Jason Wells

Idea is death. The world is my representation, approached from the veil of ignorance. I cast aside the veil and the light is clear. The clarity illuminates the null. The eye is the window from the soul, not into it; paint your world with your idea. The meaning comes from within, where I shall never find it. Seek idea to explain, and die. The guides counsel the ignorant idea. Not a beginning, but an ending. Total transformation. Ready? It’s easy.

As I was leaving the office, I saw a gorgeous sunset over Point Loma. All dark roses against blues. I took a quick snapshot of it before I hopped in the car and headed home.

I love discovering things that are assumed to be obvious or straightforward by practically everyone, myself included, but as it turns out aren’t. It reminds me of the great chasm that exists between what we think we know and what we do know, which is good to keep in mind, always. But more than that, the investigation itself is illuminating, and I like my world illuminated with this kind of light.

This seems like a straightforward question: How may people have ever lived? There should be a number, right? After all, you can count people; couldn’t we just count everyone, all the way back, and there’s your number? It seems so simple. Actually, it’s anything but; it’s completely impossible to answer precisely. No one can produce the number–not ever, it seems to me.

Not because the information isn’t available or anything as humdrum as that. It’s true that the data is profoundly scarce; decent statistics about human population hardly exist before the 20th century, let alone 50,000 years ago. But that isn’t the real problem. The problem is the actual number isn’t knowable, not even in principle.

Why not? How can that be? Because of the paradox of the heap. Imagine a heap of sand. You begin removing sand from the heap. Is it still a heap when a single grain of sand remains? If not, when did it change?

People are human beings, and whether or not something is a human being is not a binary yes/no question. A person is understood to be a member of the species Homo sapiens. That’s a good start, but it unravels pretty quickly. There are billions of members of H. sapiens alive today, and the farther back you go, the less there are. But does that mean if you go back far enough, there was a single member of the species? Of course not. It’s not as if a gravid female H. erectus one day gave birth to an obviously distinct H. sapiens baby. Was her child really a different species? Who can answer that definitively? The transition had to have been smooth, like baldness; you think you know when someone is or isn’t bald, but where’s the line?

One might respond with a shrug, saying: ok, but so what? We can still have a rough estimate based on some simplifying assumptions. Maybe so, but that skirts the real issue. You could ‘simplify’ the problem by declaring that Neanderthals don’t count, and that archaic H. sapiens does; but it’s completely arbitrary. Where’s your justification? Even if you could make the case that a particular species membership defines personhood–good luck with that–you’d still be hindered by the fact that species boundaries themselves are hazy, vague things, as Ms. H. erectus would attest. Or would you doubt she considers her baby kindred?

The very definition of a biological species is a matter of serious debate even today, because evolution doesn’t quantize itself into convenient little bundles. Life is an ever-branching tree, not a string of pearls. It is a continuum of change that we package for our cognitive convenience. And so the number of people who ever lived is a heap, but entirely knowable heaps don’t sit on continuous branches.

Problem: I have this blog, but barely ever post to it.

Theory: Blogging is lower friction from my phone. Here’s my test.

I saw this image of the world’s largest Jesus in an article in the AP iPhone app. I saved the photo to the phone. I then created a new post in the WordPress app and pulled it in. Then wrote these words. Post. Poof.

ZARDOZ!

It’s a gorgeous Sunday afternoon and I’ve been outside enjoying it. This year’s wet spring has caused an botanical eruption in all of my gardens. Check it out.

The front terrace. When Heather and I moved in, this had been a dehydrated little green lawn. We tore it out and planted pineapple sage, rosemary, thyme, lavender, cycads, an orange tree, heather and morning glories. The three rosemary plants along the front are flowing over the front of the terrace like waterfalls and are ready to take over. (In case you’d been wondering, we’ve been developing a combination of Mediterranean and semi-tropical gardens front and back.) This terrace now takes a tiny fraction of the water the original lawn did, thrives in the blazing sun, and unlike the lawn, it’s beautiful.

This is in the side alley next to the house. We planted this sapling Mexican lime tree just a couple months ago, and it’s covered with tiny blossoms. We planted the surrounding clumps of lemon thyme the same afternoon, and each is now easily twice the size it was that day. We haven’t watered it; it just grew. The thyme is delicious.

This is the back patio, just behind the pool. When I bought the house in 2006, these queen palms were hardly shoulder height, and the dwarf palms were thin little things hardly a foot tall. Now the palms are 2-3x taller and the dwarf palms are so lush you can hardly see the terrace anymore.

This year’s basil crop in the herb garden. I planted it in March, but only three plants. Another seven germinated unattended; I just noticed them growing all over the place. (See the tiny ones in the back?) Presumably they came from seeds produced from previous years of basil. I expect we’ll be having a whole lot of pesto with seared ahi this year, but we can’t possibly eat that much basil, so I’ll give a lot away. The plant at the bottom right is garlic. It germinated by itself as well, I found it growing in the compost–it had been discarded from dinner one night–and seeing its success, transplanted it. Aside from that and a little watering it now and then, I’ve done nothing; and it’s tripled in size.

When we moved into the house, this strip of land out front was encased in severe, soulless concrete. I asked Brutus to jackhammer it off and then planted a line of seven fan palms. These were originally growing as tiny weeds along Scott St. in Point Loma, so I dug them out with a spade, took them home and grew them in the herb garden till they were big enough to thrive on their own. I have room for two more at the end and a couple more I can transplant; I may do that another time. I can’t believe how much nicer this is than concrete.

The valencia orange tree. We brought this with us when we moved from Solana Beach. For years it had struggled, producing no oranges. And this year–bam! I see the start of at least 10 oranges.

Cycad, lavender, and a monster rosemary bush. In the back, the pineapple sage and a pine tree that I discovered in the terrace out back a few years ago.

You know, until I took that botany class a few years ago as I pursued my philosophy degree from UCSD, I really had no idea what a green thumb I was blessed to have. I love watching these natural, evolved, elegant machines build themselves with such subtlety and grace, reacting to the environment, follow cycles of light and dark, wet and dry. As yet there is no engineering or technology as sophisticated as a single cell of these plants, nothing nearly capable of taking photons from the sun and applying them to dirt and water to build and reproduce themselves. I’m not sure if it’s common knowledge, but the full breadth of photosynthesis is still not fully understood by science, and no one is capable of building a truly photosynthetic technology. Think of that. I’m surrounded by literally mind-boggling beauty.