2017 May 16^th

Today we have a change from the din of disaster that is any chronicle of the Trump administration… so we revisit Dr Guru from “And Yet Again…” He is smart enough to be apolitical. I hope you enjoy the change; it’s temporary.

                                       Dr Guru   

Interviewer:  Dr Guru, I’m having trouble with the expression, “The glass is half full.” Isn’t the glass both half-full and half empty?

Two men buy the same stock; it goes up fifty percent and they each sell half of their holdings to insure some profit. The next week the stock continues its climb. One man is disgusted that he sold any of his holdings; the other is delighted with the increased profit on the shares he still owns.

 Of course the glass is both half full and half empty; all glasses are. Fortunately, each of us can choose the way we see the glass and that has little to do with how much is in it.

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Interviewer:  Do you think that humans will eventually become extinct?

Dr Guru:  “Eventually” is quite a long time. If they don’t become extinct they will be unusual indeed. Of all species that have ever lived on earth 99.9% have become extinct. Humans seem to be doing their best not to be an exception. In spite of the fact that we are the smartest species that ever existed, we may still become extinct as a result of our own stupidity.

Interviewer:  Speaking of stupidity, why do we sometimes have trouble retrieving memories?  This seems to get worse with age.

Dr Guru:  If you look at a picture of the brain you’ll see it has great long ridges and creases on its surface. The ridges are called gyri and the creases sulci. As you get older the sulci deepen and the little memories, when you try to retrieve them, fall off the gyri where they are stored and plunge into the sulci. Once they get down in those crevasses they are very difficult to retrieve. Sometimes, if you don’t try to retrieve them, they will climb out on their own and be available to you. Or, you might try to remember something similar and since memories are chained together, the similar memory may pull the absent memory up out of the crevasse.

It may help to be aware that you don’t remember the event you think you remember. You really remember the memory of that event from the last time you remembered it. That’s one reason why memories change over time. Each time you remember something, it is not the memory of original event at all.

Interviewer:  Dr Guru, are you sure about all this?

Dr Guru:  Of course not!

Interviewer:  Dr Guru, what do you think of travel?

Dr Guru:  I’m all in favor of it as long as I don’t have to leave home.

Interviewer:  How can you travel without leaving home?

Dr Guru:  If you live at the equator, you are traveling a thousand miles an hour due to the earth’s rotational speed. People at the equator have to hang on to trees to keep from being hurled off into space. Many would prefer to live at the North Pole where one simply rotates once a day to stay in the same place…much less stressful. Of course the earth not only rotates on its axis, it also travels about sixty-seven thousand miles an hour going around the sun. I like that because I love speed…especially when I don’t risk a speeding ticket! There is a problem though.

Interviewer:  What’s that?

Dr Guru: If we hit anything while going sixty-seven thousand miles an hour there would be hell to pay. Seat belts wouldn’t help.

Interviewer:  Sir, you don’t seem to take anything seriously. You really don’t, it’s scandalous!

Dr Guru:  You’re wrong about that. I take thermodynamics very seriously; I take the Maxwell equations very seriously. Let’s face it, entropy is no laughing matter; nor is the equation for gravitational attraction; nor the ubiquity of the inverse square law. None of these are occasions for humor. Well, maybe entropy is worth a giggle but that’s as far as I’ll go.

Interviewer:  Dr Guru, don’t you find it curious that we have months with different numbers of days? Oh yes, and why a seven day week?

Dr Guru:  The seven day week derives from the Judaic-Christian Bible which claims God made the earth and everything in it in six days and rested on the seventh. Of course no one believes that was six twenty-four hour days so there is some dispute about just how long God was occupied with this task. I think it’s interesting that in spite of cultures that are hardly Christian and others that hate Jews all to pieces, a few of those still use the Biblical week and a calendar developed by a Catholic Pope.

Interviewer:  You must have a solution to all this.

Dr Guru:  In the words of one of our new immortals, “you betcha.”

Interviewer:  I can’t wait.

Dr Guru:  Of course you can!... I’d keep the Gregorian outline. After all, it’s accurate to about eleven seconds a year, not bad for an old Pope. Inside the year I’d play around. I’d eliminate the months; they serve no purpose except to force school children to memorize their order and the number of days in each of them, a scandalous waste of play time. We’ll just number the days of the year instead. 

As far as the seven-day week is concerned, there’s nothing sacred about it. (OK, my bad.) I’d go for seventy-three five-day weeks. Of course these would no longer be weeks. A week is defined as a seven-day period. I shall call these five-day periods pents, derived from the Greek word for five. This has the advantage that we will have seventy-three pentends instead of just fifty-two weekends. Moreover we’ll have only a three-day work pent. We’ll name the work days, Beginwork, Midwork, and Endwork. The pentend days will be Fundayone  and Fundaytwo. What do you think of that?

Interviewer:  I think you’ve sipped a cog somewhere. If we have only a three-day work pent what happens to the gross domestic product?

Dr Guru:  You sound like an economist, gross domestic product indeed! It’s clear why Thomas Carlyle called economics the dismal science. Why is no one ever concerned with the gross domestic happiness? That’s much more important!