Well, if you want to believe her, Mrs. J. B. Dale reported in 1895 that cheiromancers noticed  Buddha’s foot bore a “mark called the ‘chakravarti,’ a wheel or discus, which should have been on the palm of the hand, by which the sages at his birth divined that he would rise to considerable eminence.” And to think, had those sages taken the baby Buddha’s footprint as we do for identification in our own era, that special sign might be available on some ancient manuscript.* Wonder what the Buddha’s line of life looked like on that hand that lacked that misplaced (or mis-grown) chakravarti?
 
Or your life line? Isn’t it interesting that among the 100 billion of us who have peopled the planet over the past 200,000 to 300,000 years that some of us want to see the future in simple markings on our skin? Will cheiromancy never go away? If the ancients thought there was a connection between lines on hands and feet were significant indicators of a life to be or to have been lived, have we carried this affinity for lines on the skin into the age of tattoos and modern fortune tellers?
 
What is it that makes us feel we can read the soul on a sole? What makes us predict a life on a line? Is it because we want some tangible evidence that the mystery of an unfolding life can be seen in folds on the palm? Do we want to simplify, to reduce, so much that we are willing to label lines with meanings as though natural selection had some purpose? It seems so. The ancient reading of palms still runs through newspapers, magazines, and circus acts and keeps its ties to astrology. You have, as cheiromancers would note, a Line of Saturn that crosses your liver line, a Girdle of Venus arcing at the base of your fingers, and the Mounts of the Moon and Venus in your hand. You hold the cosmos and your personal future, even under callouses, according to palm readers.
 
Is reading the proverbial book by its cover the base of many human interactions? Do you see, for example, a “dumb blond,” a “cowboy,” a “mugger,” in mere appearances? Are your own biases toward ideas the product of your own form of cheiromancy? Are you one to predict on the basis of appearance? Do you judge because of appearance? Would you have been the one to say that Doug Flutie was too undersized to play professional football and Spud Webb was too short to play professional basketball?  
 
And without that chakravarti on his foot would the Buddha have risen to an eminence? Would he have been the Buddha with the wheel on his hand “where it belonged”?
 
Do you need some tangible evidence to determine the nature of someone’s soul? Lacking that evidence, do you fail to see the Buddha in your neighbor?
 
 
*Dale, J. B. Mrs. Indian Palmistry, London, New York, Madras. From the Preface and quoted from p. 202 of Coleman’s Mythology of the Hindoos: Notices of Various Mountain and Island Tribes, London. Parbury, Allen, and Co., 1832.

A recently discovered mammalian fossil dating to 145 million years ago belonged to, if not the earliest, certainly one of the earliest mammal species. Called Durlstotherium newmani, the little critter lived in the Jurassic Period. Bearing the name of an amateur paleontologist and landlord of a pub near Durlston Bay, Dorset, southern England, “shrew-like” D. newmani lived contemporaneously with dinosaurs, but apparently avoided them by its nocturnality. In this lifestyle, the ancient animal certainly foreshadowed the lives of many of its bar-hopping current descendants. Check the night scene for those descendants, and ask yourself whether or not their—and almost everyone’s—penchant to party at night doesn’t stem from D. newmani’s lifestyle. Naming the fossil after a barkeep seems fitting. It also begs a question about how far we haven’t come.
 
D. newmani might have been a nocturnal animal because of daytime dangers posed by dinosaurs. If so, then it and similar mammals probably remained nocturnal until the end of the Cretaceous Period and its famous dinosaur extinction event 65 million years ago. That’s the conclusion of a paper in Nature: Ecology & Evolution by Roi Maor and others. “We find strong support for the nocturnal origin of mammals and the Cenozoic appearance of diurnality….” By the way, you’re a Cenozoic mammal and a descendant of nocturnal mammals like D. newmani. And so are the young people staying awake for the nightlife of Dhaka in Bangladesh.
 
Sleeplessness. Restless nights. Thought that belonged to nocturnal animals and to really old people. No. Today’s young are also restless in the dark hours when they go on the prowl for companionship and entertainment. At least, that’s what the November 1, 2015, edition of NewAge Youth reports. Their survey suggests that “71.7 per cent of urban youths have difficulties falling asleep and 69.9% deliberately resist sleeping at night.”**
 
Three-wheel CNGs, trucks, and cars and not, nowadays, dinosaurs. The youth of Dhaka have purposefully changed their circadian rhythm because, they say, the daytime confusion, traffic, and danger is a bit overwhelming. Pull up pictures of Dhaka on the Web if you like. You’ll get some idea. Not that the city can do much to change its population and traffic. It is what it is, just as Jurassic life was what it was. There are dangers.  But, of course, there are also Dhaka’s nighttime dangers, muggers and their lot, for example. And there’s even the problem that there’s not much to do in Dhaka at night.
 
So, here we are 145 million years after D. newmani became extinct, and we’re still somewhat nocturnal—and on purpose! How far haven’t we come? We’re still living much of lives as night creatures, watching late-night TV, playing with an IPad or smart phone, or sneaking out among the dangerous trucks, cars, CNGs, tuk-tuks, ricks, and auto rickshaws of our cities, hoping not to be attacked by one of these modern dinosaurs that prowl the night among self-driving Uber cars.
 
You know that expression “I’ve become my mother (or father)”? The next time you’re in Newman’s pub late at night, look around at your bar-mates, and ask yourself, “Why after 65 million years of learning to live in the daylight, am I staying up at night?” You’ve become your ancient shrew-like ancestor D. newmani.  
 
*BBC News Online. Fossil of ‘our earliest ancestors’ found in Dorset by Helen Briggs, Nov. 7, 2017 at http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41889633   
 
**NewAge Youth. November 1, 2015. Online at http://youth.newagebd.net/1352/a-nocturnal-generation/

Have you stood on an asphalt parking lot or basketball court during a hot summer day then moved to the adjacent grass? Then you have experienced what an artificial surface can do to the air above it by radiating in the infrared.
 
Assume that humans are affecting temperatures by releasing greenhouse gases if you want. But give some thought to potential causes of varying temperatures beyond the emission of greenhouse gases. Earth’s albedo has changed slightly because we have changed its surface. More absorption of solar energy? Less? Reflectivity is a control, and that’s obvious from your experience with asphalt surfaces and adjacent grass.
 
So, how much have we “artificialized” this place we call home? Well, Columbia University and NASA have measured 3.5 million square kilometers of urban and extended-urban areas.* This is not the planetary surface of your ancient ancestors. Can’t grasp the idea of 3.5 million square kilometers? Try sliding Alaska, Texas, California, Montana, and Nevada together into one landmass. Then urbanize every square meter they cover. Can’t think in meters and kilometers?
Those four states cover 1,355,284 square miles.**
 
Those recently (with respect to Earth’s age and even with respect to human evolution) covered areas can be added to the areas denuded of trees but not urbanized, as in Brazil or on Madagascar, where the albedo has also changed in a short period. Deforestation plays an important role in changing that planetary albedo. It might, in fact, give a previously dark green area of energy absorption a more reflective surface that throws incoming solar radiation back toward space. Puzzling. Are we changing Earth’s surface to absorb in cities or reflect in deforested areas?   
 
Just askin’. Have we added billions of tons of greenhouse gases to the 5.5 quadrillions of tons of nitrogen and oxygen in our atmosphere? Yes. But let’s put that in perspective. Five and a half quadrillion divided by, say, the 10 billion tons of annually emitted greenhouse gases equals an output of 1/55,000,000 of the atmosphere per annum. Think we’ll become Venus as the doomsayers say we will become? At the current level of emissions, the atmosphere would need almost the same length of time that has elapsed since the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a very, very warm period on our planet that occurred about 55 million years ago.
 
So, I ain’t smart enough to know whether or not the change in albedo caused by deforestation and extended urbanization will raise temperatures or eventually lower them. But, just sayin’, why don’t we just prevent people from urbanizing, spread them out, and let them emit carbon dioxide for a thousand years or so to see whether or not we can get back to that “perfect” climate the doomsayers say we need to have simply by reducing the area of asphalted surfaces and increasing the area denuded of dark green energy-absorbing forests?
 
And, with regard to some “ideal” worldwide climatic condition, the doomsayers base that “ideal” climate spectrum on…what? Until we actually know what the “ideal” is and what complex of causes makes the planet definitively vary from that “ideal,” maybe we should just park on the grass. That’s my modest proposal.
 
 
*NASA. Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project online at http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/grump-v1
 
**Three and a half million square kilometers equals 1,351,357.5 square miles. Can’t think what that means? What’s one mile away from you? Draw a mental line to it. Make a 90-degree right turn for the same distance. Make another right turn for the same distance. Make the third right turn to return. That’s a square mile. But just one. Now cover that square mile with asphalt and concrete. Then do that again 1,351,356.5 times.  

There are six elements essential for life: Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Of course, other elements play roles, some not insignificant, but take away those fundamental six, and life would have to be something other than what it now is. Yet, as significant as those six elements are, they can’t by themselves be used to define life.
 
You might point out that life suggests some kind of activity, the biochemical processes, for example. You might say, “self-reproducibility,” if you knew only the cnidarian Hydra while ignoring your own life-form. But there’s another end to a sliding scale of definitions of life, one that entails a more complex answer, as I implied above, an answer more comprehensive than one based on those six elements.
 
Do you remember why Darwin, after years of keeping his research largely to himself, rushed his famous work into print in 1859? Charlie’s motivation stemmed in large part from the work of Alfred R. Wallace, literally a co-discover of evolutionary principles and a guy about to publish his own version of evolution. Anyway, long after Darwin had been given most of the credit for understanding a mechanism for speciation, Wallace wrote a work entitled Man’s Place in the Universe It is an ambitious work subtitled “A Study of the Results of Scientific Research in Relation to the Unity or Plurality of Worlds.” Chapter X of his book addresses the definitions of life:
 
          Physiologists and philosophers have made many attempts to define 'life,' but in most cases in aiming at absolute generality they have been vague and uninstructive. Thus De Blainville defined it as 'The twofold internal movement of composition and decomposition, at once general and continuous'; while Herbert Spencer's latest definition was 'Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.' But neither of these is sufficiently precise, explanatory, or distinctive, and they might almost be applied to the changes occurring in a sun or planet, or to the elevation and gradual formation of a continent. One of the oldest definitions, that of Aristotle, seems to come nearer the mark: 'Life is the assemblage of the operations of nutrition, growth, and destruction.' But these definitions of 'life' are unsatisfactory, because they apply to an abstract idea rather than to the actual living organism. The marvel and mystery of life, as we know it, resides in the body which manifests it, and this living body the definitions ignore (192).*
 
Wallace wrote his book a half century before Watson and Crick discovered the details of DNA. Nevertheless, he knew that the problem of defining life might be dependent upon our understanding of how millions upon millions of molecules function and that constant change was a characteristic of life. For Wallace and the people of his time, a seemingly unfathomable changing complexity underlies life. Yet, he did recognize at least one fundamental property as he quotes from Professor F. J. Allen’s What Is Life?: “’The chief physical function of living matter seems to consist in absorbing energy, storing it in a higher potential state, and afterwards partially expending it in the kinetic or active form.’” And he also quotes from Professor Burdon Sanderson, “’The most distinctive peculiarity of living matter as compared with non-living is, that it is ever changing while ever the same.’”
 
HOCNSP is matter than underlies process. Life isn’t just matter. It’s stuff in an energy exchange. Now, you might argue that all matter undergoes change, and you would be correct. However, chemical reactions have products that are recognizably different from their pre-reaction components: Sodium plus chlorine equals salt. Crystals of salt are patterns reproduced ad infinitum, given sufficient time, supply of constituents, chemical energy, and space to form, and they are inorganic, and, therefore, not life. Life manages to change in an identical context of time, supply, energy, and space, but somehow remains the same: I recognize you in your childhood pictures, and you know yourself as a continuum.
 
And you, that collection of HOCNSP (and other elements) in action, are a prime example of life and the difficulty we all have in defining it to everyone’s satisfaction: Life seems simple by way of reduction, but incredibly complex in its many components that actively change while somehow seeming the same. You’re one of those living things. Help us out here. How do you define living? We all want to know.
 
Do you delve into the untold details of metabolism in your definition? Into the quantum effects in electric impulses dancing across synapses in neurotransmitters? Come on, now. You’re a sophisticated twenty-first century living combination of HOCNSP imbued with consciousness (whatever that is). You’ve “been alive” for some time now. So, how do you define what you are?
 
I asked one of my children that question when he was only three or four. That seems like an onerous task since I am still waiting for your definitive reply. “Name something that is alive,” I said. He said, “A car.” I was perplexed. A car? How could a car be alive? When I asked him, he said simply, “It moves.”
 
Of course, I didn’t press a child about life-forms that don’t move, such as trees. Nor did I delve into “growth,” or “decay,” or even “death” (that wouldn’t be good parenting). When I thought about his answer, I realized there’s something to the “auto” (self) mobile idea that reduces life to an essential characteristic. Movement implies an energy expenditure. Of course, a three-year-old probably can’t see how an expenditure of energy is also part of a tree’s existence. But, now that I think of the car—not that I’m thinking of self-driving vehicles—I’m pretty sure my son was onto something.  
 
We have a cultural tendency to value great expenditures of energy characteristic of those with prodigious outputs of creativity or work. Look at prolific authors, for example. Or look at those whose work ethic carried them to the pinnacles of their trade or profession. We realize that some among us define their lives by accomplishments almost too numerous to mention. We say, “There’s someone living life to the fullest.” And we often think of someone in a coma as being in a vegetative state. We know the comatose to be alive, just as we know the sleeping are alive. But we do associate energy expenditure with “living.”
 
So, I return to the question. How do you define life? Do you generalize? Do you delve into complex biochemistry centered on HOCNSP? Do you define life in such a way that your definition includes Hydra and human?
 
One more question: Will your definition include a car?
 
 
Wallace, Alfred R. Man’s Place in the Universe, London. Chapman and Hall, Limited, 1904. Available online through the Gutenberg Project at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39928/39928-h/39928-h.htm#Page_191

When astronomer/meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents had, in his word, “drifted,” he met opposition from geologists and their like in Europe and America. Based on evidence from continental shape, geology, and paleontology, his hypothesis lacked a demonstrable mechanism behind the “drift.” That lack of a mechanism for moving continents made drift seem preposterous to the early twentieth-century scientists who specialized in all matters geological. Wegener was, after all, an outsider. What could a nonspecialist tell specialists about their field of knowledge? His book on the subject, written during WW I while he recovered from two wounds and served as a military meteorologist, was The Origins of Continents and Oceans. It stirred controversy on widely separated continents.
 
Wegener developed an interest in his controversial subject because the coastlines on either side of the Atlantic matched like pieces of a puzzle. You have probably noted the same seemingly coincidental puzzle-piece shapes of North America, South America, and Africa. Cut them out of a paper map to reassemble. Rather a nice fit, wouldn’t you say? I remember my experience with my first world map about the time I entered kindergarten. Having seen my mother assemble puzzles in the long dark evenings of winter, I was struck by the outlines of the continents. To my father, I exclaimed, “Hey, they look like pieces of a puzzle.” But as a child, I left the thought there, did no further research into the matter, and never published my childhood observation in a peer-reviewed journal. Had I been more insightful and energetic, I might now be one of the historic proponents of plate tectonics.  
 
I’ll note that Wegener was not only older but also more educated than I when he concluded that the continents had somehow moved. But given the age difference (Wegener was born in 1880 and died in 1930 before I was born), I really didn’t have the chance to be the first to discover that coastlines across the Atlantic have interlocking shapes. Even Wegener wasn’t the first. In the century after Columbus’ discovery of the New World, navigators and cartographers had crudely mapped the Atlantic landmasses. in 1596 Abraham Ortelius noted the puzzle-piece appearance. For hundreds of years, observers more knowledgeable than I was as a child probably also noted that puzzling puzzle of coastal shapes and, like me, let it go into and out of their heads.
 
A brief primer: Wegener’s hypothesis of continental drift is now the theory of sea-floor spreading. There’s a bunch of evidence now, and the theory explains the shapes of oceans and landmasses, the location of earthquakes and volcanoes, and the rise of great mountain belts. But Wegener met strong resistance to his ideas. Even though he had shown that rocks and fossils on either side of the Atlantic matched beyond mere coincidence, he could not convince the intellectual belligerents of his time. Unfortunately, his death in 1930 prevented Wegener from seeing the role he played in the development of modern geology, paleontology, climatology, oceanography, and geophysics. You and I are recipients of information from discoveries made in the context of Wegener’s musings while he was under attack, both literally and physically during WW I and intellectually in the ensuing years. It’s because of Wegener and his eventual defenders that we understand why and where earthquakes, like those along the San Andreas Fault, occur.
 
In other blogs, I have noted the dependence we all have on axiomatic thinking born in the mind of Euclid more than 2,000 years ago. We have a tendency to accept axioms and shape our perspectives by them. Those axiomatic perspectives then become the lens through which we see the details of our world, especially those that we can’t fully explain. As Wegener struggled unsuccessfully to discover a physical mechanism powerful enough to move continents and reshape oceans, he noted, “...there must be a hidden error in the assumptions alleged to be obvious.”* Two camps of opinion had emerged. One assumed that the continents and oceans were permanent features. Another assumed they were ephemeral features of a dynamic Earth. As learned as Wegener’s opponents were, many were stuck on assumptions about how a “permanent” surface had wrinkled. Many assumed, for example, that Earth was hot initially and that subsequent cooling led to a mountainous wrinkling of Earth’s outermost layer, producing the highlands and lowlands we see today.
 
To be fair to Wegener’s opponents, I should note that they didn’t have the benefit of seismic tomography, laser measurements, side-looking sonar, satellites, and a cadre of geologists, paleontologists, paleoclimatologists, geochemists, and geophysicists who were born into the advantages provided by the twentieth century’s technological advances and the library of studies on the ages and location of Earth’s surface rocks. Nevertheless, I want to note, also, that the first reaction to Wegener’s hypothesis wasn’t indicative of scientific openness. It was, rather, indicative of errors made from “assumptions alleged to be obvious.”
 
Is it our nature to rely so thoroughly on “assumptions alleged to be obvious” that we frequently subduct into a zone of bias and prejudice like some basaltic ocean floor sinking into Earth’s mantle? As we all learn in school, the nature of “true” science is openness. Sometimes facts contradict our assumptions. The difficulties we have in understanding the people around us and the nature of our physical world almost invariably stems from our inability to know when the obvious isn’t obvious to everyone.
 
Is there an Alfred Wegener in your life? You know, an outsider who might have some insight. Is there someone who might be onto a truth you can’t see from your perspective and the assumptions you allege to be “obvious”? Maybe we’re all a bit like those early twentieth-century geologists who couldn’t accept an insight from an outsider. Maybe that’s our nature, and we know it because at times we have all been a Wegener, the outsider who has a good idea that the insiders can’t accept.
 
*Wegener, Alfred, Prof. Dr., Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, 1915. Dover Reprint 1966 of 1929 edition, 19.   

In 1918, Akron, Ohio, experienced 24 murders. In 2016, the number was 34. Same place, more murders. The great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren haven’t learned any lessons.
 
And that takes us back to Cain. Reasoning would suggest that with time and experience knowledge increases. With an increase in knowledge comes the potential for decreasing risk. Not so, however. The absolute number of murders in Akron appear to bounce like Goodyear rubber, or, maybe like some Norman Stingley Wham-O superball. Given a little umpf beyond the mere pull of gravity, such a ball can bounce over a house. But just mere gravity alone lets the ball rebound to about 90% of its former elevation. From 2002 through 2016 Akron averaged 21.25 annual murders. Now of course, no one dies a quarter, but that’s the average. The murder superball under the sheer gravity of human interactions stays very near the 1916 number of murders.
 
The same elasticity of murdered humans probably applies to many cities. You can check if you want by looking at the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting data.* We gather; we kill. No wonder murder mysteries are continuously popular. They mirror the tire assembly line of production in real life. Seems the first tale of murder started a genre based on the reality of homicide: If 100 billion people have populated the planet since the rise of our species, and if the superball of murder has bounced about as high as the initial elevation, we’ve murdered millions.
 
According to the FBI’s statistics on number of murders, the United States suffered 5.6 murders per 100,000 people in 2002 and 4.5 murders per 100,000 in 2014. During those years the murder superball bounced as high as 5.8 murders in 2006. Hard to say what the extra umpf was in that year. Anyway, the bounce was between 80% of and over 100% of that 2002 homicide number.
 
Let’s take that low number of homicides as a benchmark for human history. I know, there’s no evidence to support that claim short of the current statistics, but play with these numbers. One hundred billion divided by 100,000 equals 1,000,000. If the murders per 100,000 stayed in the zone of current killings in the United States, then over the history of the species there would have been 4.5 million homicides. But you know that’s a silly number, don’t you? It can’t come close to reality. The current conflict in Syria alone has over the past few years accounted for hundreds of thousands of murders. And previous conflicts have meant even more murders.
 
The rubber ball of Cain has been bouncing very high for 200,000 years, and there’s little hope that the manufacturers of such a bounce can reduce that elasticity even in Akron, Ohio, the home of the rubber industry. Why? Well, those ancient human ancestors used some natural materials in murders by blunt force and sharp objects. Modern materials have improved on natural ones and enhanced their properties. To whatever height the ancient murder rate could bounce, we have added more rebound through modern technology.
 
It’s interesting that we are trained to think that modern technology improves lives when in reality it often takes them in a relatively consistent bounce of homicides. Had that first murder been followed by the natural loss of rebound height, unknown millions would have enhanced the DNA of our species by living to procreate. In modern Syria alone the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates more than 18,000 children had been killed by mid-2017. Maybe Cain’s bouncing ball was, in fact, a superball, and modern Akron, Ohio, just manufactures more of the same. Is there some significance to the etymology of the name Akron? The name derives from the Greek for "highest point." 
 
* https://ucr.fbi.gov/    

The brevity of an event is no guarantee that its effect will be slight or short-term.
 
The evidence that ties the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico to the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs provides us with a sense of what an incoming asteroid/comet can do to our planet. The impactor dug a big hole as much as 18 miles deep and up to 120 miles in diameter. In excavating, it released into the atmosphere over a trillion tons of carbon dioxide and somewhere between 200 and 450 billion tons of sulfur.* The short-term effects of the sulfur release was the formation of sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, leading to the blocking of sunlight and acid rain. In a recent study of the area Joanna Morgan and other researchers re-examined the findings of a team led by Julia Brugger to estimate the effects of that day of death. According to Brugger’s team of scientists, our planet’s surface temperature could have dropped by almost 50 degrees Fahrenheit for more than a decade.** Now, today’s average surface temperature is about 57 degrees F. Think, now. That’s an average. Drop that average by 50 degrees and the dinosaurs couldn’t have purchased enough Gore-Tex from L.L. Bean to have survived. With sub-freezing temperatures for an average, much of the planet would have been a wintertime Siberia.  
 
All that from an object that was only a thousandth of Earth’s diameter.
 
But the effect came fast, and that’s the same for all small objects with big consequences. And for many human activities.
 
Break a board with your hand ala karate style. You won’t punch slowly. F=MA. The asteroid/comet that hit Earth about 65 million years ago arrived at more than 11 miles per second.
 
The swift changes that seem to occur in the world of human behavior can crater lives with equal devastation. Look at any terrorist attack. In a moment lives change. Extinction occurs, and the world is different. One isolated event alters the lives of millions for years. The only difference between a bolide and a human impactor? Intention.
 
Both unconscious and conscious impactors make life on our planet risky. Both arrive unexpectedly and unexpectedly fast. That’s why on this website I reiterate, “This is not your practice life.”
 
*http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41825471
 
**https://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/how-the-darkness-and-the-cold-killed-the-dinosaurs