Counting Up To Infinity

  David removed his finger covering Phyllis’ lips, touched it to his own lips, and lightly kissed it.

  Phyllis rolled her eyes and gave him a sharp punch to his solar plexus. David looked up at her with a look of complete surprise, disbelief, and innocence. Phyllis just rolled her eyes and sighed.

  “Love,” said David*, “I’m going to need to get back to work. Dinner then?”

  Phyllis looked adoring at her husband, “Works for me too. We’ll meet at dinner tonight.” He toggled a mental switch and the flesh and blood representation of his body shimmered out of existence. He was now operating in the full diamond computer mode on a dozen computers in the solar system. His unneeded atoms were recycled into the replicator.

  Phyllis waited and watched as her husband disapporated, she wanted to get one last look at his body and smell his aroma, before she disapporated into the computer herself. She toggled her mental switch and her essence also was merged into the intra-Galactic net, the home of the new humanity.

  ###

  About the Author Allen I. Fleishman, PhD

  Born and raised in the Bronx, I originally studied Pre-Med. All their weird and unique names did me in (after all, Ulna should be the first name of an ugly Hungarian barmaid). In graduate school I switched majors to cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is the experimental branch of psychology looking at how we think and process information. I got as far as two years when I realized that the entire field of psychology is math illiterate. Psychology completely lacked the tools to study individuals. So I made the change to the University of Illinois and the mathematical/statistical end of psychology, where I received a PhD. At the U of I my work was entirely mathematical/statistical, despite the psychology major. My dissertation was a computer simulation examining ways to optimize prediction in the face of little data. I believe they still use the term ‘Fleishman’ as a synonym for a computer job lasting more than twelve hours (small jobs are pico-Fleishman). My only human experimentation was my infamous (at least at the local Institutional Review Board) study: “Asking my wife what she thinks”, a factor-analytic study of one person. To those of us who studied psychology, it was an unpublished implicit personality theory study. I feel it demonstrated that current theories of personality (e.g., by Freud, Osgood, Cattell) are not universal. If everyone is idiosyncratic, then there will be people for whom the ‘Oedipal Complex’ is true and people for whom it is not. Furthermore, even for the Oedipal Complex people, it will be true at some times in their life, exacerbated by certain situations, but not all. Therefore, individuals and time/situation MUST be factored into any ‘General Unifying Theory of Psychology’.

  It is my strongly held belief that “Psychology is a Crock”, until 1) every psych graduate student is completely proficient in time series analysis, three-mode factor analysis, cluster analysis and newer statistical multivariate and time series methodologies; 2) every psych PhD student has done at least one ‘N of 1’ research project; and 3) full professors would be expected to have integrated many ‘N of 1’ studies to demonstrate a theory. Any psychologist who confirms a theory by comparing two averages (across many people) or computes a correlation (across many people) at a single or a couple of time points should be laughed at, or pitied. Given that maturation takes decades, I can forgive ignoring time/situations, but never ignoring people – individuals. You cannot study people (Psychology) by computing averages. Those pseudo-psychologists who are unable to make the transition, should be moved over to Sociology, where group amalgams are appropriate.

  I briefly taught statistics and psychometrics at a graduate school, when I switched to becoming a full time statistician for the pharmaceutical/medical device industry. I’ve been a statistician for the last 28 years, helping to prove that the drugs you take both work and are safe. I’ve witnessed the birth of a number of useful drugs, as well as their death when they aren’t safe or effective.

  For those of you who have heard the claim “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics”, the answer is no. Statisticians are not liars – they follow very rigid rules which prevent lies, but liars (aka marketers) can take statistics classes. In case you’re wondering why, it’s the same reason the protagonist of the book, David, would never consider lying. If everything you do is being monitored and achieved, your truthfulness is completely open for review by those who have access to it (i.e., in the lingo of the story – the ‘Ins’). Under those conditions telling the truth is as natural as breathing, with the negative equally true – lying is completely alien and doomed to certain failure.

  Discover other works by the author at https://compuhead.com/

  The Infinite when it was Two Digits Old - https://compuhead.com/site/TheInfinitewhenitwasTwoDigitsOld.pdf