Auld Times

Auld Lang Syne will fill the airwaves in a couple days. The song itself is part of the nostalgia it is intended to evoke. We resist updating the old-fashioned Scots lyrics because that is not the way we heard it in our youths. Besides, we get the gist of it as is.
 
We all know how a song can stimulate the memory of a special place, person or event. Most of us can experience that not just from a few but from hundreds of songs. There are several though (besides the Robert Burns ditty) that might come to my mind on New Year’s Eve but seldom anytime else. Oddly, most of the ones of that sort on my list I don’t even like very much, if at all. But they pop into my head as the clock runs out in the current year. A non-exhaustive sample:
 
In the Mood  performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. My mom loved to dance (especially after a scotch and soda, but without one as well) and my dad wasn’t bad at it. (I did not inherit this trait: I dance like a wounded buffalo.) She had little trouble talking him into it, commonly in the living room in the presence of company. They had dated during WW2, so my mom’s most frequently (but non-exclusively) preferred dance was the jitterbug. Her record of choice was typically a Glenn Miller album, and In the Mood was the first track. She never skipped it. It is actually a pretty good number, but I heard it so many times growing up that I was sick of it as an adult – until recent years and only on New Year’s Eve. It transports me back to when my parents were half my current age and dancing in our living room.
 
In October 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. On a clear night it was visible from the ground. My dad thought this was the start of something important so he made a point of taking my sister, my mom, and I (and the dog for some reason) out to the driveway on a very clear night. I’m guessing a local radio station must have mentioned what time the satellite would pass overhead. It came and went on schedule. Just to impress upon us further the memory of this (I was not yet 5) my dad announced firmly, “OK, we’ve seen Sputnik.” In 1958 the novelty song The Purple People Eater  about a space alien playing rock’n’roll became a hit; at age 5 I loved it and played a 45 of it repeatedly. Even though this was months after the driveway viewing, the song and that event are tangled in my head somehow; I cannot think of one without the other. The song is silly and I seldom think of it except at the very end of a year.
 
Having a sister two years older was a huge advantage in matters of pop culture right up through high school. This was especially so because Sharon was pretty hip for her entire life. She was always in step with the times, which I by nature was not. Because of her, I nonetheless was introduced to social trends and artists (Bob Dylan, for instance) when they were still cutting edge. Left to myself I would have missed them until they were passé. This started early. Sharon (b. 1950) loved the Everly Brothers for a few years straddling 1960. I would play her 45s of them, and particularly liked the 1962 Crying in the Rain. Once again, it is not a song I play as an adult at any other time, but I might just do so on the 31^st. It reminds me of my sister. Hi Sharon.
 
Janis Joplin’s I Need a Man to Love is the second track on the Cheap Thrills album, which came out in 1968. I liked Janis from the get-go, and still do, but she grew on me more and more between 1968 and 1970. (Our psyches and tastes often evolve a lot between age 15 and 18 – mine did.) Initially, I Need a Man to Love was not one of my favorite tracks on the album. A prep school buddy named George (a troubled young man, but surprisingly insightful at times) told me to give it a deeper listen. He said it was undefensively soulful. I did. He was right. All of Janis evokes an extended era in my mind, but of course that track also reminds me of George. He died of HIV related illnesses two decades ago.
 
The Commodores – Easy. This is a song about which I had and have no strong feelings as a song. I neither like it nor dislike it. In the 70s I never played it on purpose but didn’t change the station if it came on the car radio either. I would react the same today, though one seldom hears this number anymore even on an oldies station. The reason it is memorable for me is that my 70s girlfriend Angela once sang it (with radio accompaniment) in the passenger seat of my car as we drove to NYC. I don’t know why. I didn’t interrupt or ask afterward. We all sometimes do things that are hard to explain. That memory sticks with me and makes the tune a possible New Year’s Eve play.
 
Time after Time by Cyndi Lauper. In 1984 I owned a property on Schoolhouse Lane with two small houses on it. I moved into the smaller cottage and rented out the other. It was the first real estate actually in my own name. The first home that is really yours tends to be special in a way that later ones are not, and I accordingly put a lot of work into it – not all at once but steadily. The grounds in particular got attention: I installed decorative 2-rail fencing, reworked the driveway, and planted blue spruce to delineate the northern boundary line. On the cottage itself I replaced exterior trim and repaired the back deck, which had seriously dry rotted in places. I recall Cyndi Lauper’s song playing on the radio while I worked on the deck; I cannot hear the song without remembering feeling at home in that home. Incidentally, the official video of that song was filmed nearby; the train station scene is in the NJ Transit train station in Morristown. Am I a Lauper fan? No, not really though I don’t dislike her either.

My old Schoolhouse Lane cottage

Frank Sinatra Fly Me to the Moon. A night club in the 1990s, where someone important to my life worked, closed every night playing this number on the sound system. The relationship that this song evokes would require a book rather than a paragraph to begin to describe. So let’s just call it intense rather than characterize it any other way here.
 
That’s one per decade (OK, two in the 1960s -- three counting when I most commonly heard In the Mood) up to the 21^st century. I’ll leave the next three for another blog someday – maybe.
 
Once again, not one of these is a favorite song on its own terms (though I do like the Joplin number). My general taste tends more to bluesier and/or harder rock. But that is not the point, is it? The point is a memory – maybe a good one, maybe a bad one, but a poignant one either way.
 
There are also entire genres of music with a nostalgia factor. I’ve grown to like much 1940s fare far more than I did when my parents played it on the stereo for instance. I see I’m not alone in that with groups such as the Postmodern Jukebox covering songs such as What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve, charted by Kay Kyser in 1947. In the case of people as young as that, they are nostalgic for an era they never experienced. True, I wasn’t around in the 40s either, but the music definitely was in the house when I grew up.
 
So, December 31 – on which I plan a quiet evening – I may not only hear Auld Lang Syne but some unfavorite yet special tunes from my youth. Perhaps also, some Kitty Kallen and Harry James. Then on January 1 to welcome the new year I’ll try something new.
 

Postmodern Jukebox – What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

Creaky

Some days I feel my age and others not. If there is a reason for the day to day differences (sleep length, diet, exercise, or whatever) I haven’t been able to discern it. The creaky days occur more frequently with each passing year, but the first hints of them appeared surprisingly early: soon after 30. That is a time of life when the innate sense of invulnerability of the 18-y.o. fades and mortality starts feeling real. This is evident in much of the pop culture content aimed at thirtysomethings. It accounts, for example, for the success of the movie The Big Chill among my fellow Boomers in 1983. Strangely enough, Barbie, directed and co-written by 40-y.o. Millennial mom Greta Gerwig, likewise speaks to the sense of aging among today’s Millennials (e.g. the bus stop bench scene). Thirtysomething (sometimes fortysomething) is an age when many folks adopt exercise regimens and start taking megavitamins to try to slow the hands of the clock. It’s when entrepreneurs with the wherewithal start businesses that take on the Grim Reaper himself.
 
One such company is Altos Labs, formed by Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner, which seeks to extend life through a variety of methods, but in particular through cellular reprogramming. The credentials of its researchers are impressive. Calico Life Sciences, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google), is similarly dedicated to combat aging. The company’s home page is worth a look. BioSplice Therapeutics reveals its approach in its name. Juvenescence reveals its goal in its name. If none of these or competing labs produce sufficient results in time for you to dodge the scythe, there is always Alcor.
 
The notion of suspended animation has been around in science fiction for more than a century. So, too, the similar notion of deliberately freezing a body in hopes it can be thawed out and reanimated at some future date when medical science has advanced to the point to make that possible. Alcor, located in very unchilly Scottsdale Arizona, was founded in 1972 in order to do just that. When a “patient” (who, of course, must be legally dead) arrives at the facility, s/he is injected with chemicals to prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals. The body is lowered to a temperature of -196 Celsius and then deposited in a tank of liquid nitrogen. There are presently 224 patients plus about 100 pets. Among the patients are baseball great Ted Williams and Bitcoin entrepreneur Hal Finney. You can reserve a spot for yourself at a cost of over $200,000, though you can save some money if you just preserve the head.

 
It would be tempting to prank someone with an Alcor reservation who awakes after some minor surgery: say the operation didn’t go well, but not to worry because you’ve been thawed out, cured, and it is now the year 2324. You can pay the bill at the desk. The temptation probably should be suppressed.
 
Meantime, I’ll just deal with my creaks and aches as best I can and hope that tomorrow is one of those days with a more youthful spring in my step.
 
 

Neil Young – Frozen Man

Julia Gets By in the World As It Is

When I read 1984 (1949) by George Orwell as a school assignment back in the 1960s, the novel’s timeline already had been overtaken by real historical events. That didn’t matter. Alternate realities and parallel worlds long had existed in science fiction by then, predating by decades the quite serious hypothesis by physicist Hugh Everett in 1950s that they actually might exist. H.G. Wells has characters drive through a portal into one in Men Like Gods (1923), and it wasn’t his first exploration of the idea. Robert Heinlein famously rescued his early fiction (see The Past through Tomorrow) by the tactic. 1984 is a book of ideas. What mattered was that those ideas remained plausible and scary in the 1960s – as they still do in the 2020s.
 
In 1984, Winston Smith’s love interest Julia is a curious character. It is hard to see exactly what she sees in the middle-aged Winston, but she sees something. Winston himself seems surprised by her persistent affection. Julia gets her own story in Julia by Sandra Newman, a novel authorized by the Orwell estate. Nothing in Julia contradicts 1984, but the character is not as shallow and emotion-driven as she sometimes seems in Orwell’s novel. SPOILER ALERT: it is impossible to discuss what is special about this version of Julia without SPOILERS, so, if you wish to be surprised, stop reading this blog post now, read Newman’s book, and then return to this blog afterward.

Both Winston and Julia work at Oceania’s Ministry of Truth in London on Airstrip One, formerly known as Britain. (BTW, Oceania’s flag is described in passing as stars and stripes.) Winston destroys objects and old news articles that contradict current propaganda (e.g. previously projected production targets that were missed) while Julia works in Fiction where old literature is rewritten (and new literature created) in Newspeak to be compatible with the ideology of Ingsoc. The corruption of language that is Newspeak, which redefines old words and creates new ones (while always shrinking the total number in the dictionary), is a particularly insidious form of persuasion. It is difficult or impossible in Newspeak to say anything contrary to the Party without calling oneself a criminal while doing it. The words just don’t exist.
 
We learn that Julia’s parents before the Revolution had been dangerously bourgeois, which would have tainted her too, but when still a teen she informed on her mother, which won her a pass into the Outer Party. Julia wears the sash of the Anti-Sex League, though she indulges in clandestine affairs. As Winston grows increasingly troubled by the notion of truth, which it is his job to destroy, Julia notices him and is genuinely attracted to him as a bad boy. She picks up on his resistance to the Party line, especially after spotting him leaving Charrington’s shop in the prole district. Inner Party honcho and torturer O’Brien picks up on both of them. He tempts Winston ideologically by pretending to be a link to the Resistance known as the Brotherhood. He tempts Julia (who is more interested in her own personal freedom than philosophy) by dangling in front of her the prospect of being elevated to the Inner Party if she works for the thought police. She knows full well that the room above Charrington’s shop where she meets Winston for trysts is bugged. Nor is Winston (unknown to him) the only man she meets there and prompts to incriminate himself while there. So, while she actually likes Winston (unlike some of the other men), her professions of love are calculated. Given the choices she has, however, it is hard to judge her as evil – just as desperate to save herself.
 
What do the perpetrators of this system gain from it? They have the joy of the raw exercise of power. This is especially true of the Inner Party members, of course, but also applies to lower links in the chain. As O’Brien explains, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever." The fellow wearing the boot, at least in that moment, is having fun.
 
The timeline of Julia extends beyond that of 1984, which ends with Winston’s conversion and execution. We learn there really is a Resistance on Airstrip One. This seems improbable given the stability achieved by the thoroughness of Oceania’s repression, but aid to the rebels from Eurasia (one of the three superstates, the other being Eastasia, perpetually at war with each other in different combinations) has upset the status quo. There is more than a little hint, however, that even were they to succeed, it would be a false rescue: a matter of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
 
1984 at its core is a dark vision of humanity – and one that is all too credible. Julia makes the title character’s behavior in 1984 far more explicable – again, all too credibly. We are easily tempted to ruthlessness and disregard for truth in pursuit of lofty goals and also purely selfish ones. The two books are complementary and are welcome warnings about where those temptations can lead. Highly recommended.

 

The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again

Slipping and Sliding

The information center on my Chevy has a lot to say to me about everything from tire pressure to remaining oil life. Yesterday as the temperature dropped toward freezing, it warned me that icy roads are possible and nagged me to drive carefully. That’s OK. It is one reason I bought the car – not for the information center but for being a better winter vehicle. Until a couple years ago I drove a 1998 4WD GMC 2500 Sierra (previously my dad’s) and a 2014 Cruze. The ’98 was a great winter vehicle but by 2020 it finally had grown too tired to keep on the road and had to be replaced. New 4WD pickups have prices that are simply ridiculous, so I opted to replace it with a basic 2WD Colorado priced in the mid-20s, which to me seemed quite high enough. It served (and serves) the workaday purposes for which I needed a pickup. The problem was that both my vehicles were then 2WD, and the winter of 20/21 proved this to be a bad idea. The Cruze was a small sedan runabout that was reliable enough on a dry road, but all but useless in snow and ice. The Colorado was only marginally better. There were days when neither of my vehicles could make it up my driveway, which definitely has an incline but is hardly a cliff. So, in the summer of 2021 I traded the Cruze for a Chevy Trailblazer with All Wheel Drive. (AWD is distinguished from 4WD by a differential between the front and rear axles.) It handles well in snow and, importantly, makes it up my driveway.

My driveway a few winters ago

4WD and AWD are well and good for extra traction driving forward, but of course they are no help at all when trying to stop. The Trailblazer’s information center is not wrong to warn about ice. I’ve been lucky with cars and ice, but I’ve had close calls. As a pedestrian I avoided getting struck by a car that lost control on black ice only by leaping over a fence. In a Jeep (in 4WD) on an icy road I once managed to maneuver around a pointlessly stopped vehicle when it was clear my brakes weren’t going to do the job. My Cruze once slid over a small backroad bridge sideways without incident. In the two latter cases it helped that I was driving slowly and didn’t lock my brakes. On dry pavement AAA recommends at least 3 to 4 seconds braking time (adjust speed and distance accordingly) between you and the car in front. Increase this to 8 to 10 seconds on icy roads. Even this might not be enough. Over 150,000 auto accidents occur every year in the US due to icy roads. There are over 1800 fatalities in those crashes. In the Northeast only 11.4% of surveyed drivers say they haven’t driven on black ice. I think those 11.4% are mistaken. I think they have but aren’t aware of it – that they simply didn’t happen to step on the brakes while on top of it.
 
The danger doesn’t stop when you park and exit your vehicle. The CDC reports that 1 million people in the US are injured each year by slips and falls on ice and snow. More than 17,000 of those falls are fatal. For those 65 and older, falls are the leading cause of accidental injury and death. Once again, I’ve been lucky so far. Every year I slip and fall on ice at some point, but, other than the occasional sore butt, as yet I have injured only my pride. Nonetheless, I’ve stocked up on salt and sand for my sidewalks and driveway. NJ winters are unpredictable: some are fierce with repeated blizzards while others are almost balmy. I hope for the latter but am preparing for the former.

 

Little Richard – Slippin' and Slidin'

Roll of the Dice

My choice for a movie last night was a re-watch of the neo-noir The Big Town starring Matt Dillon and Diane Lane at her most stunning. I recommend it. The film was made in 1987 but is set in the mid-1950s. Matt plays a young professional craps shooter in Chicago. The Big Town can be enjoyed without expertise in the game which is fortunate because I understand the rules of craps only in the broadest outline. In its casino form the betting in craps is quite complicated. Street craps is usually considerably simplified, but the fast pace still can make it hard to follow for a newbie. For all that, it has a reputation as a workingman’s game, though at the upper levels gamblers play for very large stakes. Craps was invented in New Orleans in the early 19^th century, apparently deriving from the European dice game Hazard. It reached a peak in popularity in World War 2, but still has plenty of aficionados today. It has never been my game, but as a kid I generally liked board games with dice. They introduced a random element that nonetheless was literally in one’s own hands, thereby mirroring life itself.

Dice are very old, and probably derive from the casting of bones for divination: 6-sided knucklebones in particular, which continued to be used into Classical times. Ancient cube dice were commonly made from bone (or ivory), which gives this idea further credence. The pips (the dots) allowed numerology to enhance the divinations. Once dice were invented, of course, secular gambling with them was a natural. The oldest dice ever found were excavated in southeast Iran and date to at least 2500 BCE – perhaps centuries older. Not far behind are bone dice found at Skara Brae in Scotland, which date to at least 2400 BCE. They turn up in Egyptian tombs from 2000 BCE and also are found both in ancient China and India. Given the geographic spread of these finds, I think we can surmise that the actual origins long predate any of them. Dice of alternate shapes (e.g. 4-sided pyramids and 20-sided polyhedrons) also are ancient, but 6-sided cubes by far were, and are, the most common. The arrangement of pips were largely catch-as-catch-can until Roman times. The ancient Roman die was the same as a modern one, with opposite sides adding up to 7. The Romans enjoyed dice enough to use them as metaphors for taking a chance, just as we do today. Hence Caesar’s “Alea iacta est” (“the die is cast”) when he crossed the Rubicon on January 10, 49 BCE for a do-or-die showdown with the Senate. Dice didn’t disappear in the Middle Ages in Europe but became less common and non-standard. They made a comeback in the Renaissance. The Roman pip arrangement again became standard and has been with us ever since.
 
Modern dice come in three basic types: loaded, commercial, and casino. It is best to avoid loaded dice if one values one’s own health and safety. Commercial dice are the ones found in board games and toy stores. They are inexpensive and produce results that are random enough for informal purposes, but they almost certainly have unintended small biases in them. Casino dice are carefully crafted to be as perfectly balanced as possible; even the pips are filled with a polymer of the same density as the die itself so that they don’t introduce a bias. These, though somewhat costlier than commercial dice, are not actually expensive, but casinos change them every 8 throws or so, so they go through a lot of them.
 
Can a skilled dice player beat the odds – at least by a little? Maybe. Casinos try to get around this possibility in craps by requiring that thrown dice bounce off the back wall. This introduces enough unpredictability to make nonrandom outcomes very unlikely. Even in a straight throw, minor variations in motor control, geometry, and air resistance should be enough to ensure random results with balanced dice. Yet, maybe. Casinos make a good deal of money, though, off shooters who think they can do it. My bet is always on the House.
 
Have I ever made money with dice? Not much, but some. Back in college in a Business class we were told the dart theory of investing. Beating the S&P with any one investment is just a matter of luck, we were told, and picking stocks by throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal on average produces returns no better or worse than picking them after assiduous research, which necessarily is always incomplete. I believe this is still taught today. Some years back, I figured dice should work as well as darts, so after jotting down the names of a half dozen companies that I recognized, I rolled a die and picked that number on the list. John Deere did all right. Too bad I didn’t buy more.
 

Linda Ronstadt - Tumbling Dice

Whys and Wherefores

Prologue: I added this prologue after finishing what follows. I notice this blog rambles more than usual and also ventures off into dorm-room-style philosophy. That tends to happen when still overfull the day after a big meal. I’ll post it anyway but should regain my focus by tomorrow.
 
I’ve owned my current home since 2001, and for the past two decades it has been my wont to host Thanksgiving. Relatives plus a cadre of friends numbering between 12 and 18 would fill my dining room and kitchen on that day. The friends were mostly, like myself, single. The guests know each other but aren’t close friends otherwise in a general way. It always has been an odd and eclectic mix, but everyone always got along. Besides, I have the space to host the meal and I didn’t mind the work since it was just once a year. But times change. Several of my former regulars have found Significant Others along the way and now dine with them. No fewer than three on my old guest list have passed on. Another undergoes physical rehabilitation out-of-state following a freak accident. Another this year scheduled work on Thanksgiving for the overtime pay. Two others have acquired special diets. Too few of the rest remain for the critical mass that makes a party work except in the case of family or the closest of friends. So, I abandoned my usual role of Thanksgiving host – this year anyway. Maybe forever. (A future summer outdoor grill-fest is still possible, but that is at least 7 months away.) I owe thanks to my aunt for having hosted myself and one of my cousins for Thanksgiving this year. It was pleasant and cozy.
 
During my iconoclastic 20s and early 30s I made a point of scheduling parties and get-togethers on non-traditional holidays. (OK, a little hint of this spirit still persists with my occasional equinox or solstice party.) “Why should I blithely accept someone else’s designation of a holiday?” I asked myself. “I’m perfectly capable of choosing my own dates and reasons for celebrations as is each and every one of us.” So we all are, but the trouble with this sort of individualistic – almost existentialist – approach is that it is hard to get people to show up to your party on what seems to them a random date. They may not have the day off from work or may have plans for the next day. In consequence, as a practical matter, I eventually gave in and started hosting traditional Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Christmas parties, simply because more guests showed up for them. But, in principle, I still sympathize with the views of my younger self.

Not in my oven this year

Many of us make compromises with the philosophies of our youth. Adjusting party dates is a pretty minor practical adjustment. I enjoyed discussing a more fundamental self-questioning with one of my former Thanksgiving regulars (he now has a Significant Other and dines elsewhere) a few weeks ago when he stopped at my house while he was bicycling for the exercise. (It is weird to me that a 60-y.o. is a younger friend.) A physicist, he is one of the few people with whom I still talk like a buzzed college student. We both like the youtube channel of physicist Sabine Hossenfelder and so we chatted for a while about some of her vids. Then we veered into metaphysics. A longtime existentialist, he tells me he is having trouble these days being satisfied with the precept that life and the universe itself are inherently meaningless and that the only meaning is what we create for ourselves. He said that was easier to accept when he was younger. Now he finds it unsatisfying, even if true. I suspect he hears mortality knocking – not an unusual response to a 60th birthday. He'd be happier with a better answer to Why. I recalled Nietzsche’s line that people “will accept any how so long as they have a why.” (Nietzsche predicted 20th century secular political fanaticism, by the way, for this reason.) Religious folk do not have this problem, of course, but we all believe or disbelieve what we must.
 
I’ve been an atheist since the 8^th grade. (An episcopal priest, of all people, at my prep school back then correctly pointed out to me some contradictions in my thinking, though he might have expected me to resolve them another way.) I then discovered Objectivism, which served for a while as a secular philosophy since it is coherent and consistent if you accept certain premises; however, those premises, while reasonable, are still arbitrary as I was well aware. By the time I was in college I stopped ignoring this, embraced arbitrariness, and became an existentialist instead. Unlike my physicist friend, I still don’t have a problem with existentialist precepts even though I’m a decade older with mortality a good deal closer. We didn’t resolve anything of course, but it was pleasant just to BS in this late-night-dorm-room kind of way again.
 
So, is there an inherent meaning in anything? I doubt it. But that’s OK. Life is good (for the most part) anyway. And this year I’m thankful for not having to clean up after Thanksgiving.
 
For the musical attachment I almost went with the existential angst of Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues simply because I like Janis, but this number from Hair probably fits the topic better.
 

Original Broadway cast of Hair – Where Do I Go?

My Bad

All of us are offensive some of the time – usually in error but often enough on purpose. Anyone who thinks he or she isn’t is in need of self-reflection. (I am speaking of genuine offense: the strategic taking of offense as a passive aggressive method to backfoot an opponent or gain an advantage is another topic altogether.) Humans are sometimes clumsy, sometimes thoughtless, and sometimes cruel. No exceptions. Society and personal relationships continue to function anyway partly by our willingness to let pass the bulk of the (literal and metaphorical) pokes in the ribs and partly by apologies for the rest – both the giving and the getting of them.

Why does “I’m sorry” matter? The expression rarely fixes whatever the offense was, so what does it accomplish? It is really about respect or the lack of it. Failing to acknowledge that we crossed a line makes it seem as though the other person doesn’t matter. It verges on contempt. That is probably a worse offense than the initial transgression. This is made evident by reactions to politician-style non-apologies, as in “I’m sorry you feel that way.” The listener hears this (correctly) as meaning he is in the wrong for feeling that way. The defensive “I only did it because…” is similarly intended to place the blame on the offended party. Both are likely to deepen any seething resentment in the listener. A simple “I’m sorry” on the other hand, means “I stepped on your toes, but I regret it and don’t disrespect you.” Usually that is enough. Sometimes it isn’t (it depends on how big and damaging the offense was) but even in those cases it is a step in the right direction.

Recurring line in Get Smart: "Sorry about
that, Chief."

The greatest cause of misunderstanding in the realm of apologies is the differing thresholds people have for offense and what they regard as offensive.  After all, just because someone doesn’t like what we say or do is no reason by itself to apologize for it. Saying “It is bad to be a crack addict” does not require an apology to crackheads who are offended by the statement, even if some might think so. There is no way to eliminate these threshold differences completely, but a little empathy can do no harm.

Unsurprisingly there are sex differences in thresholds. As always when discussing such differences, it is important to note that we are talking about the centerlines of bell curves; much of the curves overlap, so many men and women have characteristics opposite to the average. Yet, the average still tells us something. There is a stereotype that men rarely apologize (supposedly from pride) whereas women apologize all the time. Professor Karina Schumann, PhD, at the University of Pittsburgh decided to put this to the test. The results were more nuanced than the stereotypes. She stated them in an APA podcast:
 
“And what I found across numerous studies was that women did apologize more frequently in their daily life… but we also saw a higher frequency of offenses reported. And what that means is when we looked at the proportion of offenses that they were apologizing for, it was identical to men's proportion of offenses that they were apologizing for… And so this made us think, is there a difference in perceptions of severity here where men are less likely to see an offense as occurring… because they just don't see it as bothersome as women see it... And so we tested this in a bunch of follow up studies with more controlled methods where we gave men and women the exact same offenses, and we had them rate how severe they were, and how much an apology was deserved and how likely they were to apologize. And what we saw consistently study after study was that men and women saw the identical offenses differently.”
 
In other words, men on average have a higher threshold than women for what is apology-worthy whether on the giving or the receiving end, leading all too often to regarding one another as either unreasonable or disrespectful. I doubt there is any cure for this, but it helps to be aware of it, and to recognize that there is a perspective from which the other party is neither unreasonable nor disrespectful.
 

Joey Heatherton – I’m Sorry

 

Big Bangs

The first half of the 20^th century hosted an amazingly gifted generation of physicists. Foremost among them was Enrico Fermi, but even a genius runs a risk of observation bias. In 1934 he attempted to create transuranic elements (or at least heavier isotopes) by bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons. Instead he split the atoms, but since he wasn’t looking for fission products he didn’t see them. He was unaware of what he had done though he later berated himself for not having seen what was going on immediately. Not until December 1938 did Hahn, Strassmann, and Meitner in Berlin recognize that uranium was splitting in similar experiments. The delay is sometimes called the 5-year-miracle. Had Fermi noticed and pursued fission in 1934, World War 2 would have been an atomic war – not just by the US at the very end but by all the major players. Horrific as that war was, that would have been worse. It was not the last time the world got lucky with nuclear weapons.
 
During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 we ultimately were saved by the well-justified fears of President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev. (I wrote briefly of my own childhood recollections of that episode, by the way, on my short story site: 22 October.) Throughout the Cold War there was a healthy dread of nuclear war that underlay the public psyche and limited the escalation of confrontations among the major powers. The term “existential threat” gets tossed around lightly these days, but nuclear weapons really did pose a threat to the existence of civilization. We understood that. They still do. I’m not so sure we still understand it. The nuclear club today openly consists of the US, UK, Russia, France, China, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. Israel does not acknowledge possessing nukes though everyone assumes it has them. South Africa dismantled its nuclear weapons in 1989, the only country ever to do so.
 
The end of the Cold War has brought complacency. Only a handful of fringe preppers build fallout shelters anymore. Nuclear weapons are regarded as big sticks no one ever will swing in anger since to do so would be suicide. Don’t be so sure. Only China has a stated no-first-use policy – and no one believes it. All other powers reserve the right to use them if the existence of the state is at stake. The most likely scenario for a nuclear exchange is the field use of a tactical weapon by a nuclear power that is losing a conventional war. The intent would be to “escalate to deescalate” – to scare the other side into negotiating a settlement. It might work, but it just as easily could turn rapidly into mutual escalation instead. More than one war has begun with a miscalculation. A return to a healthy dread will make that a little less likely with nukes.
 
Open air testing of nuclear weapons between 1945 and 1974 was reckless in any number of ways. Fallout proved to be more of a problem than anticipated, and some of the particles traveled far. Iodine 131, for instance, has a half-life of 8 days. This isn’t very long, but it was long enough for the isotope to be deposited on grass hundreds of miles from the Nevada test site, be eaten by cows, concentrated in milk, and then absorbed by the thyroid of milk drinkers. Other radionuclides are less metabolically active but are dangerous for longer, e.g. strontium 90 and cesium 137, which have half-lives of 30 years. On a global scale the level of exposure from testing was relatively minor, but cancer risks from radiation exposure are cumulative, so they did count for something. For populations nearby the test sites they counted a lot, especially when there were accidents. The 1954 Castle Bravo thermonuclear test at Bikini, for example, at 15 megatons was triple the anticipated yield. In consequence, a wide area in the Pacific was unexpectedly contaminated by fallout including a Japanese fishing boat, the crew of which received lethal doses.

Blast effect of a low yield (16 kiloton) fission bomb on 
a wood frame house at 1100 meters. "Annie" test 1953.

Yet, the tests did serve one unintended useful purpose. They were absolutely terrifying. Maybe setting one off now and then on the surface would worth the health risks if only to remind ourselves still to be terrified of them. After all, using a single nuke in anger would do more harm than all of the tests combined. The tests would remind us to think twice about playing chicken with the devices or with those who wield them.

 

Marianne Faithfull – What Have They Done to the Rain

A Little Knowledge

From the time I graduated HS until about 15 years ago it was my habit each year to buy and read an almanac full of obscure facts about the world: national GDPs, petroleum production, demographics, and so on. Some of the info actually stuck. Pocket World in Figures published by The Economist was a frequent pick, but I also often opted for others. I just liked knowing random trivia and being known for knowing random trivia. I don’t bother to do that anymore because all of that information is just taps away on the screen of any smart phone. Besides, data from a printed almanac are bound to be at least a year out of date. So, if someone at the dinner table wonders aloud what country mines the most bauxite (I have strange guests at my dinner table who are apt to wonder aloud about odd things) the almanac-reader will find that he impresses no one by immediately responding, “Australia produces 102.4 million metric tonnes annually.” Instead he surely will be smugly corrected by someone else who quickly taps his phone and says, “The latest figures are 104.8 million tonnes.” People are as proud of their phone’s knowledge as of their own. I don’t know why. It is a human quirk.

Nonetheless, just for my own personal entertainment, I still buy books that offer weird information, such as What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe Houghton, Et Tu Brute: The Deaths of the Roman Emperors by Jason Novak, and Who Knew? Things You Didn’t Know about Things You Know Well by David Hoffman. I keep them scattered here and there: the bed stand, the coffee table, the powder room, etc. Sometimes the moment is best served by reading material that comes in snippets.

 
Thanksgiving is coming up, and perhaps the reader would like a few samples of factoids from Hoffman’s book that can be used to divert attention from whatever political argument is poisoning the meal:
 
Chocolate chip cookies are not as old as one might think. Ruth Wakefield at Toll House Restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, improvised them when she ran out of powdered cocoa. She broke up solid chocolate into bits instead. The chocolate chip cookies were a hit, so she included the recipe for the first time in her 1938 cookbook.
 
If you factor options such as syrups, size, blends, and so on, there are 87,000 possible drink combinations on a standard Starbuck’s menu.
 
The word “nerd” is a coinage of Dr. Seuss from his book If I Ran to the Zoo.
 
Before becoming a noted chef, Julia Child worked intelligence for the OSS in India and China.
 
Socialite Josephine Cochrane invented and patented the mechanical dishwasher in 1886 because her servants kept breaking her dishes. The machines became a hit with restaurants and hotels in the 1890s. Her company was eventually bought out by KitchenAid.
 
Bond author Ian Fleming in the early 1950s commuted from Kent to London. The bus he took was 007.
 
Paul Simon’s first version of Mrs Robinson was titled Mrs Roosevelt and was about Eleanor. He reworked the song when director Mike Nichols called on him for the soundtrack of the upcoming movie The Graduate.
 
Houseflies hum in the key of F.
 
Irish coffee dates to 1945. Joe Sheridan at the restaurant at Foynes Airport had closed the kitchen but decided to keep the counter open when he heard that a transatlantic flight had turned back to Ireland because of bad weather. He served the tired passengers mugs of coffee with whipped cream, sugar, and whiskey. Asked what it was, he called it Irish coffee. It caught on.
 
Lincoln Logs were invented by John Lloyd Wright, son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
 
The arrangement of stars on the 50 star US flag was designed by Robert Heft for a high school class project. His teacher gave him a B-. Congress chose his design.
 
That should get you started. Be prepared for the taps on phone screens as your fellow diners check to see if you are peddling disinformation from whatever news source they prefer to hate.
 

 

Peggy Lee – I Don't Know Enough about You

My Favorite Mood-Altering Drug

That would be 1,3,7-Trimethxylaxanthine, better known as caffeine. My mornings get a lot better after the first dose, usually contained in a mug of Colombian roast coffee, black no sugar. This comes to mind due to a tragic news story about a University of Pennsylvania student who, according to her family, died after drinking a Panera Charged Lemonade. The charge in the drink comes from caffeine to which, it is alleged, the young lady was sensitive. Any stimulant can be a problem for those with certain sensitivities or disorders such as tachycardia and arrhythmia. Caffeine is not an exception. However, most people are highly tolerant of the stuff, which is fortunate since it is present in a wide array of drinks and foods – often as a natural ingredient rather than something added.
 
As long ago as 1916 the FDA nearly put Coca-Cola out of business (see United States vs Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola) because of caffeine. The FDA alleged it was an adulterant that (it would be hard to make this up) promoted promiscuity in youth. Coca-Cola countered that caffeine was not an adulterant but a natural ingredient; it wasn’t added, the company argued, but was naturally present in the kola nut just as it was naturally present in cacao and coffee beans, neither of which were targeted by the FDA. (In 1916, one should keep in mind, opium and cocaine could be bought over the counter.) The case was touch-and-go for a while, but there is still caffeine in Coca-Cola today.
 
Direct lethal caffeine poisoning is possible to achieve but it takes dedication for an average person of normal metabolism. 5 grams is a low-end estimate of fatal toxicity for adults, though actual known cases involve much higher doses (such as from diet pills). 5 grams is equivalent to 23 liters (6 gallons) of coffee (standard McDonald’s blend) drunk at a single sitting. 23 liters of anything (even water) drunk all at once is likely to cause trouble. Indirect health risks are present at lower doses of course such as from an accelerated heart rate, especially in someone who has preexisting cardio issues. For most people, however, the effects of mild overdoses are limited to sleeplessness, jitteriness, and anxiety. I experience none of that from the one or two mugs of coffee with which I start a typical morning. The effects on me are all positive.
 
Tea is the caffeinated drink with the deepest known history. (Black tea has about half the caffeine of coffee of equivalent volume and strength.) Chinese legend credits Emperor Shen Nung in 2737 BCE for accidently discovering it when leaves blew into his boiling water. He enjoyed the flavor and the stimulation. Olmecs in Mesoamerica cultivated cacao from around 1000 BCE if not earlier. The Aztec “xocolatl” (which means “bitter water”) was favored in part for the stimulatory effects. Coffee, originating in Ethiopia, spread across the Islamic world in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. Coffee was popularized in Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Coffee houses at the time were noted mercantile centers where shippers, traders, and financiers made deals. They were an improvement over taverns, at least for business, which generally is better conducted sober. Coffee just might have been the unsung fuel for the budding industrial revolution.

 
Decaffeinated coffee seems a strange idea to caffeine lovers. Yet, it is older than one might think. It was developed in 1903 in Bremen, first marketed in Germany in 1905, and first sold in the US in 1909. The brand name Sanka derives from sans caffeine. Orange was the signature packaging color, which is why decaffeinated coffee of any brand in diners to this day is in pots with orange tops.
 
I won’t personally be switching to decaffeinated beverages anytime soon. On the other hand two mugs of full strength coffee are enough. I’ll encounter enough caffeine in other meals, snacks, and beverages to carry me though the rest of the day without actively seeking it out. We all have different sensitivities though. So if Java makes you jittery, by all means fill your cup from the pot with the orange top.
 

Rival Sons - Black Coffee

Running on Empty

Even as earth’s population tops 8 billion, much public discussion lately has centered on declining birthrates around the world. Elon Musk famously called it mankind’s greatest existential threat. One informative treatment of the subject is Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson.

Half the countries in the world have fertility rates lower than 2.1, the rate needed to sustain a constant population over the long run. (The US is currently 1.78, which is a bit higher than most Western countries.) Most of the other half are very close to this replacement rate. Global population is still rising, but only 8 countries in Africa and Asia will account for the majority of the increase between now and 2050: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tanzania, and India. (India actually has slipped slightly below 2.1 already, but longer lifespans and the burgeoning elderly population will keep India’s population rising for a few decades.) Bricker and Ibbitson contend that the UN projection for global population to rise to 11 billion in this century before leveling off is in error, for it is based on current birthrates and doesn’t account for the ongoing birthrate decline in presently high-fertility regions. The authors instead project a peak population of 9 billion followed by steady decline. Immigration keeps populations rising in most Western countries despite low birthrates. Low-fertility-rate countries that are culturally resistant to immigration however (e.g. China, Japan, Hungary, Russia, Korea, et al.) are already experiencing actual declines. The authors cite the usual list of economic problems that accompany declining numbers: notably, fewer working-age people struggling to support social welfare programs and a much larger generation of old people who live longer than ever.
 
Lower fertility rates are associated around the world with rising education of women: the more years in school, the fewer kids. It is also independently correlated with increasing urbanization. This was as true in the 19^th century as it is today, and already was well noted by demographers at the beginning of the 20^th century when all but a few national populations were still mostly rural. The one historical exception was the immediate postwar period when the birthrate rose despite ongoing urbanization. The Baby Boom has to be regarded as a freak anomaly in an otherwise century-plus long downward trend – an odd ephemeral reaction to the outsize traumas of Depression and World War. By the mid-‘60s, however, the longer-term fertility decline had resumed.
 
While most commentators propose social and economic causes, some analysts wonder if something more fundamentally mammalian is at work. They refer to the famous rodent studies conducted by the wonderfully named Dr. John Bumpass Calhoun of the NIH from the 1940s to the 1970s. Rats and mice notoriously breed profusely in adverse conditions. All major cities battle rat populations to little avail. Calhoun, working first with rats and later with mice because of the latter’s shorter life cycle, decided to see what would happen if he created rodent habitats with abundant food and ideal environmental conditions. How crowded would they get? The results were counterintuitive. Yes, as expected, the population of each habitat soared at first, but then strangely fertility would fall, eventually below replacement rate. Population would peak at well below the enclosure’s carrying capacity at which point it would start to drop: slowly at first but then headlong. A crash never reversed itself once it started. Mortality in the habitats was 100% every time.
 
A typical example was Universe 25: a mouse utopia abounding with tunnels, nests, nesting materials, plentiful food, pleasant temperatures, and no predators. Universe 25 was able to accommodate 3000 mice easily, but it never got there. Calhoun placed a handful of breeding pairs in the enclosure in 1968. The mouse population doubled every 55 days in the “exploit period” reaching 620 on day 315. Fertility then began a long decline though at this point it still exceeded the replacement rate. The mice acted ever more oddly as crowding grew. Mice huddled together in some nests while leaving other nests nearly empty. The females grew more aggressive while the males became either passive or violent. There were bursts of hypersexuality. By day 560 a generation of mice that had grown up amid this weird adult murine behavior showed diminished interest themselves in mating, competing, or raising young. A few took possession of upper nests (mouse penthouses) exclusively for themselves and a handful of their favorites – Calhoun dubbed them the “beautiful ones.” The beautiful ones didn’t reproduce much either. The Universe 25 population peaked at 2,200 on day 920. The fertility rate then slipped below replacement level and the population began to decline. The rate of decline accelerated even when population dropped back below 620. The last baby mouse was born in 1973. The remaining mice grew old and died to the last mouse.
 
In his paper “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population” (1973) published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, Calhoun comments that part of the problem for the rodents (in addition to simple crowding) was precisely the lack of struggle for resources that keeps urban street rats in their brutal environments socially healthy and relentlessly fecund. Calhoun wasn’t shy about suggesting parallels to human societies: “I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man.” To the rejoinder that humans, with few exceptions, are neither mice nor rats, he would answer that in many ways we kind-of are. However much we rationalize our behavior as ideology, philosophy, and lifestyle choices, he suggests our actions may be at least as much rooted in biology.
 
If Calhoun was right, growing global affluence is a big factor in declining human fertility. It is hard to see that as a bad thing. In any event, I think Bricker, Ibbitson, and Calhoun are all too pessimistic. To start, we are not yet at the equivalent of day 920 of Universe 25: human population is still rising. Further, I think the socioeconomic challenges of declining numbers are more manageable than the worrywarts imagine. The population of Japan, for example, is dropping by over a half million per year. Nonetheless, Japan remains a pretty nice and well-run place. There are advantages to smaller numbers including a lower strain on resources. When I was born the global population at 2.5 billion was less than a third of what it is today. The US population was 152,000,000: well under half of what it is today. Yet, no one was complaining back then that there weren’t enough people. No one will make that complaint if we return to those lower numbers either – which even according to Bricker and Ibbitson will not happen in this century anyway or probably the next. That is plenty of time to come up with a “solution” if indeed a solution is necessary.
 
An obvious answer is to pay people to have kids. Many countries already do this both directly in cash payments and indirectly via subsidized child care – in some cases the assistance is extraordinarily generous and includes mandated lengthy paid parental leave. These efforts haven’t made a notable difference in fertility anywhere, true enough, but that just means the payments still aren’t high enough. I’m not suggesting they should be made higher at the current time. I’d rather see some negative population growth first. Taxpayers after the year 2100 then can step in if they wish. Meantime, I think “Empty Planet” has rather a nice ring to it – emptier anyway.
 

Metric – Empty

  

The Actuarial Gamble

Some recent unexpected hefty expenses brought back to mind a brief review I wrote in June of Bill Perkins’ book Die with Zero in which the author argued that if you die with money in the bank you either retired too late or failed to experience the full benefit of your savings. The caveat, of course, is that timing is everything: no one wants to go broke before the big sleep, yet none of us knows when that is. Actuarial tables can give you odds within populations, but those are pretty useless for any one individual. So, it is best to err on the safe side. That is easier said than done, especially in a time of market volatility – and of unexpected expenses. Even if one manages to keep nominal savings constant, inflation erodes their real purchasing power. It is no wonder that the risk to a retiree of going broke is so much greater than risk of dying rich.
 
The surprising thing is that the risk of impoverishment isn’t even higher. According to Sudipto Banerjee of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, in the first 18 years of retirement, about one-third of US seniors actually increase their assets. For his study he divided retirees into three groups: those with more than $500,000 in investments (excluding the primary residence), those with at least $200,000 but less than $500,000, and those with less than $200,000 (median was $32,000). Unsurprisingly, seniors with more than $500,000 were the most likely to see assets increase. Most of the gainers had ignored the traditional advice to shift investments out of stocks and into bonds (which are safer) as they age; stocks historically yield higher returns over time, but of course they are risky. They can crash in value in any one year (or stretch of years) so the stockholder needs enough alternate savings for living expenses to wait out bear markets. Those in the middle group on average spent down a quarter of their savings in the first 18 years after retirement. This is a lot, but not terrible. However, this average is misleading, since 16% of this group already exhausted 80% of their savings after 18 years. Those in the lowest group also spent down about a quarter on average in 18 years, but again the average disguises a substantial minority: one-fifth of this group spent 80% of their savings in only 4 years. After 18 years the majority of seniors in all groups showed a decline in net assets.

I never had an actual piggy bank but I had and still have
this. It previously had been my father's when he was a boy.

 
The largest single cause of asset depletion in all groups – again unsurprisingly – was health care costs. Despite Medicare and other supplements, the remaining out-of-pocket medical expenses can be devastating in the case of serious illness, the risk of which increases with age. The cost of a nursing home or assisted care should that be necessary is breathtaking. Less obvious causes also can contribute to the problem such as late life divorce and aid to adult children.
 
In light of all this I think Perkin’s advice is, to put it gently, insufficiently cautious. Flipping burgers in one’s 70s or 80s just to get by is not a welcome prospect, even if one is healthy enough to still do it. I’d rather risk having savings survive me. I just hope they can.

 

Bessie Smith - Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out (1929)