Perfect order, perfect horror

“Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.” This “Thought for the Day” was offered in the ABC News “Today in History” feature on 4/26/11. Credited to the great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, you are left on your own to ponder his meaning. Google itemizes over 5,000 websites that contain the quotation, mostly compilation sites that aggregate famous quotations, they offer nothing to the question of meaning. One writing blog posits that Fuentes is offering advice on how to write horror fiction à la Stephen King.

The quotation comes from Fuentes’ epic historical novel Terra Nostra written in 1975. In a chapter titled “Stages of the Night” set in Rome, Brother Julian is instructed that the night has seven stages: “crepusculum; fax, the moment at which the torches are lighted; concubium, the hour of sleep; nox intempesta, the time when all activity is suspended; gallicinium, the cock’s crow; conticinium, silence; and aurora”. Brother Julian rebels at this arbitrary partitioning. “The night is natural... and its division into phases a mere convention…”

Brother Julian concludes that “…perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror; nature rejects that order, preferring instead to proceed with the multiple disorder of the certainty of freedom.”

In a later section, one of Fuente’s characters dreams "I travel from spirit to matter. I return from matter to spirit. There are no frontiers. Nothing is forbidden to me.” Absolute freedom seems the theme.

So rather than Fuentes giving us advice on how to write horror novels, I believe he is making an observation on the relationships between order and security, risk and freedom.

At one time, children played in the dirt, knee-torn trousers, scabby elbows and all. There was no hue and cry to equip them with alcohol hand wipes and helmets, and yet they thrived. In our security-burdened psyches today, perfect safety is the goal. As a result, we have arrived at such warped outcomes as TSA agents fondling the nether regions of 6-year-old girls and their great grandmothers.

The expansion of the nanny state has grown largely on citizens' fears and their desire to be safe. But unwilling to content themselves with personal choice, your neighbors are asking legislators to limit your choices as well. I don't personally smoke nor consume trans fats, but who am I to say that you can't enjoy a French fry? Laws banning foods or behaviors or practices remove from the individual the necessity to exercise common sense, to take personal responsibility for their life, to actually live their life.

Living entails risk. To be alive is to be exposed to risk. One could and should take reasonable measures to mitigate risk, but beware that in the act of doing so, you are always trading off freedom for security. For that reason, it is important that the bulk of these tradeoffs be made by personal choice, not a stultifying government.

Recognize that dreams of perfect order result in the nightmares of its victims. Witness Nazi Germany and the Soviet archipelago.

Accept some risks, manage them, and live your life. Remember that the only way to be perfectly safe is to be perfectly dead.

A season in the sun

Although growing up in the age of tractors, have you ever seen a team of horses turn a furrow? Their heaving breath and clomping hoofs work hard to cleave the soil. Have you felt your bare toes melt into the crumbled, rich earth?

Have you seen a belching tractor pull a gang of moldboard plows, each turning a fresh furrow of rich, fragrant earth, the plows themselves shiny as mirrors from the friction of the soil? These are the memories of our agricultural past. Man’s struggle to till the soil has advanced from pointed sticks to hoes to horse drawn plows and then tractors and crawlers. There seems to be no end of our escalation of power, our ability to rend and tend the earth.

After the first plowing in May, when the soil is still moist but dry enough to be pliable, the turned furrows are allowed to dry in the sun. Flocks of birds swoop down to devour the bonanza of exposed earthworms, but many more of the earth-richening creatures escape below to safety .

When the earth has dried a bit, gangs of steel discs are pulled across the fields to break down and level the soil. If you were to walk into this biologically active sea, you would sink to your ankles in a velvety, fragrant mass. There is nowhere on Earth like a field just prepared to be planted. The sheer potential of the soil, the thousands of tons of corn or wheat or potatoes to come, waiting only for adequate sun and rain.

The seeds are planted in straight rows with military precision. By the end of May, green tendrils rise in discernible rows as the early crop begins to assert itself. Taking sustenance from rain, sun, and soil, the potential of many tons of crop yield begins to assert itself. By July the crop is over knee high and vibrant green. In August, just taking a tinge of brown. In September, ready to harvest.

If the autumn rains come, mud is the enemy. Tractors gang up to haul harvesters and combines through the muddy fields. The crop must be dry enough to avoid must and rot, but leaving it in the field to decompose is not an acceptable option. Whole corn stalks can be fed into choppers that blow huge silos full of aromatic silage to feed the cattle over the long winter.

In December, January, and February, when deep snow and the cold of winter blanket the land, the barns are warm with the lowing of cattle, consuming their rations of sunshine from the silos. Soon enough, though, new furrows need be plowed.

But for now, a little rest.

How to retire a millionaire

Say that you were starting out your working career all over again and the challenge is how to retire, 50 years later, a millionaire? Let’s neglect for a moment that in 50 years from now (2061), inflation will have rendered "millionairehood" quotidian. Instead, imagine this is 1961 and you are surveying the last half of the 20^th century for your best chance to retire in 2011 as a millionaire. Which would you choose?

1. Play the lottery, $2 per day, 5 days a week ($10 per week)?
2. Invest that same $10 weekly in a Standard and Poors 500 stock index fund?
3. Marry a cop or schoolteacher?

Although there is an argument to be made for door number 3 (Forbes, "The Millionaire Cop Next Door"), let’s focus on choices 1 and 2. In order to analyze these choices, we will need a little math. (Yes, your high school algebra teacher was right – you will find this stuff useful).

Playing the Lottery

Playing the lottery is a popular choice because it is relatively painless. Spending a couple of bucks a day has little opportunity cost, i.e., you are not depriving yourself of coffee or hot dogs or paying the rent or other such daily necessities. But what are the odds of winning a million bucks? Let’s take the Massachusetts Cash Winfall lottery as an example. This game of chance costs $2 and asks you to pick 6 numbers of 46. In order to win the jackpot, you must select the proper winning numbers, each with the following odds:

1^st digit 1 out of 46 (2.1%)

2^nd digit 1 out of 45 (2.2%)

3^rd digit 1 out of 44 (2.2%)

4^th digit 1 out of 43 (2.3%)

5^th digit 1 out of 42 (2.4%)

6^th digit 1 out of 41 (2.4%)

Those odds don’t look too tough. With over 2% chance of selecting the correct number for each choice, you should be a big winner if you just play the game 50 times, right? Unfortunately, that’s not how probability works.

To calculate these odds, you must multiply the probabilities (1/46 x 1/45 x 1/44 x 1/43 x 1/42 x 1/41), which yields a vanishingly thin 1 out of 6,744,109,680. If you were required to select the numbers in the exact sequence in which they were drawn, this would be your odds of winning. Fortunately, the lottery does not require that you match the order of the numbers drawn, so the above odds can be reduced by taking into the account the number of different ways (orders) in which the winning number could be drawn.

The first winning number could be drawn as any of the 6 digits, the second as any of the remaining 5, the third as any of 4, etc. So the total number of ways that the winning numbers could be drawn is 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 720. We can now divide 6,744,109,680 by 720 to determine your actual odds of winning – 1 out of 9,366,819. To put this into perspective you would need to buy one ticket per week for 180,000 years before approaching certainty of winning. Did you really think it would be easy? How many million-dollar lottery winners do you know?

How about the popular Powerball game? It requires that you select only 5 numbers (and then that pesky 6^th Power Ball). This game is rigged to make your odds much worse. The first five numbers are drawn from a pool of 59:

1^st digit 1 out of 59 (1.7%)

2^nd digit 1 out of 58 (1.7%)

3^rd digit 1 out of 57 (1.8%)

4^th digit 1 out of 56 (1.8%)

5^th digit 1 out of 55 (1.8%)

Multiplying these probabilities and then dividing by the number of ways the numbers could be drawn yields a friendly 1 out of 5,006,386. But that must then be multiplied by the probability of selecting the final Power Ball number, 1 out of 39, yielding the overall odds of winning as 1 out of 195,249,054. Feeling lucky?

Bottom line, you could spend an entire lifetime squandering $10 on lottery tickets each week and your odds of hitting the big one are still much less than being hit (multiple times) by lightning.

Playing the stock market

Everyone knows that the stock market is risky. But it is orders of magnitude less risky than playing the lottery. Since 1950, the Standard and Poors 500 stock index has returned an average of 10.8% on your investment. (Yes, that includes the recent financial meltdown).

What would happen if, as an eager young worker, you resolved to put $10 each week into an S&P 500 index fund? Further assume that your account grew tax-free (e.g., an IRA or 401K), and that all earnings and dividends were reinvested. At the end of a 50 year working career, you would have accumulated a million bucks if your average stock market returns were in the neighborhood of 10.5% (see nearby chart).

Now the stock market has no guarantees and it is certainly possible to lose capital, especially in the short run. I would no more recommend that you put all of your money in the stock market as I would urge you to bet it all on the lottery. But $10 per week is a cheap gamble on the market with far greater odds of gaining you a million bucks than hitting the lottery. Here’s my advice – play the lottery for fun, play the market for retirement, and keep some money safe – at least a 6-month emergency fund. That gives you the best odds overall of retiring a millionaire.

Of course, you could always marry a school teacher.

Our wacky but lovable language

English has become the common language of international commerce and discourse. That is so because it is wonderfully expressive and wonderfully compact in that expression. How did that come to be?

Several years ago I traveled frequently to Europe for work (poor me). One of the things I noticed in my travels was multilingual signs. Take the one nearby, for instance. Note that the same message in English takes 17%, 34%, and 46% more characters to represent in German, French, and Dutch respectively. The same is true when English is compared to Spanish and Italian. That is not uncommon, and it is not an accident.

While German and French and Dutch are relatively pure, English is promiscuous and highly mongrelized. English has freely borrowed words from many different languages (balcony, Italian balcone; absurdity, French absurdité; alligator, Spanish el lagarto). We borrow words enthusiastically and unabashedly. As a result, the English vocabulary contains about twice as many words as Spanish, for example. From this large vocabulary, we can most often express an idea in fewer words than any other language.

This is a mixed blessing. While English expression is more compact, Spanish is much more consistent and easier to learn. But for non-native adult speakers, English can be a nightmare to master.

In English, there are words that are pronounced the same, spelled differently, and mean something different: lo, low. We also have words that are spelled differently, pronounced the same, with different meanings: feint, faint. If this is not enough, we have words that have the same spelling, but different pronunciation and meaning: “He took the lead in banning lead-based paint.”

All this gives us significant cause to be proud of our English mastery, but also caution in how we understand and use it. There are very many common errors committed, even by native speakers. For instance, here are some examples taken from some very credible sources such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

“Low and behold”

The writer may have meant to “stoop low and see (behold)” but that doesn’t make much sense. He might also have meant to “make a sound like a cow (low) and see,” but that makes even less sense. The multiple meanings of “low” arise because one sense is derived from Old Norman lagr, lying flat or low, while the other is from Old English hlowan, to make a noise like a cow. This is an example of a homonym – a word with the same spelling but different meanings. Did the writer mean some sense of “low?”

No, not at all – the writer meant “lo.” This is a heterograph, words that are pronounced the same, spelled differently, and mean something different. The writer didn’t mean to use “low” at all, but rather “lo,” from Old English locian “to look.” The phrase “lo and behold” thus means to “look and see.” That makes a lot more sense.

“Just make due”

Similar to the above, “due” is a homonym, either a noun, “she was due a refund” or an adverb, “proceed due west”. But neither are the writer’s meaning. In fact, “make due” is completely meaningless. This is another heterograph: the writer meant “just make do.” To “make do” is to manage with what is available.

“site/sight/cite”

These heterographs are commonly confused. They are not synonyms: each has a different meaning.

Site – place related. As a noun, the position of something, a building, etc. As a verb, to put into position or to provide a place to locate. From French site via Latin, situs, “place, position.”

Example – “The police selected a site for their speed trap.”

Sight – vision related. As a noun, something that is seen, or the process or function of seeing, or a device that aids the eye in seeing or finding an object. As a verb, to catch sight of or to test for straightness . From Old English sihþ, “something seen.”

Example – “The police tried to keep the speeding car in sight.”

Cite – officialdom related. A verb which means to quote an authoritative source, to summon officially (as in to court), or to commend for outstanding service. From Old French citer, "to summon."

Example – “After stopping the car, the police cited the driver for speeding.”

As earlier stated, English is wonderfully expressive. But because of the way the language has grown by acquisition, it is replete with easily confused words. Your best defense is to read widely and pay notice to context. And of course, in this Internet age, there are great sources of information on the web. One of the most interesting ones is http://www.cooper.com/alan/homonym.html. Alan Cooper maintains an extensive list of homonyms and encourages contributions of new ones from his readers. Join in the fun.

Liberal bias at NPR?

Steve Inskeep, a long-time reporter for National Public Radio, recently published a piece decrying the claims of bias at NPR. He bases his argument in part on the fact that some conservatives listen to NPR.

But it is a non sequitur to posit that "if some conservatives listen to NPR, then NPR is not biased." To begin with, NPR is multifaceted. In addition to “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” which tend to be straight news (except when addressing issues such as “social justice” or public unions), there are many others (“The Takeaway,” “The Diane Rehm Show”) which often resound with liberal viewpoints.

According to the IRS, there were approximately 140 million individual tax returns filed in 2010. These taxpayers run the political spectrum from ultra liberal to right wing. There can be no excuse for not addressing this wide demographic while NPR is, even in part, publicly funded.

The sound of one hand clapping is discordant unless it aligns with your political frame of reference. That’s why liberals don’t complain about NPR bias. No one is exhorting NPR to make every word uttered on air politically neutral. But is it too much to ask that interviewees and panels be selected as to present a balanced spectrum of views?

In search of balance

There has been much brouhaha lately concerning taxpayer funding of the public broadcasting system, National Public Radio in particular. There are those on the right who feel that NPR offers programming biased to the left. Those on the left, of course, feel that NPR is right down the middle because they find it resonant with their beliefs.

Some weeks ago, NPR ran a self-referential segment which explored whether this bias existed. The conclusion, not surprisingly, was “absolutely not!” But perhaps a more independent analysis might show otherwise.

Listening to NPR programming on Sunday, March 6, the following random items were noted:

• Representative Peter King (R-NY) is anti-Muslim. There was no debate, no alternative point of view.
• The federal deficit was caused by tax cuts for wealthy “fat cats” and two unfunded wars. There was no debate, no alternative point of view
• Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin is anti-union. There was no debate, no alternative point of view.

If the “P” in NPR is to stand for “Public”, then they must recognize that there exist other points of view. Is it possible that Rep. King abhors extremist jihadists but is pro-Muslim? Can it be that the federal deficit has increased enormously by social spending? Perhaps Gov. Walker is pro-taxpayer more than anti-union?

Your personal point of view may differ, but NPR cannot ignore that a range of valid opinions exist in the public marketplace of ideas. To force feed us their views without debate is not acceptable if they expect to receive public funding. Unless, perchance, the “P” stands for “Progressive”.

From mainframes to orchids

Sitting in a condo in Vail, Colorado. Suddenly my iPhone chimes with a Facebook notification alert. My cousin Maria, from eight time zones away has posted "La mia orchidea sta fiorendo ... non ci posso credere!!!!"

I was struck suddenly by the sheer wonder of it.

In 1968, having joined the Marine Corps and they having denied several naive requests to be posted to Vietnam, I was sent to Computer Sciences School in Quantico Virginia. It was only a generation prior that "computer" was a time honored profession peopled by those who laboriously calculated logarithmic and trigonometric and ballistic and astronomical tables. Human computers performed tedious work and were prone to errors. Several computers would perform the same calculations which later would be compared and discrepancies resolved. Human computing was time consuming, imperfect, and very expensive.

Then everything changed. Driven by the computing demands of World War II, scientists created the first electromechanical computers. At first rudimentary and slow and consisting of clattering banks of relays, these machines were still many times faster than humans and, if programmed correctly, capable of delivering faultless results. In the 1950s truly electronic computers evolved, first with hot, glowing vacuum tubes and then with silent and swift transistors. The age of machine computing was well underway.

Later I was posted to the Marine's worldwide data processing center on the verge of the Kansas prairie. The machines were housed in cavernous, clean, air conditioned rooms and were kept comfortably cool and dry – more so than the human attendants who went home to suffer in the sultry Midwestern summer nights. Mainframe computers were huge and noisy and vibrated as data was searched and manipulated and written to hundreds of disk and tape devices. High speed printers whirred and whined and gushed out boxes of printed reports at the unbelievable rate of a thousand lines per minute. All this while consuming enough electricity to power a good sized village. These machines calculated and printed paychecks, maintained base and outpost inventories, and kept track of myriad facts and figures of a modern military force.

But while all of this progress was being made in computing, the real magic was just underway. On October 29, 1969, the Internet was born when two computers, one in Los Angeles and one in Palo Alto, California, first talked to each other. It was at that point, slowly, grudgingly, and very gradually, computers became less about calculating and more about tying people together.

In Vail, the iPhone in my hand has a million times the memory and processing capacity of those early mainframes. And much, much more importantly, it reaches out as if by magic through the air to tell me that my cousin Maria could hardly believe that her orchid was in the process of blooming.