Personally Speaking Nothing is ever so simple as it first appears. • Murphy's First Law While waiting for the light to change at a local intersection, I recently heard a few disconnected phrases of a radio interview with a man who, from the sentences that I heard before taking the green and moving on, apparently has written a book on How to Make a Cup of Cappucino coffee. Upon first hearing, this did not sound like a topic for a book as much as for a few lines in a recipe book. But, as the phrases on the radio faded from attention when I began minding the traffic again, I caught the author's drift. It made sense, in a funny sort of way. To make a Cappucino, you need a pot, a cup, coffee, sugar, whipped cream. Take it in whatever order you like: First, the cup. It's a small chinaware vessel, made from clay, shaped and glazed in a furnace--each of which separate operations involves a series of totally unrelated technologies and discoveries going back to the earliest days of human civilization, and improved through the ages in a series of discoveries and inventions. The cream? Someone had a cow, probably a herd, milked either by hand, more likely with a pneumatic milking machine in a dairy milking shed alongside a row of other cows who fed on grass and grain--invoking agriculture, animal husbandry--and so on; you get the idea. Oh, and there's the coffee, probably harvested from a farm in Colombia, Guatemala, or some other foreign country, followed by harvesting, packaging, and shipping via ocean vessel--a whole 'nother world of inventions, skills, and assumptions. I know people who say proudly of their achievements and possessions, I did it all myself; I earned this wealth, all by myself and it's mine, all mine; I made my life with no help from anyone . . . Oh, really? We are, most of us in fact, merely aggregators of ideas, products, and services conceived and produced by others, which allows us to produce other products and services, with the expectation that we will be paid, nicely we hope, for our use of those ideas and products and earn a profit for ourselves. Steve Jobs invented the Apple, the Macintosh, the iPhone and all the related gadgets and apps, all by himself, right? With no help from the people who invented plastic, discovered the actions of electrons, radio waves, and the mathematical algorithms that drive computers. Why, of course--not. Jobs, like most all successful icons, is a brilliant aggregator of ideas and processes that others conceived through research in pure science, and who probably earned far less money for their troubles than Jobs, the inventor/marketer. But they aren't complaining, likely. This time of year (it's not quite yet Christmas; New Year's is around the corner, as I write this) is often one of reflection on the past, and planning forward for the future. In that state of mind, it may be appropriate to remember: Nobody is an entirely self-made entity. Our physical bodies appeared alive, squirming and breathing, following on from actions in which we personally had absolutely no participation, with incipient brainpower that qualifies us as human, constructed of atoms created as a consequence of the Big Bang (if you believe such truck), and transmitted down through aeons of time in matter that through processes no one really understands has somehow become DNA molecules that have been recycled millions of times--billions, even, and will be recycled billions more, making for continuous life while the universe continues. So, to make a simple cup of coffee is an act of participation in the continuation of creation. Interesting. In the words of Sir Isaac Newton, whose phrase was cribbed recently as a book title by today's reigning International Genius in Chief Stephen Hawking, We stand on the shoulders of giants.\par }{\plain Happy New Year. Go out and invent something. Start with the wheel. And remember, everything is connected to everything else. You ain't that smart. |