​It’s virtually impossible for anyone to sail on the sea of life without potentially passing by or into some maelstrom like disease, socioeconomic collapse, natural disaster, troubled relationship, family loss, or war. So, as I sit in the crow’s nest of today, March 4, 2020, I scan the horizon, looking for swirling water I might avoid by a simply adjusting the jib or even by jibbing. Changing the angle of the jib would allow me to proceed by piloting a course that avoids the whirlpool. Jibbing would keep me under the doldrums of inaction.
 
Because all of us, to use the Homeric phrase, must sail the “wine dark sea,” all have to choose between jibbing and swinging the jib. Personally, I prefer the latter, even though by doing so, I reroute. What’s your preference, sailor? Are you going to jib or realign the jib?

​Although it is not in every work, the search for identity is a theme that writers have woven into all genres of literature. Some authors have their characters search through time consciousness. Proust, for example, and Updike, too; both belong on the list of authors who have used time as the basis of “identification.” The search, however, isn’t limited to awareness of or relationship to past or present. Other authors have used love, death, war, morality, coming-of-age, survival and heroism, and even society as the background against which characters seek and find—or lose—their identities. The theme of identity permeates literature with good reason: We’re always in the business of either finding out who we are or refining who we are.
 
Identity is a complex issue, of course. We speak of “wearing masks” that both define us (our Egos) to those we meet and hide us (our Ids) from those with whom we interact. That we behave in certain ways, profess certain beliefs, and adjust our appearances for both the daily grind and for “special” occasions, indicates a rather common obsession with identity. On a very basic level, the search for and maintenance of identity makes us into lexicographers of the word human. We are nothing if at not first “human.” Everything else, especially identity, is piled onto that elusive concept, a concept to which we have ascribed different attributes. Just as the dictionary writers add new meanings, new definitions, so we often redefine human, that is, what it means to “be human,” and what it means to be “a human (being).”
 
Circular definitions (“a banana is a banana”) usually enter the discussion when one tries to explain either identity or human being. With arguable degrees of success, we’ve been in the business of trying to define what it means to be human for all our intellectual history. If you go to a site like Dictionary.com, you’ll see that human means “of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or having the nature of people.” Yeah. So what does that meaning mean? A banana is a banana. It’s banana-like. Not very helpful, right? Try out your own definition right now; give it the circularity test. Go ahead, really. I’ll give you a moment since you are giving me a moment. I’m serious; I can wait…
 
Let me guess. You’re thinking, “Does he want me to define the modifier human? Or does he want me to say what ‘a human’ is? Adjective or noun? What are we looking at here? Can I define human being? And why does he want me to define either? Is it because there appears to be an obvious relationship between having an identity and being (a) human? Isn’t identity a psychological concept, but the concepts of “human” or “being a human” are biological (sedentary bipedal mammal with keyboard)? As always, when I read this guy, I have to ask, ‘Where’s this headed?’”
 
When I was a teenager, I had a discussion with friends that was far beyond my ability to form anything but the simplest of arguments on identity and the “nature” of human. But maybe that’s where some discussions always end: In simplicity, or, maybe in reduction. Surely, though I can’t remember the details of that debate, in my youthful limitations, I argued as much from ignorance and emotion as I did from logic. And, of course, when emotion walks onto the stage of debate, reduction usually ensues, sometimes often with raised voice, as though volume makes an argument. Take questions on ethics and morality, for example. Take, identity and the definition of “human.” Or, address the very difficult matter of abortion as an example tied to defining human and identity. Complex and controversial as the issue of abortion is, it centers on what it means to “be human” and how we define human and identify. In that reduction, we see two fundamental positions: Pro-choice and pro-life.
 
Among the arguments of pro-choicers one hears that 1) “It’s” the woman’s body to do whatever she wants to do with “it”—an argument that uses it to represent both the woman and the fetus, i.e., the identity of either depending upon the point of view—and 2) The fetus is a parasite, an inconvenient (from different perspectives) one to be kept and tolerated or discarded at will. Among the arguments of pro-lifers one hears that 1) All life has value and is even “sacred” and 2) The unborn also have rights because they have individual identities. I’ll admit both groups would argue against my reduction of their positions, but bear with me for a moment.
 
Reducing the arguments for and against abortion to just two representative positions each would most likely be deemed unacceptable by either side because neither side wants to accept the simplistic definition imposed by the other side. After all, the tenets of both sides are also coupled with personal and group histories, including both joy and sadness, confusion and surety, hope and despair, adherence to or rejection of philosophical, religious, and cultural traditions, and physical and psychological well-being. And then the circumstances of conceiving add complexity, such as in rape and incest, lust and love, inheritance and image, drive to continue the species, though in any or in all of these the fetus is, in fact, not an active participant, so it lacks any intention, good or evil, positive or negative, beneficial or inimical in its own conception. If we who are defined as “human” have so much difficulty with our own identity and definition in spite of our extensive experiential backgrounds, the fetus has infinite difficulty because “it” has no intellectual or experiential tradition, personal or cultural, to use as a point of departure.
 
The argument against the two pro-lifers’ positions I mention above entails, I believe, a rejection of the principal assumptions in those arguments. First, to say that life has value and is sacred is to speak axiomatically. It is somewhat self-serving position because in saying “Life has value,” one can ensure (and insure) his or her own life’s value. Pro-choicers would argue that neither value nor sacredness is self-evident, that both, in fact, are cultural baggage handed down through inculcated philosophies and theologies. Both might be psychological mechanisms that foster the continuation of the species (Kids, can’t live with them; can’t stop reproducing them). If (human) life has value, then the living live to reproduce, saving what has value. Second, to say the fetus has rights is to impose a legal tradition that has not permeated all cultures. The Romans, for example, sometimes abandoned malformed infants. And around the planet both today and historically, fully-formed humans have been denied “rights” and have been enslaved. Thomas Jefferson’s “unalienable rights” aside, not everyone accepts as a truth self-evident some universal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Probably billions of fully mature and rational humans have been treated as “sub-humans.” In this reduced argument for pro-choicers and against pro-lifers, I ascribe to them an ethical or moral system that is definitively situational. But isn’t that their position? Otherwise, there are moral absolutes, and the axiomatic thinking of the pro-lifers gains weight.  
 
The two pro-choice arguments I enumerate are subject to both a bit of science and legal precedent by the pro-lifers. No, I’m not talking about Roe v. Wade (though the woman who was at the center of that ruling, Norma McCorvey, became in 1995 an advocate for pro-life). Rather I’m looking at the use, among other purposes, of DNA to convict criminals.
 
Let me start with the science and make it personal and then with justice. You are related to your biological mother. You carry some of her genetic heritage, but not all of it. Some of your DNA is yours exclusively. Since the OJ Simpson trial, the public has become more aware of the ramifications of this separate DNA, and TV crime show detectives and lawyers use DNA evidence to catch murderers (or identify either the pathological or the pathogenic). In “real life” detectives and prosecutors also use DNA to pin crime upon criminal and in some instances to free the falsely accused and imprisoned. Our legal system accepts that one’s DNA belongs to that person and to no one else, so it is admissible as evidence. Now if the pro-choice argument of “it’s my body” holds, then logically, the body that commits the crime is also the body of the mother—or an extension of it—because any singularity of body is demonstrable by its DNA. Short of convicting the offspring, the justice system could put the blame on the mother whose biologically identifiable body, or clone, committed the crime. Foolish argument? Maybe, but it is a logical extension of the “it’s my body” position.
 
We all know that we use DNA to convict or exonerate the offspring. So, legally we are in a contradictory bind. Do we accept the individuality of the offspring as defined by its DNA, or do we accept the joint ownership of the body (or should I say, joint ownership by the DNA?)? If one takes the “it’s my body” argument to its logical conclusion, then the current justice system imprisons only half of the real criminal. Of course, pro-choicers would say, “This is absurd.” (Not an argument) The mother neither participated in the crime nor had criminal intentions. (An argument) But is it absurd? How does it do anything other than reveal a basic contradiction in an Either/Or? Either the fetus is one with the mother fully or not one with the mother. How is it that pro-choicers are willing to accept DNA as indicative of individual human identity in one instance but not in the other? Is this where Emotion steps onto the stage of debate and loudly shouts an axiom with the face of Janus? Should pro-lifers shout in return, “Free the imprisoned! And put their mothers in jail”? Should the pro-choicers exclaim, “It’s not an Either/Or! Rather, it’s a Both/And”? DNA identifies both sentient individual and sentient clone. “It’s my body; it’s my body; IT’S MY BODY! That ‘whatever you want to call it’ has its own behavior’ as anyone who has ever put a hand on a pregnant woman’s stomach knows.”
 
But let’s say the pro-choicer decides that the DNA argument is specious at best. Now what does the pro-lifer argue? There’s always that other argument (#2), that the fetus is a parasite. It is true, obviously, that the fetus gets its life-sustaining chemicals from its host and simultaneously gets a safe house provided courteously by that same hostess. But here we go again with that stubborn DNA argument. Parasites have distinct DNA, and they don’t have the same physiology, form, or complex makeup of their hosts; but more importantly, they don’t turn into organisms that carry a considerable amount of their host’s DNA as a fetus does. And parasites don’t find sustenance and growth outside the host; parasites like malaria run their reproductive cycles within the host. “Human” (for want of a better word here) fetuses do not reproduce within the hostess, and they can become adult humans. With some care, the most premature of fetuses have been known to survive early ejection from the hostess and to grow into self-sustaining and reproducing humans. “Parasite”? I think not, at least not in the lexicon of biologists.
 
Obviously, there’s a divide between the two sides of the debate. Pro-lifers accept an axiomatic right to life and the undeniable separate DNA of the fetus. Pro-choicers reject axiomatically derived values and favor the desire or perceived needs of the hostess who decides to abort a “clone” or “parasite.” (But they, also, rely on axioms) The argument has in the past few years gone Roman, with some defending the post-birth life of an abortion survivor and others defending the post-birth demise of the aborted left in the wilderness to die or be raised by wolves. Senate Bill 311, designed to amend title 18, US Code, “to prohibit a health care practitioner from failing to exercise the proper degree of care in the case of a child who survives an abortion or attempted abortion,” has been defeated in 2020. Essentially, being born alive isn’t in the eyes of the government at this time a guarantee of any of those rights enumerated by Jefferson, at least not a guarantee of those rights for infants, or should I say, post-birth organisms capable of becoming, through some transitional developmental  biochemistry, mature human adults.  
 
And all this brings us to more questions, such as 1) At what age do Jeffersonian rights apply? 2) Who determines the rights and the extent of rights of others? 3) If there is no axiomatic right to life, then what justifies keeping you alive if society, or another member of society, deems you a burden subject to euthanasia or murder? Pro-choicers might argue that the Jeffersonian rights apply at the age of reason, that those rights are not absolutes, but rather situational and subject to change as culture changes, and that a mature sentient being can decide to terminate the life of another on the basis of economy, resources, or convenience (of whatever nature). Pro-lifers would reject those opinions, arguing, for example, that those who suffer some temporary psychological ailment that disrupts their ability to reason would make them subject to termination as the Nazis argued during WWII. Similarly, if humans enter the “age of reason” gradually, say between four and seven years old (I don’t know when), then what happens when they exit the “age of reason” in dementia. Is there a sliding frame during which the demented are partially rational and partially irrational, partly endowed with certain unalienable rights that gradually slip away with increased brain erosion or loss of self-identification? But then if “reason” is the guide, then one has to ask whether or not any “unreasonable” act at any time of life warrants others to consider terminating the “unreasonable actor.” (If so, goodbye many impulsive high school and college students)
 
There is, of course, the argument both sides could make from the “lesser of two evils.” That isn’t a new dilemma. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna, the bowman, questions whether it is justifiable to kill his kinsmen among the rival Kauravas. Krishna, Vishnu’s avatar and Arjuna’s cousin, tells him that in a justifiable war he would be justified in his killing because one doesn’t kill the soul, just the body. Krishna favors the Arjuna and the Pandavas in the battle at Kurukshetra because in his eyes, the Kauravas would usher in a culture of hedonism and self-centeredness, whereas the Pandavas would usher in a culture of Dharma. In the abortion debate we appear to have a strange and topsy-turvy version of Kurukshetra. Those who would favor emphasis on personal needs, a modern version of Kauravas, believe nothing of significance is killed, just a soulless body. The modern Pandavas believe there is a “sin” in killing kinsmen, as Arjuna believed before Krishna convinced him he fought a just war.
 
We know from DNA studies that the fetus is, in fact, closely related to the mother, a kinsmen. Every abortion is the battle at Kurukshetra reenacted, the two sides of the debate falling in the camp of either the Pandavas or the Kauravas. The Pandavas argue that their opponents in the debate, the pro-choicers, are defenders of Anrita and the dissolution of universal moral law (Rita), a dissolution that necessarily follows from their acceptance of the identifiable Self as the sole authority on (human) rights. The Kauravas argue that the Pandavas fool themselves by thinking that there is Rita (Rta), that the Self, however it identifies according to situational necessities, is the decider and that “sin” or wrongdoing in almost any religious sense, is simply a cultural construct. Further, they argue that the only right is the right of the one who gets to decide what is right, what is “human,” and what identity is significant.
 
No doubt the pro-choicers will continue to say, “It’s my body” and “It’s a parasite.” And pro-lifers will continue to argue for the identification of the fetus as “human” with rights independent of its hostess because its inevitable future is a “human” presence. That arguing is not going to change until both can agree on what human means, what constitutes identity, and what a human is. Kurukshetra is an ongoing battle centered on defining the terms human, human identity, and a human. The abortion debate is a re-enactment of Kurukshetra.
 
After about 60 million artificial abortions in the United States since Roe v. Wade, where do you stand? And because volume isn’t an argument, don’t shout your answer.

Does Michelle Kunimoto owe a debt of gratitude to Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century cleric who was burned at the stake for, among other ideas, thinking that the universe was populated by many solar systems contrary to what his Inquisitors believed? Bruno (1548-1600) reasoned that the universe was infinite and, therefore, capable of holding an infinite number of worlds like our own. And now, thanks to work by persistent bright people like Michelle, we know that other Earths are not only possible, but very much likely.
 
Astronomy doctoral candidate at the University of British Columbia, Kunimoto discovered 17 more-or-less Earthlike worlds hidden in the Kepler satellite’s data. Planet KIC-7340288 b is 1.5 times the size of Earth and lies in the Goldilocks Zone, the habitable zone of its sun. * It’s far away, about 1,000 light years, so from our perspective it is a mere speck of dust. Those 17 planets bring her total discoveries to 22. Bruno would be happily vindicated. Too bad the discoveries come too late to save him from the Inquisition’s bonfire. I suppose the only consolation is that Giordano died not only enlightening but also in shining himself.
 
As we know, astronomers strongly knew in 1988 and fully confirmed in 1992 the existence of exoplanets. Michelle’s work adds to the growing list of other worlds, at least two of which now seem to exist in habitable zones. So, what’s the lesson we can learn from Michelle?
 
Two lessons, really, but both no doubt some hardworking relative once told you. Persistence pays. Hard work pays. Michelle Kunimoto looked at the data gathered on 200,000 stars by the Kepler satellite. Maybe there’s a third lesson. You can’t assume that others have discovered everything that can be discovered.
 
That third lesson reminds me of the well-known anecdote attributed to Max Planck. Planck, Nobel laureate, having contributed his famous constant to theoretical physics in his illustrious career, said in 1924 that his advisor Philipp von Jolly told him to choose another field of endeavor as he began his studies in 1874 because physics was “a highly developed almost fully matured science … [with] perhaps… a dust particle [of opportunity].” Obviously, Planck found that “dust particle,” a really tiny one in Planck’s Constant, and Michelle, searching through the universe for specks called planets, found 22 of them.
 
*University of British Columbia. 28 Feb 2020. Astronomy student discovers 17 new planets, including Earth-sized world. Phys.org. Astronomy & Space. Online at https://phys.org/news/2020-02-astronomy-student-planets-earth-sized-world.html
Kunimoto, Michelle, Jaymie M. Matthews, and Henry Ngo. 25 February 2020. Searching the Entirety of Kepler Data. 1. 17 New Planet Candidates Including One Habitable Zone World. The Astronomical Journal, Volume 159, Number 3.

In a study of hit songs to find out why they pleased people, Vincent k. M. Cheung and four other neuroscientists separated the chords of famous tunes from their lyrics and melodies and had people listen.* The participants didn’t know the songs being played, so they responded only to the sequence of chords. Cheung’s group discovered that those who listened found both unexpected chords and expected chords make music pleasant, depending upon the chord sequence.
 
I suppose you have always known this, at least intuitively. It’s a matter of prediction, something our brains do to help us survive. Knowing the near future means not stubbing one’s toe on a curb or rock. We anticipate the chords of the next measures, and in hearing them know our predictions hold true become satisfied by our knowledge. But, we also like “pleasant” surprises, i.e., surprises that do not endanger, but nevertheless drive adrenalin through our biological pipes. Scary scenes do that to us in movies where the threat jumps out unexpectedly from the shadows—though ominous music often serves as a warning. I think, with regard to this, of a couple of movies with daring heroes climbing near vertical cliff faces only to have a bird suddenly spring from a crevice about to be used for the next handhold, as in Gregory Peck’s climb in Guns of Navarone and Roger Moore’s climb to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Meteora, in For Your Eyes Only.
 
The Max Planck researchers found that two chord patterns produced “pleasantness”: “Those with low uncertainty and high surprise, or the opposite, highly uncertain but not surprising…If the participant was sure what was coming next (low uncertainty) but the song unexpectedly deviated and surprised them, they found that pleasant. However, if the chord progression was harder to predict (high uncertainty) but the actual chord … did not surprise them, they also found the stimuli pleasant, possibly suggesting they had guessed correctly.” I think the research applies equally to movies, as in the two I mentioned above, and maybe, also, to life itself.
 
There’s a certain pleasantness to certainty and predictability. Knowing the near future—or at least thinking we know the near future—allows us to relax. With a reasonable guarantee that no grizzly or tiger is about to pounce on us from the underbrush, we feel secure. The absence of the unpredictable manufactures its own form of pleasantness. You can imagine, if you don’t live a place where threats abound, the unpredictable nature of living where predators like lions, alligators and crocodiles, muggers, and coronavirus wait in hiding.
 
And that brings me to the fears spreading around the world this spring, 2020, about the coronavirus threat which apparently started somewhere in or near Wuhan, China, and has spread, as of this writing to countries as far away as Brazil, Italy, and the United States. The predictability of seeing someone with a normal body temperature and regular breathing pattern provides a background of security for us when we are in crowds. When the general population seems to be healthy, individuals live in certainty. One person in a respirator or face mask, however, instills uncertainty. Those Max Planck researchers concluded that “the interactive effect between the uncertainty of the upcoming chord and its level of surprise was associated with brain activity changes in emotion…related areas. Importantly, activity of the nucleus accumbens (part of the basal forebrain) was associated only with the level of uncertainty.”
 
Now, the term basal suggests that where the activity occurs is a bit deeper in the brain than the area mostly associated with reason. In fact, that small section of the brain does appear to be part of the “reward system.” Thus, with regard to music, we guess (it’s just a guess) that the nucleus accumbens is important in rewarding us with the effects of dopamine, either during the surprise or shortly thereafter. But since it is deeper in the brain than our center of reasoning, we might also guess that it is somehow complexly related to what goes through the limbic system, you know, the system with which we associate the amygdalae and “freezing, fleeing, or fighting.”
 
What our brains do with uncertainty isn’t a new experience. Today’s reactions to the new coronavirus is reminiscent of a time not too long ago when Ebola was the threat du jour. People have always known that in a horror movie some shadowy figure will spring upon the unsuspecting victim, and they await the scare they predict will inevitably occur. The fictional threat is, in fact, no real threat, but the brain accepts it as such and releases the same neurotransmitters. In “real life,” however, the uncertainty drives people to hoard and hide to minimize the chance of unpredictable threat, that is, they mitigate the feeling associated with unpredictability.  
 
Unfortunately, hoarding and hiding aren’t 100-percent guarantees against bacteria and viruses. The one-celled prokaryotes and semi-living whatevers are just too good at sneaking through the underbrush of life. Hoarding and hiding, long the defensive actions of those in fear of plagues, do provide us with a semblance of security through predictability, or seeming predictability. If we hoard and hide with others who haven’t been bitten by the bug, then we feel secure, but remain wary. Hoarding and hiding make some sense, and other than washing hands and avoiding unnecessary contact, they are the best we can do until we develop a vaccine that works. But in large part hoarding and hiding are mostly just a floccinaucinihilipilification that satisfies a deep part of the brain, the part stimulated by low uncertainty and high surprise or its opposite, high uncertainty without surprise.
 
"Expect the unexpected" is old, but valuable, advice. The interior of our brains evolved with—to attribute purpose to the process—safety in mind. We are so complex, however, that our brains have invented in music and drama the fictional equivalents of real-world unpredictability. Even when there are no real threats to our personal existence, we inundate ourselves with such unexpectedness.
 
Inundate?  Take the brain’s handling of caffeine or some other substance as an analog. The more caffeine we consume, the more receptors we develop. Satisfying the need for caffeine grows with increased consumption and develops a feedback loop. Is there analogous activity in the basal forebrain? When the unexpected does arrive as we expect it to arrive eventually, do our brains seem to thrive in its seeming unpredictability? Like children addicted to ever more violent video games, do we thrive emotionally on increasingly more serious threats to our health? In those video games, kids expect the unexpected and act from the basal parts of the brain to seek a return to pleasantness derived from restored, if temporary, predictability. Does a similar drive for predictability manifest itself in hoarding and hiding—or in scapegoating? You can see in reports online, in print, and on TV that the media delves into the inner brain and fosters hoarding, hiding, and scapegoating.
 
You don’t have to be very old to remember when the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas confirmed the first case of Ebola in the United States in 2014. Scary. Right? Remember, compared to the current coronavirus, Ebola was deadlier at that time, taking the lives of nearly half of its victims in West Africa (e.g., 3,091 deaths in an infected population of 6,500). The coronavirus is less deadly, currently some 2,000+ deaths out of 60,000+, most of those in the earliest stages of the epidemic before the medical community knew there was a problem. One death out of every thirty infected is very serious, obviously, but it is far less than Ebola’s toll of nearly one out of every two infected. But relative numbers are no solace to those infected or killed by the disease.
 
You will always be subjected to drives originating in basal parts of your brain because of their interconnectedness and their relationship to neurons in other parts of the brain. Not even those neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute can fully explain the complex responsible for triggering emotional responses. That basal part appears to be reactive. But you do have that other part of your brain, the proactive and largely rational part. It understands that the world is full of the unpredictable. It isn’t one solely concerned with immediate responses to whatever is expected or unexpected, but rather also with what might surprise over the long term. You have the ability to make plans, and if hoarding and hiding are part of those plans, hoard and hide. You will not, however, eliminate totally the world’s unpredictability, including contagious diseases. Yet, would you want a world so predictable? Music’s uncertainty and certainty both give us pleasure. Drama also provides it through similar mechanisms. If you listen to music and watch movies with surprises, you probably crave the pleasantness both provide through the juxtaposition of the predictable and unpredictable.
 
Unlike people succumbing to the Black Death in the fourteenth century, we have more than slow word of mouth communication about the spread of disease. That foreknowledge spread round the world makes the coronavirus the expected unexpected. That in itself is means to turn the most unpleasant of surprises into a mitigated unpleasantness. Turning the unexpected into the expected is what we do not with our basal brain, but rather with our frontal cortex. Use yours in trying times to compose the music you deem most pleasant.
 
*https://maxplanckneuroscience.org/the-science-of-a-billboard-hit-song/

Let’s start with an assumption: In general, since the last glacial ice advance some 8-12 thousand years ago, Earth became a bit warmer. Add another assumption: Anthropogenic greenhouse gases have increased the effect of a natural interglacial period and possibly staved off another ice advance, maybe for 100,000 years, maybe for less. And a third assumption: If humans can change worldwide climates and are, in fact, changing them, there’s little you can do individually to stop the changes short of denying yourself a way of life to which you have become accustomed while you hope that others also deny themselves the benefits of abundance. Among all the benefits to which you have become accustomed is eating. That has to change starting today, Ash Wednesday. In short, the climate Lent that begins today isn’t just a 40-day period; rather it’s year-round, every year until, well, 10,000 to 100,000 years hence.
 
So, what are you giving up for your Climate Lent? How about abundant food? That is, how about growing less food to offset the effects of increased carbon in the atmosphere? Bo Huang, Francesco Cherubini and friends from the Industrial Ecology Programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology published a study that indicates a reduction in cropland has a mitigating effect on warming. * Essentially, their findings indicate that abandoned cropland plays a role in regional climate control.
 
Okay, that’s not too difficult to believe. After all, such cropland can turn to carbon dioxide sinks when trees replace crops. But even before the forests grow on abandoned cropland, the land’s albedo increases. With increased reflectivity comes decreased warming of the air above the land. Over the course of the past 24 years, abandoned cropland or repurposed cropland covering an area the size of Switzerland resulted in a cooling of western Europe by about one degree Celsius, an effect the article’s authors say is the result of abandoned cropland.  
 
Here’s where you come in to say, “I’m concerned enough about global warming that I’m going to take personal action.” Lowering food waste and promoting more efficient agriculture are two recommendations that arise from the study. Oh! You don’t farm? Not even garden? Get your food from the grocery store? Still, you can do the first if not the second. For Climate Lent—which, as I mentioned, isn’t just the six weeks in spring, but maybe for the next 10 to 100 millennia—start fasting. That will cut down on food waste. But then there’s the other problem. With fewer acres devoted to cropland and a world population growing at an astounding rate, you probably won’t have much of a choice in this anyway.
 
Of course, the growing population will probably result in another repurposing of newly abandoned cropland, turning forest back to agriculture. What a conundrum? Do we plant food or forests? This discussion and this day, Ash Wednesday, are making me hungry.
 
* Huang, B., Hu, X., Fuglstad, G. et al. Predominant regional biophysical cooling from recent land cover changes in Europe. Nat Commun 11, 1066 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14890-0

Far be it from me to question those who have a study to back their claims, but may I ask a question about either the data or the conclusion? In the American (other countries have their own version) version of debate over immigration, one side has convinced local and state legislators to pass “sanctuary laws,” the nature of which appears to be peripheral to the belief that regardless of their status innocent and good-willed people are no threat to the well-being of the nation. However, not everyone is good-willed. So, for many there is a need for an explanation when the well-being of citizens and legal immigrants might be threatened. Now, a study purports that the passing of SB54, which bars police from enforcing federal immigration laws, has had no effect on crime in California.*  Essentially, the study says crime statistics are about the same as they were before SB54 was passed. I suppose that is good news, but is there a catch?
 
A steady-state crime environment is apparently okay for some, but is it possible, since those who did the study haven’t released the specifics, that immigrants committed crimes while citizens committed fewer crimes, thus keeping the numbers the same? In other words, who wants to accept a steady-state crime environment if American criminals are decreasing and undocumented criminals are increasing? Wouldn’t statistics on crimes per number of undocumented immigrants vs crimes per number of legal citizens be more revealing of the effects of sanctuaries? Just askin’.
 
Today, we are immersed in a sea of data, much of it used to manipulate us. In addressing how we might be manipulated, Cathy O’Neil exposed the widespread misuse of data and statistics in Weapons of Math Destruction.** O’Neil, writing about the use of teacher-evaluation statistics, cites a common phenomenon called Simpson’s Paradox: “when a whole body of data displays one trend, yet when broken into subgroups, the opposite trend comes into view for each of those subgroups” (136).* An example she uses comes the 1980s, during the Reagan administration when a report entitled Nation at Risk revealed that SAT scores were declining. The authors of that report ignored the effect of increased numbers of people taking the test and assumed the decline applied across the board. But when others examined the data for each socio-economic group, they found that the SAT scores had actually risen within each group, “from the poor to the rich.”***
 
We are easily swayed by numbers because we’ve been taught that they “don’t lie,” “are irrefutable,” or “are nothing if not objective.” Assuming I’m like you, I don’t want crime to increase; assuming I’m like you, I want it to decline. Assuming I’m like you if you are an American citizen, both of us can describe ourselves as a descendent of immigrants, mine having come through Ellis Island in that great wave fin de siècle and early twentieth century.
 
I know that hardships and crime always plague large migrations as some take advantage of the vulnerable among immigrant groups and native populations, and I’ve read about or even seen movies on Irish, Italian, German, Russian, and on just about every nationality’s gangs and criminals. Lots of good people have suffered and continue to suffer at the hands of a few bad people. And those bad people can be either homegrown or imported.  
 
But my generalizations aside, I think we need to know what statistics truly say about any of us. And with regard to “groups” of any kind, from educational to religious to political, I would like to know that the statisticians have accounted for Simpson’s Paradox. Have the researchers who published the study on the effect of SB54 taken into account that paradox? I will acknowledge that one of the authors of the study, Charis Kubrin, plans other related and more specific studies. I hope that when she does conduct those further studies that Simpson’s Paradox plays no role in her conclusions. Let me ask again: Is it possible the reason crime statistics haven’t changed in a sanctuary state and its cities, is that citizens have committed fewer crimes while undocumented people have made up the difference? Just askin’.
 
Immigrant communities aren’t any more or less violent on average than any representative native population according to other studies, but even that fact, which is often tossed into the mix of research data on crime and immigrants, doesn’t eliminate the potential incorporation of  Simpson’s Paradox into conclusions. I know that whenever data collectors tell me about a trend of any kind, I’m going to keep the paradox in mind lest I be tricked.
 
But a final word on the matter. No victim of a crime committed by an undocumented alien can be comforted by any trend in crime statistics just as no victim of a crime committed by a citizen can be comforted just because the perpetrator is a citizen. Relative changes in crime statistics mean nothing to victims. And whereas it is true that a citizen might be the victim of a crime by another citizen, the undeniable reality is that if the undocumented criminal were not in the country, the particular crime that person commits would never have occurred. There’s no better example of this than the tragic death of Kate Steinle whose life ended when five-time deported and undocumented alien shot her as she walked with her father. One wonders how any of those legislators who backed SB54 might have voted if they had been Kate’s parents. California experienced 1,661 homicides in 2015, the year Kate was killed. Had she not been shot, would a citizen have made up the difference by shooting another citizen? That, of course, would keep the crime statistic the same, showing neither a rise nor fall in violence. If SB54 were in effect at the time, would the substitute murder convince some that sanctuary cities have no effect on crime? Simpson’s Paradox.    
 
*Shultz, David. 15 Feb. 2020. Crime did not surge when California became a ‘sanctuary state.’ Posted in Scientific Community. AAAS Meeting. The work by Kubrin was unpublished research at the time of this writing. Shultz’s report is online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/crime-did-not-surge-when-california-became-sanctuary-state  Accessed February 20, 2020.
 
**O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Ineqauality and Threatens Democracy. New York. Crown Publishing Group.
 
*** Nation at Risk, regardless of Simpson’s Paradox, influenced Americans’ views on public education, leading to a general notion that those schools were failing.   

In the last act of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, Voynitsky says, “Everyone [Everything, really] will be just as it was.” The audience, having sat through the entire play, realizes that in spite of all the turmoil of professed and unrequited love, ennui, existential meaninglessness, and even Voynitsky’s (Uncle Vanya's) attempted murder of Serebryakov, nothing much in the end has changed.
 
Televised political debates remind me of that play. 

I have to admit I’ve watched all episodes of Columbo, the Peter Falk TV series about a seemingly inept detective who inevitably outwits the ostensibly shrewd murderer.* In fact, I can hear one of the episodes running on the TV in the kitchen right now, a rerun of a rerun of a rerun of a … The alternative is to put on the morning news, where real murderers too frequently go uncaught, and justice isn’t poetic, regular, or indisputable.
 
Probably, no phrase is more aligned with an actor than “Oh! Sir, one more thing,” the words Columbo uses to disrupt the feeling of untouchability in a proud confident murderer. Falk utters those words at the end of an interview scene and after he leaves the setting, starting those words sometimes off set and appearing at the door through which he had just exited. The words usually elicit in the murderer the oh-oh expression that precedes fast thinking to cover a possible mistake in an alibi or in falsifying evidence meant to frame someone else. Columbo uses the expression as a method to unravel a criminal’s tightly knotted alibi.
 
“One more thing” is a rather simple reintroduction of a topic, a postscript that becomes more significant than the discussion that preceded it. Falk mastered its delivery, and it became a hallmark of his character, a lieutenant intent on tracking down and wearing down the guilty by persistent sleuthing. The three words might also be part of your own repertoire of performances, especially when you just can’t let go of something someone else said or did. It’s the “one more thing” that drives grudges, adamant stands on issues, and closed minds.
 
Columbo’s script writers used the expression to further a plot by revealing hints of evidence yet to come and sparking some small revelation in the mind of Columbo. As watchers, we already know who committed the crime in the TV series—the story always begins with the criminal and the crime, postponing Falk’s entry for as much as a third of the episode—and our pleasure derives from watching Columbo slowly uncover the evidence even though at the outset he appears to suspect the suspect.
 
No human condition is new. The 100 billion or so of us who have inhabited the planet have off and on experienced everything that the current seven billion now experience. Like Columbo, we arrive upon a scene whose action is already in progress. And like Columbo, we have our suspicions about the actors and the actions, but it takes us time to unravel the Gordian knots of life. We’re always asking about “one more thing” because we meet life’s episodes already in progress, the progression of more than 200,000 years of human experience and interactions.
 
Oh! And one more thing. You don’t have to fault yourself for not seeing the truth of any circumstance immediately. To play on other expressions, such as “If God wanted us to have napkins, He wouldn’t have given us sleeves,” I’ll say, “If God wanted us to know everything immediately instead of discovering as we go, He wouldn’t have given us the words ‘one more thing.’” Keep saying, “Oh! Sir (or Madam), one more thing.” It demonstrates that you know the world still has its mysteries, if not for everyone, such as the people who watch from an omniscient viewpoint like fans of Columbo mysteries, at least for you. Even though it introduces an afterthought, the expression is a key to having a curious and persistent mind that continuously seeks truth beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe the reason I like Columbo is that the show reminds me that I can always pursue more information and possibly get to a truth, if not to The Truth.
 
 
*I know. I might have spent my time more wisely trying to fill the considerable gaps in my knowledge, feeding the hungry, promoting world peace, or inventing some device that makes life easy. 

Remember the stories about President Lincoln as a boy, the kid who walked miles to return a lady’s penny and the kid with a sense of humor. As the latter, he held some neighbor kids upside down to have them “walk” on the ceiling, leaving those impossible footprints his stepmother, supposedly also a person of humor, made him clean before repainting the ceiling. Seems that “walking” on the ceiling isn’t a new trick: Some dinosaur did it a bunch of years ago on a cave ceiling in Australia. Or, so the story went before somebody figured out the trick.
 
It wasn’t a trick by a teenage dinosaur. Instead, the dinosaur walked through shallow water, making footprints in the sediment. Over that bunch of years, the sediments lithified and those in the layer beneath the impressions eroded away, exposing the bottom of the footprint. That supposedly remained an unsolved mystery since their discovery. And that in itself is a mystery.
 
Why? Think about it. The impressions you make when you walk in sand or mud are “im-pressions,” that is, pressed into the sediment. Over time, other sediments can be washed or blown in to fill the depression made by your foot. That means the bottom of your foot becomes a cast of the foot. Most people would mistake the toe casts to be the top of the foot, and that is apparently what happened in Australia as no one for a while figured out how the footprints got on the cave ceiling.
 
Even in museums, dinosaur footprints, extracted from surrounding sedimentary rocks, are displayed upside down because the orientation makes them “look” like a foot. The 200-million year-old footprints found by geologist Ross Staines in 1954 in the Mount Morgan cave were recently reexamined by paleontologist Anthony Romilio who explained how the dinosaur made ceiling footprints top-down and not, Abe Lincoln style, bottom-up.*
 
I have little doubt that if the Lincoln story is true, his mother understood immediately how he accomplished the feat. The world as we know it works as we have known it. Gravity continues to play its role. But I found it interesting that intelligent people could be puzzled by a phenomenon with clues so apparent. Yet, children who visit museums still see footprints displayed upside down, the flat part (the top of the infill of the mold) on the bottom and the bottom part (the “toes”) on the top.
 
Much of what we do we do to fit the mold we know or imagine. We are easily fooled by a different orientation from whatever we have experienced. Magicians use our susceptibility to their advantage, fooling not just you, but also me and many others who allow our preconceptions to interfere with our ability to reason and solve. Politicians play on the same susceptibility. And, apparently, Honest Abe was no exception among politicians, at least in making the impossible appear to be possible.
 
So, here’s some advice (for me as well as for you): Before you look in amazement at "footprints on the ceiling," consider that the world still works the way it has always worked and allow that frontal cortex of yours to reason whether or not you are seeing things top-down or bottom-up.
 
 
*U. of Queensland. Solved: The mystery surrounding dinosaur footprints on a cave ceiling. 17 Feb 2020. Online at  https://phys.org/news/2020-02-mystery-dinosaur-footprints-cave-ceiling.html   Accessed February 16, 2020
Also, if you want to see images of dinosaur footprints, see images located at https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrEZ7CloUpeQmAAXwsPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=dinosaur+footprints&fr=yhs-pty-pty_maps&hspart=pty&hsimp=yhs-pty_maps&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9zZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tL3locy9zZWFyY2g_aHNwYXJ0PXB0eSZoc2ltcD15aHMtcHR5X21hcHMmdHlwZT1BMSZwYXJhbTI9OTc4NDQzNDctNDU3NC00MWZhLThkNzUtNzQ4N2E4Y2UzNGVkJnBhcmFtMz1tYXBzZGlyZWN0aW9uc3NlYXJjaF80LjR-VVN-YXBwZm9jdXM1OTUmcGFyYW00PS1haXNvX2VtYWlsLUFkdmVydGl6ZV92NC1kc2ZfZW1haWwtLWJiOX5DaHJvbWV-SW1hZ2VzK29mK2Rpbm9zYXVyK2Zvb3RwcmludHN-RDQxRDhDRDk4RjAwQjIwNEU5ODAwOTk4RUNGODQyN0UmcGFyYW0xPTIwMTkwNjAzJnA9SW1hZ2VzK29mK2Rpbm9zYXVyK2Zvb3RwcmludHMmdD06Ly9tYWls&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFQ9Il9EJs4eisGGGKbObg_TWcXSOpYHic3ErXqdSQmGYpoH6yHAXUo2yDWFcwbaOw8Qr1luBg_IeDz2-TWmfJDKp35rRL4MY-Zb9ILi299JVO0Cx1skp6gT39dPxbM4poRLpwQT_MVULujT3BA9PTahBP_josDwGg72Y3vlnQFH&_guc_consent_skip=1581949528
Or visit the Dinosaur Footprint Museum in Connecticut.
In showing college geology students a large dinosaur footprint taken from a western fossil site, I used to orient it bottom-up and then ask a series of questions to see whether students could understand the orientation, that the flat side was the top of the infill, for example, and that the “toes” were the filled in mold, a cast of the toes. Once the students understood the orientation, they easily imagined the method by which the footprint was made and preserved. Why it took more than half a century for someone to explain the footprints in Australia isn’t a mystery: The cave was shut off from visitors for a decade or so, and only recently did Romilio have access to the cave, the casts made by Staines, and photos Staines took a half century ago. 

We think everyone has a single birth mother, but, in truth, everyone has many. Those other, surrogate mothers give birth to attitudes and ideas—and often to behaviors. All have one name: Necessity. All those mothers, and yet we are like orphans, moved from one foster home to another, cared for briefly and then abandoned and left on the side of the road to whatever comes next, the next disease, company shutdown, political turmoil, war, or natural disaster. The next foster mother picks us up for a while, carries us into the new orphanage of concern and then she fades away as the intensity of her necessity gets pushed either into the background by another necessity or into the next generation. Or, we discover that she was not as necessary as we originally thought. We move from the home of one to the home of another always unexpectedly and always with a sense of urgency at first. Today, for many of us the current Mother of Necessity is also called Climate Change, and she is much like Cinderella’s evil stepmom. She gets us to do the work without rewards and plays favorites. Nevertheless, she holds us for a time by saying something like “We’re all in this together.”
 
The “we’re-all-in-this-together” concept is good for peace and environmental stewardship, but arguably bad for personal freedom.  No more telling example of this presently fosters the youngest generations than the fear that some climate catastrophe approaches like some dark figure cruising through the world’s neighborhoods in a white van. For the climate fearful, there’s an imminent threat that requires immediate action. But what action? Turn off the Sun? Vacuum carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases from the sky? Shut down all industry and all the machinery that makes modern life modern? And is it enough for some of us to take some action while privileged others take no action? To give up some freedoms while others roam free?
 
Take advocates of carbon taxes and limited carbon footprints as an example of those who would “save us all” at the expense of individuals. We’re all in this together, aren’t we? Aren’t we all going to suffer the consequences of a warmer world? Dire consequences of our cushy life await us just around the bend of time. Shouldn’t we make the changes we need to make before everyone dies in droughts, or super storms, or floods, or ice, or topical diseases, or whatever climate change advocates say will wreak havoc? Climate change is the current Cultural Mother of Necessity for many. But that’s not new. Surely, those who suffered the consequences of the Little Ice Age were driven by the physical necessity of their long “winter” that imposed cultural necessities different from those imposed by the Medieval Warming Period. Surely, also, during that long cold spell when traditional crops, such as grapes, declined in abundance, people had to learn out of necessity to live on other crops and, for example, drink more beer than wine.    
 
The current Mother of Necessity brought together under UK government auspices some 100 Brits to discuss climate-related issues, including carbon footprints.* The “citizens’ assembly” was supposed to provide “ideas going forward” for the MPs to consider. And, of course, the recurring themes all of us have heard over the last twenty years arose in the various subgroups of the assembly. According to a February 10, 2020, report by BBC News Online, one participant expressed the “equality” that carbon taxes would impose on everyone: “It’s going to create more equality for everyone, so if you have lots of money, people are going to take lots of flights because you can afford it. But you’ll probably end up paying extra for that.” Now there’s a Harrison Bergeron solution that any Handicapper General would be happy to impose! The “imposed equality” thought seemed indicative of the assembly’s attitudes that overlaid much of the map of human activity loosely—and at times tightly—centered on restrictions that governments “should” impose on citizens.
 
When I said “much of the map of human activity,” I wasn’t exaggerating. One participant suggested shipping bananas to the UK instead of flying them into the country. Shipping supposedly has a smaller carbon footprint; and, in truth, when bulk cargo is shipped, it does have a smaller footprint. But it still has a footprint. Refrigerated cargo vessels running from banana-producing countries to banana-consuming countries burn relatively “dirty” bunker fuel, with each ship doing about the “same environmental damage” (i.e., emissions) as a thousand diesel trucks. I have no figures on the tonnage of bananas flown into the UK as opposed to the tonnage shipped into the country. Perishable as they are, bananas can still be shipped efficiently in refrigerated vessels that, though taking longer to traverse an ocean, can transport fresh fruit from the tropics to the higher latitudes. But those ships, as you just read, do emit greenhouse gases. Maybe the assembly’s participant so concerned about transporting bananas to the British isles was thinking of eighteenth-century frigates driven by the wind possibly with new versions carrying fruit in units refrigerated by solar power. That climate talk is often “all over the map of human activity” is indicative of the nebulous nature of this “Mother of Necessity.” She keeps telling her children, “Clean your room,” but the children see toys, clothes, books, electronic devices, and sports equipment and think, “Which should I clean? This is a lot of work, and I want to play.” So, they hide laundry and toys under the bed, thinking as children are wont to do, “out of sight, out of mind. Mom will never look there.” Putting bananas on ships to England is one way to keep emitting carbon dioxide invisible since the maritime shipping industry isn’t a country governed by climate change agreements. Ships can have an owner but a different operator. They carry the products of many businesses. So, who signs an agreement? Who cleans “the room,” especially when there are no consequences and as globalization increases, there will be the necessity of using more ships? The International Maritime Organization says it’s working on reducing carbon emissions by 2050. Is that urgent enough? But if individual new ships are more efficient, will the necessity of having more ships to handle increased global trade result in no net reduction of emissions? Sure, we can design a bedroom that has drawer and closet space for everything, but there will of necessity be more rooms and more stuff to store.
 
Let’s say that the “dire” predictions made by some and assumed to be true by members of that UK assembly soon manifest themselves in actual weather changes. Then what? Obviously, the status quo for any society will change primarily because regions once known for certain crops will either become unsuitable for agriculture altogether or suitable for other kinds of crops. So, the wheat and corn belts of North America might shift into Canada. Bad for wheat and corn farmers in the USA; good for those in Canada. Even northern Europeans and Russians might find themselves building large grain elevators like those in the United States that might, with climate change, fall into disuse. But if temperate zone conditions migrate to higher latitudes, won’t tropical zone conditions migrate, also?
 
Let’s accept that southern USA might become more tropical. Could Florida, the land of oranges, become the banana capital of the world, replacing the role now served by tropical lands? Now, there’s a thought. Homegrown Cavendish bananas for Americans. The already cheap fruit, thanks to controls by monopolies like Chiquita, will become cheaper. Americans might adopt the practice of St. Lucians and begin flavoring with banana, instead of tomato, ketchup. No need for transporting bananas by planes and ships. Trains and trucks will do. Then, as tropical temperatures climb the latitudinal ladder, will Georgia become the land of oranges? And will the Carolinas assume out of necessity Georgia’s role as a land of peaches? Will the apple orchards of Winchester, Virginia then move to Erie Pennsylvania while those Erie and southern New York vineyards move to Barre, Vermont?
 
Climate has always been the Mother of Necessary Adaptation. Climate changes, even small ones like the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age, force the children to adapt. Maybe our own adaptations of bipedalism and opposing thumbs were related to ancient necessities brought on by climate change as forests in Africa became savannas. We’re always in the business of adapting because of environmental and societal changes. Manhattan, once a wooded area like some untamed Central Park, is now a vertical environment of concrete and steel. But long before it was a wooded area, it was covered by a thick Laurentide sheet of ice. The earliest inhabitants of North America, probably traipsing those woods shortly after the ice melted, adapted to their new environment and climate. Not far to the southwest of New York, the inhabitants of the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter adapted some 16,000 years ago as the great glaciers began to retreat from North America. Imagine the Mothers of Necessity that have fostered human life over those many millennia.
 
As there have always been biological mothers, so there have always been mothers of necessity. They keep advising us on how to survive, mostly by telling us how to take care of our own rooms. With the rise of modern worldwide and nearly instantaneous communications, the current Mother of Necessity rules over a large foster home. As she puts us to bed in this newest of foster homes, she is a bit cruel, telling all her children nighttime horror stories of impending doom. The children, gathered in government-sponsored assemblies like that of the UK, know only the stories Mother has told. They offer in their simple naïve ways the solutions we’ve all heard, most of them giving more power to the powers in control. But children have short attention spans. So, the Mother of Necessity, or her surrogates will continue to remind us that each of us needs to clean up the room. In contrast, she’ll demand nothing from those surrogates who will continue to eat bananas imported from afar or, having the means to travel regardless of cost, and they will go to the tropical climes of today, traveling in greenhouse gas spewing planes and arriving to eat bananas fresh in situ. Apparently, like some evil stepmother in a fairy tale, the Climate Change Mother plays favorites.
 
So, if as children we sometimes don’t listen to our real birth mothers when they tell us to clean our rooms, why is it that we seem so obedient to our mothers of cultural necessity? If we’re all in “this” together, in this foster home, shouldn’t we all be treated equally, Cinderella on a par with her stepsisters? And shouldn’t we all be expected “to clean our rooms”? After all, we’re all in this together. Aren’t we?
 
 
*https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51438317