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Imagine you’re inside the best coffee shop in the world, standing near the entrance. You’ve just finished an expertly prepared Flat-white paired with a vanilla-frosted biscotti. Outside, it’s a wonderful bluesky day; you’ve not a care in the world. No niggling responsibilities. No plans or expectations for the hours ahead. Nothing begging your attention. Only you and your thoughts (same thing), and unbounded sensory freedom. You pull open the door and hold it for a young woman coming in. She may be a student at the university, given the hardbound textbook jutting out from an unwieldy backpack slung over her shoulders, sloshing about there as she tries to slip past you. The two of you exchange polite smiles. Once outside, you think to yourself, what the hell, I’ll walk down to the bluff, look out onto the lake, see what’s going on. You take two steps on the sidewalk and then it happens, you hear a loud Thud, unlike any sound you’ve ever heard before (and will never forget), followed milliseconds later by the Screech of rubber on pavement. You look up and spin around. From a distance of maybe two hundred feet, you see a human being crumpled on the ground beneath the front bumper of a black Suburban. Or was it a Tahoe? Either way, an older model SUV, and black. It was partially into its turn when it struck the pedestrian; you see the front left blinker flashing orange. You see the driver push open the driver’s side door – she’s a woman with shoulder-length grayish hair, her face is in her hands, she appears frantic. That’s about as much as you can make out. The horror goes down in five seconds – it takes that long for the brain to record this new state of the world. You stand there unable to move, a feeling welling up inside you, unlike any you’ve felt before. A half minute goes by and you hear sirens in the distance, people gather at the scene. Your brain fires particular motor neurons, activating essential muscles, the direct cause of you turning to walk away. The brain does this all by itself. You don’t tell the brain what to do, its function is automatic.

Later, blocks away, a police car pulls up alongside you, an officer flags you down. She hops out and asks if she might speak with you. You (your brain) agrees. Long story short, your brain (using your bio-linguistic faculty and referring to itself as “I”) reports: Yes, I witnessed the aftermath of the collision. And yes, I am certain I saw a woman (the putative driver) step out of the driver’s side door. Continuing, your brain gives the officer a description from its memory. The officer notes your name and contact info and asks if you might testify to this in court, as a bystander to the accident. Yes. You never are called to testify, but you learn days later from a report in the newspaper that the driver was a man. So you lied to a police officer? Of course not, your brain reported (literally put words in your mouth) the information it had stored in its memory. But that information gathered at the scene of the collision, specifically the input that streamed in from the outside world (via the visual transduction system – your eyes) was imperfect, noisy. You (the brain’s host) were physically two hundred feet away, there was a high humidity haze in the air distorting the view. So the distorted view of the organism exiting the SUV matched (albeit poorly) a female human being (woman), a model of which your brain created and had continuously updated and improved all the years of your life. So later, your brain reported to the officer what was, in fact, a false state of affairs. In other words, the brain was mistaken (but not broken). And most folks would add: an honest mistake. All this is consistent with modern neuroscience and human psychology.

When the output of your heart is in error, we say your heart may be broken (literally). A broken heart, we do not ever say, has lied, or even that it has made a mistake (not in the psychological sense of the word, b/c the heart is not that kind of organ). Renal insufficiency is also not a mistake, it’s a broken kidney (one or both). The heart is a pump, it outputs blood; the kidney is a filter, it outputs filtered blood; the liver is a detoxifier, it outputs bile – the brain is a thinker, it outputs thoughts. Insufficient or poor quality output from an organ is evidence the organ may be broken. The brain’s thoughts are expressed through speech and writing. If a brain was trained on noisy inputs, it may have stored non-true things about the outside world. If later on the brain is challenged to report what it saw¹ (e.g. SUV collision with pedestrian), it may report (output from memory) a falsehood about a past state of the world. That brain (person), we would say, was merely mistaken. On the other hand, if our bystander to the collision had (somehow) come to know that, in fact, the driver was a man, and later expressed to the officer that it was a woman, then that brain (person), we would say, spoke a lie. By analogy, then, such an output from the brain may indicate the brain is broken. Maybe not irreparably, but broken. Maybe we call the pathology: ACI, Acute Cognitive Insufficiency.

We think of the brain as a kind of computer. When some input to a traditional computer represents an error, like when an input to a program represents something false, we don’t say the computer is broken when it subsequently outputs an error. No, we call that a (software) mistake, as above. Likewise with the brain, its thoughts (e.g. beliefs) are contingent on the quality of its inputs. So the bystander to the collision, had he somehow gotten less noisy inputs (maybe instead of walking away he moved closer and saw, more clearly, that the driver was, in fact, male), his brain would have, we can assume if it were not broken, stored the correct value: driver=man.

There is no evidence for an Intermediary Spirit that “edits” our brains’ contents (thoughts) before they are spoken (or written). All the evidence we have thus far, as to how a brain works, reveals that it is nothing more than compartments of cells which communicate with each other via signals (chemicals) called neurotransmitters, along fibers (nerves and motor neurons) that innervate the muscles, causing them to contract, and in turn make us move. Including, for instance, a writer’s hand, or a speaker’s mouth (or the bystander’s feet). That’s it. These signals evidence no reliance on any Spirit for their transmission. And you’ll find no Conductor lurking along the motor neuronal pathways, “switching the tracks” as it were, altering the message before it reaches the muscles (including the ones required to speak). None, no evidence of ghosts. Though it may seem like there is an “I” in the brain, there’s no evidence for this. Human beings don’t will a given future to occur, they merely experience the future after it arrives. Repeatable evidence for this claim indicates the time between the two can be as little as 10 milliseconds. And like every other organ in the body, the brain doesn’t function through our will, no, it functions all by itself. And will continue to do so as long as glucose is sufficient, no disease is present, and its sensory inputs are of high quality, that is, they represent the truth about the material world. None of this is controversial neuroscience; only a Dualist would be disturbed by it. The next time a materialist tells you that “you” don’t think your own thoughts, you might concede he’s right.

Which brings me to re-consider moral judgement. Ask a million people if lying is wrong, and I expect a million people would answer yes – save some outlier examples where most of them would agree lying is excusable (maybe even advisable). Then go ask your favorite AI Chatbot – “What is the biochemical basis of a lie” – and the answer may not surprise you (although you’ll likely find it disappointingly incomplete, as I did). What I didn’t understand, though, until I asked, was just how much is known about the cellular biochemistry involved in storing memories in the brain. It’s beyond the scope of a blog post to describe the anatomy of neurons and neurotransmitters and all of that, but suffice it to say, memories are thought to be represented in the brain by “plastic” patterns of synapses and associated biochemicals of activation (neurotransmitters, ions, etc.).

OK, so if a brain has represented, in its “synaptic configuration,” a memory corresponding to a supposedly true thing about the material world it had gathered from (noisy) input: say, driver=woman, and later was prompted to recall that memory (Officer asks: driver=man OR driver=woman ?), but instead reported through the speech faculty of its host, a false memory (driver=man), then how the heck is that even possible? Chemistry doesn’t “lie.” How does a brain activate the mouth of its host to speak a false memory? The brain must be broken (somehow), no? If the output of any other organ in the body were abnormal, we’d likewise suspect that the organ was broken. If a person lies, i.e. his brain expresses a false memory, then it seems logical that brain may be broken. Before we’d conclude that, of course, we’d rule out the possibility the brain was merely mistaken (hazy view: driver=woman).

Now here’s the moral rub: As I’ve pointed out already, if a person speaks a falsehood, it might be because he stored a falsehood (some input was in error). We don’t morally condemn him for it (we say it was an honest mistake). But when a person speaks a falsehood, and we later find out his brain misrepresented the truth value of its memory when speaking it, well then that person, most people would agree, committed a moral error, and such a person is a bad person. But doesn’t it strike you as strange to pardon one “synaptic configuration” in the brain, and not another? If a person’s heart or liver is broken, we don’t morally condemn the person². No, normally we’d be sympathetic, we’d want to see the person get the appropriate treatment to restore proper function. So shouldn’t we feel similarly sympathetic toward a person with a broken brain, a proven liar? If you accept that there is no “I” in the brain intercepting thoughts and misrepresenting them through the spoken word, then isn’t it weird to hold a person morally responsible for lying?

By the way, the intro story above was a lightly fictionalized account of a personal experience I had many years ago in Milwaukee at a coffee shop near the University.

1. The retina and optic nerve are considered part of the central nervous system and are directly connected to the brain.

2. A person I knew a longtime ago, nearly a teetotaler herself, had moral contempt for people on the waiting list for a liver transplant, specifically those who’d admitted that their own livers were diseased due to alcoholism.

A leisurely neighborhood walk with The Dog the other day. We rounded a corner near the top of the bluff to take the trail we always take that winds down to the sea. Then suddenly, what’s this? We heard a number of crows – not enough to make a murder, though maybe an attempted murder – going off in the trees. This was more than a lover’s quarrel, for sure, these crows were pissed off. We stepped beneath the branches to get a closer look, saw a few of the crows, but we couldn’t see what had gotten their dander up. Turns out there must’ve been five or six of them, all pointed and cawing at the same object. But what? So we continued on, toward the trailhead, to get a better look from a different perspective. Ah ha! there she was, perched, undaunted by all the racket, and appearing calmly supercilious. I figured it was a girl because the girls are bigger than the boys, about 1.5-2X bigger. I had my camera with me, with the Tamron 28-200 lens attached. A “budget” lens, as experts refer to it, but when a patient Great Horned Owl is your subject, pretty good glass, I must say. And in less than ideal light at that. Followed by a little post-processing on the computer, and voila! Click (or tap) to embiggen, maybe you’ll agree.

And then I waited. How long would it be before she tired of my presence, and the crows, who hadn’t stopped their cawing the whole time I was there. Not long it turned out. Happy with my captures, I started my retreat from the forest floor back to the trail to rejoin HW and The Dog, when, after a few anxious head bobs, she suddenly lifted off her perch. I hadn’t switched off the camera, in fact it was still on and in auto-focus mode, and set to a suitably fast shutter speed (1/800). I pointed, pressed and held the AF button, then pressed the shutter. It all happened in 2-3 seconds.

Bam!

Just magnificent predators.

Minutes later, we were about halfway down the trail when when way off in the distance I spotted her silhouette, she was perched on a branch in a different tree, backlit by sunlight filtering through leaves, already drawing the attention of a new murder of crows. And, from what I could tell at that distance, still appearing unbothered by them.

Vulgar. Insipid. Grotesque.

Sure, but without question deliciously contemptuous as well. And, I thought, artfully rendered. Though I might have substituted a trash bin for the shelf that the golden commode rests on. Just to give the display a little more derogatory oomph. But that’s a minor quibble.

I have a quiet disdain for political signs of any sort that patriots erect on their front lawns. But I’m happy to call out exceptions.

I’m not sure what the dino mockup adds to the overall meaning. Maybe a leftover statement of resistance, from a time long ago. Like when King George version III demanded fealty of the American colonies to his lordship, circa 1775. Yard signs around present-day Massachusetts might have read: Not Your Servants – Piss Off You Odious Turd

There are many good reasons to like this book, which I recently finished listening to while walking The Dog this morning. Although I have a special reason for my affection for this work. Near the end of the book I found myself completing the thoughts of the main character, Meursault, before the narrator completed speaking them into my earbuds. I think this is because Meursault, given the circumstance he finds himself in, responds to the prison chaplain in the same way I expect I would, or would like to think I would. In my head I was literally completing Meursault’s sentences. And this wasn’t a case of me unconsciously reading ahead, because I wasn’t reading words on a page with my eyes, I was hearing the words with my ears. I remain quite curious and fascinated by this modality for experiencing art.

Again, this morning, I was in a dream-state walking down the middle of the street like I were a Solipsist. Unconsciously holding tight the handle of a retractable leash while Chloe flitted about, tethered at the other end. Proving that Solipsism is wrong, I snapped out of it when another apparent homo sapien and her canine appeared suddenly. Relieved I was not, in fact, a brain in a vat, I tapped my right bud to pause the narration. In this mode the buds still attenuate ambient noise, so barely was I able to hear her announce herself as Lisa, and this is Luka, I believe she said. The woman had Asian features, Luka did not. She told me she’d recently moved to the northwest from somewhere in the southwest, and, I suppose to make light conversation with a stranger, added that she’d hoped Luka would adjust to the change in weather. I instantly supposed it was Lisa who was the one feeling trepidation about the change in weather, but then projecting the concern onto her dog. Then, just as instantly, I felt a tinge of regret, that if I was wrong to attribute the concern to Lisa, then I may have maligned Lisa in my mind, so I said to Lisa, I’m sure Luka will get along just fine up here, and, welcome to the neighborhood. In a sweetly squeaky voice she said, Thank You! By now the dogs had become tangled up in their leashes so I reached down and unclipped Chloe. Lisa kept Luka leashed. The two dogs played for a while. Lisa and I were out of things to say so we watched the dogs play and said nothing more to each other. Eventually, I put Chloe back on the leash, she pirouetted and gave Luka a swooshy-tailed goodbye, and then we moved on. As we walked away, I re-tapped my right bud to resume listening to the last pages of the book, Mersault’s final lament. The sky was blue, the air was warm, we were under a mile from home.

…

We’re on the road again tomorrow, out of the country, the three of us destined for a multi-day adventure in a foreign land. HW is provisioning us as I write. Let no man put asunder.

A woman in Anchorage who owns a pet-sitting service had a bumper sticker on her Jeep that I was especially fond of: “Support the troops, not the policy.” I was talking with a close friend recently in email. He and I mainly agreed on what Memorial Day remembrance should be about, and not about. He mentioned the Vietnam war, and the [miss-attributed] harsh criticism too many people in this country at the time had for the returning troops from that “conflict overseas” (recalling John Prine).

I replied that this miss-attributed criticism heaped on returning troops was by people who didn’t understand the kernel of wisdom in that bumper sticker. Especially where their criticism targeted conscripts (~1/3 of all troops who fought in Vietnam) – I mean, how stupid and insensitive were those people. A man is forced to go to war to face possible death, or else face jail time, and he’s the target of your scold?! Talk about blaming the victim.

I proposed that maybe Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day should be collapsed into a single holiday of remembrance. If the point is to be grateful to the men and women who made a huge sacrifice to protect our freedoms, then let’s remember them all, both the fallen and the one’s fortunate enough to have returned home alive.

Or, keep the days of remembrance separate, as they are now, but maybe follow up Memorial Day with a companion celebration of raucous contempt for past leaders who got us into foreign wars, frequently on false premises (looking at you McNamara* and Bush), that had nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the freedoms of individual Americans. Call it: Anti-Jingoism Day. So that future Americans should never, forget, the folly. Give all Americans Anti-Jingoism day off from work, except for employees of Faux News and other like-minded hawks – their punishment is to write on a blackboard one thousand times the words of that bumper sticker.

* Hat-tip for the confession of folly in his memoir

If you’ve come here to read the Galapagos adventure write up, click here

I spoke with a white man at the Miami airport. We were in the gate area together waiting to board a plane for Seattle. He was seated in a row of chairs opposite from where HW and I were seated. Slouched in his seat, possibly weary from travel, he had a calm demeanor. Probably in his 70s, his face was splotched with sunburn. Our eyes met. Where you been, he asked. The Galapagos Islands, I beamed. HW and I had returned to the states two days earlier, but I was still in a dream-like headspace, all pain surrendered, as one feels during the waning half lives of a narcotic. And so as a way to share my surplus of lightness of being, and to offset the ennui of airport layovers, I winked at the man, smiled, and added, you know, to confirm that Darwin was right. The man wore a t-shirt sporting an ad for a beach-side bar in Puerto Rico. His travel companion was wearing the same t-shirt but in a different color. She was a black woman, nestled in her seat and pressed against the chair arm that separated them. Her bangs didn’t move when she raised her head slightly to regard me with a kind of stern look, which, all I could think in the moment, may have been triggered by her hearing the word Darwin. Naturally, I assumed they might have been to Puerto Rico recently, and perhaps like HW and I, were on their way back home. Of course we now know he wasn’t right, the man said. His companion shot him an approving look, then looked back at me and smirked. No, I don’t know that, I said, returning his volley. I felt HW stir next to me. His companion squirmed uncomfortably in her seat and glared at me with mercurial eyes. Right away, a convenient set of assumptions about me seemed to occur to him. He looked at me pointedly, chuckled dismissively, and said, well, where did we come from do you suppose? We? You mean like me and you? Yes, Man, where did Man come from, he insisted. Oh boy, we got a live one. Just then HW piped up, shot him a glance and said, you got him going now! From a distant ancestor, something resembling but not the same as modern apes, I said. At this his companion curtly shook her head no, her eyes still fixed on me. Then, like an insatiable child… and where did the ape-like things come from, he said. Gee, I don’t remember, Lemurs maybe… you know there’s something called the evolutionary tree. You can trace life back to the first amoeba or whatever. Sure, he said, and where did the first cell come from. Ultimately, from a self-replicating molecule, I said. His companion continued to shake her head no, the immovable bangs glistening under the natural light beaming through the tall windows behind her. Yes, I said, molecules that catalyze their own reproduction, it’s called the RNA-world hypothesis. You ever hear of Lee Ross, he said. Who? Wait, he’s a crackpot, isn’t he, I said. Maybe I have. He leaned back hard in his seat, as if to retreat from his conviction. Well, I’m no scientist, he said, but Lee Ross is an astrophysicist, and he says there is no way life could have evolved from no life. You could look him up. I am a scientist, I said. It’s a straightforward lab experiment to show that certain molecules self-catalyze their own reproduction. People around us began to listen in. Couldn’t I put the same question to you, I said, where did God come from, if that’s who you suppose created life? He paused and looked at me, as if to concede I may have had a point, but I couldn’t say for sure, and with that his countenance changed, like me he appeared to acknowledge how preposterous it was that two strangers in an airport should be discussing the greatest mystery in the universe, and leaving it unanswered, in an exchange that couldn’t have taken more than sixty seconds. Then the call came for early boarding and the man stood up and helped his companion into a wheelchair. A few minutes passed and I spotted her in line, the man standing behind her with his hands on the handles of her chair awaiting the gate agent to scan their boarding passes, still staring at me, warily.

The sea was variably indigo blue and tourmaline green. Everywhere we went was like a phantasmagorical zoo sans cages or bars. On land, the naturalists asked that we not stray from the approved paths; in the water that we please resist the urge to touch. This never felt like a limitation. The ever present animal life was often within arm’s length, or swimming so close to our masks it wasn’t clear who came to see who. Countless species of birds were everywhere. Albatrosses with eight foot wingspans knifed through the air like stealth jets. Boobies performed acrobatic nosedives into the water to catch fish only they could spy. Black male frigate birds soared on updrafts, showing off their radiant orange gular pouches. The girls looked on, ranking their displays. We were voyeurs to two Swallow-tailed gulls copulating. Two turtles too. Yellow-crowned herons hunted ubiquitous Sally lightfoot crabs that moved crabwise among the lava rocks like rainbow toys in a dream. Fancy flamingos scoured the floor of a backwater lagoon for food, oblivious to our presence. Penguin pairs played on the rocks and slid on their bellies into the sea. An undaunted mother albatross rose and leaned back to reveal a most beautifully colored egg she was incubating. So close she was, I imagined she was inviting me to take a turn. Near sunset large groups of iguanas would arrange themselves non-randomly, and stare motionless at the setting sun like they were members of a cult. Brilliantly-colored lava lizards flourished on every island we visited. Darwin’s finches flitted among the trees, singing. At night fifteen foot sharks circled our yacht, drawn to the bait fish drawn to the boat lights. We used inflatable rafts to shuttle between the islands and the yacht. One day dozens of dolphins joined us. We ate like royalty three times a day and drank juices made from fruit I didn’t know existed. We cozied up in the lounge and devoured lectures on island geology, marveled at the art of ancient volcanoes. We were smack dab on the equator over five hundred miles from the nearest continent, yet we had WiFi. It was eighty degrees or better every day. The night sky was like living in a planetarium. Not a day passed when I didn’t want to applaud. One night we left the yacht and slept in a tree house. The next day we visited the Darwin research center and cried like children when told the story of Lonesome George. We visited a plantation and learned the proper way to taste coffee. We made friends and were rocked to sleep by shallow, long period waves. On the penultimate day of our adventure we took a long, solemn walk on Chinese Hat island where I’m pretty sure I saw HW tear up. It was all that overwhelmingly fragile and beautiful.

I am reading with my ears The Road by the late Cormac McCarthy. I imagine this is similar to a blind man experiencing art through touch. Obviously there is more than one route into the brain for the outside world to take. I wonder, though, how the story feels different, sentence for sentence, as it is interpreted by the auditory cortex versus the visual cortex. The narrator was born to read aloud this book. I mean the haunting timbre of his voice, especially as the narrative segues between its spare points of view, is just excellent. Sadly, as with McCarthy, the narrator is no longer with us.

The book feels like a tocsin for the times. There’s an ever-present sense of doom as the boy and his father make their way south through apocalyptic ruin. I read somewhere that there is a renewed enthusiasm in the country for prepping for the end of times. Especially by the monied class. Some dude built an elaborate underground bunker made of reinforced concrete in the middle of a man-made lake. The bunker is accessible only through its “roof”, the only portion above the surface of the lake, which is connected to the shore by a retractable drawbridge of sorts. Except the lake isn’t filled only with water, it can’t be, because as it encircles the roof it functions more like a moat that can be set on fire with the click of a button on a remote. Surely the intention here is to keep the cannibals at bay and the bunker inhabitants uneaten.

In 2007 The Road was announced as the next novel to read by Oprah’s book club. “Enjoy this hellscape adventure ladies!”^* Oh to have been a fly on the wall at that discussion group.

* Specific gender demographics of the Oprah book club are not available, however it is thought to be composed of predominantly women.

Consider Alaska’s southeast strip of land, a modern landmass including Alexander’s Archipelago so vast that if it were overlain on the eastern seaboard of the continental US would have entire states disappear beneath its footprint. My words here exist in utter obscurity. I am not well known for being well known. Consider a single stone, no larger than your thumb, existing on the margin of a short spur of sandy asphalt that leads from a parking lot to an unremarkable Delaware beach, mindlessly kicked off the path into some anonymous mound of windblown sand by a flip-flop wearing child as she recklessly bounds from the car toward the summer sea. The child is at once young, green, and uncaring. There the neglected stone will lay, undisturbed, pretty in its own right among a trillion other stones strewn to equivalent anonymity up and down the shoreline. It is not as if the stone will exist as a stone forever, though, even as its hardbound constitution has rendered it durable. The stone has seen a lot in its tens of millions of years of existence. A mere shadow of its former self you might say, sure, but whereas once it was a boulder big as a house that could squash a car whole, it was helpless when faced with a two mile thick slab of ice coming for it. Finally subsumed in a frozen cocoon, the boulder was transported over tens of thousands of years, then ignominiously abandoned on an anonymous beach in a place come to be known as Delaware. There to be further remodeled and diminished by the unthinking forces of wind, rain, and sea. Fast forward another ten thousand years or more, and it finds its belittled-self disrespected, arrogantly kicked aside by some late-comer organism. That’s what timeworn, abject anonymity feels like.

The AmericanPeople^® woke up to learn that, consistent with its zeal to make great again all things, the executive branch of the United States of America, on behalf of its hard-working taxpayers (the ones who bankroll the military industrial complex), ordered big bombs be dropped from big planes on The Hooters in Yemen.

Hooters?

Yes.

Now, don’t go taking me literally, but do take me seriously. Or I may be joking. Or I may be exaggerating (only people who don’t love me would call it lying). And even if it is “lying,” so long as you get your tRuth across the goal line it’s not like anyone with the attention span of a fruit fly is going to detect the end run, amirite? tRuth lies on a spectrum. Don’t believe me? Google it. It’s true. The tRuth is like a mental health disorder. Or it’s like pornography, you know it when you see it, so long as you don’t gawk too long and overthink it, it’s ok. Like that horror in Ohio a while back. A neighborhood dog was spotted on an outdoor barbecue, medium-well. Or was it a cat? No matter. And it doesn’t matter if wasn’t either. The tRuth is that anyone who would do such a thing is a horrible person. Sometimes the tRuth has to go in search of its own evidence. But a tRuth teller can’t always wait for that.

Naturally, this taxpayer clicked the link to learn more as to why the executive branch ordered the bombing. And here’s the craziest thing – I was redirected to a page with a report on the bombing, which included Ads for Hooters. To know me is to love me. And if you love me you know I’m being honest. Hooters! Our executive’s reasons for bombing The Hooters in Yemen were, of course, spotless and tRue. No problem there, and I’ll get to that. But those Ads, they just kept refreshing themselves and distracting me. Like you’re reading sugary drinks are bad for you while being coaxed to click an Ad for Coke. I mean it does make you wonder, right, how do they do it? You’re on a page reading about how bad X is and up pops an Ad for X!

Digression: Quite a while ago I had the temerity to apply for a job at a FAANG company. The screener I spoke with described the role the company was recruiting for. He said it would involve creating software to process a bazillion user clicks on Ads his company had hosted on a bazillion pages all over the Internet. My mission, were I to accept it (were he to offer it ;-)), would be to build a real-time system to process this continuous stream of user clicks on Ads, and then order the Ads according to their probability of popularity. And then use the result to prioritize which Ads to place on the page visited by new users. The theory being that the most popular Ads were more likely to be clicked and stuff purchased, so the company could make more money. The screener directed me to an interactive online whiteboard, then asked me to “sketch” out the program I would write to accomplish this task, as he looked on.

I failed. That’s right, thirty+ years of programming computers, two advanced STEM degrees, plus a head for math, and I failed. I failed because I am a slow-twitch builder of things. Like there are people with fast-twitch muscles and people with slow-twitch muscles. The former excel at activities that require explosive bursts of speed sustainable for a short period of time, whereas the latter tend to be slower but endurable. Think the Hare and the Tortioise. I am the Tortiose (goo-goo g’joob). FAANG companies don’t hire tortoises, they want hares. The screener was very gracious, I can tell you know what you’re doing but maybe this isn’t your particular “problem space?” That, and my heart simply wasn’t in it. We thanked each other and hung up.

So while those Ads for Hooters were insistently flashing at me, begging I click, I thought back to that interview and figured the company had eventually found its hare. Instead of an up and comer at the company I’d been diminished as its victim. The least I could do now was resist becoming another data point in the hare’s statistical model. So I didn’t click on an Ad. Take that! I did, however, continue with the article to learn the tRuth behind the bombings. Turns out the executive’s second in command had convinced the executive of the deviant nature of the business model at The Hooters in Yemen. It had gotten so out of hand in fact that twenty-something girly-girls, dressed in skimpy, skin-tight orange shorts and tank tops, had “weaponized” their breasts! They would position themselves on the shore of the Red Sea and on command lift their tank tops high over their heads to expose their naked breasts to the captains of US-flagged cargo ships! Wanting to get a closer look, naturally the captains turned to port, unfortunately at their peril, as the girly-girls did this very near a submerged offshore reef known for tearing massive holes in ships, even double-hulled ships.

On hearing of this terror, which the executive assumed was the tRuth – and even if not so what – he ordered the bomb bays filled and commanded America’s finest be dispatched from the airfields in Saudi Arabia to carry out the mission. Doubleplus, the pilots were equipped with helmet cams so the murder and carnage could be live-streamed, which it was, to a hi-res monitor placed on the executive’s desk, where his aids said he viewed the horror with a contemptuous smirk while downing his lunch of two McDonald’s quarter pounders and large Coke.