And yet, a trivial question it is not.  In fact, I very nearly didn’t go this year, so it’s important for me to remind myself why I do take 6 days off from work, buy a non-cheap pass, pay for non-cheap airfare and scrounge for accommodations in an overstuffed Austin during the second week of March every year to go to SXSW Interactive (NB: to add the Film and Music portions would frankly be too much). Here are my five reasons:

1) Encountering new ideas.  SXSW consistently pulls to its stages some of greatest minds in science, business, technology, entrepreneurship, journalism and all-around awesomeness.  Because there are so many stages, these speakers have incentive to share their best work with us lest we leave for another of the 35-40 simultaneous talks.  This year alone, I was lucky to catch talks by neuroscientist David Eagleman, inventor Dean Kamen, game designer Jane McGonigal, Mathematica creator Stephen Wolfram, and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis (about all of whom I will share below).

The ideas these luminaries share are not only valuable per se, but also serve to collide together in the bubble chamber of your head to spawn new ideas of your own. That’s the magic that keeps on going weeks after you’ve returned home.

2) Encountering new people.  One of the great things about SXSW is that all those great speakers are just milling around with the rest of us — without their Secret Service detail. Stephen Wolfram was getting a sandwich with his two kids. Dean Kamen was standing on the curb waiting for a cab when I shook his hand (bonus!). Bob Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com) was just moseying about at his friend Peter Diamandis’s talk.  One of the founders of Anonymous (who shall remain anonymous) was sipping margaritas at the Silicon Valley Bank mixer (and they were excellent margaritas – thank you, SVB). And about thirty thousand others are hanging out with you at the drinks tent, the exhibit floor, the blogger’s lounge, the Mashable party, the FedEx free food truck, and the karaoke bus.

The friendly, fun and cooperative atmosphere of SXSW lends itself to turning these hallway encounters into lasting friendships and business connections. Which brings us to…

3) SXSW is a nexus.  In addition to meeting new folks, SXSW is a great place to meet up with old friends from far-flung corners of the world, as well as those who live down the street whose schedules never seem to mesh with yours.  That VC guy in Palo Alto you never connected with? He’s there. The blogger from Portland you wanted to collaborate with? She’s there, too. And if they’re at a party trying to score free drinks like you, it means that slot in their calendar is open – go thee forth and connect.

4) Capturing the zeitgeist. If Eric Schmidt is correct in saying that mankind is creating 5 exabytes of information every two days, then I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you can’t get through all five of those exabytes in two days. Or even two thousand years.

So there needs to be some sifting, and conferences like SXSW do an excellent job of that. World-class speakers bring you the latest developments in their fields – design, journalism, computing, yak husbandry. You get to sit there and absorb so, for a glint of a moment, you can be on top of world developments before falling hopelessly behind.

5) Inspiration. Besides conveying metric craptons of interesting data, the speakers also move us with their words and feats so we reach for better versions of ourselves.  When you hear Dean Kamen talk about how he spent 8 years creating the Slingshot water purifier to solve the world’s water problems, you have no choice but to walk around with jaw agape, rejoicing in humanity’s potential to think big.  Psychologists call this emotion elevation, and it’s totally contagious. SXSW is a good place to catch it.

So. What did I actually learn there? Here’s a sampling:

Peter Diamandis on his new book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

• Prize competitions like the X Prize are highly efficient, leveraged ways of sparking breakthrough innovation and launching entirely new industries, like private space travel.
• Some other X Prizes under way: lunar lander, handheld medical diagnostics, carbon capture, education.

Dr A.K. Pradeep on neuroeconomics and neuromarketing:

• The prefrontal cortex of a teenager lags in development, so they understand the language of emotion, not logic.
• People over 60 are capable of focusing, but they can get easily distracted by outside stimulus. If a message is negative, they tend to disregard it.
• 7 dimensions of a brand: form, function, feeling, values, benefits, metaphors, extensions

David Eagleman: The Secret Lives of the Brain

David’s a rising star in the Baylor Dept of Neuroscience. Get his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, because it is awesomeness and therefore I didn’t take a lot of notes during his talk. Yeah, what a tease, I know. Well, you can always check out this video instead.

Stephen Wolfram: Computation and its Impact on the Future

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and the author of A New Kind of Science, a tome on cellular automata. He got his PhD in theoretical physics at 20 and won a MacArthur Fellowship at 21, so he’s got some tricks up his sleeve.

• Computation is happening everywhere in the universe, all the time. As far as computation is concerned, the complex interactions happening inside a hurricane are mathematically equivalent to what a computer can do.
• Wolfram|Alpha Pro is one unimaginably versatile, powerful piece of software. Not only can you query this ‘knowledge engine’ with a math problem, ‘population of Austin’ or ‘passengers on the Titanic’ and get a complete report with tables and graphs, but you can also upload entire files – a spreadsheet or your Facebook profile, say – and it will crunch numbers and spit out all kinds on interesting meta-data on your data. Completely mind-blowing.
• Wolfram showed what Wolfram|Alpha Pro could do in terms of ‘quantifying the self’ when he plugged in some files of his logged daily activities, such as all the emails he had sent since 1990, or all the steps he had taken in the past year.
• He also demonstrated the potential of the software to respond to medical queries, such as “LDL 180 male 50 years old”, which would spit out a report on where that falls in the range of normal. By Bayesian inversion, it can also give differential diagnoses if you add to the query “+ symptom xyz”. This could be powerful stuff.

Jane McGonigal: How to be SuperBetter

Jane had dazzled me with her book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World, so I had to check out her talk on the new game she had developed, SuperBetter.

• She was inspired to create SuperBetter after a mild concussion left her mostly incapacitated and depressed. It worked so well that she decided to turn it into an app for the world to play. The game aims to help people achieve their health goals by increasing in them the quality of resiliency, which has three components: courage, agency and time.
• The game itself has a fun and sparkly interface and has you do 4 tasks that in turn increase your physical, mental, emotional
• There a bunch of apps, websites and games out there that already allow folks to increase their well-being, plan fun activities with friends, or set shared goals: Everest, Lift, Mightybell, dailyfeats, Schemer (brand-spanking new site by Google), Citizen Logistics

Dean Kamen: Invention and Inspiration: Building a Better World

I already told you that I was thoroughly blown away by Dean’s presentation. He worked for 8 years developing the Slingshot, which basically takes wastewater and turns it into injection-grade purified water. In order to make this work, Dean basically bent the laws of thermodynamics to his will and figured out a way to recover 94% of the energy used in water distillation. Still, the purifier was intended for remote, underserved areas that just didn’t have electricity. So he also invented a power supply (based on a Stirling engine) that can run on twigs or cow dung or Reese’s Pieces. Pretty sure Prometheus got chained to a rock (and worse) for doing stuff like this.

He also talked about FIRST (For Inspiraton and Recognition of Science and Technology), his insanely cool worldwide athletics-style engineering competition for kids ages 9-18, which is basically designed to make it cool to be smart. It’s been around since 1989, and this year 250,000 students from 50 countries will participate. I had no idea.

Emily Pilloton: Design. Build. Transform.

I attended this talk on a recommendation from Mashable, and I’m glad I did. Emily teaches high school in Bertie County, North Carolina, which is slightly east of the middle of nowhere. Through her nonprofit Project H (and in spite of serious obstructionism by school administrators), she taught her students how to design, prototype and build chicken coops — and a whole farmer’s market (!). The kids pulled it off.

• Four things kids need to learn about: citizenship, creativity, capital, critical thinking.
• She introduced us to the design idiom of the ‘vernacular sublime’ – simplicity that is beautiful, familiar and functional.

Ray Kurzweil: Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit

Ray’s vision of the accelerating acceleration of technological progress is so brain-frying and mind-expanding that I didn’t even get a chance to write much down. A staggering number of predictions he made in his earlier books have come true. As a cofounder of Singularity University, he’s well-poised to predict the future since he’ll be overseeing its creation. The fields to look out for: genomics, nanotechnology and robotics/AI. Most of what he covered is in The Singularity is Near and Abundance. The graphs charting humanity’s technological progress are astonishing.

Biz Stone: Content as a Means for Social Change

Biz is one of the cofounders of Twitter. Instead of reporting on the latest wowie zowie technology, he chose to share five stories from different timepoints in his career, each illustrating a principle for life mastery. His demeanor while delivering the talk was so peaceful and generous as to have been a lesson unto itself.

• Opportunity can be manufactured. In high school, Biz wanted to be one of the cool athletes but wasn’t all that good at baseball, basketball or football. So he got permission from administrators to start a lacrosse team from scratch, and became the star lacrosse player. Build your own universe, then rule it, dammit.
• Creativity is a renewable resource. When he was a lowly mailboy at the publisher Little, Brown, Biz took it upon himself to steal some time on a workstation to design a book jacket for a new project, then casually place it amongst the pile of proofs. And if they didn’t like it, no big deal – there’s more where that came from. Turns out the project manager did like it, and biz got an insta-promotion to the design staff.
• To succeed spectacularly, you must be willing to fail spectacularly. There will be no hedging! Biz invoked the storyline from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire to illustrate his point.
• There is compound interest in altruism. You don’t have to wait to make it big before engaging in serious philanthropy. In fact, 40 cents a day buys antiretroviral drugs that can turn an AIDS patient’s health around so dramatically that it’s called the Lazarus Effect. You can start doing that right now. And the future of marketing is philanthrophy, so weave it into your business from the outset. Practice doing well by doing good.
• Ask lots of questions from mentors and experienced folks. And go forth and change the world by building a business and having fun while doing it.

So there’s my attempt at preserving some of the learnings and inspiration from a remarkable gathering. If you were there, too, and have cool stuff to add, please do so in the comments – consider this our own nexus for the useful information we gleaned.

Religion

There are no diacritical marks (representing vowels) in the Hebrew Torah – it’s all consonants.  As a result, any reading of the Torah is effectively an act of interpretation.

Mathematics

• The most efficient way to tile a 2-dimensional surface is a hexagon.  It has the best ratio of boundary to surface, or uses the least amount of ‘ink’ per surface area as you draw the cells on paper.  The honeycomb exemplifies this in nature.  Although for hundreds of years mathematicians have intuitively known this to be true, it was only in 1998 that Thomas Hales proved it mathematically.
• Until recently, the most efficient way to tile a 3-dimensional space was a Kelvin cell – a modified 3-D hexagon.  Then in 1994, Weaire-Phelan cells came along and beat the Kelvin cell’s efficiency by 0.03%.

Problem-solving and creativity

• Improve your thinking and creativity by making deliberate mistakes.  Then, ask yourself, “If this is the wrong way, what’s the right way?”
• Second, exaggerate: how would you go about solving this problem if you had no constraints of time or money?  That will yield some useful insights.
• Third, invert the problem to come up with novel solutions.  If traffic’s problem is that the destination is more fun than the traffic, what if we were to make the traffic more fun than the destination?  What if you had great books on tape that you really enjoyed listening to in traffic?  Then it wouldn’t be as much of a problem.
• Fourth, use all ideas.  A mistaken answer for one problem may be the correct answer for another.  As one wise person said, “The time to work on a problem is after you solve it.” What are the chances that your insight only applies to that one measly problem you were working on?  So go forth and find some applications.

Psychology

• After battle exposure, officers get post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at dramatically lower rates than enlisted soldiers.
• Experimentally, hypnosis can alter your dominant sense of time orientation and take it from future-oriented (ant) to present-oriented (grasshopper).
• There are at least four types of charisma: authority (exemplified by Obama), kindness (e.g. Dalai Lama), visionary (Steve Jobs) and focus (Bill Clinton).  Each can be learned, and you can turn them on or off depending on the situation.

Psychology of love and relationships

• Adrenaline mediates feelings of attraction.  As a result, many women end up going for dominant, intimidating men who scare them a little, mistaking the feeling for attraction.  This isn’t always good.  Instead, it’s useful for a couple to be aware of this phenomenon and use it to recalibrate and rejuvenate their relationship by engaging in exciting activities together.
• Marrying for love is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history.
• John Gottman’s studies show that successful responses to a spouse’s bids for attention are the best indicator of marital success.  Example of a bid: wife’s reading the paper and says, “Wow, that’s interesting!” (the bid) and the husband says, “What’s interesting, honey?” (the response).  Couples who have an 80-85% positive response rate basically don’t get divorced.  Even a 50% bid response rate augurs a rapidly rising divorce rate.
• Marital satisfaction for men correlates with how much sex he gets and how little criticism he gets.  For women, it correlates with how sensitive he is to her emotional cues and how much housework he does.  There’s a certain complementarity to this, in that the more housework a man does, the less her wife nags him.

Keeping your brain young

• Playing first-person shooter video games can reduce mistakes by surgeons.
• Travel, new language acquisition, taking a different route to work, and brushing your teeth with the non-dominant hand are ways of waking up your brain and keeping it cognitively fit.
• Women should let their husbands talk more because men are most at risk for losing their verbal abilities as they age.  Men should let their wives drive more because women are most at risk of losing their visuospatial abilities as they age.
• The best thing you can do to keep your brain sharp is to walk briskly 30min per day.  You gain the maximum benefit at around 40min/day.  There’s no additional benefit beyond 60min/day of exercise.
• Social contact is the second most protective agent against cognitive decline. People who have 5 or more close social ties have half the cognitive decline of those who have fewer than five.
• Smoking doubles the rate of dementia later in life.  Even a casual cigarette or cigar is highly deleterious.
• Water and cosmetics can contain lead.  Use a PUR water filter (better than Brita), and check the cosmetic products you use against the Cosmetics Database.
• A Mediterranean diet has been shown to be the best for protecting against cognitive decline.  Think 7-9 servings of colorful fruits and vegetables a day.  Juices don’t count; eat the whole fruit or vegetable.  Wild fish and sardines are good.
• Green tea is the best for improving brain function.  Oolong tea is second.
• Texting while driving increases accident rates by a factor of 23! You may as well be driving while completely wasted off your ass.
• A person on average fails to notice a sudden event while driving – eg kid jumping in front of car – around 30% of the time. That goes up to 90% when you’re on the phone, so you’re better off not talking at all, hands-free or not.
• Relaxation is a key to optimal brain function.  This means meditating or doing absolutely nothing for at least 10min.
• Getting slimmer improves brain function.  Measure progress by waist size, not weight.
• Have a positive emotional outlook.  Read Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman.

Mycology (the study of mushrooms)

• Fungi have ruled the earth twice: once during the Permian-Triassic (P-T) extinction 250 million years ago, and once again at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction 65 million years ago.  At these extinctions, sunlight could not get through the atmosphere and most organisms perished while fungi flourished.
• Oyster mushrooms can break down petroleum-based oils (like motor oil) embedded in soil, taking levels from 20,000ppm to 200 ppm
• Other fungi have shown to be hyperaccumulators of heavy metals, sequestering heavy isotopes like Cs-137 from the ecosystem.
• A mycelium network visually resembles a network of neurons.
• Agarikon, red reishi and chaga mushrooms have high activity against viruses.  In combination, they are more active than ribavirin against influenza virus
• Cordyceps subsessilis and Cordyceps sinensis have immune-modulating activities that make them candidates for use in organ transplantation and multiple sclerosis treatment, respectively.
• Turkey tail mushroom capsules as an adjunct to traditional breast cancer chemotherapy mediated dramatic remissions and multiyear survival for some late-stage cancer cases with otherwise bleak prognoses (3 month survival or less).

This represents but a fraction of what transpired, and I’m deeply grateful to the organizers for creating such a lovely environment conducive to the free exchange of ideas and connections.

But I digress.  Let’s get to the heart of the matter: why Christmas vacation sucks.  I know my fellow curmudgeons are out there, and thanks to the internet, they too can find a few words to warm their shriveled little Scrooge hearts.  Read on:

1. I can’t throw a goddamn party for a whole freakin’ month.

For pretty much the entire month of December, I can’t throw any kind of party.  For the first half of the month, every night of the week is taken up by multiple holiday parties, each one of them samer than the next.  I know, boohoo, I have sooo many parties to go to – rough life.  But what if I just want to have a dinner party?  Nope, can’t compete with Ugly Sweater Party XIV or the White Elephant gift exchange that’s going to saddle me with a mahogany desk organizer set.

And then, in the second half of the month, everybody leaves town, so I still can’t throw a party.  Of course, if I just skipped town myself, that would solve the problem, so really this article is about ‘Why Christmas vacation sucks if you’re stuck in your hometown.’

2. Santa Claus is a phony, grammatically murderous Coca-Cola concoction

The phoniness, kitsch and just plain ridiculousness of Santa never ceases to amaze me.  First of all, have any of you noticed that ‘Santa’ is the title for a woman – like Santa Monica, Santa Margarita, and Santa Ana?  Call him Saint Nicholas if you must, but calling a man ‘Santa’ is like naming your daughter Biff or saying Ms Brad Pitt.  Just plain wrong.

Then you have the roly-poly white-bearded red-suited imagery which all basically comes from a Coca Cola ad.  Since capitalism is a quasi-religion in the US, it’s only appropriate that its foremost quasi-religious figure should come from corporate America.

But is he really all that quasi-religious?  Let’s look at the lyrics of ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ for a moment, shall we:

He’s making a list
And checking it twice;
Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice
Santa Claus is coming to town!
He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!

Hell, this guy ain’t Santa Claus – he’s god!  Compare his white-bearded mien, and métier of sitting at a chair dispensing judgment and favor, with the iconography of God the Father of the flowing white beard, sitting at his throne, thunderbolt in hand.  Coincidence?  I think not.  Also, he’s fat, and that’s not the kind of role model we need nowadays.

3. Christmas is a corruption of Saturnalia.

Basically, nobody knows when Jesus was born.  Heck, nobody even knows what year he was born, let alone what day.  What the Holy Roman Emperors did know was that Saturnalia, which happened around the winter solstice, was the Romans’ favorite holiday.  This is when society went topsy-turvy: kids were let out of school, slaves became masters, masters became slaves, and misrule ruled.  Oh, and there was much drinking,  nakedness, and good old-fashioned orgies.

This was totally not with the Holy Roman program, and the government couldn’t quite fight it.  So they co-opted it.  Well lookee here – seems like Jesus was born around the solstice, too!  Now let’s all party – tamely, thank you, with your clothes on.  And speaking of orgies gone terribly wrong…

5. Christmas is an orgy of rabid frothy consumption and acquisitiveness.

Every year, the reports from Black Friday get more lurid.  People camping overnight in store parking lots, pepper-spraying one another to get to merchandise, trampling each other to death.  Chill the fuck out – it’s only stuff!  For a whole month, everyone’s running around like Godzilla high on speed, trying to eat what it can and charge the rest.

Hey, I don’t mind a thoughtful present every once in a while.  But how much is it worth if you had to buy it under duress – because ‘tis the season?  I’d much rather have you get me a present on some random day of the year, like July 17, because you saw something you thought I’d like.

6. The whole story of Christmas and nativity is fabricated, weird and historically inaccurate.

Here’s the standard story of the Nativity: Joseph and Mary, 9 months pregnant, have traveled to Bethlehem (uh, why? – we’ll get to that in a sec).  They ask for a room in an inn, but the innkeeper says no vacancy.  The retire to a stable, where Mary gives birth in the presence of reverent livestock and shepherds, at which point three wise men/kings/magi who have followed a star arrive from the East bearing gifts of frankincense, myrrh and Lego sets (they were old school like that).

Now, if you’ve actually read the New Testament, you’ll notice that this story does not exist anywhere in the Bible.  Go ahead – look for it!  It’s simply not there.  It’s a mishmash of the accounts from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, which directly conflict with one another.

First of all, Matthew has no story of Joseph and Mary traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem because they live in Bethlehem.  In a house.  No stable, no animals, no shepherds, no manger – just a simple home birth.  He is visited by wise men, but their number is unspecified.  The wise men are sent by Herod, whose astrologers have told him the exact time and date of the birth of a child who will supplant him as King of Judea.  The wise men lie to Herod and say they didn’t find the kid, after which Herod orders the killing of all boys 2 yrs old or younger in Bethlehem.  This means that the wise men visited baby J. two years after his birth, not on his birthday.  This makes sense, considering that there were no high-speed magnetic levitation trains to bring the wise men from way back East to the birthplace as soon as the star marking Jesus’ birth appeared. And where exactly is ‘The East’ anyway?  Poughkeepsie?  Tenafly?  Or more like Beijing or Bali?

In Luke, the Annunciation of the virgin birth is made to Mary, not to Joseph as in Matthew.  Joseph and Mary travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem.  Now why would an exceptionally pregnant woman want to do that?  For the Roman census of that year, of course.  Except that Romans kept very good records of such things, and there was no census in that year. (Historians agree that Jesus was most likely born in Nazareth; the story of the birth in Bethlehem is a literary device so it all lines up with prophecy from the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament.) Then they end up in a stable, visited by common shepherds but no wise men bearing gifts.

The two stories don’t really align with one another.  Matthew’s subtext is how awful a man Herod King of Judea was, while Luke’s subtext is contrasting the humble origins of the true savior, Jesus, with the ostentation of Emperor Augustus.  Call ‘em what you may, but they ain’t the story of the Christmas you know.

7. Christmas music drives me batty.

All I can say is that I feel for all those poor bastards who have to work in retail establishments where they have to listen to the same songs over and over again FOR A MONTH.  Just my periodic visits to stores are enough to get visions of cluster-bomb fairies and chocolate-covered shotguns dancing in my head.  Stop the madness!  Anything, even Neil Diamond or Barry Manilow instead.

That said, there are a few saving graces to the Christmas season.  People are a smidge nicer.  The holiday parties are kinda fun on occasion, and nog spiked with Bailey’s must be consumed at least once a year.  And hearing “Ho ho ho” so often gives you hope that they must be somewhere. But my favorite part: you can actually drive around in LA and get places, ‘cause everyone’s gone.  Not that there’s anyone left to visit, but who cares!  The 405 is clear – drive anywhere, just because you can.

And the #1 reason why I can’t stand the fucking holidays is…

8. You just killed 50 million trees, assholes.

Let me ask you this: do you re-purchase tree ornaments every year?  Or do you just stash them in a box and recycle them next year, saving yourself time, money and trash?  Makes sense, doesn’t it?  Well why don’t you do the same thing with the damn tree then?  There is nothing a real tree can do that a plastic Christmas tree can’t.  It stands there.  It allows ornaments to hang.  And it lets people put presents at its foot.  Moreover, you don’t have to strap it to your car roof to drive it home, it doesn’t shed, and it won’t ooze gooey sap that gets all over the place, and you don’t have to go through the ordeal of disposing of it either.

Also, consider this: there are about 100 million households in the United States.  If half of them get a Christmas tree and a few million businesses get one, too, then we’ve got over 50 million evergreens that get slaughtered each year just so people have a completely optional decoration in their home to put presents under and goofy ornaments upon.  That’s 50 million trees that would otherwise be CO2-fixing, oxygen-releasing organisms contributing to the health of the planet and maybe acting as a buffer against climate change.  I don’t care if they were planted specifically for that purpose — they’re still trees that were live before and dead after.  And upon disposal, at an average weight of 30kg per tree, that becomes 1.5 million tons of organic waste that goes into landfill.

That just ain’t right.  So either get a plastic tree that gets the job done, or go treeless.  ‘Tradition’ is often a euphemism for mindless obeisance; let authenticity and affection define your Christmas instead.

The big question is, which languages should you take?  Here’s my take on which to take, with a rough rating for each.  I’ve taken French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Portuguese, Arabic and Chinese lessons, so those are based on firsthand experience:

Chinese. Everyone’s talking about how China is going to take over the world.  Whether or not that is true is irrelevant to the fact that if you become any kind of entrepreneur or businessperson, you’re certain to deal with China.  Printing, manufacturing, outsourcing, construction, finance — it’s all there.

Chinese business runs on the principle of guanxi — loosely translated as ‘relationships.’  Basically, it means that in a 2hr business meeting, you will spend the first 1:50 talking about your families, and the last 10min negotiating the deal.  Knowing Chinese in this situation will hold you in good stead.

Also, there’s a hierarchy of how good a deal you can get from a Chinese merchant: the gringo rate for those who don’t speak Chinese; the rate for the foreigners who can hack a few sentences; and the rate for natives.  The better your Chinese, the better the deal you’ll get.

Knowing Chinese will also give you access to a millennia-old body of literature, poetry and philosophy, if you’re into that Eastern wisdom thing.  On the downside, the effort required to speak, read and write Chinese will be about 3x that of picking up an Indo-European language with a Roman alphabet, so you need to be pretty determined.  And because of the sheer volume of work required for a Chinese course, you want to make sure your courseload is pretty light for that semester.  Like a jumbo box of Corn Flakes, it’s easy to digest, but a lot to get through.

The big argument for learning it in college is that you’ll never have the luxury of time and the facilities to do it again, so you might as well do it now.  Also, if you speak Chinese fluently, it is very likely that you will never be unemployed.  There’s some company somewhere who will find your Chinese expertise indispensable and be happy to make you their envoy to the Middle Kingdom.

Ease of learning: 1 Employability enhancement: 10 Cool factor: 10 Overall: 21/30

Japanese. Back in the ’80s and ’90s, Japanese was the go-to language for the budding careerist, because then the Land of the Rising Sun was the one poised for world conquest.  Some decades and a few financial meltdowns later, the bloom may be off the cherry blossom, but Japanese is still hella cool.  With three writing systems, it’s a bit of a bear to get good at reading and writing, but the richness of the literature is well worth it. It can enhance your employability but not by much, so it’s more of a recherché scholarly thing to do for the coolness factor.

Ease of learning: 2 Employability enhancement: 7 Cool factor: 10 Overall: 19/30

French. Hate to say it, but French is pretty useless except for speaking, well, French.  If you speak French to Parisians, they will love you and treat you like a king, which is the diametric opposite of the treatment most Americans receive.  The literature is astonishingly rich, and it’s a treat to read Montaigne, Molière, Balzac, Rimbaud, Éluard and other greats in the original.  French pop is pretty awesome, too, and knowing French makes listening to Aznavour, Jacques Brel and MC Solaar that much more fun.  Although the employability boost is minimal at best, of all the languages you could learn, this one probably makes you look the most sophisticated.

Ease of learning: 6 Employability enhancement: 1 Cool factor: 10 Overall: 18/30

Italian. I freakin’ love Italian.  The pronunciation and grammar are super-straightforward, so you’ll learn it faster than almost any other language.  It’s super-useful for music (allegretto ma non troppo), food (how delightful it is to know that spaghetti alla puttanesca means spaghetti in the style of a whore?) and figuring out the gazillion Latinate words in English. Also, Italians are super-friendly, and if you speak Italian to them, they will freakin’ love you.

Also, Italian was almost solely responsible for making me appreciate opera.  Once you understand what ma in Ispagna son già mille tre is talking about, Don Giovanni becomes a lot more fun to watch.  By far the biggest bang-for-buck factor of any language I can think of.

Ease of learning: 10 Employability enhancement: 1 Cool factor: 9 Overall: 20/30

German. Tougher than Romance languages and not nearly as mellifluous to the ear, learning German is a labor of love for most people.  I happen to love German culture, delight in the way the language sounds, and find the prospect of understanding Schiller and Rilke in the original very appealing.  I also like that it informs me of the Germanic roots of English.  Can’t say it does anything for your employability, since all Germans speak English better than we do.

Ease of learning: 5 Employability enhancement: 2 Cool factor: 9 Overall: 16/30

Spanish. Easily the most useful language you can learn on the planet.  There are 400 million native speakers and 500 million total speakers of Spanish in the world, second only to Chinese.  By speaking Spanish, you can own Central and South America as well as Spain (aka the world’s biggest non-stop party).

If you have any intention of pursuing medicine, learning Spanish is de rigueur in the US.  You will have patients who simply don’t speak English, and asking them “Where does it hurt?” slower and louder ain’t gonna get you nowhere.  It’s also super-easy, especially if you already know another Romance language.  So learn freakin’ Spanish. I picked it up in med school, and it has been indispensable — especially since people in hispanohablante countries tend not to speak any English.  Order dinner in Costa Rica?  Check.  Direct the cab in Barcelona?  Check.  Bonus: you can listen to the Spanish-language soccer commentators on TV, which are approximately 5.8 quadrillion times better than their English-language counterparts.

Ease of learning: 10 Employability enhancement: 8 Cool factor: 6 Overall: 24/30

Russian. No personal experience with this one, but I’m guessing its employability enhancement factor is on the rise.  Billionaire oligarchs have business to do and money to burn, so there’s an opening there for the enterprising linguist.  There’s also a serious boy shortage in countries like Russia and Ukraine, so if you’re a dude, speaking a little Russki may give your love life a boost if that’s your dish.  Russian’s a great entrée into the world of Slavic languages (Czech, Polish and Ukrainian are not far off), it’s a new alphabet with a whole different grammar, and — Pushkin!  That’s all you need to know, really.

Ease of learning: 4 Employability enhancement: 8 Cool factor: 9 Overall: 21/30

Portuguese. A few years ago, Portuguese would not have even been on the list.  But now, with the rise of Brazil as an economic power and the fact that four (four!) of my close buddies have married Brazilian women, Portuguese is a contender indeed.

First of all, the language is cake, especially if you already know another Romance language.  Second, it’s super-useful — entrepreneurial opportunities abound in Brazil now in the same way they did in the US in the 1860s.  And Brazilians just don’t speak a whole lot of English.  Third, if the fit hits the shan here in the US, where ya gonna go?  Canada is too darn cold and Australia is running out of water, so you may want to consider Brazil.

Portuguese is also fun to speak.  All the hard consonants are softened, and the vowels undulate like the strains of a Carlos Jobim song — speaking it is like giving your mouth a mellow massage.  Also, Brazil is insanely fun.  Scientists have shown that a Brazilian’s DNA, instead of the usual A-T-G-C, is made of the nucleotides P-A-R-T-Y.  Add to that the friendliness (and pulchritude) of Brasileiras, especially towards American men (sorry ladies — but hey, I hear China has a serious boy surplus), and you’ve got yourself an excellent case for falar português.

Ease of learning: 9 Employability enhancement: 8 Cool factor: 9 Overall: 26/30

Arabic.  There’s an old joke that says war is how Americans learn about geography.  If that’s the case, then events of the past 20 years have put the Arab world on the American mental map.  Kuwait and Iraq come to the fore through the 1991 Gulf War.  September 2001 was another reminder of things Arab.  And more recently, the Arab Spring uprisings highlighted Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Tunisia, and Libya.

Of course, for most people, the reason to learn Arabic isn’t the places in turmoil, although you’re sure to land a State Department job if you’re an American fluent in the language.  It’s the Gulf states, awash in oil wealth, that make learning Arabic a viable economic proposition.  From the reports of my ex-patriate friends in places like Dubai, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, there is serious demand for Westerners who are willing to work over yonder.  And if you can speak their language, you’re in business.

There’s one big issue with Arabic: schools teach modern standard Arabic.  This is the Arabic spoken in newscasts, and everyone understands it — but nobody speaks it.  The problem is that there are 22 Arab countries, and they all have their own dialects which are not necessarily mutually intelligible.  So they’ll understand you when you speak your perfect textbook Arabic, but you may not understand them when they respond.  There are whole chunks of vocabulary that you won’t find in any dictionary — e.g. shwei shwei is colloquial Lebanese for ghalilan in modern standard Arabic, which is what you tell people when they ask how much you understand: a little bit.  You basically have to make your peace with learning one dialect (e.g. Egyptian) which won’t be fully usable 80% of the time.

Ease of learning: 5 Employability enhancement: 10 Cool factor: 6 Overall: 21/30

‘Roots’ languages. As Americans, the rest of the world has often accused us of having no roots.  And it’s sadly true that many immigrants come here from countries of rich cultural heritage — Korea, Iran, India, Vietnam, China — only to lose the native tongue within a generation.

Letting a colorful and rich native culture get homogenized into the bland consumerism that passes for American culture is a crime to you — and your children.  McDonald’s and Spider-Man ain’t culture, yo.  Knowing stories from the Mahabharata, Shahnameh, King Dongmyeong — now that’s something solid you can hold on to.  And essential: trees reach for the sky only if they have strong roots.  If you’re not fluent in the language of your ethnic roots, chances of your kids picking it up are nil, so now’s an excellent time to get on that case.

So don’t be ashamed of taking Persian if your name’s Amir, Hindi if your name’s Sunil, or Korean if your name’s Grace.  I guarantee it’s a decision you’ll never regret.

What other languages have you found useful to learn?  Chime in below in the comments.

Trained as a physician and business consultant, my mind has a tendency to spontaneously diagnose problems and notice what’s weird.  For an industry that is presumably invested in its own perpetuation and success, the counterproductive practices I noticed about the publishing industry were very strange indeed. Some practices (like treating authors poorly) may work short-term, but are bad business in the long run.  Others are just plain dumb, now and forever.  Here’s some of the weirdness I detected in the publishing biz:

1) Publishers take away the rights to your own book.

Publishers buy your book from you, after which you no longer own it.  They’re putting in venture capital and gambling on you, killing trees, printing books, shipping ‘em and hoping they sell.

That makes some sense.  But it’s profoundly strange to me that if you wanted to quote from your own book, you would have to ask them for permission.  Because now the publisher owns your thoughts and words!  A licensing arrangement, whereby they purchase the right to create products from your intellectual property without owning it outright makes more sense to me.  Or the author retains rights and does a profit-sharing agreement.  Methinks authors should own their works for all perpetuity.

2) As an author, you get a raw financial deal.

As a first-time author, you usually get a piddling advance.  Then you get royalties, but only if you earn back your advance.  So if you got a $20,000 advance (pretty good these days) and get royalties of $2 per book, you need to sell 10,000 copies before you get a penny in royalties.

Also, your royalty rate is 10-15% of the cover price – about $2 per hardcover if you’re lucky.  You could make more selling pretzels on the street corner, brother.  Unless you’re amongst the very few authors on the planet (less than 0.001% of them by my estimate) who move books by the million, this is no way of making a living.

Contrast this with selling a book or ebook through your own website, where you would retain 100% of the cover price, or selling through the Amazon Kindle store, where you could retain 70%.  Those 10,000 copies you sold are now a healthy income instead of a prelude to it.

3) The arbitrary pricing of books disregards value.

People are used to paying a certain amount for books: about $25 for a hardcover, $10-$15 for a softback.  For a bigger book, you may pay more: by virtue of its thudding 957-page heft, Bill Clinton’s My Life was $35.  You pay by the pound.

This makes no sense.  A fancy gourmet meal costs more than a Subway sandwich.  A handmade Italian handbag costs more than a nylon sports tote.  Even stuff that’s sold by the pound – like produce – costs more when it’s good.  Just ask the heirloom tomato guy at the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market how many happy customers he’s got at $4/lb for mutant-looking but tasty fruit.

For quite some time, I also had many satisfied customers for my dating ebook for men when I had it priced at $70 (it’s less now).  70 bucks may sound like a lot to pay for a bunch of bits and bytes.  But my readers knew that not only could the information in the book save them more than its cost in just one night, but could also bring them benefits worth far more than $70, over and over again.  So it made a lot of sense for them to buy a copy.

So it also makes sense that a sweeping, epic, astonishing, potentially life-altering novel like Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts should cost more than all that Twilight dreck.  Price would also give the customers a gauge of the quality of a book – just like it works with meals, handbags, watches and almost anything else that’s sold.

4) Traditional publishing’s business model is wasteful and inefficient.

Most consumers don’t know that a bookstore is basically a consignment shop.  Publishers send books at their own expense and only collect money if the books sell. The bookstore sends back the books that do not sell — at the publisher’s expense — mostly to be pulped.  Unless they’re paperbacks, in which case the bookstore rips the covers off and sends those back to the publisher, tossing the rest of the book in the trash.

I was first struck with this monstrously wasteful practice as a teenager working at Waldenbooks, when we’d spend whole afternoons ripping covers off sci-fi and romance novels and tossing them in the dumpster.  These used to be perfectly decent trees, for godssakes!  The publisher’s guess at how many copies they need to print usually overshoots demand, so the feature is built into the system.  Add to that the two-way cost of shipping books and all the fossil fuel burned in the process, and it all starts to make even less sense.

5) The publisher’s the bitch of the bookstores.

A bookstore has a limited amount of shelf-space which it must allocate efficiently.  If it decides to push a book and give it prominent placing, the book does well.  If it shelves a book in an obscure corner, or worse, refuses to carry it, the book dies.  The bookstore also collects 50% of the cover price and does not pay for shipping to and from the publisher.

This is how a lot of retail works, and dealing with rent and salaries makes their business no walk in the park, either.  However, it still doesn’t make the publisher’s business model any less crappy.

6) Publishers have no identifying data on their customers.

Let’s say I want a copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. I can walk into the Barnes & Noble on 3^rd Street Promenade, pick it up, pay cash for it, and walk out.  Nobody will know my name, email or phone number.  And they will never be able to reach me again to tell me about Skloot’s next book, or another medical nonfiction book like The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which I just might dig.

If they did have a handle on me, they’d have a list of customers who are already interested in a specific author or genre.  Instead, they waste their marketing dollars on advertisements and book tours that mostly miss the customers they’d already spent money acquiring the first time around.

When someone buys an ebook from my site, they have to enter their email and phone number for the credit card to process.  I now have a handle on them and can send them free newsletters to keep them in the loop, and tell them about new products when they come out.

7) Traditional publishing is hopelessly slow. 

If you were to get a book deal with a major publisher today, your book would appear in bookstores 12-18 months from now – in April 2013.  If your book were topical – on current events, an economic trend, or science even – it could be old news by the time it came out.

This actually happened to a friend of mine who wrote a book in 1998 about the coming resurgence of the then-depressed American economy.  By the time it came out in 2000, the Dow had broken records, American prosperity was at new heights — and my friend’s book was utterly irrelevant.

Publishers are perfectly capable of ‘crashing’ a book to market when it’s called for – witness Penguin’s 12-week sprint to print Jill Bolte Taylor’s A Stroke of Insight on the heels of her TED talk going completely bananas viral in March 2008.  But that’s rare.  The other 99.9% of the time, they plod along at their glacial pace as if there are no predators and the Internet doesn’t exist.

Science books are particularly vulnerable to this delay.  The information in a science book based on the “latest research” will be 1-2 years old at the time of writing, since that’s how long it takes data to wend its way out of a lab into a peer-reviewed journal (with the exception of arXiv).  With the additional printing delay of 1-1.5 years, your science is 2-3 years old at press time, which is enough time to build an Extra-Large Hadron Collider and rewrite your field’s paradigm twice.

As a comparison, you can compose an ebook in the morning and have it for sale on your website before dinner.  Or submit one to Amazon and have it up in 24-48hrs.  Moreover, when revisions become necessary, you can update the manuscript or upload an entirely new one in a matter of hours instead of months.

8) Royalty payments come at starvation-inducingly infrequent intervals.

Let’s say you hit the jackpot, and you get a contract with a major publisher.  Woohoo!  Let’s say you hit the jackpot again as a result of dining on an exclusive diet of rabbit’s feet and fortune cookies, and your book starts to sell like bottled water to a bunch of people stuck in the Sahara desert with no water for, like, 30 days.  You’re rich, right?

Well – maybe.  Apparently royalty checks come to you once every 6 months, or once a year.  So you could be making bank, but with no actual money in the bank.  Contrast this with Amazon, which pays you monthly (better), or selling your own books, where you get paid daily (betterer).

9) There’s a lack of transparency of sales data in the book industry.

How many books do you have to sell to make it a “bestseller”?  Without real numbers attached to it, the term is essentially meaningless.  And smart cookies like Tim Ferriss can come along and figure out how the New York Times bestseller list score is computed and get (and keep) a book on it.  (From what I hear, it takes fewer sales than you think to hit the list, but they have to be sold in the right venues at the right time.)

In December 2010, publishers were up in arms over Amazon’s release of Nielsen BookScan data to authors.  Shouldn’t this have been the norm since Day 1?  Instead, publishers have been practicing a strange, cryptic hoarding of their book data – lest anyone find out the true meaning of “bestseller”?  Who knows, but disempowering your producers (i.e. authors) is crappy business practice.

10) Publishers and agents are remarkably bad at spotting genuine talent.

Have you heard the story of the diamond-in-the-rough manuscript from an unknown author that was immediately spotted by an eagle-eyed editor, shepherded through publication and turned into a blockbuster?

Neither have I.  The story of the biggest publishing successes of recent memory is the story of dozens of publishers and agents repeatedly being hit on the head by blazing meteors of talent but being too anesthetized to notice. 144 publishers turned down Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield, creators of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, the best-selling nonfiction books of all time, before Health Communications Inc agreed to publish them – but only if the authors paid for the first printing run out of their own pockets.  Tim Ferriss was famously rejected over 40 times, Louise Hay had to start her own company to publish You Can Heal Your Life, and J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter manuscript was serendipitously rescued from some slush pile because she couldn’t even land an agent, let alone a publisher.

From my encounters at Book Expo America over the past decade, I found people in big publishing houses to be risk-averse, protocol-driven conformists – basically, microcosms of the hidebound, antiquated, change-averse industry they work in.  As this is the antithesis of being entrepreneurial, it does not bode well for the industry.

11) Publishers have abandoned their sacred trust, publishing garbage and toxic dreck in the name of making a buck.

There is an opportunity cost to publishing a book: the time, money, effort, editing, publicity, marketing, paper, printing and shipping to bring one book to market occurs at the expense of another, potentially better book.  And every time you publish a book by ciphers like Sarah Palin or the cast of some brain-shrinking reality show, you’re precluding the publication of the next F. Scott Fitzgerald or Eckhart Tolle.

People!  There are poets out there, novelists, self-help authors, mystics, storytellers and scientists who shine a light that humanity desperately needs today.  Go find their light and amplify it for all of us to see – and make your megabucks that way, lord bless ya.

When you have a platform to broadcast words and ideas, when you have the power to select a few voices to broadcast via your platform, when you have an imprimatur that lends credence to those voices, when you have a megaphone for affecting a population’s hearts and minds, you have a sacred trust, like being a doctor, teacher, priest or chef.  You’re here to bring beauty into the world.  You have a responsibility to feed good things to human minds, like a restaurant serving brain food to humanity.  And if you serve them poisonous food, you deserve to be shut down and put out of business forever.

So when you publish the memoirs of a vice president who’s basically a war criminal, or like Judith Regan completely abandon conscience and decency to publish If I Did It, or disseminate the deranged frothings of some spite-filled TV host, you have violated your sacred trust and are automatically consigned to Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, where the arch-traitors abide (think Judas, yo).  There, like a cook condemned to eat his own contaminated food, your punishment should be to read only books you’ve cynically helped publish.

Of course, all of this is to say that no fire and brimstone will be necessary for the demise of traditional publishing.  For as the Bible said, there are two kinds of people: the quick and the dead.  Ebooks and Amazon are already on the case.  When your competitor has the emails of all its customers; knows what they like, courtesy of collaborative filtering algorithms; has no consignments, shipping costs or bulk returns; gives its suppliers a fairer deal; and can distribute worldwide at a fraction of your speed and cost, it’s probably a good time to look for a new job.

Those kids graduate and pretty much continue to have the same dating woes — only now with fewer single people around living in the same building and sharing meals with them every day.  So if they had challenges then, it gets about 1000 times worse once they’re expelled from the warm womb of alma mater.

From my observations, the following dating challenges are common to most smart people.  In fact, the smarter you are, the more clueless you will be, and the more problems you’re going to have in your dating life.

On the one hand, this makes no sense.  Smart people can figure stuff out, right?  And this dating stuff should be simple!

On the other hand, it makes total sense.  For simple things, it takes someone smart to really screw it up (or a computer).  So whether you went (or should have gone) to the likes of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, Swarthmore, Amherst, Dartmouth, Brown, Oxford, Cambridge, Berkeley, Penn, Caltech, Duke, read on:

1) Smart people spent more time on achievements than on relationships when growing up.

Smart kids usually come from smart families.  And smart families are usually achievement-oriented.  Bring me home those straight A’s, son.  Get into those top colleges, daughter. Take piano, violin, tennis, swimming and Tibetan throat-singing lessons. Win every award there is in the book. Be ‘well-rounded.’

Well, you’re a talented little bugger.  Of course you should develop those talents. At the same time, there’s an opportunity cost associated with achievement.  Time spent studying, doing homework, and practicing the violin is time not spent doing other things — like chasing boys or girls, which turns out is fairly instrumental in making you a well-rounded human.

The upshot of all that achievement is that you get into a top college — congratulations! — and then continue doing even more of what you were doing before.  Dating is at best another extracurricular, #6 or #7 down the list, somewhere between Model UN and intramural badminton.

I’ve been co-hosting young alumni events for name-brand schools for long enough to know that these kids come out a little lopsided (which sounds so much better than ‘socially awkward’, don’t you think?).  All they need is a little tune-up, or a proper dating textbook to get them going — plus a little practice.

Of course, as noted above, things only get worse once you graduate.  And if you’re frustrated with your love life, you just might try to compensate by working harder and achieving even more to fill that void.  Left untreated, this condition can go on for decades.  I know people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond who still haven’t figured out how to create an intimate connection with another human being.

It’s because they’ve been going at it the wrong way.  Which brings us to…

2) Smart people feel that they’re entitled to love because of their achievements.

For most of their lives, smart people inhabit a seemingly meritocratic universe: if they work hard, they get good results (or, in the case of really smart folks, even if they don’t work hard, they still get good results).  Good results mean kudos, strokes, positive reinforcement, respect from peers, love from parents.

So it only makes sense that in the romantic arena, it should work the same way.  Right?  The more stuff I do, the more accomplishments and awards I have, the more girls (or boys) will like me.  Right?  Please say I’m right, because I’ve spent a LOT of time and energy accumulating this mental jewelry, and I’m going to be really bummed if you tell me it’s not going to get me laid.

Well, I’ve collected a lot of jewelry in my time, and I’ve gotta tell ya it’s not going to get you laid, brother (or sister).  It may get you a first date, but it’s probably not going to get you a second date.  And it certainly won’t bring you lasting love and fulfillment.

Here’s the thing: your romantic success has nothing to do with your mental jewelry and everything to do with how you make the other person feel.  And making someone feel a certain way is a somewhat nonlinear process that requires a different kind of mastery than that of calculus or Shakespeare.

In other words, you need to earn love (or at least lust).  Sadly, no mom, dad or professor teaches us about the power of the well-placed compliment (or put-down), giving attention but not too much attention, being caring without being needy. I wrote a whole book about that, boys, so that’s a story for a different day.

3) When you don’t feel like a fully-realized sexual being, you don’t act like one.

At some point in your life, you got pegged as a smart person.  From then on, that was your principal identity: The Smart One.  Especially if you had a sibling who was better-looking than you, in which case she (or he) was The Pretty One.

Now as a woman you could be absolutely stunning (in which case you’re both smart and pretty and everyone hates you except for me — call me!), but your identity is still bound up in being The Smart One.  So maybe you dress frumpy and don’t pay a lot of attention to your appearance.  Or never bothered to cultivate your sensuality as a woman or, as a guy, your sexual aggression.

Attracting a partner is all about the dance of polarity.  Energy flows between positive and negative electrodes, anode and cathode, magnetic north and south.  Unless you actually convey femininity as a woman or masculinity as a man, you’re not going to attract a suitable companion of the opposite sex.

Part of the issue is this: when all of your personal energy is concentrated in the head, it never gets a chance to trickle down to the heart, or, god forbid, the groin.  By virtue of being born of the union of male and female, yang and yin, you are a sexual being.  Deal with it.  Now do what you need to do to perpetuate the race already.  Use what mama amoeba gave you.

That brings us to…

4) You’re exceptionally talented at getting in the way of your own romantic success.

Here’s an incontrovertible fact: every one of your ancestors survived to reproductive age and got it on at least once with a member of the opposite sex.  All the way back to Homo erectus.  And even further back to Australopithecus. And even further back to monkeys, to lizards, to the first amphibian that crawled out of the slime, the fish that preceded that amphibian, the worm before the fish and the amoeba that preceded the worm.

And you, YOU, in the year 2011 C.E., the culmination of that miraculously unbroken line of succession, you, Homo sapiens sapiens, not just thinking man but thinking thinking man (or woman), are the only one smart enough to SCREW THE WHOLE THING UP.

Perhaps you should consider thinking a little less then.

Because heaven knows that the amoeba, worm, fish, amphibian, monkey and primitive hominids didn’t do a whole lot of thinking. Their DNA had a vested interest in perpetuating itself, so it made sure that happened.

Turns out your DNA works the same way, too.  And maybe when you’re really sloshed at a party and your whole frontal lobe is on vacation in the outer rings of Saturn, you’ve noticed that your lizard brain knows exactly how to grab that cute girl by the waist for a twirl on the dance floor.  Or knows exactly how to arch your back, flip your hair and glance at that handsome hunk just so that he comes on over to say hi.

To put it plainly, you are programmed to reproduce.  Now quit thinking you’re smarter than the 3 billion base pairs in your genome and 4 billion years of evolution.  Actually, just stop thinking altogether.  As the Tao Te Ching said, “Stop thinking and solve all your problems.”  Let the program do its work.

5) By virtue (or vice) of being smart, you eliminate most of the planet’s inhabitants as a dating prospect

Let’s say by ‘smart’ we mean ‘in the top 5% of the population in terms of intelligence and education’.  Generally speaking, smart people seek out other smart people to hang out with, simply because they get bored otherwise.  And if they’re going to spend a lot of time with someone, intelligence in a partner is pretty much a requirement.

Well, congratulations — you’ve just eliminated 95% of the world’s population as a potential mate, Mr or Ms Smartypants.  Now, luckily, the world’s kinda big, so the remaining 5% of the gender of your choice is still a plentiful 160 million or so people.  Even if only 1% of those are single enough, good-looking enough, local enough and just all-around cool enough for you, that’s over a million people you can date out there.

Still, that’s less than one in five thousand people. And if you live in a smaller city, it may be just a handful of folks who are going to meet your stringent criteria.

At this point, you have three choices:

• Loosen up
• Do a very thorough search all over the planet and be prepared to move to Düsseldorf OR
• Join a monastery.

My hearty recommendation is choice A.  The purpose of relationship (and perhaps all of life) is to practice the loving.  No partner is going to be 100% perfect anyway, so learn to appreciate people for what they have to offer, not what they don’t.  And love them for that.  That’s what real loving is.

Nobody’s asking to lower your standards here; you should still spend time only with worthwhile company.  But do question the standards to see whether they’re serving you or you’re serving them.

When you open your heart to love, you may find fulfillment in ways you never imagined possible — like the day you tried sushi or beer in spite of your trepidation, found it surprisingly alright, and expanded your personal envelope of pleasure.  Taking that into consideration, given a choice between happy-go-lucky and picky-but-lonely, happy sounds like more fun.

This article originally appeared on my other blog, The Tao of Dating, and then on Huffington Post in 2009. Since then, The Tao of Dating for Women has become the #1 rated dating book on Amazon. And smart boys all over the world still find The Tao of Dating for Men surprisingly useful.

“That’s a pretty big number,” I thought to myself.  If I had 400 trillion pennies to my name, I could probably retire.

Previously, I had heard the Buddhist version of the probability of ‘this precious incarnation’.  Imagine there was one life preserver thrown somewhere in some ocean and there is exactly one turtle in all of these oceans, swimming underwater somewhere.  The probability that you came about and exist today is the same as that turtle sticking its head out of the water — in the middle of that life preserver.  On one try.

So I got curious: are either of these numbers correct?  Which one’s bigger?  Are they gross exaggerations?  Or is it possible that they underestimate the true number?

First, let us figure out the probability of one turtle sticking its head out of the one life preserver we toss out somewhere in the ocean.  That’s a pretty straightforward calculation.

According to WolframAlpha, the total area of oceans in the world is 3.409×10⁸ square kilometers, or 340,900,000 km² (131.6 million square miles, for those benighted souls who still cling to user-hostile British measures).  Let’s say a life preserver’s hole is about 80cm in diameter, which would make the area inside

3.14(0.4)²=0.5024 m²

which we will conveniently round to 0.5 square meters.  If one square kilometer is a million square meters, then the probability of Mr Turtle sticking his head out of that life preserver is simply the area inside the life preserver divided by the total area of all oceans, or

0.5m²/3.409×10⁸x106m² = 1.47 x 10^-15

or one in 6.82×10¹⁴, or about 1 in 700 trillion.

One in 400 trillion vs one in 700 trillion?  I gotta say, the two numbers are pretty darn close, for such a farfetched notion from two completely different sources: old-time Buddhist scholars and present-day scientists.  They agree to within a factor of two!

So to the second question: how accurate is this number?  What would we come up with ourselves starting with first principles, making some reasonable assumptions and putting them all together?  That is, instead of making one big hand-waving gesture and pronouncing, “The answer is five hundred bazillion squintillion,” we make a series of sequentially-reasoned, smaller hand-waving gestures so as to make it all seem scientific. (This is also known as ‘consulting’ – especially if you show it all in a PowerPoint deck.)

Oh, this is going to be fun.

First, let’s talk about the probability of your parents meeting.  If they met one new person of the opposite sex every day from age 15 to 40, that would be about 10,000 people.  Let’s confine the pool of possible people they could meet to 1/10 of the world’s population twenty years go (one tenth of 4 billion = 400 million) so it considers not just the population of the US but that of the places they could have visited.  Half of those people, or 200 million, will be of the opposite sex.  So let’s say the probability of your parents meeting, ever, is 10,000 divided by 200 million:

10⁴/2×10⁸= 2×10^-4, or one in 20,000.

Probability of boy meeting girl: 1 in 20,000.

So far, so unlikely.

Now let’s say the chances of them actually talking to one another is one in 10.  And the chances of that turning into another meeting is about one in 10 also.  And the chances of that turning into a long-term relationship is also one in 10.  And the chances of that lasting long enough to result in offspring is one in 2.  So the probability of your parents’ chance meeting resulting in kids is about 1 in 2000.

Probability of same boy knocking up same girl: 1 in 2000.

So the combined probability is already around 1 in 40 million — long but not insurmountable odds.  Now things start getting interesting.  Why?  Because we’re about to deal with eggs and sperm, which come in large numbers.

Each sperm and each egg is genetically unique because of the process of meiosis; you are the result of the fusion of one particular egg with one particular sperm.  A fertile woman has 100,000 viable eggs on average.  A man will produce about 12 trillion sperm over the course of his reproductive lifetime.  Let’s say a third of those (4 trillion) are relevant to our calculation, since the sperm created after your mom hits menopause don’t count.  So the probability of that one sperm with half your name on it hitting that one egg with the other half of your name on it is

1/(100,000)(4 trillion)= 1/(10⁵)(4×10¹²)= 1 in 4 x 10¹⁷, or one in 400 quadrillion.

Probability of right sperm meeting right egg: 1 in 400 quadrillion.

But we’re just getting started.

Because the existence of you here now on planet earth presupposes another supremely unlikely and utterly undeniable chain of events.  Namely, that every one of your ancestors lived to reproductive age – going all the way back not just to the first Homo sapiens, first Homo erectus and Homo habilis, but all the way back to the first single-celled organism.  You are a representative of an unbroken lineage of life going back 4 billion years.

Let’s not get carried away here; we’ll just deal with the human lineage.  Say humans or humanoids have been around for about 3 million years, and that a generation is about 20 years.  That’s 150,000 generations.  Say that over the course of all human existence, the likelihood of any one human offspring to survive childhood and live to reproductive age and have at least one kid is 50:50 – 1 in 2.  Then what would be the chance of your particular lineage to have remained unbroken for 150,000 generations?

Well then, that would be one in 2^150,000 , which is about 1 in 10^45,000– a number so staggeringly large that my head hurts just writing it down. That number is not just larger than all of the particles in the universe – it’s larger than all the particles in the universe if each particle were itself a universe.

Probability of every one of your ancestors reproducing successfully: 1 in 10^45,000

But let’s think about this some more.  Remember the sperm-meeting-egg argument for the creation of you, since each gamete is unique?  Well, the right sperm also had to meet the right egg to create your grandparents.  Otherwise they’d be different people, and so would their children, who would then have had children who were similar to you but not quite you.  This is also true of your grandparents’ parents, and their grandparents, and so on till the beginning of time.  If even once the wrong sperm met the wrong egg, you would not be sitting here noodling online reading fascinating articles like this one.  It would be your cousin Jethro, and you never really liked him anyway.

That means in every step of your lineage, the probability of the right sperm meeting the right egg such that the exact right ancestor would be created that would end up creating you is one in 1200 trillion, which we’ll round down to 1000 trillion, or one quadrillion.

So now we must account for that for 150,000 generations by raising 400 quadrillion to the 150,000^th power:

[4x10¹⁷]^150,000 ≈ 10^2,640,000

That’s a ten followed by 2,640,000 zeroes, which would fill 11 volumes of a book the size of The Tao of Dating with zeroes.

To get the final answer, technically we need to multiply that by the 10^45,000 , 2000 and 20,000 up there, but those numbers are so shrimpy in comparison that it almost doesn’t matter.  For the sake of completeness:

(10^2,640,000)(10^45,000)(2000)(20,000) = 4x 10^2,685,007 ≈ 10^2,685,000

Probability of your existing at all: 1 in 10^2,685,000

As a comparison, the number of atoms in the body of an average male (80kg, 175 lb) is 10²⁷.  The number of atoms making up the earth is about 10⁵⁰.  The number of atoms in the known universe is estimated at 10⁸⁰.

So what’s the probability of your existing?  It’s the probability of 2 million people getting together – about the population of San Diego – each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided dice. They each roll the dice, and they all come up the exact same number – say, 550,343,279,001.

A miracle is an event so unlikely as to be almost impossible.  By that definition, I’ve just shown that you are a miracle.

Now go forth and feel and act like the miracle that you are.

Think about it,

Ali B

Thanks for visiting! You can find more of my writing here and here. I also wrote a book on how smart women can find more love, which turns out to be the highest-rated of its kind on Amazon (4.9/5 stars). The book on how smart men can be more successful with women is also alright.

PS: Update 9/26/11: To all you smartypants out there who just can’t wait to tell me “the probably of existing of something that exists is 100%” and “this is all just hand-waving” — yes, Einstein, I know, and you’re totally missing the point.  The probability of sentient life is not something that can be measured accurately, and hundreds of steps have been deleted for simplicity.  It’s all an exercise to get you thinking, but some of you are so damn smart and obsessed with being right that you’ve lost the mental capacity to wonder and instead harp on the numerical accuracy of the calculation.  And no matter how you slice it, it’s pretty remarkable that you and I, self-absorbed scallywags that we are, stand at the end of an unbroken chain of life going all the way back to the primordial slime.  That’s the point.  Now if you have something interesting to say, I’ll approve the comment, otherwise into the slag-heap of trolls it goes.

Update 11/10/11: Someone at imgur.com came up with this beautiful infographic, which apparently made the rounds of the planet while I was asleep.  Click on it to get the full-size version.

The movie is about music, love, betrayal, regret, longing, and the meaning of true art.  It has a largo pace, with long takes allowing you to imbibe scene and nuance.  It’s hard to imagine a Hollywood movie allowing any one character to speak as long as the young Marais in his first visit to Sainte-Colombe, where, in an incredibly discursive and ballsy monologue, he makes his case for being taken on as the maestro’s student; or to have so many scenes of uninterrupted bucolic beauty; or to dare to dwell on close-ups conveying worlds of meaning with the subtlest of facial gestures.  Although the score is ravishing — put together by Jordi Savall from his own and the protagonists’ compositions — in a movie about music, the silences sometimes speak the loudest.

In my research into the movie, I made a heartbreaking discovery: Guillaume, who plays the preposterously handsome young Marais, died of a freak lung infection in 2008 at only 37.  That this eerily paralleled some of the fictional action underscored the film’s pathos.

In the end, if the best art compels us to nobler thought and deed, Tous les Matins du Monde certainly qualifies.  Should you watch the movie — to paraphrase Coleridge from the closing lines of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — a sadder and a wiser man (or woman) you shall rise the morrow morn, and more human.

Iranian authors are all over the bookstore: Marjane Satrapi with Persepolis; Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran; Roxana Saberi’s just released Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran; Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi. Shirin Ebadi took the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. Nasim Pedrad is our very own Saturday Night Live cast member. The founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, is Iranian. So is Firouz Naderi, the head of NASA’s Mars Exploration; Omid Kordestani, Senior VP at Google; hundreds of super-genius university professors; and about 12 million doctors and dentists, one of which has made you say ‘aaah’ in the past week.

Unfortunately, there has not been a commensurate rise in Iranian-American jokes. There are jokes about Irish-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans. (To be fair, there are also no German-American jokes, but what is there to make fun of? Punctuality? Good hair? Superior engineering? But I digress.) Heck, there are even jokes making fun of Southeast Asian drivers.

But who’s making fun of Iranians? Nobody. Except for Iranians themselves, like Maz Jobrani and his riotous US Census videos. Most likely, this shortcoming stems from a lack of familiarity with the endearing quirks of Iranian culture that would lend themselves to proper parody.

Listen up people: we’ve been here almost thirty years now – figure it out already! To get you started and rectify this gross injustice, here’s a cheat sheet of said quirks:

1. Iranians are overeducated.
According to the last US census, Iranian-Americans possess on average 4.7 doctorates for every man, woman and child. There are two reasons for this. First, every Iranian mom pushes her kid to become a doctor or lawyer (or both) and failing that, a dentist. Second, when a Muslim fundamentalist revolution hits a country (as in 1979), the educated people tend to skip town looking for greener (or at least less murder-prone) pastures.

2. Iranians are hairy beasts.
If you’ve ever gone to the beach with an Iranian friend, he’s probably redefined the term ‘Persian carpet’ for you. It’s cool – we wear our fur (and the concomitant early balding) proud, because we know it comes from an excess of manhood. Heck, when you’re at the Red Cross donating red blood cells and plasma, we’re donating testosterone. By the gallon. Especially for those poor Abercrombie & Fitch boys who can’t even seem to be able to grow any facial hair, let alone any manly chest foliage.

3. Iranians are kind of loaded.
You can’t just hop a boat or scale a fence to get from Tehran to Beverly Hills (7587 miles/12,210km distance). The skills and resources required to evade authorities over there, get on a plane, evade authorities over here, and get a pad beyond your means — these all predispose towards a craftier, more educated crowd making it here. Immigrants tend to be an industrious bunch in any case, and with their education, smarts, and devastating good looks, Iranians tend to do well for themselves.

4. Iranians like their bling.
What’s the point of having the dough if you can’t show it off? No self-respecting Iranian will be caught dead without their Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada, Armani and Rolex. The only acceptable means of transportation: BMW, Mercedes or Lexus – in any color as long as it’s black, please.

5. Iranians are late.
If the invite says a party starts at 8pm, the Iranians will start rolling in at 11.30 – maybe. This isn’t quite as bad as Brazilians, who may or may not show up in the same fiscal quarter as they promise, but adjust your expectations accordingly.

6. Iranian hosts feed you to burst capacity.
Ever wonder what it feels like to be one of those force-fed geese that becomes foie gras? Well, if you go to a proper Persian party, you will. Hospitality is one of the cardinal virtues of Iranian culture, and we will not rest until all of our guests are supine and helpless on the floor like anesthetized walruses. The food tends to be mighty yummy, so trust me, there are worse fates than this.

7. Iranians are allergic to authority.
At every opportunity, an Iranian will do his level best to find the shortcut, outsmart the boss, bend the rules and otherwise coax, wheedle, charm and haggle his way out of a situation. Chalk it up to our long history of being overrun by Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, Russians, Brits and still coming out on top at the end of it all. Bonus: hire an Iranian lawyer – they were born to do what they do.

8. Every day is Formula 1 Grand Prix day for an Iranian driver.
Iranians can be some of the most pointlessly aggressive drivers on the road. This is because many of them were trained on the demolition derby that is the roads of Tehran — or at least inherited the genes of their parents who survived those roads (yes, these things can be transmitted genetically, just like the propensity for Prada). And what’s the point of driving your black 400-hp BMW M3 if you can’t treat the 405 like Nurburgring? Exactly.

9. Iranians party hearty.
You can extrapolate from the foregoing tendencies that Iranians indeed like to have a good time. An Iranian, Sam Nazarian, quite literally owns Los Angeles nightlife and is expanding his empire worldwide. Dancing, singing, cooking, eating, drinking, celebrating the fullness and freedom of life – these are hallmarks of Iranian culture. History shows that all forces attempting to suppress this natural joyousness fail sooner or later. For the sake of our brethren over there, we fervently hope it’s sooner rather than later. And for my own sake, you’d better show up to my party sooner rather than later so I have enough time to overfeed you.

Ali Binazir is a consultant & hypnotherapist in Los Angeles who fits only 6 of these 9 stereotypes
Visit his blogs: Awaken Your Genius and Tao of Dating
Got a question? Wanna invite him to your party? Send him a BMW M3? Write to him

Thurman is the leading Tibetan Buddhist in America, a professor of religion at Columbia and buddy of the Dalai Lama.He’s just one seriously cool guy – take my word for it.

Danny Hillis is a genius.For me, the idea of genius isn’t just about being smart and having the intellectual horsepower. It’s about generativity, about making things.Well, in his spare time, Danny Hillis created the 10,000 year clock to illustrate his concept of ‘the long now’ – the idea that it’s a good idea to lead our lives now as if we’re having impact way beyond our own lives and that of our children. Hence, ‘long now’.

He’s also made a computer out of tinkertoys and been a Disney Imagineer and a zillion other things.I’d never met Danny in person, and the one thing that I noticed is that this guy is massive.He’s got these meaty bear paws, is at least 6’3”, and has the biggest head I’ve seen on a person.In fact, you could easily fit two of my heads inside his.All them neurons need a home, I tell ya.

But enough introduction.The conversation started civilly enough.Thurman talked about the 3 jewels (or refuges, or rattanas) of Buddhism: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha.Roughly speaking, that’s the teacher, the teachings, and the community.

Hillis then chimed in saying that science essentially has the equivalent. The teacher is nature itself, and the almost mystical ability of mathematics to model, explain and predict the world.

The teachings are the body of knowledge accumulated by many teachers.Each individual teaching is like a brick in a castle.Every once in a while, a teacher brings together a few bricks in a way to really enhance the edifice and create a whole new structure for insight – for example, when James Clerk Maxwell created the four equations of electromagnetism out of theretofore disparate fields of knowledge.

And then there is the practice of the community, which, like religion, has its own dogma – double-blind studies, peer review, reproducibility of results.Hillis emphasized that the dogma is there mostly in service of being careful to avoid the mistakes of the past.

By now a lively repartee was developing between Hillis and Thurman.And I’ve got to tell you: Robert Thurman is one funny dude.He was cracking jokes the whole time, and at least at one point, he made Danny Hillis lose it – tears, couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe, the works.If you ever get a chance to see Thurman live, you should.The man’s a riot.

But I digress.Thurman picked up the thread at this point and talked about how the Dalai Lama has spent the last 20 years talking to scientists.He really likes science!Little known fact is that when Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, was a young man in India, he used to repair people’s Swiss watches for fun.Apparently Tenzin, like Danny, is an inveterate tinkerer.

In fact, Buddhism is simply about seeing reality as it is, which is why the Dalai Lama is so fond of science.All the Buddha ever did was to see reality, and to report that it was all right (as Thurman put it, cracking up the auditorium).“It’s fine!” he said, and proceeded to report that to all comers.When humans can understand reality, they release suffering.This can only be done by understanding yourself; otherwise you’re pretty much stuck.

At this point, Thurman shared one of his stories with us.In one of his earlier incarnations as a young bodhisattva, the Buddha decides to use his yogic powers and ascend to Heaven to have a chat with god. So he finds Brahma, who asks him imperiously whether he has an appointment.

Ah, no, not really, just kinda hanging out, ascending to the heavens, no biggie, I can always come back.

Alright, you can stay, says Brahma.What do you want?

Nothing.Just wanted to ask you why you created the world and how it all works.

At this point, Brahma starts just yammering away, saying some pretty official-sounding boilerplate, and then sending the bodhisattva back.The somewhat baffled young man starts to make his way out, but right outside the palace gate Brahma stops him.

“Okay, look, I know you just heard me say all that stuff, but I’m in my court, and it’s important to maintain appearances there, y’know?The fact is, I have no idea where it all came from and I have no idea how it works.I didn’t make it!It was here when I got here.I just happened to be the first one to get here.

“Then all the other people arrive, the thousands of mini-gods, and they see me here and think I’m in charge.For a while I tried to disabuse them, but then I realized it was totally futile, and I was provoking a crisis of confidence.Hence, the bluster you just heard.”

He sizes up the young bodhisattva, then continues: “Now you look like the kind of person who’s going to be a buddha, which means that you will figure it all out eventually.When you do, I want you to come up her and tell me how it all works, and tell those humans down there that it’s not all my fault when things go wrong.”

This was all prelude to the idea that the Buddha was actually a scientist – someone with an unwavering dedication to seeing reality.

At this point, Danny Hillis brings up the topic that became the center point of the night’s friendly sparring: “Can you prove reincarnation?”

The doctrine of reincarnation maintains that your soul never expires, and that you have had thousands upon millions of lives preceding this one, and just as many to come (which is different from ‘reintarnation’, which maintains that you will come back in the next life as a hillbilly).

You have to understand that, to Buddhists, this is a foundational belief.It’s presupposed so deeply that it’s not even a topic of debate.But it’s clearly something that Danny couldn’t countenance (and frankly, I’m not crazy about it either).

But Thurman was armed: supposedly a Prof. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia had done some studies 40-50 years ago with thousands of cases of reincarnation.I checked the reference, and it’s true: Stevenson was the head of the UVA Dept of Psychiatry for over 30 years and wrote hundreds of papers documenting some persuasive cases of potential reincarnation.Check out his Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson

Thurman then talked about how the doctrine of emptiness, or shunyata, is the central tenet of Buddhism. Shunyata is a difficult concept – one that Buddhist monks may take a lifetime to grasp fully.So if you don’t get it right away, rest easy.The basic idea is that things have no essence that’s separate from other things; the existence of everything is relational.Emptiness is not the same as nothingness; it’s about things having no essential self (or anatta).

Hillis agreed with this notion and with the futility of names and labels in general.He picked up a plastic bottle, “this particular solution to Schroedinger’s equation at this moment in time,” and pointed out that you could call this any number of things and it wouldn’t be any one of them.

Thurman is a disarmingly formidable debater because he’s such a deep-down Buddhist that he’s not even attached to the most fundamental tenets of the religion.When Danny Hillis said that he found it hard to believe the whole notion of incarnation, Thurman quipped back, “I only half-believe in it myself!”

He even recounted a story about a meeting between Carl Sagan and the Dalai Lama.Sagan poses to the Dalai Lama, “What if science incontrovertibly disproved the idea of reincarnation?What would you do then?”Apparently without missing a beat, the Lama replies, “I will stop believing in it!”The lightness with which Buddhists – even the biggest Buddhist of them all – hold their beliefs demonstrates to me their true adherence to non-attachment.

This is when the debate got interesting.Hillis said that in science, we can measure things: action potentials, mass, brain activity, etc.This whole ‘soul’ entity was simply not measurable; and besides that, what was the mechanism by which the soul traveled?

At this point, Thurman, who is obviously well-read in science, countered that in physics, you can’t really measure things anyway: “Schroedinger’s cat – how heavy is that?”One more hearty audience chuckle scored for the professor.I don’t believe Thurman fully grasped the idea of uncertainty – the impossibility of pinning down both the momentum and position of an elementary particle – so he was using a pop-science formulation to get back at Danny (who was prepared to catch the slip, by the way).But I did laugh.

Now it was time for Danny to challenge Thurman.He said, what if artificial intelligence progressed so far as to create sentient beings – would you then say that those beings had a soul?“Sure!” replies Thurman.Buddhism has no problem with that.

At this point, the conversation moved to the idea of death, and by extension, nothing.Thurman said that in Buddhism, you can’t have nothing.That means that there is no such thing as absolute nothing – there is always something there, which is the ground of being.The Buddhist argument for this was convoluted and subtle, and frankly, you’re going to have to ask Bob about it.But this is a point on which Hillis wholeheartedly agreed: even the ‘total void’ of space constantly has particles being created and annihilated.Indeed, one can experimentally measure the existence of these virtual particles in vacuum through the Casimir-Polder effect.Wild and crazy stuff.

The title of the discussion was ‘Science, Religion and Ethics’, so Hillis touched upon the subject.He and Thurman called ethics “being in the long now” – the idea of taking the course of action that makes the most sense in the very long run.Hillis extends this idea to several generations past one’s own children – witness the 10,000-year clock and his work with the Long Now Foundation.Thurman, with the Buddhist view, has all of eternity in mind.

They talked about a lot more, and Thurman cracked us up several more times with Star Trek jokes and irreverent comments.He even had a moment of righteous indignation when talking about war and leaders who lead us into war, and how humans, in their extreme cleverness, have now made war obsolete.War is impossible, since it’s impossible to win!For elaboration of this concept, he referred us to Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

I leave you with Thurman’s epilogue, which he called his ‘consolation prize.’He admitted that after 45 years of studying all this stuff, this night, as he was talking to us, he was still far from enlightened (and his wife and kids can attest to that).However, Buddhism says that someday, we will all achieve buddhahood.It may take longer for some, less for others.But once you’ve achieved buddhahood and ultimate enlightenment, that insight penetrates all of time, all the way to the past, to the present day.So “we will all enjoy this evening together as nirvana retroactively.”

By that token, nirvana is now, as soon as you realize that it’s now.Enjoy this perfect moment.