The Gates of Horn

The Titanic is going to be a household word for a while because of the movie. When I think of the Titanic I always think of one of the many literary coincidences that make life interesting.

In 1898 Morgan Robertson wrote an novel about a ship called the S.S. Titan. She was the biggest ship ever built, close to 70,000 tons. She could cruise at 25 knots in spite of this immense bulk because of the amazingly powerful engines and their triple screws.

In the story the ship was on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York when she struck an iceberg and sank with great loss of life. The tragedy in the story revolved around the fact that this enormous ship had only 24 lifeboats, not enough for even half the passengers on the star-studded passenger list. Most of the passengers were drowned. This was written in 1898.

The Holy Grail of Social Science is predictability. The S.A.T. scores, I.Q. tests, Gallup Polls, we hear about them all the time, and distrust them much of the time.

Politicians want definite, accurate predictions about the behavior of voters.

Marketers drool at the very concept of a totally predictable consumer population, and do their best to create it by cunning psychology and research about T.V. watching and demographics.

It is refreshing to learn about an amazingly accurate method of predicting success that required material that costs less than a dollar. This may be the reason it isn’t widely used today, in spite of its success. It was the marshmallow test applied to four year olds in the 1960's.

My students are all used to my standard saying about the world we create with our own amazing minds. If I say, “What you think….” there will often be a chorus that adds the rest, “…is what you see, and what you see is what you get.” Some of those who know the saying have also put it into use to alter their lives along the lines they desire. My posting about that was on November 20th.

There is a corollary, and it is as true as any statement can be, and continually verified by personal experience…What you expect is what you see. Let’s look at it for a while.

It always puzzled me as a little boy that when I ate bacon it turned into a boy, and when my cat ate bacon it turned into a cat, even when, as was not unusual, we ate from the same piece of bacon. No matter what we ate in common, his food became a cat and mine became a boy.

Many years later I found myself dealing temporarily with an analogous problem. I was trying to write the electrical differential equations of the nervous system to describe how it is, that whatever the temperature outside may be, the human body stays around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

We have all experienced, willingly or otherwise, the tremendous and continuous high level noise from the loudspeakers of rock groups, or the enormous dynamic range of a full symphony orchestra from almost inaudible to immensely powerful; song bird to thunder storm.