So many people

 

It was fine when I stayed put in Minnesota for the most part. The world seemed large, but Minnesota sort of spoke to the rest of the world. It acted as a microcosm. And even the travel we took from there hearkened back to that place as a kind of knowable reference point. Minnesota was an analogy.

Then we tore up all the flimsy roots and flung ourselves off once again into the wide world. And there are so many people. Japan was crammed, absolutely crammed, and not afraid to go out and show it. It's not much different here. People are everywhere!

You will not understand how many people there are and neither will I. Yesterday I was talking about all the people taking pictures of the beach here. Everyday ten thousand new people come here and they take a picture of the beach.

I ask you:

Where do all these pictures go?

I follow ten stories, a hundred stories every day, I have a thousand, and I write just one. But do you know how many stories there are?

534,565,109,336,298,004,288,776,364,987,303,219,997,136,399,001,002,697,142,314,688,887,410,014,879,523,659,823,226,444,112,970,003,660,985,321,658,017.

And those are just the good ones.

The problem with numbers

 

I probably spend too much time on the Internet. With all its fecundity it seems like there would be so much entertainment there. Certainly far more entertainment than the too much TV I watched when I was 20 years old and there were but nine channels to view on my local television.

And yet, it all comes out to about the same.

Even as this thought occurs to me, and I set it down here, I am astonished. This surely cannot be so. I must be joking!

But if I look into my heart, my soul, my critical self, my pockets, and my little gray cells, without the dramatic math of nine million possibilities vs. nine possibilities, if I look at my actual experience, oh   my    god.

It is so.

It is so!

When I think of nine million channels of the Internet, surely even a single percent of that, taking the single best out of every hundred, must be excellent. But how about a single percent of that single percent! That's 900 channels of the most rarefied, scintillating, distilled to perfection content on planet earth......

.....which I just squandered two hours of my life on.

I could have been writing this.

"Is it better than nine million other things?" You might ask.

It's not a competition. A person can only do one thing at a time.

And then they feel what they feel.

The scale of things

In our world of so many billions of people, it is easy to misjudge the scale of things. 

I merely work at a modestly busy, near urban library of a vaguely largish American Urban area (the hundredth largest in the world actually- higher than I thought!). But people still regularly misjudge the scale of their interaction with us. Just minutes ago a man bypassed our efficient and easy to use automated return slot, and large check in machine, through which our team of people processes many many thousands of transactions of a great variety every day, all to come to manually hand me a book return at the front desk at the library. 

"I couldn't renew this." He said. "So someone is waiting for it and I wanted to get it right to them."

!

"Oh no!" I cried. "I will call them immediately! Thank you so much! This will be our highest priority! Can you just do me one favor?"

"What's that?" The patron asks suspiciously.

"Will you hang this "Library Closed" sign on our front doors so that we can focus all our attention on getting this book over to the person waiting for it?" 

Then I pull our fire alarm.

Actually, I don't do any of that. One reason is that I simply try not to be a sarcastic asshole. But more importantly, to our discussion here today, I don't do that because, statistically speaking, three institutions will have already been an asshole to that guy already today.

In the scale of things four is just too many.

My birthday rights

 

Because it is my birthday tomorrow I have been thinking...

In the past on my birthday I have focused mainly on myself, and on what special things might come my way because it is my birthday. But I have grown older and wiser, more magnanimous, and now I think:

What about all the other people who have the same birthday as me?

There are over 21 million of them!

I wish them all the joy in the world!

Still, 21 million is a lot of people. It is so many that one could populate one of the largest cities in the world with just the people born on my birthday. The birthday city! One could extinguish the local supplies of cake and candles there overnight! Drivers' License Bureaus would be overwhelmed. Halloween in the City of Birthday would be buried in scraps of discarded wrapping paper.  Greeting card stores would burst on the scene in mid-October, make small fortunes, and go bankrupt before Thanksgiving.

I mean, if we even had Thanksgiving there. This would be a very international city with every kind of person from every kind of place and culture. But best of all, on October 27th, one could walk around the streets of this strange new city and instead of saying "Hi." or "Good day.", one could simply say...

"Happy Birthday!"

And one would almost invariably be right.

"Wait, why "almost" right?" The reader asks.

If I had to live in the City of October 27, I would have smuggled in my wife.

I can do that. It's my birthday.

 

The better my blog posts get...

 

I have figured it out, and so I wanted to share it with you:

The better my blog posts get, the fewer the readers I have.

And the last week of blog posts around here have been dynamite! They have been smokin'! Which is why there is just you reading here today. Not that I'm complaining. You're great.

But it may help explain why today's blog post is how it is.

I need to lower the quality before it's too late.

God is always right

 

Today I was reviewing some of the history of Clerkmanifesto. Perhaps my recent, unmarked passing of the ten year anniversary of my daily posts here, sometime last week, made me nostalgic. And maybe once again I was puzzling out how, while for everything I can find to read and watch on the Internet, I do so alongside ten thousand to ten million other readers and viewers, but for clerkmanifesto it's just... us. 

Hi.

Sometimes, rolling through the past work, I wonder what it is about it. What ingredient is missing? What has kept ten years of my writing out on the deepest backstreets of Internetland, where the wind howls and the cars rust? Tumbleweeds roll by.  A baseball field tucked into  acres of parched corn lies unused. And next door to me, the things you thought were on the Internet, but couldn't find no matter how hard you looked or thought should be there, play backgammon with each other and never answer the door.

But there is a classic joke, and I prefer a joke here:

A great flood is coming. A man waits in his house. A car drives up to the house. The driver calls out urgently to the man "Quick, get in the car. The flood is coming!"

The man replies "No. Thank you. I trust in God."

The car drives away. The waters rise. The man goes upstairs as water fills his house. A boat arrives at an open second floor window. "Get in the boat!" The boat driver says. "The waters are rising!"

"No, thank you." The man says. "I trust that God will save me."

The terrible flood rises some more. The man climbs onto his roof as his house is subsumed. A helicopter flies over and a rope ladder is lowered down to the man. "Grab the ladder!" The helicopter people cry.

"I have faith that god will save me!" The man calls back.

The helicopter flies away. The waters rise and sweep the man off the roof. He drowns. He is dead.

In heaven, he demands to be taken to god.

The man says to god "What happened? I had absolute faith in you, and yet I perished in the flood!"

God replies: "What? I sent a car. I sent a boat. I sent a helicopter..."

And so I imagine dying, long from now, and going to see god. And I will say "First of all, thank you. Second of all, what was the whole deal with Clerkmanifesto?"

And god will reply "I sent a car. I sent a boat. I sent a helicopter..."

And I'll say "You did?"

And god will say "Forty-seven N. Oak Street, Buffalo, New York?"

And I'll say "No. That wasn't my address."

And god will say. "Ah well. Let us not dwell on these things."

Meditation

I have started meditating.

In preparation to start meditating I read some books and other things about it. I ended up settling provisionally on a method in which I set a timer for about 15 minutes and then count backwards from one hundred. I focus myself in the numbers, rooting in the present, and then with each breath slowly count down. If my attention wanders I start over again at one hundred.

The lowest I have gotten to is 98. 

But I have done this hundreds of times. 

Between 99 and 98 I may even have written this entire blog post in my mind, in tiny pieces.

"No, my darling. We are not writing blog posts. We are seeking presence and peace."

One hundred.

Ninety-nine.

Your World Cup Semifinal Predictions!

 

I have not really been brave enough to predict much in this World Cup. As I said, no one knows what's going to happen and then after it happens it was oh so obviously going to be just that. 

At which point my prediction, for example, might look a bit... silly.

But then I saw someone sort of famous in soccer predicted a semifinal of France vs. Morocco.

Not very many people predicted a semifinal of France vs. Morocco.

People were all like: "This guy is amazing!"

The only problem is that all his other guesses were completely wrong, so wrong as to be outright wacky. I think maybe the other semifinal is supposed to be Ghana vs. Cameroon.

Ghana and Cameroon are not in the other semifinal. They were drummed out of their groups unceremoniously.

Though they certainly gave it a good go!

Anyway, my main takeaway from all this is:

Who cares?

So here are my very authoritative semifinal predictions:

France 7

Morocco 0

Sorry Morocco, but Morocco is like a heroic kid at a giant dam. It's been an amazing feat holding back the force of all that water, but it has built and built and built, and now, when it finally bursts, it's going to be ugly.

Croatia 2

Argentina 0

Of course I desperately want Argentina to win, but my superstition that predicting Argentina's loss in this space will always work out for the best, causes me to not dare alter my path.

If I'm right about these predictions we will revisit them. If not we will forget all about it.

More big super fun pictures!

 

Sometimes when I have an almost random assortment of pictures to show, I don't know how to title my post. Having already titled, I don't know, three or four thousand posts I don't want to repeat myself. But I also don't want to look through all 3,500 post titles just to be sure I don't. So I've decided to simply throw a lot of adjectives at the title figuring that will probably randomize it enough.

This is to explain why none of these pictures are particularly "big".

Sorry big fans.

Today I've got maybe an eagle or two, a dead bird picture that one of the eagles ate the heart of, perhaps in order to have courage (it'll make more sense when you see the eagle), and a few detailed shots of local graffiti so massively digitally manipulated as to make them into fair representations of the abstract art of the 1950's. 

I hope you have super big fun!

There comes a time

 

There comes a time in everyone's life where they must write a blog post. For some people this happens but the one time, or even a little bit less. For me it has happened 3,100 times. So maybe I don't accord it the same gravity with which I once did.

On the other hand maybe I always accorded this little gravity to my blog posts. Maybe my blog posts have all the gravity of the moon! Maybe they

bounce

as if

in 

slow

motion.

Or, wait, get this: Maybe blog posts are like base hits in professional baseball. Did you know that it is widely considered that if one gets 3,000 hits in a major league baseball career one is guaranteed a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame, baseball's greatest, most sought after honor? 

Maybe now that I have written over 3,000 blog posts my legacy is assured, and I am merely burnishing my legacy.

But the wise reader counters:

Ah, but a base hit on the moon has so much less value, for the ball travels farther at the slightest touch.

Let us think on this a while, as the ball flies.

Obscurity

 

As I write, the brilliant Lionel Messi is about to play his significant 767th game for his football club, Barcelona. This will tie him with a great midfielder named Xavi for the most games ever played on this historic team.

Coincidentally I am today working my 7,670th day at my less historic library, which is exactly ten times as many days of work! Also my work days tend to be longer than Messi's games. Although on the plus side they less often leave me covered in bruises.

My 7,670 days are, however, not anywhere close to a record for most days worked by someone at this library.

I have no idea who does hold that record.

Absolutely no one is keeping track.

Coronavirus in the driver's seat

 

 

 

 

Did you know that more than 38,000 people die in car crashes in the U.S. every year? This is roughly the same number as the annual average deaths by Coronavirus over the last seven years. 

Yes, I know that Coronavirus only started this year, but look:

 

2014: Zero Deaths

2015: Zero Deaths

2016: Zero Deaths

2017: Zero Deaths

2018: Zero Deaths

2019: Zero Deaths

2020: 248,000 Deaths

Seven year average of deaths: 35,428 deaths per year.

 

Yes, 35,428 is not 38,000 but trust me, the math will work out perfectly on this before too long, and then it won't match because it will be too big going the other way.

"But, hey, what's the point of all this?" Someone out there is asking. "Are you suggesting that people die all the time in car crashes and we don't ask people to stop driving! So maybe we shouldn't be asking people to stop dying of Coronavirus!"

That wasn't my point, but fair enough: 

Anyone who wants to die of Coronavirus is free to do so.

But if they cause anyone else to get sick or die along with them they will be subjected to...

A fine!

Yes, our Coronavirus rules are very strict here in America.

I have been noticing that coronavirus safety is a lot like driving. The people who are going much faster than you all seem completely crazy and reckless. Whereas the people going much slower than you are all overcautious hazards of the road. 

I think this driving analogy is the perfect analogy for Coronavirus as long as we add the following details:

1. Everyone who is driving in this scenario has had three stiff drinks before getting in their car.

2. There is a major ice storm going on at the time of the scenario.

3. While there are some mildly suggested speed limits we don't have any Highway Patrol.

I don't mean to paint such a grim picture though. It's looking very good for unusually effective vaccines being on the way! Plus, it should be noted, since the dawn of humankind, less than one person a year has died on average from Covid-19. 

And, most importantly, at press time, we're all still alive.

 

 

Statistics

 

There is a 92% chance that you will love reading this post. It's about statistics. Everyone loves statistics.

Sorry. I meant: 54% of all people love statistics.

I mean, historically they do. Currently only 32%  of people love statistics, although it is trending slightly back upwards from the recent low of 27%.

Oh! Update. There is now an 81% chance you will love reading this essay. 73% of respondents in a recent poll said that they like it "very well" so far. But that number dropped to 64% when we started talking about the poll numbers on this particular post in real time. There is a three in ten chance that people will get irritated when you start analyzing how they feel about analyzing how they feel.

So that checks out.

Also seven in ten people object to "too much math".

That's 70%! Which, if you filled a warehouse six yards deep in 4mm ball bearings would-

What's that?

Oh. Our most recent poll indicates that we have dropped down to only a 32% chance you will love reading this post. That's down 58 points in just eight short paragraphs. Experts are attributing this to "the math hit effect". They are also attributing it to the fact that only 31% of people love statistics. This is down a point from earlier in the essay when 32% of all people were just crazy about statistics. Experts don't know what to attribute this to. "We're baffled as to why most people don't like statistics." This is according to 97% of Statistical Analysts in a recent poll.

The good news is that after our last paragraph we jumped 21 points to where there is now a 53% chance you will love reading this post!

The bad news is that the reason the approval indicator climbed to 53% is because so many people stopped reading this post. 

So to improve our chances that you will love reading this post we need to increase the number people who quit reading this post.

Wait, that can't be right!

And yet, apparently, 61% of the time it is!

You can't argue with statistics.

Or math.

Or, generally speaking, my blog posts. 

Which is why I so enjoy writing them, 72% of the time.

Chances

Trying to reassure myself on a recent morning I noted that the most reliable odds of a Biden victory placed his chances of winning currently at 87 percent. 

I'd take an 87 percent chance at almost anything. For instance it was unseasonably cold out, but I needed to go for a walk because I haven't really been getting enough exercise. I looked up the weather on the Internet to see what the precipitation chances were. Yes, it was cold, but the chance of snow (Snow! In mid October!)  was listed as just 5 percent and soon dropping to 0 percent. The conditions of my walk seemed assured. A one in 20 chance is laughably small and so I grabbed my camera and headed out for a journey through my neighborhood.

At which point it started snowing. 

Lightly.

It was a fluke, I thought. And it would fade as the chance of snow dropped down to its impending forecast of zero.

But it just snowed harder. 

And my point in all this is that I will take an 87 percent chance of a desired outcome anytime and be delighted to do so. But that doesn't mean that 13 out of every 100 times freezing fucking ice won't fall out of the sky and bury and kill everything.

But don't worry. If such a thing happens, against all the odds, then surely Spring will one day come again. 

There is an 87 percent chance of that.

Difficulty modifiers

I am not a big fan of sports in which success or failure is based primarily on judging. I'm not saying that gymnastics or ice skating or boxing or dressage can't be thrilling to watch, but when the bulk of the decision about who won comes down to a panel of judges I know I'm in for an exercise in frustration. The thing is, I don't generally agree with people. Even my fervent passion for football is hardly likely to outlive the miracle of Messi. The more games of it that I see the more games I find that come down to the entirely mercurial foul and penalty calls of the referees.

Nevertheless there is a brilliant element in the completely judged sport of Olympic Diving that I long to have applied everywhere, where anything is judged: 

Degree of Difficulty, or difficulty modifiers.

My badly interpreted version of it is this: Any good diver can execute a fairly perfect dive and get a good base score, but as twists and somersaults are added to the dive, as it becomes more and more difficult to do, that base score needs to be multiplied by a higher and higher number, 1.2, 1.3, 1.5, and so on. A perfect double twist dive must be worth considerably more than a perfect swan dive. And thus too, theoretically at least, if a diver executes a dive no one else in the world can do, but does it less than perfectly, it is still a winning dive over a dive pretty much anyone can do that is done flawlessly.

Of course this brings up all sorts of those same judging problems in all those sports that I hate. But are these problems worse than the fact that someone making a bad cross into the box in football that ends up bouncing off an opponents face into the goal is worth exactly the same number of points (one) as a backheeled pass to a teammate who brilliantly chips that ball in a soft loft over the goalie's head for a goal? 

I actually don't know anymore.

The thing is though that I find this difficulty modifier more useful outside of sports, like in the arts, which are already evaluated by less objective standards, having no goals, runs, or baskets to tabulate. You may have been dazzled by Joaquin Phoenix's performance as The Joker. He even won an academy award for it. But for any real student of difficulty modifiers there are many signals that he did not deserve to win any particular awards for the role. The fact that no fewer than four other actors in 55 years have played the same role to wild, fawning, and amazed acclaim suggests that the difficulty level of playing The Joker is insanely low. There may be no role that makes an actor look more brilliant, with the possible exception of playing a developmentally disabled person. I'm not saying Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, Mark Hamill, and Joaquin Phoenix aren't excellent actors, or that they didn't do a great job in all their respective, legendary, fawned over versions of The Joker, but that should be a "great job" times one-point-zero. Put any of those actors in a romantic comedy, where virtually no actor has ever won an academy award for best actor, and where incredibly few are ever lionized, except maybe by me, and then see what they can do. 

But don't forget to multiply it by 1.7 first.

The business of upvoting

I have only recently discovered that a curious, even ridiculous feature of my work email at the library is that it is possible to upvote emails. So someone sends around an all staff email like "A box of DVD cases seems to have gone awol in the delivery. If you see it around please let me know." And there is a little thumbs up near the top right of the message where I could, if I so desire, click. 

One upvote.

Someone liked it!

In my exhaustive research for this post I learned that not only does it show how many people liked an email, but it even shows who! I feel like I've discovered a little universe here, with an emphasis on "little". Not many people seem to take part in this upvoting feature. Or, fairly speaking, maybe almost everyone does, but most people can't find any message they quite like enough.

Still, I've learned a few things from the votes. For instance the head of automation tends to get a couple upvotes on his messages, even when they're dry as can be. One of them is always some mysteriously random name I've never heard before. No one upvotes our branch manager, which makes sense I guess. It doesn't seem like it would suit him, all that fuss. The Circulation Manager gets upvoted only by people outside of circulation. I think they're trying to cheer him up.

The biggest number of upvotes I've seen on any all-staff email is the one we got from the library director wishing us a Happy New Year. The upvoters on that email were exactly who I'd think they would be, a more aloof, ambitious group. I was not inclined to think well of any of them. Well, actually, one of them was okay because I found in my research that that person upvotes pretty much everything by anyone.

I think from now on I'm going to cc her on all my messages.

New decade

File this one under "Numbers".


I'm here to talk about the new decade. Or, specifically, how one can, excitingly, use the new imminently arriving decade to make things seem much longer, bigger, and older than they really are. For instance I am inclined to sometimes see it as pretty impressive that I have worked at my library for 25 years now. 25 years? Ha, screw that! As of this coming January second, I will have worked four decades at this library! That's a lot of experience. And as to my being 55 years old. Forget it. I am seven decades old now, or I will be very soon. Sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, aughts, teens, and twenties.

Although I confess all that prodigious age is making me a bit queasy. Nevertheless let's try and just roll on blithely through as we enter into this being a two decade blog. Two decades of blogging. Wow. Although while we're doing that we should keep in mind that this "decade" stuff is pretty small change. Which is easy for me to say, after all:

I have two centuries of writing experience.

Numbers for number's sake

A couple weeks ago I hit a small milestone; 2,500 blog posts. That may not seem like such a notable amount to you, but to me... well, it didn't seem that notable either. So I didn't mention it. 

Then, today, I was upstairs at my library shelving and I wondered what I would write about.

"What will you write about today?" I asked myself.

Out of nowhere I thought:

I have now answered that question 2,500 times. 

Do you know how much 2,500 is? 

It is a quarter of a myriad.

What does one do with a quarter of a myriad?

I like to put them in little stacks and admire them.

As soon as I have another few quarters of myriads that's just what I'm going to do.

The forest of threes part three

In my first piece about three we discussed how things come in threes. In my second piece about three we discussed how things come in threes. And I'm glad you read them. I'm glad you stuck with me. Because this is the culmination, this is where it all comes together, this is the third piece about three.

Which you must admit has an elegant resonance to it.

If only I had some idea what it could be about.

In the forest of threes: part two

Yesterday we learned that everything comes in threes.

It's amazing. Everything does indeed come in threes, because, you know, as soon as you have something, anything, you can pretty well group it with something else, so long as you're willing to apply any effort to it, because everything has something in common with something else. And once you've done that bit of work you can always find another one to complete your set. So that's three, which is the number everything comes in. And then if there's an obvious fourth one that you can't avoid it's just a matter of time, with that many, before another two come along and you're on safe ground once again. Whew!

But what if there's a whole bunch of stuff all at once, way more than three? Well, it merely means that you're not grouping things correctly. A simple illustration can be made with colors or clouds. We can sit here naming colors or clouds for hours and never get to the end of it. But they're just iterations of the three colors. Red, Yellow, Blue. And the three cloud types. Cirrus, Cumulus, and Stratus. And the reason there are three colors and three clouds is because there are three of everything. Just three. Only three. Three.

And for my third proof that everything comes in three, well, for the life of me I can't think of one.