The Principle of Least Astonishment: Deep Time and Human Time

‎"People look upon the natural world as if all motions

of the past had set the stage for us and were now frozen

. . . To imagine that turmoil is in the past and

somehow we are now in a more stable time

seems to be a psychological need. Leonardo Seeber

. . .referred to it as the principle of least astonishment.

As we have seen, the time we are in

is just as active as the past. "

--Eldrige Moores, Tectonist;

from "Assembling California",

in Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee

Years ago, before I studied biology in graduate school, I graduated with a degree in Geology with Honors from a stable university on the continental craton. Although I ended up in a different field, my knowledge of geology has made the history of North America come alive for me in my travels across the continent over the course of the past 30 years.

Photo: Unconformity between the Tertiary volcanics of the Datil-Mogollon Volcanic field and the underlying Mesaverde shales and sandstones. The lavas were extruded during Eocene-Oligocene time (beginning approximately 28 mya). This unconformity is exposed in the wall of the Zuni Plateau north of the Zuni Salt Lake, Catron County, NM.

Browsing in the trade books section of the university bookstore one day during my senior undergraduate year, a title caught my eye: In Suspect Terrain, by John McPhee. A reproduction of a painting of the Delaware Water Gap graced the cover. It was a book of essays about geology and the plate tectonics revolution from the perspective of the USGS's conondont specialist at the time, Anita Harris.

The title caught my eye, because Skip Nelson, our structural professor, had been discussing with us the concept of "suspect terranes", pieces of the geology of a region that have a different geology from the adjacent country rock, and the origins of which are suspected to be from elsewhere on earth. In those early days of the theory of Plate Tectonics, little was known about suspect terranes, and it was hard to see how such terranes fit into the theory. Much arm-waving--the speculations of scientists scratching their heads together--became stories,and then hypotheses that had a decent chance of being tested as the both the science and the technology that supported it advanced over the years. But at that time it was still arm-waving and stories.

Of course I had to buy the book. And in rooting around a bit more in the same section, I ended up buying McPhee's first book on the subject, Basin and Range, as well.

I had gone into geology in 1979, after hearing about plate tectonics from my English professor at a small private liberal arts college. A transfer to the state university was required once my passion was ignited and my interests revealed. (That English professor saw that I was less than passionate about the liberal arts, and being somewhat of a curmudgeon, Dr. Pierson had written on one my papers: 'Does college bore you?' I was a little hurt at the time, because the truth hurts when one is trying to make the best of a bad college decision, but I was grateful to him later). The early '80's, as the revolutionary theory of Plate Tectonics was maturing in the field, was an exciting time to be thinking about geology and earth history, and I was captivated.

As I went through the spring semester of my senior year, with field trips to Missouri, Wisconsin and Ohio, I was also reading about the rise of the Basin and Range, the possible docking of micro-terranes on eastern North America, and the problem of overgeneralizing from theory without benefit of working field experience with the actual rocks. Reading McPhee and my texts in historical geology, stratigraphy, sedimentology, and structural geology became an obsession that took precedence over everything else. (I got a "C" in communications--required to "round out the degree"--which did not even upset me as it otherwise might have done).

Later, as a young mother chasing after a very energetic two-year old, I discovered McPhee's third book in the series, Rising from the Plains, about the Grand Old Man of Rocky Mountain Geology, David Love, whom I had met briefly during a field camp a few years earlier. Although my later interests and experiences, as well as the need to support my children by myself, took me in other directions, I maintained my interest in Geology. Recently, I found McPhee's Annals of the Former World, which contains the three original books about Geology,with updates and two new books, one on the geological origins of California, and one on the pre-Cambrian rocks that underly the sediments of the stable craton of North America.

Our move to the Ragamuffin Ranch, where the geology of the Colorado Plateau stands out in the Datil-Mogollon Volcanics, caused me to want to pick up Annals for a second time, and as with every really good book one re-reads, I noticed certain parts anew. In this case, I was thinking about the problem of dogmatism in science, encouraged both by scientists whose funding is politically motivated, and by non-scientists who confuse initial arm-waving with a testable hypothesis, and who take it to be the same as truth handed down from Sinai. "The science is settled," says one of the latter about one such arm-waving idea. But the science is rarely settled so early in the life of an idea.

Geology is by its nature a big-picture science, and one that depends a great deal on inference from what can be observed to how it got to be the way it is. Whereas much of science as practiced within the dominant paradigms of each scientific field today is deductive, the big-picture thinking about Geology is necessarily inductive. (Despite the turf wars about these two methods of discovery, both deductive and inductive thinking are necessary for a complete science). Further, Geology--by the nature of its subject matter--is primarily about TIME. Lots and lots of time. Or as geologists say it, "Deep Time". Time that is orders of magnitude greater than the span of a human life, or even the span of numerous human generations. The kind of time that geologists tend to discuss makes a million years appear as the blink of an eye, and the entire time of human existance on the earth is scarcely longer than that.

The disconnect between Deep Time and Human Time leads to some interesting human misconceptions about our power and place upon the planet. On the one hand, human beings are the first species upon the earth that have become self-referencing observers of the evolution of life on the planet. We are capable of thinking about and questioning the way life came to be here, and our place in that parade of "endless forms most beautiful". We can think about the meaning of our existence and we know the finite nature of our lives. All of this makes us important to ourselves, and perhaps, as an aspect of the universe that observes itself, we are important in the grand scheme of things.

But this disconnect between Deep Time and Human Time also leads to the idea that we are the culminating act of evolution: that our existence was the necessary end of a long chain of programmed events. It is rather like the paint on the Eiffel Tower believing that the tower was built for its own sake, as Mark Twain once remarked. Enter Seeber's Principle of Least Astonishment, which is the idea that all of what we see around us is the culmination, that now that human beings walk the earth, change should stop because evolution is finished. The continents are in their final place, the species that exist now shall exist forever, the climate that we have been born into shall not change. So we have written, and so shall it be done.

Evolution has no teleological direction. It is the response of organisms adapting to and failing to adapt to changing environments over time. This leads to changes in the gene frequencies within species, and that is evolution. If we were able to rewind and replay the course of the evolution of life upon the earth, there is no guarantee that the results would be the same as we now see; there are too variables along the way. Species that have the genetic wherewithal to meet and survive environmental change evolve. Those that do not become extinct.

And so it becomes somewhat amusing to watch as those who believe that they understand evolution, those that make fun of the Creationists and call them "neanderthals", are also those that have turned science into a political agenda and have begun an effort to "Stop Global Climate Change" by legislation. They have about as much chance of success as they do to "Re-Unite Gondwanaland!" (Both quotes can be found on bumperstickers.The first appears to be serious, and the second is geological tongue-in-cheek).

Even geologists get pulled up short by the disconnect between Deep Time and Human Time. And even though they predict that when the two kinds of time intersect, as they did during the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and the Tsunami of 2004, turmoil becomes inevitable, we still tend to think that the earth should behave itself and stay still beneath our feet. We tend to want the species that existed when we were born to be there when we are old, and glaciers should neither retreat nor advance so long as human beings live upon the earth. We think of disasters as a nasty interruption of "normal" rather than a "normal" feature of a dynamic planet.

Never mind that we owe our big brains to the last ice age. Never mind that climate has been changing upon the earth since before the oldest rocks we can find on the continents existed. And never mind that life on the planet has had an effect on its environment since the oxygen revolution.

From the perspective of Human Time, an earthquake, a tsunami, a volcanic eruption, are all potential disasters. And it makes sense to think of them as such. Human beings are meaning-making individuals, and we view events from the perspective of their meaning to us.
And that is necessary and--dare I say it?--normal to our evolutionary niche. And if we can predict and protect ourselves from disaster, this is a good thing for us. But when put into the perspective of Deep Time, such disasters, even ones on a extinction-level scale, are more grist for the mill of evolution--the change over time of life on earth.

The Principle of Least Astonishment may indeed by a psychological necessity for going about the daily business of living. And yet now and then, the view from the perspective of Deep Time creates for us the Most Astonishment, it creates wonder at the precious nature of our existence, birthed on the edge of the creative maelstrom and able to look into it and see the circumstances of our genesis. Wonderful life, indeed!

The Trials and Tribulations of Changing Operating Systems

You think it would be fairly easy to do this stuff. After many trials and tribulations with Windows Vista--problems like automatic shut-downs, frequent error messages, problems with the hard drive--I decided to go to a Linux OS, thinking it would work better with my system and make my life easier.

The first trial was with Mandriva. It seemed good at first, but there were some problems. Like a sound system that sometimes did not let me control the volume, and problems with the way files were stored. It was not logical to me and I was forever looking for files. The Home folder was a complete mystery to me--I didn't know it existed, and therefore couldn't find files. There were other problems. Like pictures. The Mandriva photo manager did not allow me to rotate pictures, so all of my portrait view pictures would load onto Blogger and Facebook sideways and upside down. I couldn't use them.

After a few weeks of this, I was ready to bag Linux altogether, and sent my friend the Techno-Wizard a message saying so. He suggested that we partition the drive and change out from Mandriva to a more logically formatted Linux System. He suggested Ubuntu. I agreed, and he took my machine home to do the deed. I picked it up again last Thursday, and having a deadline to get a Business Plan Questionnaire done, I logged into Ubuntu. I thought I should log into Ubuntu because when the Techno-Wizard came to take my computer, I had been working on that document, and done about two hours worth of work. But no documents existed at Ubuntu.

Oh. The Home folder had been loaded on Windows.
So I logged into Windows.
After some searching, I found that the Home Folder had been loaded there under an abbreviation of my name.
But even after loading Open Office, I could not download the files.
We think its empty. Well actually, the Techno-Wizard does.
Me, I USE computers. And I hate it when they DON"T WORK like I expect.
You've heard of Road Rage?
You've heard of PMS?
Hell hath no fury like this woman confronted with a deadline and confounded by empty files and lost folders.
And upside-down pictures!

But Windows is such a pain, that I am willing to deal with fury in order to get to something better. And better do it now, while I still have some estrogen--albeit it comes in unpredictable flashes-- to protect my heart from the sudden escalation of fight-or-flight.

Patience, they say, is a virtue.

Here is a You Tube video from College Humor that puts this all into perspective:




Ubuntu? I'm going to learn Ubuntu.

Just one question:

Where the heck do they get these names?

Noakh: Here Comes the Flood

This past week, as autumn has been deepening in the Sandias, I have been living with Noakh, and the primeval mythos of origins from the Akkadian and ancient Hebrew.

It is an odd juxtoposition.
Such stories might be understood better in the burgeoning life of springtime.
But the Torah has a logic of its own. So we study the Hebrew myths of chaos, creation, the bursting of boundaries, and re-creation all in the weeks following Sukkot, as the earth travels towards the cold sleep of winter in the northern hemisphere.

Last Saturday evening, the Women's Torah Study Group had a late afternoon study session, followed by Havdalah. And since we begin the next week's parashah on Shabbat afternoon, we began the new year of study with Parashat Noakh. And then this week, along with work, news of the election, and neuroscience, I was preparing to leyn (chant) Noach for the Parallel Minyan today. And so I set the gathering stormclouds of political change and national crisis to the tune of the ancient Deluge that beset the Two-Rivers sometime in the long ago.

Parashat Noakh is interesting, following as it does on Parashat B'reshit, which contains two different creation stories and some geneologies. In B'reshit, the first creation myth tells us that creation was essentially about bringing order from chaos through establishing boundaries:

"Once when G-d was about to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a chaos, unformed, and over the face of the tehom (the great deep) there was darkness . . ." (B'reshit 1:2)

(Note the translation: B'reshit does not mean "in the beginning," a phrase that uses the definite article; rather, the Hebrew word is indefinite, signalling that this is a myth--a story told for the purpose of making meaning, not a factual report).

The first creation story in B'reshit is the younger of the two stories; it is written in classical Hebrew and it is carefully crafted to convey a precise meaning. The use of certain Akkadian words such as tehom, the root of the name of Tiamat, the primeval goddess of the Enumah Elish (the Mesopotamian creation myth) is intended to draw the hearer's attention to the similarities and differences between the two stories. For in B'reshit, the primary act of creation is done by the separation of the forces of nature, bringing order out of chaos. And in B'reshit, the capstone of each act of creation is the acknowledgement that it is good. Human beings are not the accidental product of a war between the gods as in the Enumah Elish, doomed to suffer purposeless and chaotic existence; for in B'reshit, when the human beings are made, they are the capstone of creation, and are pronounced very good. And when human beings, endowed with free-will, choose to leave the garden/womb and become moral beings, they become productive partners with the Eternal, making their living by the creative work of their hands.

From this story we learn two things:
One, that material existence is not only good, but very good. Thus, Judaism rejects Platonism.
And secondly, that bringing order out of chaos by separation and boundaries is very good.
The root of the Hebrew word for holy--kadosh-- means separate, set aside.

Judaism does not interpret the eating of the pommegranite as a fall into sin; the story is interpreted as the human first choice to know the difference between good and evil, with the attendant consequence of the recognition of human mortality. The serpent--nakhash--is the ancient Mesopotamian symbol of wisdom. This interprative difference between B'reshit and the more well-known Christian understanding of Genesis, means that Judaism has no concept of original sin. Rather, in Jewish understanding, humans are moral creatures, and in the exercise of free-will must make choices. And in Torah and in the Midrash, we see that G-d (who is not portrayed as omniscient and omnipotent) is consistently surprised by the consequences of creating human beings--who are set apart from all other animals--by this need to choose, to reach, to strive.

And this is the point of the Hebrew version of the story of the Deluge. The ancient mythos of the middle east has many flood stories, probably due to some dim memory of a great deluge--perhaps at the end of the last ice age. In the Gilgamesh Epic, the flood story is about the fruitless search for immortality, in which the hero learns that he is missing his life by making the search. But in the Hebrew myth, the story seems to be about chaos breaking out due to the transgression of boundaries by humans and by G-d. The story is confused because of the redactor's weaving of numerous older versions of the story so that multiple meanings can be discerned. However, the thread is there.

At the beginning of the story, it is said that the Eternal (Elohim) sees that human choices have made the earth full of corruption and Khamas. Khamas, often translated as 'violence,' can also mean the full range of human evil. No boundaries--no law--has been set on human choices, and so chaos breaks forth due to human choices. But further, the Eternal has not set boundaries on the Eternal. Thus the chaos that breaks forth is deadly to all life. It cannot be punishment for sin, since no law has been set forth, and since such punishment would be confined to human beings. It is rather, the transgression of the primordial boundaries set forth to bring order out of chaos:

". . . on that day all the springs of the tehom--the great deep--broke out, and the firmament opened. Rain fell upon the earth . . ." (B'reshit 7:11)

Note the use of the word tehom here; chaos, in the form of the primeval waters of the great deep, breaks forth ferociously, just as in the Enumah Elish, in the war between the gods.
And at the end of the flood, when the boundaries on chaos are remade, and when Noach makes an altar in some inchoate thankfulness for his return to life, the Eternal understands the divine mistake. Boundaries are set upon human behavior and law is made:

"Be fruitful and multiply and spread out upon the earth. And let the awe and dread of you be upon the land animals . . . moreover, for your own bloodguilt I will require your lives: The one who sheds human blood/ that one's blood shall be shed by another/ for human beings were made in the image of G-d (e.g. willfull and creative, and with an understanding of their own mortality)." (B'reshit 9:1-6)

And boundaries are also set on the Eternal:

". . .never again will I destroy all the living beings as I have just done.
As long as the world exists/ planting and harvesting/ cold and heat/ summer and winter/ day and night/ will never end." (B'reshit 8: 21-22)

The covenant is sealed with the sign of the rainbow, meant to remind both human and G-d about the boundaries set:

"Here is the sign of the covenant that I am establishing between me and you all that breath upon the earth . . . I have hung up my bow in the clouds . . . and when I see it, I will remember the everlasting covenant between G-d and all that breathes upon the earth." (B'reshit 8:13, 16).

We humans are concerned with chaos and with order. Creativity is the process of setting and breaking boundaries, only to remake them; it is the process of bringing holiness--separations--into the world for the purpose of making life good. Human beings have an understanding of chaos and the ticking of time towards our own mortality. In order to live by the work of our hands, we create the Rule of Law, that even the Eternal may not transgress. All of our science, all of our technology, and our very lives rest upon this fragile bridge: the understanding that the universe is a lawful place, that choices have consequences, and that we cannot wish away their reality.

And that when we refuse to see the difference between good and evil, when we try to wish away the reality of consequences, we loose chaos--the Deluge--again upon our worlds.

I have been thinking of all these things this week, as the politicians in this time of election, beguile us with promises that they have the power to set aside reality and its consequences.

"When the night shows, the signals grow on radios,

All the strange things, they come and go as early warnings,

Stranded starfish have no place to hide, still waiting for the swollen Easter Tide,

There's no point in direction, you cannot even choose a side.
Lord, here comes the flood . . . " (Peter Gabriel).

And human hope? It comes not from a politician who has begun to believe his own press.

Hope comes from the memory of past struggles and the establishment of boundaries. We remember that the price of our liberty is that we be mindful of what is true and real.

And that we understand that our task in life is to bring order out of chaos by our mindful choices.

And then, may we remember the rainbow . . .

Blessed are You, Eternal . . . who remembers/is bound by the covenant with all that lives . . .

Tov Meod: Towards Order Slowly

Ahhhh!

Step one accomplished.

The office is set up and usable.

The books are back on the shelf
and the boxes have found corners to dwell in temporarily.

My desk is also set up.

There is more clutter on it now, but everything on the surface of the long part is related to IRD.

Tomorrow I can prepare for my classes this weekend in an office that is set up and workable.

And I even managed a quick trip to the grocery store.

Order is on the way.

; Tohu V'Bohu: Sometimes Chaos is Good

At the beginning of B'reshit (known to the Western World as Genesis), it is written:

"V'ha-aretz haita tohu v'bohu.
The earth was in chaos."
If you prefer King James--which is translated to masterful English--we read "the earth was unformed and void." It was the creative power of the Eternal that "moved across the waters" and brought cosmos out of that chaos. And ever since, human beings--especially female ones--have been laboring to do the same.

That seems to be my task this week.

While I was gone, the Engineering Geek took a week's vacation and installed the Brazilian Cherry hardwood flooring in my office.

He was very good. He disturbed my things as little as possible by simply moving them as they were to other places for the duration.
Now it's my job to transform my office to make it a workable space by this weekend.




On Tuesday evening, we put the dedicated canine daybed back together and in place.
We also put the desk back, and hooked up the computer and speaker phone.
That got me ready for the last day of Distance Training for IRD.

The office was looking pretty good.
Spare and clean.
Too bad there were still books, binders, papers that need to be shredded, and all the accountrements of modern living to be brought in. But it still looked doable. Even with the 6 boxes of supplies helpfully dropped off on our doorstep from IRD.


I got some more stuff into my office on Wednesday morning, since I had started some of the IRD reading and lesson plan study the night before. It was still looking good.


But 45 minutes before I had to leave to take N. to Taekwondo Belt Testing, Fed Ex pulled up. The friendly Fed Ex man got out his dolly. Oh.
Nine more boxes that had to be opened and inventoried right away covered the new floor in my office. And it's a good thing I did not delay! I needed to inform the IRD shipping contingent that I needed more copies of The Fellowship of the Ring and some Level 6 packets, as numbers for that course had gone up dramatically. Those folks were already on it, though, and had already arranged for another shipment.


Here is the state of my office this morning.

It's kind of exciting to be getting the actual teaching materials for my summer's work.
But I'd like one more day to get the office in order so that I can then focus on teaching prep.

And I am not a chaos sort of person.
Order is my specialty.
Which is why I am forever working against entropy to bring order out of chaos.

So I must remind myself that sometimes chaos is good. It is the ground of being creative.
And creativity is one of the aspects of divinity endowed to humanity.

I do intend to post about summer plans and exciting changes coming our way in the next few months. After I do the work at hand.
Such as getting the office together so that I can think in here.
And getting a work routine down so that I can focus on the meta aspects of teaching.

And, quoting from B'reshit again, it is:
"Tov meod."
Very good.

Finally....Chaos: Starting to Lay Flooring

It has been two weeks since we brought our wood flooring home for installation.

The flooring does hace to sit for at least 72 hours, but ours has acclimated for much longer. That's good--I suppose, but it was NOT planned that way. We planned to start laying floor last weekend. But you know how it is--Sh...tuff happens!

We had N. to get home from camp and N. to send off to Illinois. We had the water softener blow a gasket (actually an 'O'-ring seal) and start leaking all over the garage...

So on Friday, we'd said, we'd begin. On Friday, we went about measuring because before you can begin, you have to PLAN. And Bruce is a planner extraordinaire.
And that planning is important so that the boards are centered in the room, and so that any "ripped" (sawed longwise) boards aren't so narrow as to look funny at the edge of a room.
I am really glad Bruce knows about these things, because I...being engineeringly challenged...had no idea how much goes into getting ready for laying a floor.


Then, we had some more supplies to get.
Friday evening, before we began our Shabbat, Bruce spent some time on the phone with Lumber Liquidators. We found out we needed a different trowel than the one we used on the composite flooring we installed at the other house. We also needed solvent to clean off any misplaced Bostik Adhesive.


After Torah study yesterday, we went to get those items. We also needed the MSDS (Materials Safety Data Sheets) print-outs, so that we knew how to safely handle the adhesive and the solvents. Then we stopped to get gloves, knee pads and blue painter's tape.

After Havdalah, I emptied the china cabinet, and we moved the furniture out of the dining room--the first room we plan to do. Except---the china cabinet! It is too heavy for Bruce and me to move alone--we need more muscle. So we are working around that until we can get some help. I saw my kitchen become crowded and my dining room emptied.
Bruce disconnected the stove from the stove-pipe because the platform it rests on must be moved, too.

This morning--well, we did not get an early start. I should hide the newspaper! I kept walking out to the kitchen and saying, "Bruce, should we get started?" And he kept saying, "Just let me finish this section."

Maybe I'll cancel the paper for the duration!

But we finally got moving. More measuring, more calculating. Some heated discussion about where to actually start and which way to orient the boards.
Our hallways are orthogonal (at-right-angles-to) the large rooms.

But finally--action! The baseboards came off. More measuring was done to make really, truly sure we would not glue ourselves into an off-center look.

Then the carpets started coming up. We are now committed to trying to actually, really, truly get this done...before the High Holidays, I hope!

I find that as I age--and believe me DIY ages me FAST--I am less and less willing to tolerate chaos for long periods of time. And I am mindful of how long it took to get the tub in! That "weekend project" actually took close to three months. (Holidays and a Bar Mitzvah intervened).

But I have to keep tellling myself that:
1) I was the one that wanted hardwood floors
2) We are saving thousands of dollars by laying the floors ourselves
3) The value of our house will go up by about double the materials cost plus the estimated installation (the part we are not going to pay!), making our installation real sweat equity
4) My husband is a perfectionist--meaning the work will be done beautifully
AND
5) I will enjoy the fruits of our labor for far longer than I will have to live in Chaos.

So--bring on tohu v'bohu (chaos), because the joy of DIY cannot be far behind.