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.

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.