Well, old Rabbie Burns was right; things never turn out quite as planned. After spending many hours at LaGuardia Airport this evening, we were sent home, our flight to Michigan canceled due to high winds. We will try again tomorrow; our goal is to be there watch the Maize and Blue trounce the Iowa Hawkeyes in Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor at 3:30 p.m. tomorrow.
Going to a game at the Big House is quite an experience; I hope to have a report to file later this weekend.
We’ll be traveling to Ann Arbor, Michigan this evening, and waka waka waka may have to lie fallow for a day or two. Visitors are encouraged to browse our archives in the meanwhile, and we’ll be back as soon as we can.
This past Friday, President Bush signed into law H.R. 4411, the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act, which prevents U.S. financial institutions from transferring money to online gambling services. The bill was sneaked, in typical sausage-and-legislation fashion, into the SAFE Ports Act (H.R. 4954 As Amended) for the Senate vote, where it passed 98-0, with two abstaining (Sens. Chafee and Akaka).
At the apex of the southern Chinese Hung Ga system of kung fu is the Iron Wire form, sometimes referred to as the Iron Thread. It was created by Tit Kiu sam, one of the legendary Ten Tigers of Canton, and its main purpose is to cultivate internal power.
The Iron Wire is practiced under controlled tension; it derives its name from the feeling one has during many sections of the form that one is stretching an imaginary cord between the hands. Each movement is carefully synchronized with the breath, and at many points in the form there are particular sounds that the practitioner must utter. These sounds are intended to direct the breath (or “chi”) to various organs and muscles. If performed incorrectly or without understanding, this combination of moving tension and controlled breathing can, in fact, cause serious harm, and as a result the form is taught only to advanced students.
In a recent post, I recommended that readers with an interest in biology pay a visit to the Tree of Life Web Project, an interactive display of the taxonomic relationships linking all life on Earth. Upon seeing the post, one of our commenters, microbiologist Andrew Staroscik, mentioned that he had rather a low opinion of […]
As readers will recall, this past weekend was the occasion of Wellfleet’s annual Oysterfest. It was a splendid event, as always. The weather was just beautiful – cool and crisp, with a deep blue sky and golden autumnal sunshine, and thousands of visitors were on hand, drawn to our charming seacoast village by the promise of happy company, good food, rivers of beer, amusing special events, local arts & crafts, and of course a limitless supply of sweet and succulent Wellfleet oysters, served up in every imaginable configuration.
One of the events on the crowded agenda was a spelling bee, which your humble correspondent was persuaded to enter. Though I am, if it doesn’t seem unduly immodest to say so, a damned fine speller, I did not prevail. After several rounds I found myself presented with a noun I had never heard of: a widely distributed aquatic plant known as the cabomba. I had no choice but to take a guess, and offered C-A-B-A-M-B-A (with the voice of the departed Ritchie Valens ringing in my ears), and that was it for me.
What was the winning word? I’m sorry to say I don’t remember. There were several that were served up right at the end; I recall the eventual winner, a literate young woman, grappling with foraminifer, eutrophication, and minuscule, but I can’t remember which was the final hurdle, if it was in fact any of those. I imagine I was still swooning in stunned disbelief.
The first prize was a copy of Mark Kurlansky’s The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, which would have made a lovely addition to my library (I already have a copy of his excellent history of the codfish).
Oh well, there’s always next year.
Cabomba.
As I mentioned a while back, one item getting frequent play in my rotating reading stack is the hefty volume The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, and as I expected, it is hugely engaging and informative. I’m about halfway done with it – the backwards pilgrimage is currently marching through the latter Carboniferous period, where we mammals have just been joined by the Sauropsids (including all reptiles and birds) . I’ve already learned a great many interesting things, and will be sprinkling some of them about these pages in days and weeks to come. For today, however, I’ll call the attention of any of you who have an interest in natural history to a marvelous website, the Tree of Life Web Project. Onto the sidebar it goes.
Our post a couple of days ago about the ruthless Kim Jong Il drew a visitor who left a link to a dramatic image, reproduced below:
Presumably this is a nighttime sattlite photo, showing the luminous metropolis of Seoul, and the prosperous, well-lit Republic of Korea to the south, and the veiled, darkling, and preposterously named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north. The emotional power of this image is immediate, and tragic.
I assume it is genuine, but I can’t be sure. The person who left it signed in only as Kim, which narrows things down in Korea about as much as if he had signed in as “Jim” over here. The waka waka waka comment settings require that one provide an email address inorder to leave a comment, and also allow commenter to link to their websites; the email address left by Kim was from the gov.kp domain, and the website linked to was the official DPRK government website (well worth a look, by the way).
I rather doubt that our visitor is actually a member of the government of that enslaved nation, nor even a resident; I’d be curious to know more, Kim, if you’d care to drop me a line.
Today is Friday the 13th, always a good day for me, as I was born on one, back in 1956. And this year is no exception; my lovely wife Nina and I are back in Wellfleet this weekend, and as always it is balm to the spirit to be here. And as if the cool sea breezes, lovely autumnal light, and serene natural beauty of this New England coastal village weren’t enough, tomorrow is the 2006 Wellfleet Oysterfest, a gustatory extravaganza that draws lovers of our renowned and eponymous mollusc from all over the Northeast. Expect another favorable review.
There was a tragic and shocking event here in New York today, as most of you have probably heard by now. Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle, acquired just this summer by the Bombers in the trade with the Phillies that also brought Bobby Abreu to the Bronx, was killed, along with his passenger, when the small plane he was piloting flew into a high-rise apartment tower on East 72nd Street.
I don’t really know what to say about this sad, strange story; I just thought it would be remiss of me not to make note of it. It is always so unsettling to see how some lives end while the rest of us go on, for a while at least.
One of the least palatable aspects of the situation in North Korea is the humanitarian quandary created by Kim Jong Il’s ruthless game, in which he relies on the misery of his enslaved people for his own protection. North Korea depends for its very survival on foreign aid; the United States and China are the principal benefactors. It is only this largesse that makes it possible for Kim to maintain an enormous standing army, and to play with nuclear weapons; had the Chinese seriously pressured him, he would have had to stand down. They didn’t, though, partly because they are concerned that any further instability, such as might be caused by even deeper poverty and famine, would drive hordes of refugees across their border, but also, I think in large part, because they enjoy the discomfiture that the obstreperous Kim causes the Western bloc.
The US, too, has been reluctant to cut back on the millions of tons of food we send to North Korea, but for quite different reasons — we are well aware that to do so would sentence a great many people to starvation. Kim knows that this leaves us in a difficult position: by refusing to provide any more foreign aid, we could press China to do more about the rogue state that it helps to support — but only at the cost of our conscience. Lacking one of his own, I am sure he is laughing up his sleeve at ours.
It’ll be lighter fare this week, as I am working rather long hours and will be traveling on Thursday. For the moment, two pointed little jokes:
With characteristic bluster, the insane despot Kim Jong Il has defied the will of the international community generally, and the United Nations Security Council in particular, by conducting an underground nuclear test, of as-yet indeterminate magnitude. He’ll soon be sorry, because he can expect swift and certain retribution from the UN, in the form of some harsh finger-wagging, and if that isn’t enough to teach the impudent little rascal some manners, you can be sure he won’t be spared some stern tut-tutting as well.
He’ll think twice before he tries that again.
Thanks to commenter Kevin Kim, I’ve been spending some time poking around in Korean blogs. All cultures, of course, have their odd little quirks and idiosyncracies (the United States is no exception, of course, what with our drive-thru wedding chapels, monster truck pulls, and yen for Mespotamian nation-building), and I’ve run across one that seems to be unique to Korea. No, it isn’t kimchi. I’m referring, of course, to fan death.
My old pal, the guitarist Steve Khan, has many friends in Venezuela, and has spent a lot of time down there in recent years. This has given him an opportunity for a first-hand look at the enlightened presidency of Hugo Chavez, and unsurprisingly, he is not impressed. Steve sent me, yesterday links to three items by New York Post columnist Douglas Montero that show some of what life is like in that beautiful Caribbean country under this egomaniacal popinjay. Read them here, here, and here.
Another long day today – work followed by a long evening of teaching and training down at the kwoon, and here it is pushing midnight and no post written yet. So rather than bloviate into the wee hours, I think I will offer you all, instead, a glimpse of New York City life, in the form of a conductor’s announcement that I heard on the F train as I was making my weary way home this past Saturday.
We’ve all heard of the “out-of-body experience” (“OBE”), in which a person has the sensation of detachment from the physical self. These are often reported in situations where a subject hovers close to death; people will recount, upon returning to normal consciousness, that they were floating near the ceiling, looking down upon themselves and others in the room (who are often doctors and nurses struggling to keep the patient from dying).
Yesterday’s New York Times carried an interesting report of some new neurological observations of this phenomenon.
The technological infrastructure here at waka waka waka is provided by an outstanding hosting service called BlueHost. Among the many excellent services they provide for the absurdly low fee of $6.95 a month is a versatile website-statistics package. It occurred to me earlier this evening that it might be amusing, in lieu of coughing up yet another grim and controversial entry about the accelerating decline of civilization, to look over some of the search-engine phrases that have brought visitors here over the past year.
The other day I ran across an item from the Boston Herald about a jihad-related kerfuffle in France. The story is about a high-school teacher named Robert Redeker, who has been driven into hiding after he published an article in Le Figaro suggesting — how dare he! — that Islam is trying to impose its cultural will upon Europe.
OK, as promised, politics entirely aside for the moment (although just for the moment, I’m afraid, as there’s just too much material out there, and more every day).
Sure, the war in Iraq, and the jihadists’ campaign to bring down the West generally, get most of the headlines. But today’s item is about a new weapon in a much older war – the fight against hiccups.
It was a long and busy day today – kung-fu testing and seminars all day in Chinatown, and a glorious victory by the Michigan Wolverines this evening in Minnesota. So the waka waka waka staff are taking a much-needed break. We’ll be back soon, most likely tomorrow.
Well, I know I said I was going to lighten up on the political stuff, but the fact is, there’s too much of it, and it’s too important. Here is an excellent piece by Fouad Ajami, from the Wall Street Journal, in which he discusses recent intelligence reports, adresses some misconceptions about the situation in Iraq, and argues that we must not “give in to despair.” Do take a look.
I’ve been posting a lot of political items lately; too many, really, as I don’t want political issues to dominate here. I also think I am giving the impression that I am far off on the right, when actually my opinions vary widely on an issue-by-issue basis – I tend to side with the Left on most social issues (gay marriage, church/state, abortion, drug laws, environmental and energy policy), though not all (affirmative action, gun control, border control, and pushing toward socialism generally), and with the Right, specifically the neoconservative right, on one issue only, which is foreign policy, to the extent that US influence is fairly and honestly brought to bear in a struggle against tyranny. I have defended, at length, our our decision to knock Saddam off his perch, but I agree also that the job was catastrophically bungled, and that heads that still issue orders should have rolled. I also share the Left’s low opinion of George Bush generally – his swagger, his smug religiosity, his inarticulateness, his lack of intellectual subtlety, and his inability to admit and correct error – as I have made abundantly clear in any number of posts.
So I’ll try to ease off on the political rants. But not just yet; here’s one more.
In my previous post, I mentioned my alarm at seeing so many people taking antidepressant medication. My friend Jess Kaplan, in an email, points out that I have rather glibly lumped together an entire spectrum of mental disorders. He is quite right, and I should address his criticism.
I’ve begun to notice that an awful lot of people around here are taking antidepressants. Admittedly, I live in New York City, but still, it seems a little creepy. I haven’t bothered to hunt down any statistics, but even just counting the number of people who are casual enough about it to have mentioned it to me (and I figure it’s safe to say that at least that at least half the folks who take them don’t let on) it’s starting to look pretty rampant.
From Ornette Coleman:
There is no bad music, only bad performances.
This idea unfolds nicely.
I’ve just come home from the movies. I don’t get out to the pictures as often as most people seem to, and I miss a lot of flicks I know I would have liked. Other activities (reading, writing, playing chess, practicing/teaching kung fu, playing music, introspective brooding, etc.) always seem to win out.
Tonight though, a new documentary by filmmaker Heidi Ewing (an acquaintance of my lovely wife Nina) opened at the Angelika Film Center on Houston Street in Manhattan, and we went to see it. It’s called Jesus Camp.
Well, time to lay off politics for a moment – although there is plenty to talk about, in particular that narcissistic moonbat Hugo Chavez’s statesmanlike performance at the UN, and the heartening domestic response in which even familiar left-wing drones such as Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel paused in their bastinadoing of the C. in C. to circle the wagons. “Hey! You can’t slander the President of the United States,” they cried with one voice. “That’s our job.” Clearly, what is needed for world peace is an attack from space.
But there will be ample opportunity to get back to world affairs soon enough. Yes, the clash of civilizations rages on, the polar icecaps deliquesce, insane despots smirk approvingly as atom bombs roll off the assembly line, and the Pope lays his plans for the Rapture, but all that must wait.
I whacked a mouse.
I have mentioned Bernard Lewis in these pages before; he is perhaps the West’s greatest living scholar of Islamic history and culture. This evening, as I was poking around over at the Maverick Philosopher’s place, I ran across, in a comment by Sam Graf to a post about appeasement of our foes, a link to a lecture given by Lewis earlier this year. In it he talks about the meaning of freedom and justice in Islamic societies, and of the historical events and forces that have brought us to our present crisis. The essay is brief, but Lewis is peerless, and you will learn more from these few paragraphs than from a year’s worth of the self-serving partisan din that passes for political debate these days.
A recent astrophysical result has cosmologists scratching their heads. Apparently the microwave shadows that galaxy clusters ought to be casting aren’t showing up as predicted by our current understanding of Big Bang theory, and nobody knows why.
Avast, ye scurvy bilge rats. Just in case you didn’t know, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
By now you may know that there has been a coup in Thailand, the 17th since World War II. General Sonthi Boonyaratkalin made his move while Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was out of town, visiting Gotham for one of those occasional UN hootenannies that so effectively maintain idyllic peace and stability in the world (and do an even better job of reducing every thoroughfare east of Seventh Avenue to a state of total vehicular thrombosis for days on end).
As you’ve no doubt heard, the Muslim world has its knickers in a twist once again, this time over some remarks made by the Pope during the recent “Apostolic Journey of His Holiness Benedict XVI to München, Altötting, and Regensburg”. It’s been making the rounds that the Pontiff suggested that Mohammed, in the later verses of the Qur’an, had wrongly advocated the use of violence in the defense and propagation of Islam. To imply that peace-loving Muslims are prone to violence is, of course, so preposterous that Muslims the world over, in protest of this baseless and blasphemous insult, and in defense of their faith, are erupting in violence once again.
String theory, which has been touted for decades as the best hope for unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity, is taking some heat these days. Critics complain that the model has yet to generate any testable predictions, meaning that experimental confirmation remains out of reach, and that progress has been slower than we might have expected if string theory is really the right description of the world.
Recently Lee Smolin, an enormously gifted physicist and cosmologist (and the author of the fascinating book The Life of the Cosmos, to which I ought to devote a separate post), and Brian Greene, who is actively engaged in string-theory research (and who has written the clearest popularization yet of the subject, The Elegant Universe), appeared on NPR to talk about this issue. If you are interested in these matters you might like to listen to the program; you can do so here.
Just a few odds and ends for tonight; I’m whipped. Nocturnal recluse that I am, I’m still not used to this up-first-thing-in-the-morning business, and I’ve been averaging about four or five hours of sleep. By the time Friday rolls around all I can see is a great Eye, rimmed with fire.
As happens every year around this time, my charming hundred-year-old Victorian bowfront limestone has been invaded by mice. I think they spend the warmer months outside, either in our small back yards or up in Prospect Park, which is just at the end of my block, but right after Labor Day each year they set up shop indoors. I’m up late most nights, and they’ve been pretty bold this time around – skittering across the floor, squeaking behind the cupboards, even jumping out of my sink when I went to put a dish in there the other night.
Usually it’s not a big deal. I get some old-fashioned mousetraps, bait them with something attractive, set them in strategic places, and typically take out three or four of the little varmints each night. It’s the big ones at first, then the smaller ones, and after a few days it’s all over. This year, though, something has gone horribly wrong. I haven’t nailed a single one.
It’s video week at waka waka waka. My friend Jess sent me this clip, which is a prickly discussion between Matt Lauer and George Bush on the subject of torture. Here are two men who obviously loathe one another; they are trying as hard as they can not to attack each other physically, and just barely managing. They are standing almost toe to toe, and while Lauer is trying awfully hard to be deferential (you’re always “one down” when you’re with POTUS), W is right up in his grill, jabbing away with his index finger in a way that would certainly get my Irish up. It’s hard to believe this is the President of the United States being interviewed by one of the nation’s foremost news anchors; the whole thing seems more like two ill-tempered dads getting into it at a little league game.
I’m still adjusting to rejoining the labor force; I got home awfully late this evening, and will be up at cockcrow to do it all again. As a result, all I have to offer for tonight is what seems to be a truly creepy video clip, sent along by my friend Eugene Jen, who remains an inexhaustible source of Internet arcana. This macabre flick, a bit of postwar Soviet mad-scientist mayhem, is called “Experiments in the Revival of Organisms”, and is introduced, quite astonishingly, by the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane (who, if you will forgive me for being catty – it’s Fashion Week, after all – could have spent just a bit more time in wardrobe). The organism in question, it appears, is a dog.
I haven’t even got past the intro yet myself; let’s enjoy it together. I’ll make some popcorn.
New York City has a rapid metabolism; a lot happens here, and even when it’s something unpleasant, the wound closes quickly, and rarely leaves much of a scar. September 11th was different, though; it hurt us very badly indeed, and though we don’t have much of a limp these days, we are still shaken, and today here in Gotham the old pain was back again, throbbing and aching, and the gaping hole where the towers were still feels like a missing front tooth.
Everyone, as far as I can tell, knows someone who died that day. Our family was lucky – we’re all still here. My wife and I were still at home in Brooklyn when the planes went in, and our son, then thirteen, was safe at school nearby. But my daughter, who had just begun her junior year, was at Stuyvesant High School, about five hundred yards from Ground Zero. She and her classmates gazed in horror from an eighth-floor classroom directly facing the doomed towers, and saw the first one fall before they were evacuated onto West Street and left to find their own way northward amid the panicking throng. My wife and I, watching from our rooftop across the harbor as the ghastly pall of smoke blew directly over us, had no idea what had become of her, and grew more and more anxious as the day wore on. It was not until five or six that evening that she was finally able to get through to us on the telephone – tearful, but safe.
As I say, New York is a resilient place – vibrantly alive if any place on Earth is – and we’re fine, mostly. But there are some wounds here that will never fully heal, and today you couldn’t be in the city without being aware of the presence of a great, almost unbearable sorrow, the collective grief of the millions who mourn the thousands who died.
As I look out my back door I see, rising from the site about three miles away, the brilliant columns of light that pierce the sky every year on this day, towering to the very zenith. I hope our neighbor, firefighter David Fontana of Rescue Company One, who gave his life, on his wedding anniversary, to save the lives of so many others, can see them too.
I’ve gone and done it again; I’ve jumped into an argument about free will over at Bill Vallicella’s. There are two threads at the moment; they are here and here.
An item in the news yesterday raises once again the stubborn puzzle of consciousness. A 23-year-old British woman who has been in a “vegetative state” for five months has been shown by a sophisticated scanning technique to exhibit patterns of brain activity, in response to verbal stimuli, that are indistinguishable from those occuring in normal, conscious volunteers.
An item in yesterday’s New York Times reported a somewhat dispiriting result on the anti-aging front (a subject that seems to attract my attention more as time goes by, for some reason – and particularly so this week, when I feel as though I am aging about 48 hours each day, with about 90% of it happening at seven a.m. when the alarm goes off). A troika of researchers at The University of North Carolina, the University of Michigan (go blue!), and Harvard have found that a gene called p16-Ink4a, in acting to prevent cancer, might be contributing to our senescence.
This working-for-a-living thing has me all worn out, so for tonight, rather than offer the eloquent and persuasive post I had planned, in which I shall reassure those readers whom I seem to have upset with recent political posts that I am not Bull Connor or Curtis LeMay, I offer an engaging, if somewhat macabre, link dedicated to the grotesquely fascinating world of mummies. Enjoy.
Well, it had to end sometime. The delightful two-month break occasioned by the infinitely avoidable death (wilful murder, more like) of PubSub has come to an end, and I find myself back in harness, this time for a large software company in midtown. I like my new coworkers – they are bright and friendly – and the work seems interesting, but I do have to say it is a bit of a jolt to be back in shoes and long pants, and to exchange the slow rhythm of the tides for the screeching chaos of Manhattan. This new outfit is also by far the most corporate environment in which I have ever found myself, after decades in the recording studio followed by five years of small startups, and I feel like Tarzan in a dinner jacket. But with two kids in college, there are bills to pay, so we adapt.
My biggest worry is having no time for reading, writing, quiet contemplation, and unhurried, healthful exercise; I think spending the summer as a “gentleman of leisure” spoiled me no end. But I’m not complaining, appearances to the contrary – I am well aware how very lucky I was to have that much-needed break, and as my dear mum used to say, the only real peace in this world is on the other side of the churchyard gate. So for now, with freedom out of reach, it’s farewell to the beach, and back into the breach.
It’s been a long day, and having just got in from a long drive back to Brooklyn from Cape Cod, I’m rather too worn out to say much tonight.
But I do want to note with shock and sorrow the bizarre and untimely death of Steve Irwin. He was a delightful character, and an iconic figure in his native Australia. His fearless and hyperkinetic enthusiasm, his genuine love of animals (and his immense skill in handling them), and his goofy smile, khaki shorts and broad Aussie accent won him millions of fans the world over (I was one too, in case you can’t tell), and I join them all in mourning his loss.
It was a damp and blustery day in Wellfleet yesterday, as the low-pressure system dubbed Ernesto passed to our west. With high pressure to the east, the resulting gradient made for strong winds blowing in from the Atlantic onto the Cape Cod backshore. I dropped by the beach at Newcomb Hollow with my trusty Sony Cybershot, and snapped the image below:
But a still picture really doesn’t do it justice. As it happens my little camera will take movies as well, so if you’d like to, you can download brief clip – complete with poorly recorded audio – here. (Best to right-click the link and choose “Save Target As”, then save and run the file on your machine.)
Jess Kaplan calls my attention to some new writing about our presence in Iraq by Christopher Hitchens – with whom I usually find myself agreeing – over at Foreign Affairs.
A few days ago I wrote a post about Robert Wright’s book Nonzero, in response to Kevin Kim’s thoughts about the idea of telelology in evolution. Earlier this evening a new commenter, a blogger who goes by the nickname ‘gordsellar’ stopped by to offer some worthwhile remarks in that post’s discussion thread. I moseyed over to peek at his site, eclexys – which, being obviously the work of a curious and intelligent person, has since been added to the waka waka waka sidebar – and found an interesting item about a marvelous animal you might very well never have heard of: the tardigrade. How I can have written hundreds of posts over the last year and a half without mentioning this cuddly little creature, I can’t imagine.
Our Sun is about five billion years old, which is about halfway through its expected lifespan. A star begins as a collapsing cloud of gas, mostly hydrogen, and when the ball has grown dense enough under the pressure of its own gravitation, the hydrogen atoms begin to fuse into helium, liberating a tremendous amount of energy. This outward force acts as a counterbalance to the crushing inward pull of gravity, and the star settles into a comfortable equilibrium. Over time, fusion reactions occur between helium atoms as well, and begin working their way up through a series of elements, and the star takes on a layered structure, with the more massive elements toward the core. You might think that the more hydrogen a star starts off with – in other words, the more massive the star is – the longer it would last, but in fact it goes the other way, because the increased gravitional pressure due to the extra mass causes the fusion reactions to proceed more rapidly, more than making up for the extra “fuel”. The really big stars burn very brightly, very violently, and very briefly indeed compared to a modest specimen like ours: in contrast to the ten-billion-year lifespan of our Sun, giant stars may burn for less than a million years.
In an ongoing discussion over at Maverick Philosopher, one of the interlocutors has made the assertion, in defense of dualism, that the human mind must be more than the physical activity of the brain, because the brain is a finite physical system, and the mind of Man, allegedly, is infinite. To quote from the thread over at Dr. Vallicella’s place:
Because the human mind is not bounded, it cannot be physical.
Sounds good. We all have the feeling that we can accommodate any new concept that comes before us (though, on reflection, a peek at contemporary political discourse might be sufficient rebuttal), and adjust our behavior with limitless flexibility. But why do we think so? What makes us so sure?