes and events that might take hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The seafloor spreading that moves plates and changes the shapes of continents ranges from about 1 centimeter per year to 15 centimeters/yr. At the fastest rate, those Lester Park stromatolites have had enough time to circle the planet. You are currently traveling, dependent upon your location, on a plate with a slower rate. Where you now live, that place that seems to have undergone so little change during your lifetime, will be somewhere else, different by about almost a mile in 10 to 20 millennia. Try to imagine 10,000 years against a backdrop of Lester Park’s 490 million years.
 
While we partake in a grand extinction, we pay homage to extinct life. Museums are testimony to our fascination with life gone by. Parks also testify to our ambivalence. We might by our individual actions contribute to habitat destruction and associated dire effects on various species, but we take the time to note life’s historical context. In 1999, the state of New York had a rededication ceremony for Lester Park, which it had received in 1914 by a farsighted individual. From the Renaissance on, a growing number of people became interested in fossils and what they represented. After Darwin published his findings in 1859, that interest increased, and by the early twentieth century, a number of people dedicated themselves to paleontology and micropaleontology. Think of it as a form of Ancestry.com. Related to all life, we humans want to know how we got to be what we are and how the place we call home differed and will differ. 
 
Lester Park in New York is a good place for such contemplation. But, then, so is the place where you are right now.

Recently, I asked whether or not psychology is dead. Admittedly, the question seemed Nietzschean. Lest the psychologists think I’m picking on them, let them be aware that I’ve also asked whether or not philosophy is dead. Psychology dead? Philosophy dead? “What do you mean?” you ask. 
 
Good question. I based that assessment of psychology on changes in the DSM, now standing at version number five. What, pray tell, does that number indicate about all those other DSM versions, that is, numbers one through four? Were they just guessing? Did the species undergo a significant change, a mutation that included alterations to the psyche? Have humans changed dramatically and rapidly enough that the first version of the DSM is no longer applicable to them? 
 
And then, why say “Philosophy is dead”? Why pick on poor philosophers whose goal is simply to explain the “why” of it all, why, for example, we are present in this Cosmos and what are the natures of humanity, reality, and morality? Have you read any physics book lately? Seems to me that the philosophers have turned over some of their obsessions to the physicists, who, by the way, have offered some pretty convincing answers. 
 
I’m not trying to start an interdepartmental war between philosophers and physicists as you might think. Anyway, if conflict did break out, what are the philosophers going to use for weapons? Syllogisms? And if psychologists are well-adjusted because they understand motivation and behavior as they claim, then there’s probably no chance of a hot war started over an insult to their profession. “He’s crazy,” they’ll simply claim, and then coin a new term for DSM VI or VII or XIX to define the special type of craziness. The point? Psychology has apparently changed with the times. Do I insult the discipline when I point out changes in the DSM, such as the use of terms like “gender dysphoria” to replace “gender disorder,” the former more indicative of “dissatisfaction” than the latter’s 1950’s type of labeling that, in the UK, led to the persecution of Alan Turing. What the heck were the psychologists thinking back then? If psychology were truly a mechanism for understanding humans today, if not the humans of 250,000 years ago, wouldn’t it have from the get-go been founded on underlying principles and laws? Look at physics. Newton discovered the underlying laws of macroworld physics. After hundreds of years and a new explanation of gravity by Einstein, Newtonian physics still enables NASA and artillery companies to land a projectile on an intended distant and moving target. You can still use Newton’s work to understand why your bathroom scale reads as it does. 
 
But I’m not so sure that my next intellectual coroner’s report will be met with peace banners, or dismissive reactions, or new numbers in a catalog. I think I’m about to offend sociologists, social workers, and social service employees. At the very least, I expect a robust response from them as I proclaim that sociology is dead. Why should I expect withers to wrinkle as I beat this dead horse? Well, there are hundreds of thousands of people employed in social services and social work, not to mention all those university sociologists who write articles on “trajectory guarding,” “the intersectionality of precarity,” and “value chains.”  
 
Saying “sociology is dead” implies that it was once alive. Oh! No! Stepping on powerful toes here, Donald. Okay, not “dead.” Stop huffing, sociologists. But certainly if not dead, then subject to some scrutiny for tautologies even grandma could point to. And speaking of grandmas, I’ll relate a criticism made some time ago by Stanislav Andreski (Andrzejewski). In his Social Sciences as Sorcery, he criticizes the “pretentious nebulous verbosity” found in the writings of his fellow sociologists. * Almost 40 years after reading his assessment of his discipline, I still remember his proffering an example: Sociological research filled with neologisms and formulas might end with a conclusion, such as “humans are gregarious.” Andreski says something like “which I can well believe because my grandmother told me so.” 
 
Yes. Reams of research papers dedicated to stating the obvious. And now the sociologists have teamed up with the environmental sustainability group, specifically over plastic bags. Yep, in 2019, plastic bags were anathema. Then COVID hit in 2020, and people were advised to keep their reusable, probably disease-ridden, COVID-carrying canvas grocery bags at home. Just before COVID hit, I was walking through the grocery store when I was given reusable cloth bags through a bank promotion. After COVID hit, the grocery store banned the reusable bags in favor of reinstated plastic bags. Sorry, that was a digression. Where were we? Oh! Sociology and sustainability. And for the record, I’m not opposed to sustainability in general. Earth has lots of mouths to feed, and it’s getting more every year.
 
Sociologists and environmentalists working together. Good combo. Both looking out for the good of humanity—I almost wrote “mankind” but caught myself—or if not specifically for humanity, then both are looking out for the good of this place, that, except for a few on the International Space Station, houses all humans. Or, as Shakespeare writes in Richard II, “This Earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Natue for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea….” 
 
If you recall, the ban on plastic bags and straws met resistance across the nation. So, the sociologists went to work to discover the reasons people were so adverse to fostering sustainability and so stuck on plastic bags. Now here’s where conclusions get, for want of a better word, grandma-like. Supposedly, at least according to the lead author of a study entitled “How do I carry all this now?: Understanding Consumer Resistance to Sustainability Interventions,” consumers resist such bans as the one on plastic bags because they “target” an individual behavior associated with or “embedded in” social practices. Remember that term. 
 
Also, for a minute just forget that we’re not talking about the sustainability of plastic bags. Practically speaking, we won’t run out of polyethylene because it is made from fossil fuels, and as we decide to decrease our use of those fuels for driving around and making electricity, we’ll have more available for making plastic. You can try to corner the plastic bag market, but you’ll be overwhelmed just as Curtis Jadwin is overwhelmed in Frank Norris’s novel The Pit, when he tries to control the wheat market. The amount of ever-renewing wheat flowing into the Chicago Board of Trade is the analog of the number of plastic bags that could flow into grocery stores. We can keep making more bags for centuries. So, we’re not talking here about sustaining plastic bags. That makes me wonder what the sociologists are addressing. Do plastic bags destroy soils, making them less nutrient rich and less agriculturally productive?  
 
So, what’s being sustained? The environment in general, I guess, however one wants to define it. Maybe ocean environments in particular. All those plastic bags floating in the ocean will choke fish and mammals, for example. That would mean a diminution in their numbers, and thus, a reduction in sustainability. At least, I think that’s the point. But here’s where Andreski’s grandma comes in. What is a “social practice”? 
 
According to a summary article on the sociologists’/environmentalists’ work, social practices are “activities, materials, and meanings that are similarly understood and shared by a group of people.” ** I know that all new definitions require intellectual bronco-busting, but to include “materials” and “meanings” as “practices” is a bit of a stretch. And then, to make sure you and I can understand at least the fringe on sociology’s in-house terminology, the writer explains, “Eating, cooking, shopping, driving, and reading are examples of social practices shared by large groups.” ** Let me see whether my brain can grasp this highfalutin jargon. Groups of people share the experience of “eating, cooking, shopping, driving, and reading.” Who’da thunk it? I’m devastated by my previous ignorance in this. “I once was blind, but now I see. Hallelujah!” 
 
According to the authors, using plastic bags is a “shared, habituated practice” that I assume falls into the category of “social practice.” And people resist changing a shared, habituated practice because they are concerned about 1) who gets to control the change in such practice, 2) unsettling emotions caused by the change, and 3) the loss of linked practices that together frame their familiar lifestyle. Linked? You use the plastic bags to carry home groceries and then use them to carry out the garbage or to pick up Fido’s doodoo on the streets of Manhattan. If we assume that we don’t change our habits for these three reasons, we have to ask what solutions the sociologists propose.  
 
Before we consider one of their solutions, let’s offer our own suggestions to eliminate plastic bags. If Star Trek-like, we could beam our groceries to our homes, I suppose we could eliminate bags of any kind altogether. Unfortunately, teleportation doesn’t seem to work on cans of beans at this time. Or, if we make larger backpacks and cargo pants with deeper pockets, we could just walk into and waddle out of grocery stores. Yet another solution might be to widen grocery store aisles so that we can drive down each as store employees toss groceries through the open back windows.
 
But no, those suggestions aren’t going to work. So, what do the erudite sociologists suggest, and does their suggestion have anything to do with socialism, specifically with Mussolini-type fascism? 
 
Yes, if no re-education system works, they want to eliminate the use of plastic bags by having a government entity dictate the control on bags. I can hear the pronouncement in the voices of Sargeant Schultz or Colonel Klink of Hogans Heroes: “You will not use plastic.” But in case a relative does use plastic bags, the government agent will no doubt exclaim, “I see nothing; I know nothing.” Okay, that’s unfair, and you sociologists out there should have reason to complain. I know you mean well. But, in fact, one of the conclusions by the researchers who wrote the paper was “to monitor and adjust practice-based interventions if consumer resistance emerges.” Think about those two words: Monitor and Adjust. The authors end by recommending three main strategies: 1) refocus sensemaking (Is that doublespeak for “re-education camp”); 2) encourage accommodation (That seems innocuous, right?); and 3) accelerate stabilization (whatever that entails) “if consumers are grappling with discomfort…”
Ah! There’s no solution like a government solution, especially one proposed by sociologists. 
 
So, in the sense that there are numerous practitioners, sociology probably isn’t dead. But into what has it morphed? 
 
Notes:
 
*Andreski, Stanislav. 1972.
 
**Weingarden, Matt. 2 April 20211. Consumer resistance to sustainability interventions. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-04-consumer-resistance-sustainability-interventions.html   Accessed April 7, 2021.   
 
   

Makeup and baby powder; face and butt. We love talc, or more specifically, talcum powder, a finely ground form of Mg3Si4O10(OH)2, a silicate mineral. Of course, there are the suspected and presumably demonstrated carcinogenic dangers, but, hey, everything is bad for you in some way, isn’t it? And, hey, also, isn’t it true that some talc has associated asbestos, making it a potential source of mesothelioma? “What’s that you’re putting on your face, Honey?” And “What are we going to do about the baby’s persistent diaper rash?” 
 
Yes, we have long tended to use natural products or enhanced natural products before we knew of their potential harm. We’ve done the same with artificial products like those tens of thousands of chemicals we all carry around in our bones and flesh, chemicals that we only recently synthesized and, we like to believe, innocently cast into our environment. Look, who in Japan knew ahead of time what would happen to the people of Minamata because of methyl mercury poisoning dumped into the bay? Okay, maybe some knew, but generally, most of the environmental damage, the poisons, the tens of thousands of synthesized and natural compounds, entered the environment through ignorance, sometimes well-intentioned ignorance. Like that talcum powder for face and bottom. Works, doesn’t it. Absorbs oils. Dry lubricates as well as graphite without the black pencil powder.  
 
And now we’ve found a comet covered in talcum powder, well, more specifically in phyllosilicates. Yeah, something like a big baby bottom hurtling through space, even came relatively close to Earth, just a few million kilometers away at one point. Eight football fields in diameter, Comet P/2016 BA14, tells the tale that Earth by itself isn’t the only place where subtle dangers lie. The universe is filled with unhealthful compounds. The universe is filled with dangers, many of them masked in beauty, like those makeups composed of microscopic slippery sheets of phyllosilicate molecules we call talc.  
 
But notice your tendency to infer. You almost never give those chemical dangers a thought. You infer a safety when you can’t see a danger, even a danger that envelopes you, or your face, or you butt. You infer that you will not be hit by a talcum powder comet today. You infer that your chair will hold your mass, that the floor will support your weight, and that the predicted tornado will not hit your house to sweep you away to Oz.
 
We have to live our lives with an underpinning of inference. Otherwise, we would spend all our moments in a constant anxiety. “Will the chair continue to hold me? Will the chair continue to hold me? Should I worry I use makeup? Did I kill the baby by using baby powder to prevent diaper rash? “DID I KILL THE BABY?” 
 
Here’s a personal story. My father lived 97 years; my mother, 95. Now, admittedly, the last six years—they died the same year—of their lives were not their most vigorous. Macular degeneration prevented him from walking a daily five miles of a hilly golf course, a two-decade hobby he had with his buddies after he retired and that included going to one another’s homes for a late morning Irish coffee. In their nineties both parents gradually became weaker, their last year’s mobility limited to wheel-chair travel. Both had been smokers until they were in their sixties. Unfiltered cigarettes for decades, mind you. Both grew up in houses whose walls had both asbestos plasters and lead paints. Both breathed the coal soot spewed from western Pennsylvania’s chimneys. Both consumed processed meats. Both lived through the Great Depression, relative poverty, and, for him, the battle on Okinawa during which many of his fellow Marines died. Both had a good work ethic. But he daily worked with printer’s ink and lead-based metals because he was a linotypist until he switched to computer-driven printing where he worked. Her ironing board was covered with an asbestos cloth to prevent fires, a fact I discovered as a little child when I asked why the iron didn’t set the cloth on fire. I remember visiting one day when they were in their late 80s or early 90s. My father asked, “Do we have salami for lunch?” She replied, “No, that’s in the refrigerator downstairs for next week. We have baloney for today.” Of course, that was served on white bread. Now, there’s a health-food story that will drive millennials to overdose on green tea. 
 
But before you run to the health-food store, realize that those people born before the Spanish Flu killed millions, learned as the twentieth century passed, the gradual lessons of the times, that some things once thought beneficial were, in fact, not as beneficial as they were supposed. Know also the common lot of people: That Camel once boasted that a high percentage of doctors preferred its cigarettes over the other brands, demonstrating that the “educated” class were as ignorant as their “uneducated” contemporaries.** Did my parents smoke? Yes, in fact, he smoked Camels for years, and I knew doctors who smoked. “Horrors!” you exclaim as you rush to the nearest Whole Foods for solace in your electric vehicle with all the poisons, like lithium and cobalt, that its batteries contain. 
 
So, all those who currently infer that electric cars are better for both humanity and planet Earth, might have some learning curve ahead of them, from the peak of which they might look back to the uphill slope of environmental hazards over which they recently climbed to their present inferences. What’s next? A commercial that proclaims that more doctors drive electric cars than those who drive cars with internal combustion engines? *** 
 
Might my parents have lived into their 100s had they lived a different lifestyle? It’s possible. But, then, anyone can be hit by a truck, even a healthy jogger. Good genes in my parents? Maybe. Certainly, talcum-powder-based makeups never did her in. Lead poisoning, or asbestos, or coal dust, leaded gasolines, or all the environmental hazards of the twentieth century didn’t seem to have much of an effect on their almost 100-year-old bodies. Heck, even when macular degeneration prevented him from seeing a golf ball well enough to hit it, he rolled the high score, 287, for his bowling league. 
 
Maybe every so often each of us should examine our many inferences for their truth. Sorry, I guess I gave you a thought you won’t be able to shake today, the thought that maybe your chair, your floor, or even your ceiling might not be what you think it is. Sit well, my friend, sit well. Some inferences seem to be necessary for sanity.  
 
 
Notes: 
 
*National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. 6 April 2021. Exploring comet thermal history: Burnt-out comet covered with talcum powder. https://phys.org/news/2021-04-exploring-comet-thermal-history-burnt-out.html   Accessed April 6, 2021. Takafumi Ootsubo, Hideyo Kawakita, Yoshiharu Shinnaka, Mid-infrared observations of the nucleus of comet “/2016 BA14 (PANSTARRS). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103521001093?via%3Dihub  
 
**See an example commercial at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAB04wkCxqw   Accessed April 6, 2021.
 
*** Williams, Thomas D., Ph.D.,  29 June 2020. UN warns of devastating environmental side effects of electric car boom. https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2020/06/29/u-n-warns-of-devastating-environmental-side-effects-of-electric-car-boom-2/    Accessed April 6, 2021.