Who on Earth is the happiest?

  A recent survey attempted to find out which are the happiest nations on the planet, based among other things on life expectancy, degree of freedom, social support, general trust, and generosity.  The top countries are Scandinavian.  Finland, Norway, and Denmark, followed by Iceland and Switzerland, in that order.  America was eighteenth on the list, the study citing obesity, wealth disparity, and business and governmental corruption as partial reasons.

  Of the ten least happy countries, eight are in Africa, with badly overpopulated Burundi at the top of that list.  Dense population and resultant poverty, poor health care, entrenched bloody tribalism clashes, lack of education, and endemic corruption all contribute.  Some 600 million people on that troubled continent don’t even have electricity, much less electric toothbrushes.

  What rank on which list will the United States earn in coming decades?  That’s largely up to us.

  But surely virulent partisan politics, continuing degradation and dumbing down of our educational system, rampant drug abuse, an ever-burgeoning deficit, increasing population numbers, and spreading distrust of all government levels are not going to help.

Phil

The New Killer Addiction

   It’s epidemic.  All over the planet.  And there doesn’t appear to be a cure.

  People, especially young people, are increasingly no longer involved in the real world around them but are almost constantly engrossed in the shallow artificiality that is flipping past their emotionless zombie gazes on their smartphones and tablets.  Take a short break from your own cell and look around in any public park, at the beach, on school campuses, in airline terminals, on buses and in airplanes.  Nearly everyone is immersed in Phoneworld.  You see couples on the street far more engaged with their phones than with each other.  People ostensibly go out for a group dinner, then rudely ignore each other so they can receive messages and feverishly thumb texts off into the ether.  Tourists standing before nature’s splendors take endless phone shots and selfies rather than indulge in old-fashioned experiencing and enjoying.

   The addiction all too often has gruesome and deadly consequences.  Driving while texting and talking on cellphones is killing 5,000 people a year and injuring thousands more across our nation alone.  Even distracted walking with resultant injuries is becoming a threat, with people bumping into each other on busy sidewalks or stepping out into traffic.

   A recent Baylor University study of college students, published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, found that women spend an average of ten hours daily on their cellphones, while men spend an average of eight hours.  Subtract sleep time and that doesn’t leave many hours for reality.  Sixty percent of all students queried admitted they may have Screen Addiction. 

   Nobody seems to know what to do about it. 

  There are increasing pressures that deepen the addiction through thousands upon thousands of apps.  A Hilton app lets you use your phone as a room key.  Restaurants and supermarkets and stores are encouraging you to use your phone as an ordering and checkout tool, allowing them to operate with fewer employees.  Theme parks have navigational and ride-wait-time apps that speed customer flow.  There are gadgets that tether your phone to you so you seldom even have to put it down or into a pocket or purse. 

   And all the while robotic web crawlers, lurking invisibly and silently behind our billions of screens, are at work for vast data centers like Facebook and Google and Amazon, tirelessly watching and listening and gathering and storing away data on every addict, from our educational and employment and medical and political and social histories to our dining and entertainment preferences to our brands of underwear.

   Is this an early sign of artificial intelligence (AI) creeping into our lives, eventually to seek more control over us than it obviously already has?  Robots are not only building our vehicles but are also taking over driving them.  Computers are piloting and landing planes and controlling our habitats and talking cordially with us and even generating news reports. 

   We lost one of our great minds recently.  Before he left us, Stephen Hawking warned humankind about the insidious encroachment of AI.  So far, there’s no evidence I can see that anyone has listened to him.

   We’re all too mesmerized by—and intimately occupied with—our wonderful cellphones.

Phil

Downside Up

     All my life, I’ve thought of northward on a map as ‘Up,’ southward as ‘Down,’ and eastward or westward as ‘Over.’  Living in New England, we would drive ‘up’ to Canada for a summer vacation or ‘down’ to Florida for a mid-winter warmup, or ‘over’ to New York State to visit my uncle and his family.  I would look ‘down’ at my feet to see if my sneakers were tied or ‘up’ into the night sky to marvel at the familiar constellation Orion.  Everybody else I knew seemed to observe the same orientations.

     Then a few years ago I went way ‘down’ to Chile in the Southern Hemisphere to view the night sky from a barren mountaintop high in the Atacama Desert, where it has not rained in decades and the atmosphere is not only free of moisture but also free of both air and light pollution.  Severe clear.

     The night sky was spellbinding in its majesty.  Impossible to adequately describe.  Venus was casting my shadow onto the ground, I could see the Andromeda galaxy with my naked eyes, and the legendary Pleiades, those ancient beautiful seven sisters, were dazzling and nested in a bed of diamond-like lesser stars I’d never even known were there.

     But the constellation Orion was upside-down.  A few other constellations that I’d been able to see from the Northern Hemisphere and that I could still see from the Southern Hemisphere were also upside-down.  What?  I had to make a sketch on a pocket pad to figure out why.  For the first time I realized there really is no ‘up’ or ‘down’ or ‘over.’  Those are all merely arbitrary concepts.  Weightless astronauts learn this lesson quickly on arrival at the International Space Station.  At any distance from our home planet, there is no longer any ‘up’ or ‘down.’  Even on the surface of our planet, if I look ‘down’ at my sneakers and then wait twelve hours, or half an earth revolution, I’m actually positioned on my head from where I was twelve hours earlier, looking ‘up’ at my sneakers.

     It was a disconcerting lesson in orientational prejudice.  The good people in Chile have every right to say they’ll go ‘up’ to Antarctica for penguin-watching or ‘down’ to Maine for photographing moose if they wish, and I have no right to fault them for it.

Phil

Lexophiles: people who enjoy punny word puzzles such as:

When fish are in schools, they sometimes take debate.

A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.

When the smog lifts in Los Angeles U.C.L.A.

The batteries were given out free of charge.

A dentist and a manicurist married. They fought tooth and nail.

A will is a dead giveaway.

With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.

A boiled egg is hard to beat.

When you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.

Police were summoned to a daycare center where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

Did you hear about the fellow whose entire left side was cut off?  He's all right now.

A bicycle can't stand alone; it's just two tired.

When a clock is still hungry it goes back four seconds.

The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine is now fully recovered.

He had a photographic memory which was never developed.

When she saw her first strand of grey hair she thought she'd dye.

Acupuncture is a jab well done. That's the point of it.

Those who get too big for their britches will be totally exposed in the end.

Phil

Our modest star

Our Sun is only a smallish average star in a Universe where there are stars hundreds and thousands of times larger and grander.  Yet we owe all we are to it.  Our planet with its rich resources and wondrous vistas.  All flora and fauna on it.  Our very existence.  If it were to vary its energy output by a few percent, Earth and every living thing on it would perish.  One day, as the sun begins to grow old (it is already middle-aged) and expands to become a red giant, Earth will, indeed, perish, but long before then we can only hope we will have found another planet in a younger star system and, over several voyaging generations, have made it our new home.  This is the best argument for continuing a vigorous global pursuit of space programs.  If we do not do so, then the Universe will never know humankind, with all our scientific and sociological achievements, ever even existed.

This mesmerizing video (scroll down) displays the ultimate in abstract art, because absolutely nothing is or can ever be more important than what it depicts:

http://earthsky.org/space/red-giant-pi1-gruis-convection-granulation-bubbles

Phil

Perspective

As intrepid Voyager One left the neighborhood of our star’s planetary system in February, 1990, it turned around and shot a last photo of earth, by then four billion miles away.  Carl Sagan called the photo “The Pale Blue Dot.”  It was only a pixel caught in a sunbeam.

Here’s another recent shot of our earth and our moon:

https://www.space.com/39268-osiris-rex-snaps-color-pic-of-earth-and-moon.html?utm_source=sdc-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20180106-sdc

For me, this somehow puts all the British Royal Family’s pomp and glitter, and the perpetual petty partisan squabbles and corruption in Washington, and the nuclear posturing of North Korea’s Kim, and the egomania in Hollywood, and all my life’s insignificant concerns, in solemn perspective.

That small blue marble in this lonely photo is the only home we’ve got in the black vastness.

What will we make of it?

We writers can help as illuminators and guides.

Phil

Taking miracles for granted

     Miracles are all around us every day, yet we take them only as our due.

     Consider glass.  What would our lives be like without this miraculous stuff?  It’s everywhere and it’s essential to the quality of our lives.  It’s made by melting simple sand, one of the most abundant materials on our planet, yet it’s incredibly durable, it can withstand extreme temperatures while remaining dimensionally stable, and, fantastically, we can see through it as though it were not even there. 

     Nobody seems to know how long glass has been around, but there’s a 5,000-year-old example in a British museum.  The Indians didn’t have glass in their abodes when the Pilgrims arrived in America wearing too many clothes, but Virginia settlers built a glass factory in the early 1600s and started putting rippled windows in their buildings.  Many of those windows still survive and serve.

     Without glass our homes would be dark boxes.  It lets in natural light and gives us expansive views while serving as a barrier to the elements.  Without glass, vehicles as we know them would never have been built, Edison would never have been able to invent the light bulb, and we would not have developed clear mirrors that let us see ourselves as others do.  Because of its miraculous optical qualities—its ability to bend light—glass can be fashioned into prisms that spread light into its colorful spectrum, and it can be made into lenses that help near- or far-sighted people see with great resolution.  It gives us cameras that allow us to faithfully capture still and moving images.  It can be crafted into precision mirrors and lenses that bring distant objects close through binoculars, and that even let us peer far out across deep time into the vastness of the Universe through telescopes.

     Glass is only one among many daily miracles that greatly enrich our lives, but I think it deserves special recognition.

     I propose a National Glass Day on which we should all raise a glass in toast to this magical material.

Phil