SOCIALISM

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan".. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.... (substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. Could not be any simpler than that. (Please pass this on) These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

REALITY vs PERCEPTION

In any collection of quotations by Albert Einstein, one of the most intriguing is this: "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." Anyone who is interested in going beyond the illusion to find a more satisfying reality would pay attention, but in actuality we all have made ourselves comfortable with the illusion that convinces us. Even physicists, who know with certainty that seemingly solid objects are actually constructed of invisible energy clouds, treat tables, chairs and cars stalled in traffic like solid, tangible things. The field of quantum mechanics has shown for more than 80 years now that the perceived reality of hard objects that senses give us is an illusion.

How do we know that our own "normal" sight isn't a "fictive visual percept," to use the medical term for hallucinated images? Actually, we don't. No philosopher using deduction or researcher using brain scans has been able to prove with certainty that our perception of the world matches "reality as it is out there," whatever that may mean. Hallucinations are identified medically because they usually arrive with other symptoms, like those associated with schizophrenia, and because if one person sees a brick wall where everyone else sees a tree, the outsider must be hallucinating.

If we follow the mystery of perception, many more issues arise than the fairly simple one of hallucination. Hallucinations are rare, but the brain's ability to turn electrical impulses and chemical reactions into a world we see, hear, touch, taste and smell is incredibly baffling. There is no light in the brain. Yet the light of the sun is blinding. This disparity is crucial, because without someone to see it, the sun is invisible. There is no visible light in nature without an eye to perceive it. What if your brains, having taken a totally different evolutionary path, didn't "see" light but "heard" it? There's no obstacle to such a development. (A phenomenon known as synesthesia, in which the senses get mixed up, is well known to neuroscience. It became much more familiar during the LSD 1960s, when trippers discovered that they could taste colors or see music.)

The fact that our senses don't match reality can't be taken for granted, even though we do that all the time. We want to discuss the profound implications of perception versus reality, but first let's look at the best proof we have. You and I may agree that the street is lined with trees rather than prison walls, but other species live in the world with us and do not agree. All living creatures sense "reality" through specific filters, and all assume that their filters (i.e., their senses) have perfect fidelity. (Cats, dogs, bees and butterflies can't tell us what their assumptions are, but we will accept that they don't think they're hallucinating. Every species operates efficiently in the world it perceives.) We take it for granted that every species using its filters sees a common reality, but what is "common" among all these perceptions is much harder to pin down.

In fact, sensory abilities differ vastly among the millions of species on the planet. What is real to one species (like a bat's sonar) is hidden to another (a deaf paramecium). Even among 7 billion humans, every person has a different "mix" of reality, depending on personal acuity, predispositions, habits, memories and upbringing (the child of a horticulturalist might automatically see 20 different wildflowers in a meadow where you see a blur of color). We tend to ignore the fact that sensory abilities differ from one person to another, unless the difference is striking, as between one person who is tone-deaf and another who has perfect pitch. Yet the larger truth is that each of us uses the brain like a personal CGI factory, creating a 3D movie of the world unlike anyone else's. Are we illusion makers or reality makers? That's the big question.

Let's start with visual systems first, given that color and imagery affect much of how we perceive reality. Humans have one lens in each eye, and our eyes are trichromatic: We have three types of color-sensing cells, or "cones," which allows us to distinguish a million or so colors. But even within humans, there is a twofold or threefold physical difference from one person to another in every aspect of our visual system (e.g., the size of the optic nerve, lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex, etc.). Variation in cone pigment genes is very widespread, particularly between genders. Recent evidence suggests that somewhere between 2 percent and 50 percent of women may have four cones, giving them super color vision (tetrachromacy), while colorblindness is a male trait.

However, color vision and eyesight vary even more dramatically among different species, many of which are monochromatic, such as seals, sea lions and owl monkeys. If a species is a "rod monochromat," then for that species, the world is free of all colors other than shades of gray. If a species in a "cone monochromat" (e.g., it only has one type of cone), then it can see about 100 shades of a single color or its combinations. Some species, such as cats, are dichromatic, which means they can see only about 10,000 colors. There are also surprising gender differences in animals; among many New World monkey species, for example, males are dichromatic, but many females are trichromatic, like humans. Honey bees are trichromatic, but not quite like humans; they cannot see red, but they can see ultraviolet frequencies.

Evolution hasn't ordered living creatures in a straight line from "crude" sight (as we humans would judge it) to more "evolved" sight (as we would call our own). Many birds, insects and fish are tetrachromatic, and some spiders and birds can see ultraviolet colors, which humans cannot. This would make insect prey glow green in the dark. The reason that we cannot see UV colors is that our lens blocks them from striking the retina, but people whose lenses have been removed in a cataract procedure or who were born without a lens (aphakia) have been reported to detect UV light.

As evolution has developed different sensory systems, reality shifted. There is no "normal" way to decode photos of invisible light. Pigeons and some butterflies are actually pentachromats; in theory such creatures could distinguish up to 10 billion colors, even though we have no way to prove this. The mantis shrimp probably has the most amazing eyes in the animal kingdom, with 16 different receptor types, including four types of receptors just for seeing UV light, and four others for polarized light. A human would need many distinct kinds of sunglasses to duplicate the sensation. Many snakes can also "see" infrared, or heat radiation, using special detectors that send thermal information through their visual system. Even the density of rods and cones differs greatly. Humans have about 200,000 per square millimeter, whereas sparrows have 400,000 and buzzards 1 million in the same tiny area. Giant squid, who live at ocean depths that are inky black, outdo all other species with a sensitivity that is several thousand times that of humans (possibly a billion total receptors, though the density is not well known).

It's hard to escape our assumption that eyesight connects us to the real world, but every living thing is connected to a created world. The question of matching our creation to a possible "real reality" will come next. The conclusions of quantum mechanics will certainly have to be brought in. For the moment, we need to realize that the world created by other species is inconceivable to us. Humans have one lens in each eye. Insects have more complex compound eyes, with individual components that resemble a single human eye. Depending on species, flies can have 3,000 to 25,000 lenses; bees have 5,500. Some box jellyfish have 24 eyes; some scorpions have 12 eyes, including several pairs in different locations on their body; scallops have 100 or so eyes along the edges of their mantle, with a special reflector lens and two types of retinas; and some spiders have eight eyes, including some with special telephoto-like lenses. No doubt you've seen multi-lens photos that attempt to show the world through a fly's many eyes, but they are misleading, because the fly has yet to process all those snapshots into a coherent world, which may have dozens of facets or only one. Are those snapshots still or moving? Another mystery, because humans have a flicker fusion rate of 50 images per second, which means that anything slower is captured one image at a time, whereas anything moving faster appears as continuous motion. But chickens don't see continuous motion until the speed reaches 100 flickers per second, and flies don't see it until 300 flickers per second, so for these creatures, the world doesn't turn into a movie until long after it does for us.

Finally, the mystery of perception must be sorted out from defective perception. Humans suffer from certain peculiar visual defects. For example, we can fill in information that we partially see (e.g., if an edge is blocked out), but some animals don't do that. Optical illusions have proven that our visual system is often wrong in its detection accuracy for size, shape, color, motion and depth. (Think of desert mirages where shimmering hot air looks like water.) Yet in a sense, confining our examples to eyesight is misleading, because the world is created by blending all the senses, and variations in touch, taste, hearing and smell lead to bewildering riddles. The Indian elephant hears better than humans at lower ranges, bats at much higher ranges. Cats cannot taste sweetness. Cows have about 25,000 taste buds, pigs about 15,000 and catfish about 150,000, outstripping a gourmet chef operating with the human complement of 10,000, but this, too, varies two- to threefold, as in eyesight.

So while feeling superior to chickens with their 100 taste buds and ignoring bees, which can smell something miles away, or sharks, which can detect faint, distant electrical impulses, humans must take advantage of one extrasensory gift -- our ability to reason -- in order to find out where we stand in the shadowy realm of illusion versus reality.

COMPANY POLICY

Start with a cage containing five monkeys.
Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the other monkeys with cold water.
After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result - all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.
Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him.
After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.
Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked.
Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.
After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know that's the way it's always been done round here.
And that, my friends, is how company policies are made.