Random thoughts on being random.

The story is told that Bennett Cerf, who founded the Random House publishing company, got the name for his company from the conversation he had with his partners about what he was going to do: just publish some books on the side at random. The rest, as they say, is history. Random House is now owned by Bertelsmann, which I'm sure never even crossed Bennett Cerf's mind as something that might happen. That acquisition seems almost a random event.

Randomness is everywhere. Open the newspaper, and chances are that a few of the articles describe some study or other: some sort of food causes cancer, lots of people don't like the President, fewer people are going to the dentist. Sometimes these studies claim to prove other studies wrong, sometimes they are new "discoveries," and sometimes they just seem, well, random. But the key to all these studies and surveys and experiments is that they in fact are random. They have to be. Randomness is built into the process. If the objects being studied are not chosen randomly, the study isn't worth anything. At least that is the theory: choosing subjects at random ensures that there aren't any patterns in the process of choosing the subjects that can affect the results.

The most famous polling fiasco was Literary Digest magazine's poll for the 1936 presidential election. Based on two million responses, the Literary Digest projected a landslide for Alf Landon. The problem is that the people who responded to the survey weren't randomly chosen. The magazine had used driver's license records and telephone numbers to identify people to whom to send the survey, but back then many people didn't have driver's licenses or telephones, mainly because they could not afford cars or phones or lived in places that were too remote to have driveable roads or telephone service. Not only that, but the only people who responded were those who chose to respond. That means the survey was based on responses by a self-selected group taken from a skewed sample. The sample size was huge but it wasn't representative of anything. No wonder the results were worthless.

Use randomly chosen study subjects, though, and magically the results become more reliable. Back in college in my statistics course I learned that the smallest reliable sample size is thirty, and that the margin of error gets smaller as the sample size grows above that. But large sample size is useful only if the sample is chosen randomly. Introduce any method to the choosing other than total randomness and you skew the results.

What is remarkable about this process is the use of chaos to produce order. There is information out there about tendencies and preferences. Lots of information. How do we get at that information? How do we find out whether cholesterol tends to cause heart attacks? How do we find out what most people think about our elected representatives? The answers are out there, but we need to extract them from the huge mass of other information that is also out there. The way we get the answers -- the way we impose order on the chaos -- is by using chaos, randomness. If we use order, a pattern, we can't get a reliable answer, but if we use no pattern at all, we can.

The uses of disorder and chaos are one of the great paradoxes of life. Evolution itself, the very basis of our existence as hominids, is based on random mutations that turned out to have had adaptive uses. Take away the random mutations and we might never have grown our outsized brains or even developed chins. We might even still have lots of body hair, copulate only when women are in heat, and brachiate more readily than walk.

Randomness sometimes explains a lot: as the saying goes, give a monkey enough time at the keyboard and eventually he'll produce War and Peace. Or Shakespeare. The idea, of course, is that enough randomness over enough time can yield just about any wondrous thing.

Even our everyday speech recognizes the effectiveness of lack of order. Think of the popular injunction about how important it is to do "random acts of kindness." Why random? So that anyone at all could benefit, no matter how unconnected to you. Randomness spreads the love around.

So that raises an interesting question. If randomness, disorder and chaos are so useful, why can't people handle them better? Think of it: isn't a pattern the first thing you look for in life? Babies learn about the world by observing patterns. They learn that objects fall down. They learn that if they cry Mommy comes running. Adults learn from patterns, too. We usually construct our lives based on those patterns. We know it's safe to cross the street when the light is green, because the drivers who are heading in a perpendicular direction to us stop at what for them is a red light. We know it's usually colder in January than in June. The list of examples goes on.

But there's an awful lot of chaos and disorder out there, and much of the trouble in life comes from things that don't follow the patterns we expect and break out of the routines we have constructed. New Orleans would still be standing if the old patterns about weather had held. The Soviet Union never would have imploded if prior patterns had held in 1989. We would still be using carbon paper and typewriters if previous technological patterns had not been broken by new ideas and technology. Economic projections are based on prior patterns, but can get thrown into a cocked hat by an unforeseen event. When life throws us these curveballs we have to scramble to recover and deal with the new situation.

My question is, why? If chaos is so pervasive, if patterns are so constantly disrupted, why don't we have the mental architecture to assimilate disorder? Especially since order can be produced by chaos, why can't we deal with the chaos directly, instead of trying to impose order on it? It's almost like we are vassals of the need to see patterns. When the chaos strikes and the patterns are disrupted, first we identify the variation in the pattern and then we try to figure out whether we now have a new pattern, whether we should try to go back to the old one and whether the chaos can be tamed. But we always view the chaos as a departure from the norm, rather than part of the norm. Why? Shouldn't we be able to assimilate the chaos and manipulate it directly, instead of first placing a pattern-based template over it?

If chaos can produce order, maybe chaos isn't such a bad thing. We should try to use it creatively.

Who lives life to the fullest?

In the routinized commotion of my middle age I have the opportunity sometimes to think through how I got here and what is likely to come in the years ahead. At the moment life is stable. Stability is, of course, a good thing, because it is conducive to being able to handle a situation where there are bills to pay, kids to raise, a mortgage, car payments and other similar demands - some insistent and some not. Stability also seems to be a tailor-made state for people in their forties. A routine, with no major surprises or crises, is perfectly suitable for someone with substantial responsibilities and a sense that they have to be taken care of.

Parents raising children usually want them to achieve that sense of responsibility and the ability to construct a routine aimed at meeting the obligations. Reaching that point is often considered "success" -- becoming a productive member of society. But it's a very pedestrian accomplishment, and certainly nothing that gains much recognition or approbation. And why should it? By definition, it's unremarkable.

Here in New York there used to be an expression used by the cool, up-to-the-minute folk who lived and partied in Manhattan: "bridge and tunnel people." They were referring to the souls who had to actually cross a river to get to Manhattan. Nowadays the neighborhoods have changed, and plenty of artsy types and artsy-type-wannabes live across the East River in places like Williamsburg or Red Hook in Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens or Hoboken in New Jersey. These areas used to be war zones, but now are very desirable places to live. So I don't know if the beautiful types still use the term to refer to the rest of us. But that sense among the "in" set that they are unique still undoubtedly prevails, even if they now have to cross a river to get to Manhattan - and what is unique about them, or at least what they seem to believe makes them unique, is that they don't hold down the humdrum jobs, don't commute and don't fit the normal pattern of bourgeois life. That very refusal to accept the normal demands of middle-class life is their self-proclaimed badge of honor and distinction. They think it shows they are living life more fully and authentically than the mass of plodders out there beyond the Hudson.

What is it that they were claiming to be experiencing? What great secret thrill were they feeling that the rest of us couldn't understand or even observe? Honestly, I don't know. So this could be just some form of snobbery or an attempt to create a clique. But at least on the surface it claims to be a group having unique ability to live and experience, to taste every facet of life in a way that other people can't.

Believe it or not, I started thinking about this because of Harry Potter. The actor who plays Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe, created a stir by taking on the main character's role in the revival of the play Equus in London. The stir has to do with the fact that the role requires Radcliffe to be naked at one point. That's not what got me thinking, though. It was Equus that got me thinking. The movie version of Equus, which starred Peter Firth in the role that Radcliffe is going to play, came out about ten years ago. It was based on the play, of course. The playwright was Peter Schaffer, who had also written Amadeus. Both plays deal with a slightly abnormal central character. In Equus the character had created for himself what amounted to a religion based on horses. He was an otherwise unremarkable boy in his late teens, but in his room he would engage in highly elaborate and intensely ecstatic rituals paying homage to horses. The rituals would transport him and gratify him.

Amadeus was based loosely on the life of Mozart. Its premise is that Mozart was a genius at creating music but, in everyday interaction, he was an uncivilized misfit. Both plays speak to the nature of intense experience: can a human being have intense experiences, whether of genius or ecstasy, and still live normally as a member of society?

I wonder about this often. Many people I know are deeply religious. They pray with intensity - or seem to - and when I watch them praying, their faces seem to reflect a certain spiritual gratification. They take their religion seriously. They feel it. Others I know have political or ideological commitments, and I do mean commitments. Everyone has his or her preferences, about all sorts of things, but these people really get passionate about their causes, be they environmentalism, prisoners' rights or what-have-you. It's almost like their drug.

I have never felt anything like that. I have never felt transported or seized by any abstraction. I simply don't get very excited about very much, and certainly not by concepts. I'm pretty smart but certainly not an off-the-charts genius, and I can't think of any particular talent I have in which I can lose myself. For a very long time I thought I was missing out on something. It was almost like I was observing life rather than living it. That detachment hasn't been so terrible - it has enabled the stability I posted about up top, and it has made me quite practical. Also rather tolerant and analytical. But does it mean I'm getting out of life the most that I can?

I can't believe I'm alone in this. It doesn't make intuitive sense to me that most people are committed passionately to some abstract cause or are regularly transported by spiritual reverie. Nor does it seem to me that they should be. Passionate commitment is predictably a source of conflict. And if Peter Shaffer is right, it also can bring with it some serious personal instability. Is it possible to have a unique talent like Mozart, or an intense passion like the character in Equus without also being strange?

The need to think clearly.

My reading tells me that most Americans get their news from television. I watch almost no TV, so to me this is mind-boggling. In the time it takes to watch 1/2 hour of evening news, much of which is likely to be filler and human-interest fluff, an average reader can get through most of a newspaper, which will afford a much wider spectrum of information. But even reading just one newspaper a day won't make you very well-informed. Sure, you'll know what is in the newspaper you read, but that is the limit of the news you have gotten. If the newspaper is incomplete, unreliable or biased - and most are, to one degree or another, not so much by design but by dint of the fact that human beings, including newspaper editors and reporters, have preconceptions and faults - then what you have read is only part of the story, the part that the reporters and editors at the newspapers think is important.

If you're like me and you're a compulsive reader, you read a minimum of two or three newspapers a day and several blogs. Surprisingly, it is not repetitive and it is not boring. The New York Times, which I read in the morning on the bus on the way in to work, is markedly different from the New York Post, which I read on the bus in the evening on the way home, and both of those are different from the Wall Street Journal, which I read in the office with my coffee when I arrive at my desk. Intermittently through the day I check in with blogs just to see what people are saying. In the evening, after dinner, I frequently relax at the computer, reading whatever happens to look interesting, which often is news blogs. I do it because I find it stimulating, but I also find that reading about the same events from different viewpoints helps me figure out what really is going on.

It also has given me some insights into how people think. Blogs can be wonderful, especially when the author thinks clearly and writes well enough to translate those thoughts into readable paragraphs. Some of the blogs link to each other as part of ongoing conversations about issues. Those dialogues are often very illuminating: the authors have thought about the issues and confront head-on the arguments of the people who disagree with them. As with most discussions of policy matters, these dialogues rarely end in resolution, with both sides agreeing. But with the alternative visions presented well, it's much easier to think about the issues because the best arguments for each side of the issue have been put forward.

Earlier this month two bloggers whom I read fairly often were having a conversation about school vouchers. Megan McArdle, who blogs as "Jane Galt," is in favor of them, and Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly's "Political Animal," is against them. They both discuss whether, how and why vouchers might or might not work, and put forth all sorts of arguments. Basically, Kevin views the argument as being "really" about breaking teachers' unions rather than improving education, while Jane argues that in order to improve education it's necessary to break the monopoly of the public schools. This is a worthwhile debate, and certainly well worth having. One of the things that inhibits informed decisionmaking here is that there is a relative dearth of reliable empirical data about the relative merits of voucher systems versus centralized systems.

Perhaps more interesting than the bloggers' remarks are the opinions in the comments. I see a few categories of commenters. Some are taking seriously the point of the exercise, which is to figure out how to improve the education system. For these people, the question is a practical one, focused on likely results: if vouchers are likely to help kids, let's do them. If they're not, let's not do them. If vouchers are likely to be worse than the current system, stick with the current system and maybe tweak it a bit. All these commenters have cogent arguments: some say parents can choose how to educate their kids better than a bureaucracy, others say education is not the sort of service that can really be subjected to the free market because of informational costs and because the cost of a wrong choice by a parent (namely, a bad education for the child) is not tolerable.

Other commenters, though, took a totally different approach. For them, the issue wasn't whether vouchers will improve education or not. Instead, the issue was assigning motives to the people who disagreed with their position. In this particular case, the center of attention was teachers' unions. The pro-voucher set was sure that the anti-voucher set didn't care about education at all, but cared only about preserving the teachers' unions and their rigid support of the Democratic party. The anti-voucher set was sure that the pro-voucher people didn't care about education at all, but cared only about breaking the teachers' unions.

Isn't this insane? To me, at least, it seems that when you think about public policy, the question isn't the motives of the people who propose policies, but rather the likely outcome of implementing the policies. People can have all sorts motives for proposals, some good and some not so good, but the merits of proposals have to stand on their own, no matter what reasons people may have for proposing them.

For example, suppose there is a charity drive at work. Charity A and Charity B are both on the approved list. One person in the office - call her Pam - is a big supporter of Charity A. Lisa, who works at the desk next to Pam, can't stand Pam, so to spite Pam she gives a big donation to Charity B. Lisa doesn't say anything about what she has done or why, she just gives the money. Has Lisa done a bad thing? I can't think of any reasoning that would conclude Lisa did a bad thing. Charity B gets money it otherwise might not get. If Lisa gave to Charity B because a close friend of hers was a big supporter of Charity B, rather than because someone she hates supports Charity A, the result would be precisely the same. If Lisa gave to Charity B because she believes deeply in Charity B's mission, the result would be precisely the same: Charity B would get a donation from Lisa and Charity A would get nothing. So what difference does it make that Lisa had a bad motive for giving to Charity B? The answer: it makes zero difference.

My point is that motive is usually irrelevant to policy proposals. Either something is likely to work or it is not, either it is a good idea or it is not, either its costs exceed its benefits or they don't. We might not know for sure, but the merits of the proposal don't depend on the motives of the person advancing the proposal.

I understand why people look at motives. Figuring out how things are likely to come out on the merits is hard work. It's especially hard work for nonexperts. I have no idea how to construct an educational system, for example. I suspect that most of the commenters on Megan's and Kevin's websites don't either. But if you have a gut feeling about the issue and can assign bad motives to those who disagree with you, that makes it much easier to simply discount what they say. Focussing on motives is thus a substitute for thinking. It's a proxy for reasoning rather than a reason.

This is a pretty good concept to keep in mind when trying to figure out why people are disagreeing with you. Most people aren't evil. If they disagree with you, it probably isn't because of bad motives. It's probably because of different premises. Figuring that out takes work. But if people are going to be able to talk to one another, they need to figure that out rather than look for motives.

I'm sure in some future post I'm going to violate this nugget of possible wisdom. But I'm really going to try not to.

Brief hiatus.

I am going out of town for a convention. That means, in all likelihood, no blog posts until next Sunday at the earliest. When I return I'm sure I'll have what to say. In the meantime, remember that the comments are open -- feel free to leave your thoughts about what I've written.

The tyranny of the visual.

We are prisoners of our eyes. Or at least I am. We have five senses, according to common wisdom: we hear with our ears, we taste with our tongues, we smell with our noses and we perceive temperature, pressure and balance with our nerves, skin and vestibular apparatus. But we absorb information mainly by seeing things, using our eyes. It's how we know what time it is, where we are, what the news of the day is and what is around us. The dependence on our eyes to mediate between our brains and the rest of the world has been increasing drastically as technology evolves. So much of our interaction with the world is on screens and paper, and the degree to which we rely on screens and paper is mounting almost daily.

It's not just technology that has created a tyranny of the eyes. To a large degree, we recognize things by what they look like and always have. Back when I was a kid I used to watch a lot of Star Trek (the original show, with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and lots of cheesy props and expendable extras). In one episode the Captain switches bodies with some woman. I don't remember the episode well enough to tell you who the woman was or why she switched bodies with Captain Kirk, but what absolutely sticks with me was my firm conviction that you can't just switch bodies and still be who you were when you started. Just being in a different body changes you. It also changes how other people deal with you. Why? Because you look nothing like "you." They have no way to deal with the person other than by treating him or her as the one they recognize.

It's not just television, either. Consider folk wisdom: "a picture is worth a thousand words." "Seeing is believing." Consider political debate: yes, much of it is done by sound bites, small bits of the spoken word that encapsulate something about the speaker. But sound bites are mainly transmitted on television - a highly visual medium. They are effective because we see the speaker saying the memorable words. We remember events by taking photographs - it's our digital cameras that we carry around with us, not our sound recorders, and we save photographs much more than sound clips.

Visual imagery is powerful. It conveys a lot of information. We can look at a person and estimate her age, her social status, her mood, her bearing. What things look like can tell us a lot about what they are: shape, size, color, texture. Chipped wood looks old. So does rusted metal. Shiny cars look new, and we can tell what model year they are by looking at them. We know who people are by looking at them, which is why movies like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" are so terrifying - the person we thought we recognized is not that person at all.

But appearances can't tell us everything. And because we are subject to the tyranny of our eyes, we often let what the eyes tell us govern our judgment more than we should. What something looks like is not the same as what it is. Here's an example. Anti-abortion protesters often wave placards bearing photos of early-stage fetuses. The fetuses look like miniature babies, with small arms and legs, and heads with recognizable though rudimentary facial features. The message the protesters are sending is: "Can't you see this is a baby? Just look at it!" It's not my purpose to comment on abortion here. All I'm pointing out is that the message on that placard proceeds from a visual-based premise: the fetus is a baby and should be treated like a baby because it looks like one. But that premise is faulty: whatever one thinks of abortion, the decision shouldn't turn on what the fetus looks like, as opposed to what it is or is not, and what the mother's situation is. Appearances carry too much weight in that discussion.

So the eyes deceive us by substituting appearance for essence. What made me think of this was an article in the Washington Post: Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin. The human genome has billions of matched pairs of acids strung along rungs of the double helix of DNA, embedded in chromosomes resident in the nucleus of every cell in our bodies. What we are takes billions of genes to express. What we look like takes up only a part of that, and much of what we look like - and what allows others to recognize us - is tied to the color of our skin. One gene mutated. One, out of billions. So much of what we are, so much of our essence comes out of that massively complex DNA. Yes, culture and upbringing and education shape us, but the raw material for the shaping is supplied by the DNA. And out of all that DNA code that creates human beings, the color of skin traces to a difference in one gene. But it's that gene that triggers our eyes.

If not for the tyranny of the eyes, how much trouble could have been saved. Just think of it - think of having the ability to understand what things are rather than what they look like. Understanding that what things look like is not what they are, but only a hint of what they might be.

Seeing is believing - but only if what should be believed is accurately conveyed by sight.

Huh? When did that happen?

"That" being becoming an adult.

I remember the first time it occurred to me that maybe I was leaving adolescence behind. I was 21 years old and was visiting a friend of mine who had moved out of her parents' house after a monstrous spat with her mother. We were both in college at the time. Not a fancy private school, or even a state school with a dorm -- no, we both went to Queens College, of the City University of New York. A commuter school. Which meant, for most students, living at home and coming to the campus for classes -- in other words, a lot like high school, only with more advanced classes and fewer rules. Oh, and also with alcohol, because back then - December 1980 - the drinking age was 18, so the student union building had a pub.

My friend -- let's call her Josie -- had rented the basement of a house up the block from the college's parking lot. She shared it with another girl who wasn't around all that much. The basement was just a big room, with a kitchen area on one side and a bathroom. I seem to remember she also had a television. I have no idea what the landlady charged Josie for the room, nor do I have any clue how Josie paid for it. I did like her company quite a bit, though, so I used to visit her a couple of times a week. A side benefit of these visits was that I got away from the prying eyes of my mother. At age 21 my patience for parental supervision was wearing very thin.

A few weeks into the semester I started going out with Karine. She was a petite little fireball, intense and strong-willed, head-turningly pretty. Naturally I brought her over to Josie's place, and the two of them hit it right off, which pleased me to no end. One day we were sitting around and laughing, just having a good time, when Josie pulled out her bag of weed and a packet of rolling papers. "Shall we?" she grinned at us. Karine gave a slight shrug. She used to be in art school and had taken acid at one point. Conventional wisdom in her art school was that it opened up the mind and increased creativity. After a few encounters with lysergic hallucinations she had decided that she was already quite creative enough. But by then the acid was already in her system, and too much grass gave her flashbacks. She didn't want to be a party pooper, though. So she looked at Josie and said, "Sure, I'll take a hit or two." She leaned against my shoulder and I reached over to take the joint that by then Josie had lit and smoked. I inhaled, deeply, and handed the joint to Karine. She took a hit and passed it back to Josie. We went around a couple of times, then Karine decided to stop. Josie and I finished the joint.

Josie's taste in music was folkier than mine, so she put Crosby, Stills & Nash on the turntable. "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" poured into the room, the falsetto harmonies settling on our heads. I felt the familiar heaviness of the high crowd the interior of my head, nudging gently at my temples from inside. I looked over at Karine. She was relaxed against me, nuzzling into my shoulder. Josie was smiling, swaying slightly to the voices and acoustic guitar. "Chestnut brown canary, ruby throated sparrow........" The warmth of friendship and camaraderie was palpable.

But the inside of my head was heavy and my thoughts were coming slow and tangled. This was what always happened when I got high. Not that I did it too often. I was more of a social toker than anything else: I did it with friends, just to party, not to be left out, not to be thought a drudge. And I had always told myself it was fun, never let myself think it possibly wasn't. After all, I would be a drag, stodgy and square, if I said I didn't really like it. I had to fit in, didn't I? Or so I thought. Or so I required myself to think.

Until that day. The heaviness still was in my head when I heard myself thinking "You know, you don't really like this. You don't have to do this just because other people are doing it." Karine's breathing seemed warm and deep as she leaned against me. I heard my thought again, then pondered it. "You don't really have to do this just because other people are doing it."

What a concept. I knew it was true. I just had to adjust to it. I had never thought of refusing to go along with the crowd before. Maybe it was time.

After a while the high passed. We bid Josie good night and I drove Karine home. That was the last time I got high. And it was the first time I realized that I was leaving my teenage mindset behind - I didn't have to do things I didnt' really want to do just because they were "the thing to do." If the mark of adulthood is makng your own decisions and not just running with the pack, that was when my adulthood started.

What's interesting, though, is that even today I don't really feel like the proverbial "grown up." Oh, I certainly do have the job, the family, the responsibility. I sit behind a desk and speak on the phone, make decisions, give advice, write important-looking letters and do all those other adult things. I even look like an adult. But in my head I'm still 22. The slight paunch, receding hairline and increasingly creaky joints have done nothing to advance my mental age. I'm 22 in my mind and so far nothing has happend to change that.

I wonder, though, whether I'll have another moment like that one in Josie's apartment, when it will suddenly dawn on me with crystalline clarity that yes, I'm almost 50 years old and that life isn't in the future -- it's here, right now, every minute passing by precious and irreplaceable. Would I even want to understand that other than intellectually? Isn't the 22-year-old's prospect of future possibilities and things yet to be discovered much more exciting, even if it means less respect for the passage of time? Not that there isn't much to be said for savoring every moment, but perhaps doing that also brings with it the end of optimism, and some resignation about where one is in life and how much it can change.

I'm not sure I want it.

Come look in my cranium.

Ideas.

I have ideas. Sometimes they come to me while I'm out on the street, heading to whatever appointment I have, which always seems at the moment extraordinarily pressing. Of course when that happens I don't write the ideas down and they get lost. Other times they float into the alert segment of my brain while I'm sitting behind my desk at work, trying to get done whatever has to be done that day, which also seems at that moment to be extraordinarily pressing. Usually I don't remember them once the task I'm really supposed to be thinking about reimposes itself at the top level of my awareness. Those get lost, too. And the ones that appear while I'm on the exercise machine, perspiring through my attempt to stave off early death through regular cardiovascular exertion? Those certainly get lost. Who the heck remembers what they think about when they're in the gym?

If I had a reason to remember these ideas I probably would. The one common thread they all have is that when they come to me I simultaneously think to myself, "hey that's neat. I wonder if anyone else ever noticed that before!" In my more megalomaniacal moments I delude myself that these are true insights, observations about how the world and people work that are totally original to me and would gain me great recognition if only I could remember them. Once rationality reasserts itself in my addled mind, I realize again that I'm just one guy, certainly nothing special relative to the millions of others in this great city or the billions on this planet -- so what can I have to say that would warrant other people's attention? But who knows? Maybe I really did think of something new. I have no way of knowing unless other people tell me that yes, that's a pretty cool idea and no, they haven't heard it before.

This blog is my attempt to find out. If I commit to writing stuff, I might just remember things so that I'll have material. If I actually do the writing I'll find out whether anyone else is actually interested. Who knows? Maybe I'll learn something. Maybe you will. We won't change the world, but we just might find that every now and again, by participating in this blog we can get that little spark of pleasure from being engaged intellectually. Or maybe we really will change the world. It's nice to think it's possible.

So: welcome. Please feel free to comment on my words of dubious wisdom. All I ask is that you be polite, refrain from personal attacks and behave like a civilized human being. Also, I won't tolerate any form of bigotry around here. And since Plato's guardians aren't around right now, the only guardian of this blog is me - so I'm the one to whom it falls to decide what is polite, what is bigoted and what is civilized. If policing that starts to be too much work, I might decide to close comments, but that would really be a shame because part of my objective in doing this is to learn from all of you.

Let the conversation begin.