Science Musings Blog

The renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton will be the speaker tomorrow at Stonehill's commencement. The most recent of his books I have read is The Nazi Doctors (Basic Books, 1986), an account of the the Nazi perversion of medical science during the middle of the past century, It is a book that every scientist (indeed, evey human) could read with profit as a cautionary tale.

Not that many of us are likely to turn science to such evil purpose. In the face of the Nazi medical atrocities the mind recoils, stunned, revolted, unbelieving. The German "mad scientists" do not fit the usual hero/anti-hero dichotomy. They carried the arts of healing into inversions so terrible as to seem beyond the bounds of human good and evil.

How could "civilized," well-educated scientists have gone so far off the rails? Lifton proposes that the Nazi scientists managed to cope with their crime by a process he calls "doubling" -- the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self: "The Nazi doctor needed his Auschwitz self to function psychologically in an environment so antithetical to his previous ethical standards. At the same time, he needed his prior self in order to continue to see himself as humane physician, husband, and father." Each self disavowed the other. The Auschwitz self repudiated the normal meaning of murder; the prior self remained detached from anything done by the Auschwitz self.

Doubling, as Lifton defines it, is not schizophrenia. The Nazi doctors cannot be judged "not guilty" on account of insanity. Doubling is a sane person's way of evading moral responsibility, not of eliminating it.

It is this last insight that makes Lifton's book valuable cautionary reading for any scientist or medical researcher whose work has any sort of antisocial or antienvironmental potential, no matter how trivial by the ghastly standard of the Nazi death camps. Doubling is a psychological maneuver we can all employ to deal with moral contradictions; in the camps, the maneuver was carried to unparalleled extremes.

My son's business is named Platypus Multimedia. I suspect he chose the name because the platypus breaks the mold of what we expect for an animal. It has a bill and webbed feet like a duck, lays eggs like a bird or a reptile, makes venom like a snake, and produces milk (without nipples) and has a fur coat like a mammal. What could the Intelligent Designer have been thinking? Obviously, he was having a bit of fun. Maybe he designed the platypus on the eighth day of creation, when he had time on his hands and some leftover parts.

Clearly this hodgepodge of an animal had to come from somewhere, and if you are not into intelligent design, the the answer must be in the genome. Which is why zoologists are happy to see the platypus genome sequenced.

Evolutionists reasonably assume that the platypus can trace its linage to an ancestor that lived at the time -- 160 million years ago or so -- when mammals were diverging from the reptiles. If that's so, then the platypus should share some genes with mammals and some with reptiles. This is the sort of testable prediction that distinguishes science from Monday-morning creationism.

The platypus genome contains about 18,500 genes, similar to other vertebrates and about two-thirds the size of the human genome. Genes for egg-laying, vision and venom production link the platypus to reptiles, although the venom genes may be a case of convergent evolution. Genes for antibacterial proteins and lactation are mammalian.

Anyone who doesn't understand why intelligent design isn't science should look at the article in the May 8th issue of Nature reporting the platypus results. More than a hundred authors, from all over the world, with names like Laura Clarke, Asif Chinwalla, Shiaw-Pyng Yang, Carlos Lopez-Otin, Gennady Churakov, Ravi Sachidanandam, Enkhjargal Tsend-Ayush, and Yoko Sekita, just to dip into the pool. These folks presumably represent a variety of religious faiths and no faith at all. In any case, absolutely nothing in the long and brilliant article hints at the religion, politics, or ethnicty of the authors. The data speaks for itself. By contrast, I know of no reasearch data on intelligent design that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. No surprise, of course, because there can be no data for miracles.

It is not surprising that the platypus is native to Australia. That continent has been uniquely on its own since early in mammalian evolution. It provided a sort of natural zoo where genes could be conserved that were elsewhere lost or modified among the mammals.

Genes, anatomy, fossils and geology must be mutually supporting if we are to have confidence in the story of evolution. Intelligent design makes no predictions whatsoever.

My newest book -- When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist -- will be published soon by Sorin Books, part of the 143-year-old Ave Maria Press, a ministry of the Congregation of Holy Cross located at the University of Notre Dame. I am thrilled that they have taken on the book. (Click to enlarge image.)

I spent eight years as an undergraduate and later as a graduate student at Notre Dame, eight happy and formative years. It was there that I wooed and won my wife of fifty years. I spent more than forty years teaching at Stonehill College, also established and run by the Congregation of Holy Cross. Men of the Congregation have been my teachers and friends.

Publishing this book is a bold and spirited act on the part of Ave Maria, and I am deeply grateful to them for allowing me to continue my relationship with Notre Dame in this way. The book is now available for pre-order on their website, and you can show your own appreciation to Ave Maria by ordering a copy now.

With an unabashed lack of modesty, I offer here the publisher's pitch:

Chet Raymo, author of sixteen books, steps into the fray between science and religion and seeks to delineate a new perspective, forged from both the rigorous standards of the academy and the reverence for creation born of the Catholic sacramental tradition. As a scientist, Raymo holds to the skepticism that accepts only verifiable answers, and replies to life's ultimate questions with the agnostic response, "I don't know." But as a "religious naturalist," he never ceases his pursuit of "the beautiful and terrible mystery that soaks creation, diminished by any name we give it." "Faith no longer matters to me," he says, "so much as attention, celebration, wonder, and praise."

In what he describes as a "late-life credo," Raymo traces a half-century journey from traditional faith-based Catholicism to scientific agnosticism. The point of religion, he asserts, is to celebrate the unfathomable mystery of creation. Thus he believes, "My work as a teacher and writer has been to discover glimmers of the Absolute in every particular, and praise what I find."

Raymo takes the reader on a tour de force of science, philosophy, theology, and literature as he gathers together the rich array of voices of his many traveling companions. With wonderfully detailed anecdotes Raymo brings to life a diverse cadre of mentors such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Darwin, and Teilhard de Chardin. With wit and insight he brings forth an array of quotes from the likes of Blaise Pascal, Albert Einstein, Meister Eckhart and John Updike.

Whether exploring the connection of the human body to the stars or the meaning of prayer of the heart, Raymo's challenging and engaging reflections will cause believers and agnostics alike to pause and pay attention.

Also, here are some early reviews:

Chet Raymo is one of the best science writers working today, and in this remarkably thoughtful and balanced book he has confronted the realities of the physical world that science has given us as only a truly spiritual person could: with courage and integrity, awe and wonder. His personal journey from committed Catholic to scientific agnostic resonates deeply because he addresses the questions that all thoughtful people face. Regardless of which path you choose to take, it is the journey itself that really matters, not the destination, and I can think of no one more qualified than Chet Raymo to be your guide.
Michael Shermer
Publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, author of How We Believe, The Science of Good and Evil, and Why Darwin Matters.

Amongst the angry and often strident tones of several atheists writing today rises Chet Raymo's affirmative voice, good humored and calm to the core. A scientist himself, Raymo reminds us that human consciousness is plenty big enough to accommodate both science and a sense of the holy. If the two were recognized equally and reconciled, we might make some progress toward preserving ourselves and repairing the world.
Nancy Mairs,
Author of A Dynamic God

In these times, to be devoted to contemplation is to carry all you love in the vessel of yourself into uncharted terrains, sustained by ineffable astonishment as you are asked to surrender, bit by bit, so much of what you carry in that vessel. Readers on the contemplative journey will find that Chet Raymo leads them to the point where contemplation must align itself with the revelations and demands of an unfolding universe; the only adequate context for choosing a "seamless garment of being."
Miriam Therese MacGillis, O.P.
Founder/Director of Genesis Farm, Blairstown, N.J.

This is a magnificent book, but not one for the faint of heart. In an age of militant atheists and strident believers, Chet Raymo dares to stand, where mystics and philosophers have always stood, in the place of mystery. Born of a lifetime of observing and reflecting on the physical universe and our place in it, this book offers a bracing, moving sacramental vision of existence. Neither a defense of faith nor a denunciation of the possibility of belief, Raymo invites the reader to consider the endless beauty and grace of the physical world -- a necessary spiritual practice for our age.
Douglas Burton-Christie, PhD
Professor, Christian Spirituality, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
Editor, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality

Angry, funny, piercing, brilliant, transcendent, eloquent. One of the nation's finest naturalists and writers pours out his heart on the roaring prayer of Everything That Is and the idiocy of arguing over labels and possession of that which is beyond our ken but not our celebration and singing, which is what Raymo does with stunning power and passion.
Brian Doyle
Author of The Wet Engine
Editor, Portland Magazine

Chet Raymo has enriched and graced our lives with this wonderful book, steeped in wisdom, warmth, and clarity. A classic.
Ursula Goodenough
Author of The Sacred Depths of Nature

I have previously identified myself here as a Catholic agnostic. As a naturalist, I cannot recite a supernaturalist creed, so I no longer identify myself as a Catholic (noun), but the adjective is part of who I am. I have been associated with Roman Catholicism since the day I was born.

Certainly, eight of the most formative years of my life were spent as an undergraduate and graduate at the University of Notre Dame. Oh yes, we took -- were required to take -- courses in theology and apologetics, all of which were pretty conventional. They rolled off my consciousness like water off a duck's back.

But outside of the classroom, the fifties and early sixties were a thrilling time to be a young Catholic intellectual. We devoured Bernanos, Greene, Mauriac, Bloy, Peguy, Undset. We tried on Gilson, Maritain, de Lubac, Danielou, and, most lastingly, Thomas Merton. We were stirred by classic films like Dreyer's Passion of Saint Joan and Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest. We weren't so much interested in theology as in a life lived in passionate contact with the invisible world. What sort of invisible world? Not, surely, a world of pure spirit. We had no taste, as I recall, for the Beatific Vision. Rather, we were seeking immersion in the murky waters of a pond of which the visible world was the dark and mysterious surface.

I don't see any of that among students at Catholic colleges and universities today. They are more committed than we were to the social gospel of the Church, more ready to volunteer to help the poor and needy. Theirs is a faith of service, more Christian than uniquely Catholic.

Our 1950's Catholicism was visceral, sexual, sensual, and as I grew into a robust scientific skepticism some of that stayed with me. I do not see any reason to shed it now. I'm still ready to poke with a stick at the dark and terrible beauty that lies beneath the surface of the pond. Grace, said Bernanos' country priest, is everywhere.

Tomorrow, the book.

Writing about the theologian John Haught the other day prompted me to look again at his little book What Is God?, published more than 20 years ago, one of his earliest works.

It is a smart little book. Haught anchors his notion of God in mystery, and then talks about five ways we confront mystery in our daily lives: our experiences of depth, future, freedom, beauty and truth. "For ultimately 'God' means mystery, and the prevalence of a sense of mystery would render books like this one superfluous," he writes.

In all of this he is one with the religious naturalist.

But there are two major truths that a genuine religious sense requires, he says. The first is that our lives are embraced by mystery. The second is that this mystery is "gracious." It is here, in the second "truth," that Haught and religious naturalists part company.

For the religious naturalist, the mystery is sometimes gracious and sometimes not. Was it a graciousness that sent a cyclone streaming into Myanmar, causing tens of thousands of deaths and untold misery? Is it graciousness that lets a quarter of human pregnancies end in spontaneous abortions? is it graciousness that drives natural selection? Like all believers in a gracious God, Haught must confront the problem of evil. The religious naturalist does not have to explain the apparent "ungraciousness" of God. For the religious naturalist, the mystery is law and chaos, light and darkness, good and evil, creation and destruction, hope and despair -- not as Manichean opposing forces, but all at once. In the face of this all-encompassing unitary mystery we -- humans -- struggle to be gracious. Why? That too, I suppose, is part of the mystery. Certainly, there is no evidence that atheists or agnostics are any less gracious than theists. Perhaps graciousness is part of who we are biologically.

Once Haught insists that the mystery is gracious, it is only a small step to endow the mystery with personhood, for graciousness is a human trait. And so he ends where he needs to be as an orthodox theologian, with a personal God -- thereby at least partly negating his truth number one.

Oh, if only it were that simple. We human males must woo and coo and wash dishes and vacuum and buy roses and provide candlelight and wine and whisper "God, you look beautiful tonight" and who knows what else to entice our partners into bed. The male fruitfly need only sing. Well, not sing exactly. He vibrates one wing, just one, to make what one assumes is a pleading sort of noise. If the song is satisfactory, the female fly allows copulation.

Female fruitflies don't sing, which has long suggested that they lack the neural circuitry to produce the wing vibrations.

Now, in a clever series of experiments reported in the journal Cell -- involving photoactivation of neurons and the chopping off of heads -- researchers have shown that females have the same song circuitry as males, located in the thorax. They can sing too. But their brains tell them not to.

The difference in behavior has been traced to a dimorphic command center in the brain. Female fruitfly brains are different than male fruitfly brains.

As if that's telling us something we didn't already know.

Inhibition, the biologists call it. A cluster of neurons in the female's brain inhibits the wing-fluttering behavior. Male insect brains inhibit certain behaviors too. Some biologists believe the female praying mantis bites off her partner's head to improve his sexual performance. This seems a rather drastic way to overcome his inhibitions. Humans are more inclined to rely -- counterproductively, perhaps -- on alcohol.

Anyway, it's all rather complicated. The sexes will never understand each other, regardless of species. We have these packets of neurons all over our bodies urging us to do certain things, and other packets telling us not to. Someday biologists may figure it out, using brains scans, genomes, photoexcitation of neurons, and other techniques yet to come.

For myself, I'd just as soon not know what's going on at all those synaptic centers of excitation and inhibition. Everything I know about sex, I learned at the movies.

The biggest machine ever contrived by the mind and hand of humankind will soon be up and running. Will it give us fresh insights into the creation of the universe -- or trip the Earth into oblivion? See this week's Musing.

Click to enlarge Anne's Mother's Day illumination.

John Haught is a much-admired Roman Catholic theologian at Georgetown University and a prolific writer on matters of science and faith. I have read his books with profit. While I do not concur with his earnest efforts to preserve the essential elements of orthodoxy, he always gives science and philosophical naturalism a fair shake. I share with him the conviction that science is an inadequate vessel to contain the hopes, fears and strivings of a human life. He has also been an ally in the battle to keep creationism and intelligent design out of the science curriculum of pubic schools.

So it was with a bit of disappointment that I read his "Last Word" essay in the current issue of Commonweal, titled "Don't Assign These Books." The books he's referring to are those of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, the so-called "new atheists," now available in paperback and ready for assignment in college classes. He writes: "I hope teachers will think carefully before putting them in the hands of their students, at least as introductory texts. These tirades simply add to the sad spectre of global fundamentalism. In their own way they reinforce the growing -- and dangerous -- ignorance about religion in the world today. Ironically, they also fail to offer readers an accurate and substantive understanding of atheism."

Haught's argument that the books are theologically naive can be read as protecting the turf of the professional theologian. It is certainly true that the books in question are polemics rather than nuanced theological tracts, but sometimes it takes a naif to see that the emperor has no clothes. As far as Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens are concerned, if God makes himself manifest in the natural world, then those manifestations are open to scientific scrutiny. If God does not reveal himself in the sensate world, then he cannot be known, and "the-ology" is an oxymoron.

As Haught well knows, the "new atheists" are responding to what they perceive to be a dangerously reinvigorated religious fundamentalism, Christian and Islamic. Their response is worthy of attention, and I for one would be happy to see university students reading and debating these books, perhaps in association with Haught's own God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. Why bother reading a "response" unless one has read the books being responded to?

Book burning or banning is unworthy of a free people anywhere, and although I am confident that Haught would neither burn nor ban, his plea in Commonweal comes uncomfortably close to the sort of religiously-inspired illiberalism that provoked the "tirades" in the first place.

Where the Queset Brook passes under the plank bridge along my Path, it slows and purls into a broad pond. This was called "The Girl's Swimming Hole" when it was part of the estate of Oliver and Elise Ames. The pond is no longer deep enough for swimming, but on these fine May afternoons I will sit there for an hour on my way home from college, reading, thinking, doing nothing.

And watching the surface of the pond come alive with the flit and skitter of a new season.

Water striders scull and stop, scull and stop, and now and then do an energetic back flip, in their search for morsels; the indentations of their feet and antennae on the surface of the water show up on the sunlit bottom of the pond as six fat blobs of shadow. Whirligigs spin like tops, like whirling dervishes, black as night in the afternoon sun. Mayflies enjoy their ephemeral fling as adults, their aerial orgy like snowflakes whirling above the dark water. Dragonflies and damselflies patrol the weedy margins of the pond, their bodies iridescent. Now and then a tree swallow from the boxes in the meadow makes a low, lightning-fast devouring sweep just millimeters above the surface of the water.

My mind drifts back to the new phylogenomic tree of life that was published in Nature a few weeks ago, 77 species across 21 phyla. I don't have to go back too many steps on the phylogram to connect myself to all the creatures I am watching at the pond. Our common ancestral group is the bilateria, animals that are bilaterally symmetric, with a front end and a back end, an upside and downside, a mouth and an anus. The first of our tribe appears in the fossil record about 600 million years ago, and it turned out to be an effective body plan. Of course, we bilateria don't exhaust the ranks of life on Earth, but we make up a goodly part of the phylogram. Anyway, I sit at the bridge and I feel part of something a lot bigger than myself -- something with a front end and a back end, an upside and downside, a mouth and an anus. The swallow zips across the pond; I give her a wink. She and I have our own little niche in the phylogram. We have backbones.

Humans have a way of drifting through the world as if we were temporary visitors from another dimension. A few moments at the bridge remind me that we are bound to the rest of creation by a myriad of genomic threads.

Many years ago, Time magazine illustrated an article with a painting of Pablo Picasso. As I recall, it was the ground-breaking cubist work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Someone wrote to the magazine saying something to the effect, "My eight-year-old son could have painted that." Time accompanied the letter with a highly-accomplished sketch by the eight-year-old Picasso. I haven't been able to track down the letter or the sketch, but here is a painting by the artist at age fifteen.

What Picasso was up to in 1907 with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has been a matter of debate among art historians, but it clearly wasn't to provide a photographic representation of reality. Ostensibly, the subject of the painting is five prostitutes in a brothel, but what the painting documents is a mind in interaction with the world. The "reality" Picasso seeks is at a remove from what presents itself unmediated to the senses.

At almost the same time, Picasso's contemporary Albert Einstein was showing that physical space and time is relative to an observer.

The parallels between the two lives are numerous and striking, as Arthur I. Miller has shown in Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc. By force of their creativity and personalities they pretty much defined modernity in art and science. Neither man, however, quite let go of classicism. Einstein never accepted the pure mathematical formalisms of Heisenberg and Bohr. Picasso never made the break into pure abstraction.

What they left us with is a simple lesson that has survived subsequent developments in art and science: We construct our own reality.

Which does not mean, of course, that every reality is equally real. We stub our toe against the real. It does mean to distrust pure objectivism and pure subjectivism -- and abjure dogma wherever we find it.

Anne sent me this pic the other day, bacteriophages attacking a bacterium. It was recently featured as an APOD (astronomy picture of the day) on the APOD site. Not quite sure what bateriophages have to do with astronomy, although they do look a bit like lunar landers setting down on a tiny moon.

They are viruses, of course. Like other viruses, they lack the resources to make their own energy or proteins. They can only reproduce and build their shells by hijacking the chemical apparatus of an invaded cell. Phage viruses are parasitical on bacteria. They sit on the surface and inject their genetic material (RNA or DNA) into the bacterium, commandeering the host's reproductive machinery to make more phages, in the process often killing the host.

Where did they come from? Some scientists believe viruses are degenerate life-forms that have lost every animating function except the minimum genes essential to their parasitic way of life. Other scientists suspect viruses evolved inside cells, as organelles, and subsequently escaped to take up their vagabond existence. Then again, maybe they evolved on a parallel track to cellular life.

This electron micrograph of bacteriophages reminded Anne of angels dancing on the head of a pin. And when you think about it, they are no less improbable than a company of angels. They may even turn out to be angelic allies in out fight against bacterial human pathogens. In the meantime, there they dance, little APOD pods on their spidery legs, and millions could gaily cavort on the head of a pin. Holy and terrible. Beautiful and scary.

I was with environmental science students in the campus woods the other day. Big pink granite boulders. The bedrock under the boulders is a green volcanic rock. Where did the boulders come from?

Pretend it is 1840. Two stories explain the granite boulders.

--During the great flood of Noah, when the Earth was covered with water, rock-bearing ice bergs drifted south from the Arctic. As they melted, they dropped their burden. The story nicely accounts for why we don't find these "erratic" boulders much further south.

--At some time in the past, the Earth's climate was colder and large parts of the northern continents were covered with ice. The glaciers moved out from their centers of accumulation, eroding the crust of the Earth, and plucking boulders from the downstream slopes of hills. As the climate warmed and the ice melted, its burden of rock was dropped in place.

Two stories. Both propose an improbable event: an all-engulfing flood, a continent-spanning sheet of ice. Which to believe?

Continent-spanning glaciers exist today, in Greenland and Antarctica. Water for glaciers of greater extent could come from the oceans.

The water for an all-engulfing flood requires a miracle.

The ice theory makes predictions, based on what we see where glaciers exist today. The bedrock should be scratched, and the scratches should all be aligned in the same direction, pointing to the centers of ice accumulation. Here on the Stonehill campus, if we follow the scratches north, we should find a source for the pink granite boulders on the south-facing slope of a hill. In fact, all of the ledges we find on the campus should be on south-facing slopes, and every rock we find should have a source somewhere to the north. And so we go, tramping through the woods, and -- lo and behold -- our predictions are confirmed in every respect.

This is the game of science. Explain the past using only natural agencies that we see at work in the world today. Find the simplest story that explains all of our observations. Be happy when we can find a story that can be as easily falsified as confirmed.

And, on a lovely bright spring day, let the students figure it out for themselves, by placing them in front of the evidence and letting them ask -- and answer -- questions.

You have reached the office of Harry Hawker. You may leave a message at the beep.

"Hello, Harry? Robert here. I can't give you the full scoop right now. I'm on my cell at a concert. Middle of the second movement of some symphony or other. I've got something big for you. The latest thing in personal communications. It's hot, Harry. Real hot. If you check your machine, give me a call. You know my number. I'll call you again when I get to the restaurant."

Chirrup...chirrup

"Harry? Oh, it's you, Ally. Listen, I told you not to call Daddy when he is at the concert. Yeah, I know the baby-sitter won't let you watch TV after 10 o'clock. That's what Mommy and Daddy told her to do. Now hang up your phone. Some people don't like it when a phone rings at a concert. And besides, I'm waiting for an important call. Yeah, Daddy misses you too. Go to bed."

You have reached the office of Harry Hawker. You may leave a message at the beep.

"Harry. Robert again. Where are you, guy? The concert sucked. Something dumb by Brahms. Or was it Bach? We're waiting for a table at Gina's, the new restaurant downtown. You'd like it, Harry. We'll do lunch here sometime. Listen, I'd rather not be talking to your machine but the story is this: Our R&D guys have come up with a drop-dead product. We're looking for a strategic alliance with someone with marketing clout. That's you, Harry. Give me a buzz when you get in. This is something you don't want to miss."

Chirrup...chirrup

"Harry? Mom! Why are you calling this time of the night? We're just finishing desert at Gina's. Nice place. Real classy, you know what I mean? Your boy's made good. So, what's up? No, I didn't forget that Sunday is your birthday. Yeah, I know. We'll be there for dinner. Listen, Mom, I gotta hang up, I'm expecting an important business call. Yeah, see ya Sunday. Yeah, Mom, love you too."

You have reached the office of Harry Hawker. You may leave a message at the beep.

"Harry. Robert. I'm hittin' the sack. Don't ring now, I need the shut eye. I'll call you in the morning."

Good morning. HighTech Marketing. Mr. Hawker's office.

"Hi, Karen. Robert here. Is Harry in? On the phone? OK, have him give me a call when he's free. Use my cell number. I'm on the expressway."

Chirrup...chirrup

"Harry, at last! Hey, thanks for calling, buddy. I'm on my way to town. It'd be great to do lunch. I've found a new place. No? OK, listen. Our R&D guys have come up with a voice-activated cell phone that's smaller than a pea. Microphone and speaker fabricated right on the silicon chip with the electronics. New kind of microantenna. Also picks up and transmits ambient sound. Pop it right in the ear. It's there all the time. Think about it, Harry! You dial by voice. Hang up by voice command. No bigger than a pea.

"What's that? No one will want a pea in their ear? That's where you come in. This is cutting-edge technology, Harry. The ultimate status symbol.

"Think about it, Harry. There's three billion cell phones in use in the world. Think of the market! If we get only a piece of it, we will have the hottest product since sliced bread. A cell phone in every ear. Twenty-four/seven. Never out of touch.

"Harry, listen, I'm on the downtown off-ramp. I could be at your office in... Jeez, a guy just cut me off. Some people drive like maniacs. Harry, let's get cell phones out of the hands and put 'em in the ear where they belong. Total, ubiquitous, hands-free connectivity. It's a winner...Beep...Harry, listen, can I put you on hold for a sec? I've got a call on the other line."

This week's Musing dates back more than a few years, and is rather longer than my usual Sunday offerings.

Click to enlarge Anne's illumination.