Cottleston Pie

Very young babies seem suddenly everywhere. A cousin just had her third child a couple weeks ago. I received a few digital pictures of the very young one this past week. Then on Thursday, I saw a co-worker's young one for the first time at the grocery store. I think he said he she was near 7-9 months old. I missed the exact age as I was distracted interacting with just as cute a baby as I've ever seen. She was slightly dark skinned as befits her Middle Eastern heritage (this whole, "note the skin color and racial background of the baby," is important in just a bit here). Later that same night, I swapped vehicles with my friend M for a couple days so that I would have a vehicle with a baby seat so I can pick up The Princess and her mother at the airport on Monday. (Now, you might be wondering if it wouldn't be easier to just move the baby seat from one car to another. I figured that M wanted to swap because his truck had LATCH anchors and maybe a top tether anchor. Turns out neither vehicle is equipped for either. Somehow, it still just felt easier to both of us to swap keys than move the seat.) The Princess is a beautiful young Indian American.

As tends to happen to me when something keeps re-occurring in real life, I had a dream about it. I had a baby with a lover who had left. It was an accident. Immediately after having it, she had moved far off to another city and the baby was with me full-time and completely as my little nightmare. But it was not a nightmare at all. I was actually having a great time of it. I was housemates with a young married couple. They resembled some friends I made on a ski trip this past February. They were very helpful and thoughtful. We all got along quite well in a beautiful two-story house with clean, bright, calming blue rugs and drapes. The house actually had a small, luxuriantly green lawn and a one foot tall white picket fence.

My housemates seemed a little concerned about me since I'd had the baby, as though I were a little crazy. So one day I took a long look at my baby…and realized that it wasn't white! Now, the mother was definitely white and so am I. Ergo, this beautiful light brown baby girl clearly was not mine! I'd always admired her beautiful shade of skin (which was like the real-life babies that I'd seen in the last week). My housemates had thought I was self-deluded for not recognizing the obvious discrepancy but couldn't bring themselves to bring it up.

Now, I found myself in something of a tricky situation. I found myself the sole guardian of a baby whose mother had left her for me, pretending that she was mine, and shown no further interest. The father was a complete unknown. I thought that I should be angry with the mother and become quickly disinterested in the baby's welfare, simply as a biological reaction to the idea of raising a baby that was not mine. But that wasn't happening at all. I was unconcerned with the mother's actions and motivations. I was concerned about the baby and was the only one so concerned. So I was confused. And I'm afraid that that is where this little tale ends.

I've been contemplating the whole thing all day and am truly unsure what would happen if any sort of thing like that were to actually happen (except that, in the real world, the next step would inevitably involve numerous lawyers).

A friend of mine recently added the traditional "100 facts about me" to his blog. Most of them were no surprise. One was though:

34. I'm afraid of death. Not the process of dying, but the state of being dead. I wonder what will happen to all my memories and experiences.

My tendencies are the opposite. I'm not at all worried about the state of being dead. My memories will be gone with the disintegration of my nervous system. That causes me no nervousness. A weak reflection of a few memories might endure in the artifacts of writings, photos, and such that I leave behind. My experiences will live in their repercussions I suppose.

I'm much more afraid of the process of dying. That I'll die slowly, enduring just pain and/or boredom. That I'll have no means of satisfying expression.

I was mailed this link just today by a friend along with this note:

"The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday."

I guess this only further proves Travis's theory: people can't do math.

The article is an Op-Ed piece that was published in January. I had been citing those same statistics and ideas in conversation for some time (probably to the same friend that just sent the link today, amongst others). And this is the exact article where I got them!

Don't let that take away from the power of the idea. If the statistics accurately reflect the way that people think, then that explains so much! People's misperception of probability can explain why so many people voted against their own best-interest (an economists nightmare) in voting for Bush the tax-cutter-for-the-wealthy.

Misunderstanding of probability can also explain why so many people play the lottery.

And from an entirely different direction, I concluded that many people don't deal well with probability when judging the acceptability of risk in their lives: An Acceptable Risk. I could probably give many more examples along similar lines.

So, I'm now working with the generalization that many people, even very intelligent people, make irrational decisions as a result of their misunderstanding of probability. This is important. It's not like Calculus: something that very few people need to do in real life. Some of life's most critical decisions depend upon it.

Given that hypothesis, the classic Birthday Problem is a fun demonstration of how intuition can be so wrong, or at least it is no help at all. The problem asks, "how many people need to be in a room for there to be better than a 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday?" Many people will give very logical and understandable, but incorrect, answers. I didn't get it when I first heard it in a probability class in college.

Now we may have an explanation, but what to do about it? (besides playing parlor games)

I was going to work a couple of days ago and a boy asked me as I careened down the stairs, "Do you know where Anderson High School is?" He was a thin, lanky fellow, not particularly tall, obviously young, black, with short curly hair and a backpack over his shoulder and school-appropriate cloths on. I didn't, but told him where Anderson Lane is (south on Mopac a few miles) and that I thought it might be near there. Now I think, was AHS where we used to play frisbee some years ago? I gave him what information I could about Anderson Lane and hurried to my car. As I was situating my stuff in my car, I noticed that he'd followed me to my car and was standing quietly at the back passenger door. I stepped out and asked him if he needed anything else and he asked for a ride to the school. Not knowing where it was and being on the edge of late for work myself, I declined to give him a ride. I could have gone back up to my apt, grabbed a map, and given him a ride, and been perhaps thirty minutes late for work. But I didn't. I do hope he got there. It was perhaps the first or second day of school, so assuming he was able to secure whatever his intended regular transport, he should make out fine.