Third hand

I am a strong supporter of the evolution theory and I am certain that this theory correctly explains the emergence of complex life forms on Earth. Yet, there is one aspect that I find puzzling and hard to explain, and it is not what we can see but rather what is conspicuously missing. Here is a small example and it concerns a third hand - an organ which should be abundantly present. For simplicity let us concentrate on vertebrates - close to 60,000 species including mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles and  amphibians. All have symmetric bodies and the organs that appear on the symmetry plane are relatively small such as nose, penis, beak, tongue, tail, etc. Under the hood so to speak, symmetry is gone with single organs like liver, heart, pancreas, etc thrown randomly into the body cavity.

Third hand would have been a great gift from nature for just any vertebrate, yet none has it!  For some silly reason  nature nixes  a development of a flexible appendage staring somewhere on the breastplate and ending with six or eight cute little fingers. The advantages for humans are completely clear - texting, eating popcorn while playing video games, scratching - third hand would have been a great help. For countless everyday tasks third hand would provide support and efficiency. I am not sure whether it would be helpful in sports other than boxing, car racing (for changing gears), climbing
and hand to hand combat. Certainly humans with a third hand would live longer and have tremendous evolutionary advantage. This is how a small bump on a chest of a Neanderthal man should have grown bigger and over several hundred generations evolved into this much needed organ.  Quite frankly the lack of it can only be attributed to un-intelligent design, particularly when so much of the evolutionary energy was devoted to perfecting often useless tails.

The benefits for hand-less animals would have been far greater. Consider birds with their sloppy and un-hygienic eating habits throwing away most of what they try to eat. Equipped with a third hand they would elegantly feed themselves with their head raised and on a lookout for predators. Fish would not have to use their mouth to dig in the mud, and cleaning their gills would have been a triviality. Furthermore, a third hand would have allowed them to groom each other, hopefully leading to the development of a more intelligent
biological community.

Are there any drawbacks of having a third hand? It is hard to think of any but for humans there might have been a small problem of what to do with it when it is not used. Should it hang like a weird tie or should one nonchalantly wrap it around the neck? Perhaps it should roll into a ball, or wrap around the waist? No matter what, I am certain that  we would have figured it out.

The lack of a third hand was bothering me for quite a while. I mentioned it to my wife and she immediately came up with a theory which sadly made me realize that greater forces might be at work. The main evolutionary disadvantage of the third hand is that it provides ability for endless and biologically useless sexual gratification. In other words, it is conceivable that Nature kept providing us with the third hand but the owners foolishly did not produce enough offspring and this part of the Tree of Life kept on drying up.

Diversity

These days our institution is quite concerned with diversity and
broadening participation. Recently we had a presentation devoted to a
single question: Why are there so few women at the
top US mathematics departments?

Popular culture identifies three factors that contribute to individual's success: perseverance, will power and hard work;  talent and natural abilities; and supportive environment.

American mythology puts premium on hard work and natural abilities, while modern thinking (as in Gladwell's book "Outliers") points to the environmental factors.

Clearly a tenure at Math Department at Harvard requires plenty of talent, hard work and as much support as one can get. Yet I will argue that environmental factors alone can account for the observable disparity between men and women at the top academic tier of mathematical sciences, and one does not need to look further.

In this context environment relates to a myriad of stimuli, some positive and some negative, that one receives while pursuing professional  goals. Each of these stimuli is not significant, and they do not raise to the level of being a behaviour changing factors, yet collectively they shape one's direction, particularly over a long period of time.

The main point is that the overall effect of the environment seems to be exponential. For example, in   a large group of students learning a difficult subject one will generally observe that certain percentage of them will drop out after one semester, similar percentage after another semester and so on. In other words, the rate of change is proportional to the quantity that is measured which means that  the attrition rate follows an exponential curve. In such situation, even tiny difference in the way one interacts with the environment leads to a dramatic difference twenty years later - a time it takes to climb near the top of the ladder in mathematical sciences.  Another simple example illustrating this phenomenon is as follows - suppose that getting  tenure is akin to getting certain number of heads in a long sequence of coin tosses (with asymmetric coin). If the probability of getting a head in a single toss is larger than some threshold value then the probability of success is very high and it goes exponentially to one as the length of the trial increases. On the other hand, if the probability of success is lower than the threshold value then the odds of success go exponentially to zero at a rate that depends on the difference between the threshold value and the number of trials.

How would one test the effect of the environment?
We need to find an activity that is somewhat similar to doing mathematics, but where it takes much less time to reach super-star status and (ideally) where the environmental factors are more gender blind.  Mathematicians may be upset with this choice but I think that spelling is the right comparison and it proves the point.

Spelling is a curious activity which has a well organized support system. No US kid can escape being pushed to the maximum level that  their ability and patience will allow. Spelling talent is easily recognizable, training is straightforward and the very ability to do super-human spelling is not
intimidating. Year after year the group of top 100 US spellers has the numbers of boys and girls, minorities, poor and rich kids, etc., that conform to the anticipated frequency. Statistics that deviate from the expected values are mostly genetic - having super-spellers in the family, etc.
Inescapable conclusion is that both ability and will power to be a super-speller is distributed in the population quite evenly and even-handed system aimed at identifying top performers and eliciting from them several years of hard work to reach the finals of the  National Spelling-Bee works well.

Back to mathematics - the path to the comparable status in mathematics takes about twenty years. Mathematics is far more intimidating than spelling and performing at the higher level will not automatically get you in touch with likewise gifted people. Quite the opposite, mathematically gifted kids endure years of boredom at school and often question their own sanity. Assessing mathematical talent and nurturing it is not easy and in this respect the system works moderately well only at the graduate school level. Overall the path is long,  steep and arduous.

The educational system favors men when mathematics and other sciences
are concerned. It is not a strong bias but rather a persistent push
which gives a sense of swimming against the current. Women are
constantly discouraged from pursuing mathematics - by teachers,
families, friends and media. Because of the gender imbalance there are far
fewer role models and support networks. On the path to mathematical
pantheon, one has to go through graduate school and one or two
postdoctoral positions. While men can move their families with relative
ease, women often face the phenomenon of an immovable spouse. Dream job requires tremendous level of accomplishment and related commitment of time and energy. It is safe to say that at a time these efforts are needed women have more on their plate than men.  To get a job one needs a number of publications in top journals. These days a lot of work is collaborative and it is fairly common that in cases of joint work involving  male and female mathematicians, the men's work is often viewed as more substantial.   Professional success of female mathematicians that happen to be  good looking and attractive often brings another type of speculations - yet another small insult that is painful and difficult to confront.

There is much more to say here but the point is perhaps clear - climbing to the top of mathematical profession is just a tad harder for women than for men. Those who succeeded devoted approximately half of their life to it. Just having a few extra hoops to jump through makes a lot of difference in this endurance race.

If one accepts this argument then there is a natural follow up supported by Bayesian statistics. If one succeeds against the odds then with high likelihood there is  a compensating factor.  Consequently, women at top math departments were more driven to succeed or they were simply better mathematicians than their male counterparts - both possibilities easily supported by anecdotal evidence.

Literature and Mathematics

Just recently I had an opportunity to witness a Ph.D. defence in comparative literature. The location was a well known university famous for trend-setting in the humanities and sciences alike. Its ascent to ivy-league status was arrested only by the location, where the acute problems of modern society are clearly visible within a half mile of the campus.
The Ph.D. candidate was was well prepared, professionally dressed and only odd looking shoes with heels looking like tree stumps may have betrayed a wilder side of her character.
The defense was a small gathering, four committe members, a handful of fellow students and friends and an older couple, who were most certainly the candidate's parents,  cowering in the corner.  The first question concerned the basic idea behind the thesis, its structure, origins and the thought process that led from the beginning to the final product. Given the open format of the proceedings I was assuming that the procedure is sort of like professional wrestling - lots of body slams, impressive chokes and eye gouging but in the end nobody gets hurt. Perhaps it is so, but nevertheless it felt like a real cliff-hanger.
The subject of the thesis was a comparison between two national literatures and the basis for it was several specific examples spanning several centuries. The candidate made an opening gambit by attempting to put in question the basic premises of her work, She indicated that the work was perhaps inconclusive, main claims were not supported by research as strongly as she would have liked it, key similarities between both societies may have been superficial, and so on. At this point, the father of the candidate sitting in the corner started viciously chewing on his fingernails providing much unneeded soundtrack. However, the committee took all this in stride. They put down their prepared questions and embarked on a forceful defense of the project, which at least in part must have been based on their input. Afterwards, the clouds parted and what followed was an interesting 90 minute discussion illuminating scientific methods of the field. For a complete outsider like myself, I was very impressed with the methodological issues - careful definitions of the terms, establishing the mechanism for the selection of sources, building support for conclusions based on findings, and ultimately explaining the link between two subject areas. The discussion moved slowly through establishing intellectual foundations for the work and surveying the landscape that came to view. All four committee members represented different countries and different national literatures so there was some tendency to make comparisons that were beyond the scope of this Ph.D. but in the end the work stood on its own and offered several interesting directions for continuation. At the conclusion, and after a short recess, the new Doctor of Philosophy was announced.

My own expertise, acquired late in life, is in evaluating and assessing projects in mathematical sciences and I was quite surprised at the intellectual rigor of this work in literature. There is a stark contrast with the quite fuzzy and vague ways in which modern mathematics is assessed. The projects that I am looking at are forward looking, exciting, beautiful, compelling, or alternatively they are narrow in scope, solid, incremental or unrealistic. When the fundamentals of what is being proposed are very precise and well rooted in the overall mathematical landscape, the  uncertain and speculative assessment of the outcomes invites soft and imprecise language which offers hedging against error in judgment. Apparently quite the opposite in literature - the subjectivity in which art is received  and the multitude of ways in which literary works can be interpreted asks for a precise methodology and analysis that takes things down to their fundamentals and dissects the literary works into bits and pieces of comparable nature.
It appears as if in terms of presence of precision and analytical thinking both literature and mathematics yield  a zero-sum game when the product and its evaluation are considered jointly. If it was indeed the case, rather than a superficial observation, it would support a post-modernist view that in the end truth is a cultural construct and regardless of the field of study the overall level of the scientific discourse is tied up to our cultural baggage rather than the intrinsic demands of the field.

Three functions

One, two, three, four - by certain age counting to
hundred, thousand or some other number is a well established
skill. Next, in the first grade, comes addition, and year later -
multiplication. By the end of elementary school we conquer
exponentiation. There is a reason why these operations appear in this
order, and to see it lets make a short mathematical detour. Consider
operation of composition (or stacking up) and look back at addition,
multiplication and exponentiation. In these terms, counting, that is
repeatedly adding one, is the simplest one. In order to compute x+y
one needs to take x as an input and repeat (compose) adding one y
times. To get xy we start with x and repeat addition y times, and
finally for x^y we begin with x and repeat multiplication y
times. This of course can be continued forever leading to even more
complicated operations, but we may not need to go any further. Note
that in this approach the role of x and y are quite different. While x
is an ordinary integer which is an input, y tells us how many times
some operation has to be repeated. A computer scientist would say that
these are different data types. Consequently the obvious fact that x+y
is the same as y+x is not that clear in this setting and the fact that
x and y can be interchanged is no longer true for exponentiation and
beyond. This approach points to a mathematical hierarchy and this in
turn indicates increasing complexity level.

I will try to picture the universe as seen by these three functions. The underlying mathematical hierarchy will imply that these pictures have also increasing complexity and the next one subsumes the previous ones. Each next one will offer a bigger picture and it will provide understanding of the
one below which cannot be accomplished there. This can be viewed as a
mathematical analogy similar to being in dimension one, two, three and so on.

To avoid confusion we will adopt anti-platonistic or phenomenological view of reality which seems to be quite well rooted in the current physical theories. Rather than seeing the reality as a
collection of instantiations of some primordial ideas (ala Plato), we will assume that reality is well defined and quite concrete. However, only small fragment of it is accessible to us and furthermore,
abstract ideas are tokens that we use to communicate our thoughts about it. Consequently, as individuals we can live in quite different worlds, and see the reality quite differently.

Additive World


Additive World is rather flat. It is populated by various quantities and it does not give us significant tools to compare them. Most numbers have units attached to them and it is not easy to sort it
out. We have trillions of dollars of national debt, 10% unemployment, hundreds of microsiverts of radiation from broken Japanese nuclear reactor, and so on. Each number has a song to sing but it all adds up to a lot of noise. In the end, we have only that much capacity for retention of this information, and not much use for it.

Additive World is also static, or at least it does not change in a predictable and quantifiable way. Like everything it evolves and changes slowly. But it carries us through these changes without meaningful control or understanding of these transformations. We can sense the difference and long for "good old days" but the basic fabric of everyday life is more or less constant. It is very possible that Additive World is what was meant for us because it makes us part of nature and guarantees stability.

The main survival tool in the Additive World is memory, and in the evolutionary scale the ability to produce offspring which pays attention to their parent's lessons. With very limited ability to control, predict and craft the future, most energy is used to draw from the catalog of past experiences, individual or group-wise. Having a large repertoire of standard behaviors gives an obvious advantage.

Media and advertising cater to our additive side and throw information at us without requiring or wanting us to process it. Internet, which is heralded as the expansion of human mind, creates a overpowering torrent of data. Citizens of the Additive World are not well equipped to handle it.

Living in the Additive World does not obscure the complexities of the reality. However, complex phenomena cannot be dissected and analyzed at this level. The fact that birds can fly is no different from the fact that Superman can fly - both were gifted to their recipients
without their participation or consent. These and similar things can be acknowledged and taken advantage of but they cannot be fully understood.

On the other hand, the lack of ability to explain things in the Additive World is matched by the lack of ability to ask good questions. In fact in the Additive World which is populated by most
living things there is no cognitive gap at all - they ask no questions and seek no answers. It appears that at the moment humans are the only creatures that can move on to the next level.

Multiplicative World

This is Arcadia of scientific revolution, and the picture of the universe which is responsible for the current state of affairs. Even though Babylonians and Greeks knew quite a bit about multiplication,
the understanding at the level that I have in mind is due to Newton. Calculus embodies the essence of the Multiplicative World. Its logo is a zigzagging function with maxima and minima
clearly mapped out. That is right - a function represents some physical process, placement of maxima and minima carry out nearly complete description of it, and calculus is the technology to find all
this information.

Of course there is much more - Multiplicative World is a world of quantifiable change. In this world plain numbers have meaning. If you divide the anticipated outcome of plan A and plan B
then this number is telling us something and allows to make choices. In the Multiplicative World we can compute all sorts of cool things, build theories and verify them, and visualize the future
before we make it a reality. When our predictive power fails, as it sometimes happen, we can still postmortem the failures to see what we missed.

Concept of probability and randomness makes its debut at this level, together with all sorts of statistical tools. We can quantify uncertainty and deal with situations where too many things get in a way to be precise.

Complicated phenomena are very well explained in this world. Celestial mechanics, theory of electro-magnetic interactions are cases where three laws or four equations yield almost complete understandig of physical reality.

The Multiplicative World is a world of action, it gives a mindset of a conqueror. It is a reality where you shoot first and ask questions later. It is almost certain that it represents an evolutionary blind alley as its main product is extremely efficient yet compartmentalized thinking
subjugated to interest of an individual.

It is not only the technological revolution that has roots in the Multiplicative World. Experimentation with social systems of last 400 years are direct results of it. Marx said "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." This is perhaps the Multiplicative World at its extreme - intellectual arrogance and sense of invincibility that easily leads to mayhem and destruction.

Exponential world

This world is dark, gloomy and not well understood. Very few people live there and I can only get a glimpse of it. The logo of exponential world is a point with three curves coming out of it - a depiction of state of water as a function of pressure and temperature. The curves represent phase transitions between different states e.g. gas vs liquid. This is a much more complicated and general picture than a function with maxima and minima, although it includes it as a very special one-dimensional
case. A phase transition is a more complex change than passing through a maximum or minimum and we do not have good science to describe it. There is a great deal of mathematics that needs to be
developed to deal with these questions and only some of it exists at the moment.

I would say that Darwin was the first citizen of the Exponential World. Theory of evolution unravels phenomena that do not belong to the Multiplicative World and cannot be adequately explained
there. Cosmic inflation proposed by Guth is another such phenomenon. Both explain phenomenally well lots of very fundamental questions yet most people do not understand neither theory. Perhaps macroscopic manifestations of quantum mechanics belong to this level as well. Of these two perhaps only Darwin's theory has a flavor of a law of nature while Guth's theory is just a very plausible way to explain the observable.

We are more or less lost in Exponential World and our power of mapping the future is nearly gone. Not only that, even our ability to reconstruct present from the past - when all the information is given - is not that easy either. The Exponential World is circumscribed by Now and past and future seem rather irrelevant and disconnected. If in the Multiplicative World wisdom is measured by the ability to change things, in Exponential World wise are the ones who make as little change as possible.

The Exponential World is very complex, with many non-linear interactions. There are perhaps many phenomena related to non-commutativity, existence of time probably most important of them. While multiplicative view opened the wealth of possibilities, the exponential world in contrast is much more
negative - most real life processes cannot be predicted accurately andthis is a feature of complexity that appears at this level. The Additive World from the perspective of the Multiplicative World is
easy to understand with all of its inner workings in plain view, and consequently Exponential World ought to be simple from the viewpoint of the next one up. Yet, as I will argue below, our chances of gaining this higher vantage point are practically non-existent.

Phenomena belonging to the Exponential World are present in everyday life, many as artifacts of out of bounds multiplicative thinking. Market crashes, global warming, emergence of new diseases are the well known negatives, but many biological processes such as growth of a cell, phenomena in population dynamics, and so on, are at this level of complexity as well. Finally, human beings as biological cognitive machines may perhaps be completely describable at this level of complexity. The Multiplicative World handles reality extremely well within domains encompassed by various phase transitions, and it only fails when those boundaries are crossed and entirely new phenomena emerge.

The Additive World is a perception that we share with every other species, and it is based on sensing rather than controlling. The Multiplicative world is perhaps uniquely human and it gave us tools to control many aspects of life on Earth. As this seems to be a result of just few mutations - ability to develop language being perhaps the most important one - it is not
clear that our existence is an evolutionary necessity or a fluke that spells doom for us and the rest of life forms cohabiting the planet.

In any case, the Multiplicative World is perhaps the Golden Age of
Humanity where creation of abstract ideas leads to shaping of reality on a global scale. Finally, the Exponential World is the natural final step in the self-discovery as it points out to the inherent limitations.

More worlds


From purely mathematical standpoint it
would be disappointing if there was no higher way of thinking than the
Exponential world, and the hierarchy should go on forever in a
meaningful way. Perhaps it does, yet I am very dubious if human mind
can go beyond the Exponential World, and in fact whether even the
Exponential World can be fully internalized. I am quite convinced that
Super-exponential world would yield god-like understanding of human
affairs and life on Earth, and if so this is probably off limits to
us. This is because humans as species or individuals are specific life
forms that in all likelihood can be fully understood and explained
within the framework of the Exponential World. The sliver of reality
that we carve for ourselves is as complex as we are and thus it puts a
natural boundary on our cognition.

The panel

Depletion of the ozone layer, deforestation, climate change, pollution, species extinction - the list can go on forever. Changes to the biosphere became a dominant factor in shaping the life of humans, and consequently other species as well. At the same time, from the advances in modeling it became clear that humans might not represent the evolutionary high point. Consequently, in search for how to fix the planet we had to widen the net and reach out for help in unusual places. After the discovery of life on Mars and alien life forms in Lake Mono, decisions have been made to accept proposal submissions from non-human species. Our funding agency was selected to receive and evaluate these projects. Few were expecting anything dramatic, other than the complaints from those who are nearly extinct. Overall, the program is brand new and few know about it. The rules are the same as for humans, with an allowance for supplementary documents in species-specific communication form. Non-humans have to submit through US based institutions and the overhead is several billion percent of the budget. This covers the cost of translation from the native mode of communication to a form that is acceptable to grants.gov. There is a discount if one comes through an EPSCoR state but the costs of explaining what EPSCoR is to notoriously suspicious clients are prohibitively high. Consequently most non-human proposals come through one of our math institutes, which is eager to broaden its base. Proposals from other species usually demand non-human reviews but this is lagging behind. According to lawyers familiar with the issues the conflict of interest rules require detailed analysis of the entire Tree of Life in addition to "who eats who" on a case by case analysis. This is an unexpected boon for our fast growing mathematical biology program. Translation to human readable form is another area where a lot more research is needed. I include below my review of one of the proposals just to indicate the typical product that we have to deal with.

Proposal Title: Bees -- request help CCD

Review: This is a proposal from Bees and it concerns CCD (colony
collapse disorder). The project is only two pages long and the quality
of writing is very low. Even the title is barely comprehensible. Close
to 9,000 hours of video depicting bee dances explaining the proposal is
of little help. From what I understand, CCD is a species-threatening
syndrome which manifests itself in the disappearance of entire bee
colonies. Humans do not know what causes it and apparently bees are in
the dark as well. A lot of finger pointing ensues and bees come across
as real whiners. Without presenting real scientific evidence they have
the chutzpah to blame human pollution and excessive honey extraction
for their troubles. They request reviewing from turnips and passion
fruit, both plants exclusively pollinated by bees. Leaving aside the
fact that this is a clear conflict of interest, getting a review from
a plant species is in initial stages and requires several more years of research and development. Typically one gets half a page, most of which is complaining about climate change and dirty water, because plants are not really all that compassionate and caring. Anyway, bees are threatening to cut down on honey production and pollination efforts if stricter environmental laws are not introduced by bee populated countries. They mention flowers, sky, sun and other things that are not really relevant. They brag about honey being the only food item with infinite shelf life. Apparently, they were told that they should not worry since their species is already preserved on a DNA microarray. However, this does not seem to alleviate their concerns. Overall, a disappointing submission from a species that has a strong record of being useful.

Recommendation: Ignore
%end of review


This year we had several similar projects. One from chickens was really silly (although we are strongly discouraged to use derogatory language when discussing animal projects). They demanded clear cut definitions of free roaming, at least one hour outdoors for each chicken per day, non egg-laying days and so on. With market forces already pushing in this direction they were persuaded that this is not worth 50 years of egg production and withdrew the proposal.

Yet another unfortunate attempt came from yeast. The submitting institution is a small college in Napa Valley and the project is quite well put together. Although it is very clear that the proposal originates from wine makers, there is no mention of wine yeast at all. Instead the project focuses on their lesser comrades - the bread making variety. What follows is the usual litany of complaints. Apparently yeast hates to be in dried form - they find the drying process unpleasant and disrespectful. They like to be in "cubby" soft form, and enjoy being in the refrigerator with the other food rather than in the freezer in total darkness. They do not like Costco and are generally fearful of big containers. In exchange for abandoning the dried form, they propose to clean the Gulf of Mexico from the oil spill. This speaks of their excellent orientation in current affairs but panelists questioned their oil processing ability.

A truly fascinating project (which I did not review) came from
cockroaches. It started a long discussion and went well beyond what
our agency calls "potentially transformative". The proposal from roaches came through grants.gov. It was written in perfect English and submitted by a well-known university renowned for fiercely loyal and luxuriously paid faculty. Its microbiology department is rated as first in the country. The roaches established their track record quickly, although the very details were not easy to check. Their claimed to own controlling packets of stocks of many companies, including Terminix, SC Johnson  (the manufacturer of Raid) and many others. They claim to own tankers and subs that allow them to move around with ease. This all sounded like science fiction and several reviewers started ridiculing the project and claiming that it was a rogue submission originating from humans. Maybe so, but during this discussion someone noticed that facade of the building across the street suddenly started peeling off in an unusual way and we no longer were certain who is in charge.

As for the demands - roaches ask for the sub-planet, that is total control of everything that is more than 300ft below the ground level. They are willing to make exceptions for mines, caves etc, but it is clear that they do not like us snooping around. In return they offer extraction of raw materials - gold, uranium, copper etc. The process is purely biological and the stuff accumulates in the agreed upon location. The extraction occurs simultaneously in a huge volume in a process that is completely unlike human mining. Roaches also offer sequestering of CO_2 (they seem to like the stuff and need it to grow bigger) which on face value represents a potential solution to the global warming problem. Water purification and desalinization is yet another thing that they nonchalantly throw in. Even if this is an exaggeration perpetrated by fairly disgusting insects it is clear that we should consider it seriously. The project concludes with an offer to cure several diseases and then provides a little detail that indicates profound understanding of human affairs. Apparently roaches own a patent for Viagra, having invented the stuff themselves (via human proxies). They offer to put it in public domain and distribute Viagra in our tap water just like fluoride. There are few technical details - this whole section is a one paragraph really - but basically they propose to use viruses as carriers and arrange activation based on the length of telomeres in target cells (so that people below a certain age would not be affected.) This component of the proposal resonated very strongly with our panel, which consisted mostly of middle aged men. Suddenly there was a lot of support for what one female panelist later described as a fire sale of the entire planet. While our panel recommendation is not significant, and the governing bodies of most of the countries will have to approve the deal, the very composition of these bodies leaves little doubt about the final outcome. A reviewer from former East Germany who traded in 1989 his Trabant for a BMW urged some caution. Others warned about bio-terrorism and noted that roaches can equally well distribute sex inhibitors that will wipe most of the human race; after all they need us only to turn on the tap. Alas, this was all for nothing, these warnings were drowned in the collective affirmation of oncoming sexual bliss.

The final submission was massively non-compliant and in fact incomprehensible. Our friends in the Department of Defense assured us that this is indeed a proposal but that it was submitted to grants.gov by mistake. In the end, the leading theory was that this was a submission to a non-human funding agency, run by roaches by the look of it. Apparently, promises made by roaches require the collaboration of many other species and roaches have lined up their ducks up before making their offer. It is clear that there is a new sheriff in town.

Diary from the past

 Last summer while visiting my home country I came across my uncle's diary. He wrote it in the early 70's while working in the Ministry of Everything. The family story is that his career ended abruptly when the diary was left by accident in the ministry outhouse where apparently he was composing his entries. This is a loose and imperfect translation of some of these entries.

------------------------

March 3, 1971  Beets, potatoes and corn

My name is Tadeusz. I work in the Ministry of Everything, in the Botany Unit. In spite of its name Ministry of Everything is rather small. The reason is that we are _interested_ in everything,  talk and think about it while other agencies are more concerned with _doing_ things.
Botany Unit is dealing with plants. Majority of interest is in potatoes, beets and corn, but as we do not loose sights of anything that grows. Beets are the noblest plants. They are not all that popular and useful but  display huge variety and have a long history. My closest  buddies in the Botany unit work in beets, and my background is in beet farming too.
Potato is by far the most popular plant that we work with. It is a workhorse of agriculture and it is everywhere. Together with our comrades we try to beat capitalist pigs in developing a better potato!
In comparison, potato lacks refinement, color and taste of a beet and some beet people often claim that it is downright ugly. This is all silliness as our citizenry devours tons of them daily.
Corn is a third main component of our business. By volume corn is perhaps the most important product. Unfortunately it tastes the same no matter what you do with it and not very many people want to deal with it. It is used mostly as animal feed which is where it proves its worth. Corn people want to have a separate unit and many of them have a serious inferiority complex.


March 9, 1971  Flowers and Fruits (and Turnips)

I came to the ministry when my boss was hired. My specialty is flowers which is far from the core business of our unit and everybody else in the building as well. My comrades often joke that growing flowers is a capitalist folly and look at it with suspicion. However, I feel that flowers are important and I do net let myself to be frustrated about my lack of success in expanding my domain. Once a while I mention artichokes, cauliflower, chrysanthemum tea or other flower that most people are familiar with. Overall, my section has its ups and downs and I worry about the future sometimes.
Two years ago I started also working in the Fruit task force. For some historical reason fruits were linked with corn, but lately they are closer to beets. In the end Fruits and Flowers task force is plodding along under somewhat skeptical eyes of my colleagues.
My background is in flowers and beets, and I missed potatoes and corn in my educational trajectory. In my work in Botany unit I had to broaden and hone my farming expertise and hide my prejudices against corn and potatoes. By now I have been hiding them for so long that some days I wonder if possibly lost them altogether!

March 11, 1971 Dobravka

Dobravka is the most recent addition to our unit. She came from the Crop Counting group established by the Communist Farmers Association. Her expertise is in turnips, a new task force that separated from beets. Together we started Fruits, Turnips and Flowers task force and we work together on all these plants. Some comrades are puzzled by the emergence of this new task force but so far it is doing all right. Dobravka left her husband behind, but she lets herself be distracted by his frequent visits. He practices bricklaying early morning and takes part in solo bricklaying competitions once a while.

March 22, 1971  Womenfolk

Capitalist pigs keep their women at home to shop, cook and indoctrinate their piglets. This is not so in the most developed society such as ours. For one thing there is not much to shop for or with, and anybody can cook potatoes and boil  a slab of meat until it is tender enough to bite a piece off. The little ones are so happy to see both  parents coming back from work after a long day. Small gestures like lighting a cigarette for them or cracking a bottle of vodka before the evening meal puts smiles  on their young faces.

So our unit is full of women and we are happier because of this. They smoke, drink, swear and spit just like any of us. They work hard and are totally committed. In many instances they surpass us in their intelligence and drive to excel. Just to give you an example, Marusia on top of her normal duties obtained certification to operate a tractor and she is building one in her family barn! Dobroslawa, who is our immediate boss, in spite of her soft sounding name has tenacity of a Russian crack trooper and a temper of a Crimean Cossack. Just to prove her resolve she kept her husband for 20 years in a remote farming outpost. Half of this time he spent shoveling snow. As a matter of fact all women who transferred to our unit from afar left their husbands at home. Not burdened by the family entanglements they work all the time and volunteer for additional assignments. They set standards that are difficult to reach for menfolk. In contrast, all men who travel to work with us bring their families with them. Perhaps our society is not yet as egalitarian as it may be!

In summary, we have jolly good time working with our womenfolk and respect them tremendously. Capitalist stereotypes of women being feather-brained and bitchy are myths of this diseased system.



April 2, 1971  Workers and Veterans

I glanced at my last entry and my heart filled with pride. Yet I have to report that there are still problems in our society that we do not fully grasp. Just yesterday we got another directive - each of our working groups has to include three workers or veterans. This is a sad story that I have to explain. Farming is a glorious activity, and plant growing is what our society needs very much. Everybody is equally able to contribute to this task yet workers and veterans are severely underrepresented in our task forces.  Nobody knows for sure why is that but the problem is acute and very visible. Until now the quota was two workers per task force but now it is increased to three. This is a big leap forward and if you remember our Chinese comrades ten years ago you will understand that some things cannot be accelerated beyond their natural pace. Yet we struggle and try to cope, but the errors multiply. Just yesterday I brought a worker with interest in sugar beets to my fruit task force. He was mighty surprised and my colleagues in sugar beet group were not pleased either!
This is not a good situation and I hope that out bosses will let go a little. The main concern is that workers and to some degree veterans are heavily stereotyped in our society and making mistakes like that reinforces these stereotypes. We are too small to change the society and chasing too many secondary goals takes us away from our mission.

April 9, 1971 Jagienka

Jagienka is my wife and she  brought me to the Botany unit. Earlier I called her my boss and this is not far from truth. She is very smart and never gives up. This combination allows her to win most arguments. She believes that in modern society men and women should be able to play the same roles. Consequently I acquired lots of skills that my mother did not think I will need in life.  I am happier because of that. However, I still cling to obsolete and old fashioned concepts of family. Recently, I developed fondness for removing leaves from rain gutters - something that Jagienka is unlikely to pick up. It gives me a great deal of satisfaction.


April 19, 1971  Large B and small c

Beets and botany both start with B and this creates a small problem. Potato people don't care much for it and they go about their job. However corn community is very chippy about it and they want to have a little c somewhere in the name of our unit. Our new director who is a former  leader of corn growers union is restless about it. Not much can be done as these names were established by Central Committee in 1958 but it is a constant irritant and a source of tension. Corn people have a bit of persecution complex, they constantly complain about some beet farmer being rude to them, machine farming people stealing their crop seed and generally the society not caring enough for  corn or using it in some questionable ways.
I do not know what is the remedy for this. Our corn group has just three people. It is led by Gunther, the only foreigner among us.
Sweet corn is the only kind that people fancy and perhaps it would be wise to concentrate on this leaving the animal food for others to take care of. Beets and sweet corn have some passing similarity and maybe some collaboration can be established. If only the darn thing would not be so tasteless!

April 22, 1971  Tomasz, Antoni and Krzysztof

Tomasz, Antoni and Krzysztof are buddies that I hang out with a lot. They all deal with beets, Tomasz and Antoni's specialty is golden beets - a special very refined variety that is like caviar of beet farming. Krzysztof works on leafy beets, equally intricate and important. None of these are grown or consumed in great quantities but they are very visible and important. Once every four years farmers union awards a Field award - 10,000 square meters of arable land near lake Baykal. It is conveniently reachable from the populated areas by a 7-day trip on the Transiberian railroad.
The sophistication of golden or leafy beet farming reached amazing proportions. Most farmers do not know much about these types of beets and their eyes glaze over when they are mentioned. Yet, when I listen to my comrades talking about them I have a strong sense of excitement and I am with them 100%.


April 27, 1971 Sugar beet group

Most of my colleagues were born during or after the Second World War. The only exception is the Sugar Beet group whose comrades recall the First World War. This makes them a bit old fashioned but no less friendly and social. Sugar beets are very important and they have forms that are just like potatoes and some that are very close to beets. Sugar beet group continuously struggles with trying to define the boundaries of their involvement and their meetings are very lively. They shout and scream at each other but in the end they all are good friends. Over time their focus tightened and lately they claim that some of the sugar beets are really flowers and some other are fruits.  I am less convinced but for now I go along with this argument.


April 30, 1971 Potato group

Potato group is the largest in our unit and  most successful. They started as a big potato group, few years ago they sprouted a machine potato growing outfit and finally an underground farming piece. The background for this success is simple - they deal with important stuff in a businesslike manner and they  are good colleagues. Because of the importance of potato in our culture they do not need to spend extraordinary amount of time advocating and promoting. There is no need for trying to game the system either.  The best potatoes are really good stuff and everybody knows it. If we ever complain, it is that they are so big that sometimes some crummy stuff sneaks in. But potato people are good guardians of their business. The sore point for beet people is that a beet farmer grows the same beets all the time and does not have much flexibility. On the other hand the same   potato can be fashioned into french fries, can be mashed, boiled, steamed, chopped, grounded and made into a thousand of different things. Potato farmer can have hundred of different ways to peddle his potatoes and lack of success in one of them is not a fatal flaw.



May 3, 1971 Underground farming

Underground farming is a recent fad. Historically, farming and mining were viewed as completely disjoint activities. In fact miners hated plants, and farmers were not much interested in any underground activities. Yet, underground farming has a tremendous future, particularly if the capitalist pigs keep polluting our precious environment. We keep planting stuff underground and expose miners to it. It is a slow going and sadly most farmers view miners as a bit slow and unresponsive. On the other hand most miners view farmers as arrogant and lacking appropriate knowledge and qualifications. This is all annoyingly complicated. Yet, we make tremendous investment of resources in the underground farming. We have several working groups, a farming outpost and many ongoing initiatives. The farming outpost which is called a Sunless Station sits in the middle of the country quite far from any mining activity.
I can't say that we have much to show for all this activity. The yield from underground farming is rather small and the techniques are standard - plow, sow and reap. It is the setting that makes the activity exciting but for the amount of work involved it is a bit tiresome. However, the term underground farming is very catchy, and it sells well to the public. I suppose it is with us to stay for a long time.

May 11, 1971  Farming outposts

Our unit has several farming outposts. First one was started thirty years ago and it concerns predominantly beet farming. Rather foolishly they call themselves "a jewel of botany" which our management finds extremely annoying. Potato people are good sports but this facility rubs them the wrong way. I do not know what is the reason but in part it has to do with the fact that they are doing a really good job and set  high standard for the rest. Needless to say the rest has its ups and downs.
 We also have a  fairly new corn outfit and many potato stations. Some are quite good such as the facility on the coast, but others seem rather drab and uninspired.
I already mentioned the Sunless Station - our underground farming outpost. It is probably the most questionable one, as it is limping along failing to excite either miners or farmers. Their programs are inbred and the previous manager was a bit of a nutcase, but we keep recommending them to the Central Committee, as they are rather trivial to advocate for when you are dealing with people who do not care much about the details.

Anyway, the basic idea behind the farming outposts is simple. Get the farming folks together, away from mundane and boring chores of the day. Have them talk, sing and be merry and expect good things to happen.
 Initial reaction of the farming community to these outposts was very frosty. They felt that it takes away resources from the individual farming without giving much in return. Over the years a big change slowly  occurred. These days farmers are fond of these outposts and compete to visit them. With the exception of folks in the middle of the country who are not good for much anyway the outposts remain a popular destination for farmers that want to maintain contact with the community.

May 26, 1971 Little runt

One of the farming posts stands out among the others. It is quite small and it is housed in an old cement factory. It specializes in beet growing and our management is uneasy about it. I have a strong suspicion that they might want to shut it down using ideological deviations as a convenient excuse. It is sad because this little runt provides a splash of color and a breath of originality in a rather monotone landscape. This outpost is organizing its groups around a simple idea, every participant has to grow something during their stay at the facility. Of course it does not always work as expected but they have many success stories to tell.
At the same time there are many issues - they oversell their success, manage their resources arrogantly and  without following appropriate procedures, and generally do not indicate much respect in the process. They also show little interest in potato farming and none in corn. Our bosses are exasperated with them and their patience is wearing thin.



June 3, 1971  Lech

Lech was hired the same year as I did. He is a nice guy - a bit secretive and distanced from the rest of our unit but a good colleague. His real passion is to create unusual working teams, often reaching outside boundaries of traditional farming. He maintains close connection to Butchers and most of his creations involve them. Perhaps you do not know what I am talking about so let me explain. Butchers form a completely separate Ministry with the largest budget in the country. We are a meat-loving society and it shows, even though most of meat products we tend to export to comrades who are more in need. Butchers are  paranoid people who value obedience above all. Lech used to work for them and he soaked in this mentality. Most of farmers are wary of working with Butchers and any such collaboration is not on our terms anyway.



June 15, 1971  Command Center

Our society enjoys the supreme social order and we all benefit from it. Unlike capitalist pigs that treat their workers like dirt we do not have unemployment. When people come to work for the Ministry, with the exception of members of temporary  working groups, it is a contract for life. Of course, not everybody has the same capacity to contribute but we take good care of our slower colleagues and this does not create any problems. However, there is one aspect that troubles me slightly and I suspect that capitalists may have outsmarted us a little. Let me explain. Our Botany unit, together with four other units form a larger cluster managed by the Command Center.  Command Center is where all strategic thinking occurs and high level decisions originate from. The director of the Command Center is a boss of our boss and he carries his job on a four-year rotation. This is a good and well thought out system but this is also where the full employment policies clash with reality. Command Center is a terminal destination for colleagues who were once top employees but over time became less active, less smart, less liked or simply less useful. They cling like barnacles to our flagship institution and slow it down. As a result, the director of the Command Center is surrounded by misfits whose advice is shaky, judgment poor and egos inflated. Consequently, his ability to delegate actions and solicit input is compromised and the organization suffers.


June 18, 1971 Scandal

To give you a sense of the issues with the Command Center let me recall a recent scandal that rocked our Ministry and resulted in quite a mess for everybody. A high ranking party member discovered that a distinguished employee of the Command Center for a number of years was spending a huge numbers of hours praying loudly in his office and performing other strange religious rituals. Mind that our society is very tolerant of any religion and most manifestations of it are allowed in the privacy of one's home. However,  praying in public is just too much! Colleagues were incensed by noises coming from the room, correspondence with members of several churches, including some outfits in Asia, and general lack of proper  action on the part of the management. The Command Center job that was supposed to be a harmless sinecure led first to boredom and then to an insatiable religious obsession that exposed serious weakness in the system!



June 29, 1971 140% of the norm

One of the features of the supreme social system is that it aims at exceeding all targets in a consistent and predictable manner. In our case it means that the Party wants us to grow 70% of things in the first six months of the year. Since the stuff grows all the time one might think that this means that we need to do 140% of the norm every time. This is not so, and  in fact the requirement is not without merit. Yet it is somewhat arbitrary and it creates a period of hectic activity just before  the due date. Needless to say quality suffers. Dobroslawa is a chief enforcer of this rule and this is not a laughing matter. She takes making the 70% cut very seriously. She cracks the whip and prods and pushes to make it happen. In the end, it is not particularly hard to make this goal so we good-naturedly comply.
Yet, by doing so we perhaps hide and obfuscate the genuine problems of our unit - understaffing, poor working conditions, irrational workflow and more. Yet again capitalist pigs beat us with their pragmatic approach to the workplace!


July 2, 1971 Ideological purity

We have strict rules on the ideological makeup of the members of our working teams. There is an elaborate screening process and lot of attention is given to trying to make sure that nothing inappropriate comes out. This used to be done by Dobroslawa but later four more people were added to the group. It is a lot of work - proper documentation must be entered, all documents have to be screened for signs of questionable activities, and so on. Sometime one little code indicating improper ideological upbringing can wreak havoc in our accounting. Dobroslawa keeps track of all of it and she is driven not to let even a small mistake slip out.  Lately our new director declared that he wants to do all of this work by himself. This is probably not possible and Dobroslawa is quite grumpy about it. She stealthily checks everything herself somewhat obscuring the size of the problem.

Continued here.

Miami

After narrowly escaping a hurricane in Belize I arrive in Miami. I have entire day for myself and I decide to continue my vacation. Rather than a gloomy sleepover around the airport I rent a car and head for Miami Beach. My hotel is right by the ocean and I plan to blend with the local beach bums. I also plan to work as next day I go to Santiago, Chile to be on a panel. The plans for work are unfortunately soon extinguished by a bottle of sake that I consume together with sashimi for dinner. Sadly both servings are huge  but they sorely lack in quality.
Next morning is the beach time. Running is my new hobby and I take it very seriously. I put on my running gear which is very tight and with clearly visible logos of respectable sportswear companies. iPhone in an armband and earphones complete the setup. I  am clad in black from top to bottom and in spite of the fact that I have been running only for a month I ooze confidence and professionalism.
I leisurely stroll to the lobby - fuck - two individuals with beer-bellies and first names embroidered on white t-shirts sit there discussing cars. I am obviously in the wrong section. I rocket to the beach and start jogging. The pace is geriatric and in spite of the fact that it is only 7:30 it is already very hot. After half mile I remove my over-tight shirt. This increases my comfort level but  considerably lowers my beach-bum factor and unravels glaring imperfections in my physique.
I latch onto a tall old guy who is ahead of me. He is much faster but he carries at least a gallon of water strapped to various body parts which makes me suspect that his endurance is low. Indeed, after quarter mile he stops to gulp from his bottles while I zip by pretending to be as light as a gazelle. Three minutes later he catches up, his legs are at least 3 feet longer than mine. This back and forth continues for two miles. Finally I am back where I started. I run half naked into the lobby and sit on a bar chair with a glass of ice-tea. Small puddles of sweat form on the floor around me but I understand that this is an indication of my commitment to beach life. Other patrons, may or may not agree. After a while I am starting to get confused about it and my self-confidence is waning. I retreat to my room, take a shower and dress up.
The rest of the day is hard work, I sit in Starbucks and read. There is no (free) internet connection which increases my productivity by leaps and bounds. In the evening I fly to Santiago.