Share and share alike

Share and share alike

I recently went to the doctor (in the interest of confidentiality I cannot disclose the reasons).  My doctor, yes she belongs to me, is amazing.  After listening to me for 18 seconds, the doctor stepped out of the room and gave some instructions to the nurse to draw some blood.  She didn’t think I could hear her but I heard her say that I had a cracked pot.  I was sick when we dissected frogs in high school so I didn’t even know I had a pot much less that it could be cracked.  But I wasn’t going to disclose the details of my case so please ignore those comments.  The nurse drew my blood and sent me home with instructions that they would call me with the results.

Just like clockwork, my doctor called me with the results a few anxious weeks later.  She said my serum porcelain level was 127 and that I would be fine.  I didn’t want to waste the doctor’s precious time with petty questions about whether the crack would heal.  Presumably, if I was going to be fine, it would.

But there was something that struck me.  The serum porcelain level of 127 was mine, the doctor said so.  Here is where the reader will need to pay attention.  I wondered if anyone else had ever had a serum porcelain level of 127 or if someone else might have it in the future.  I realized I didn’t know the rules of ownership here.  Did those data belong to the first person to ever have that value?  If that was the case then I must be the first.  An alternative rule is that it might belong to the last person.  If that was the case it might not still be mine.  How would I know?  What would happen to me if someone else suddenly had what had been my serum porcelain level and it was now theirs?

I am a student of forensics and have learned to use the tools of that trade (I have seen every episode of Criminal Minds at least twice).  One of the most valuable tools is the clue board.  You may not know that technical term (I made it up) but you have no doubt seen it in action.  It looks like a cork board on which clues are tacked up and then pieces of string are used to connect clues.  I have one of my own at home which I employed to solve this mystery (as I have others related to Lincoln, Kennedy, and Zuckerberg).  I tacked up a picture of me.  That reminds me, I need to write some notes on the nature of self but that will have to wait.  I then tacked up a piece of paper with the number 127 written on it.  I also put up a picture of Obama but this was just meant to represent the common man.

I stared at the clue board for a few hours (solving mysteries takes time).  I then put a piece of string from Obama to the 127.  This was meant to represent the idea that the serum porcelain level was his.  Imagine if you can, at this point there was no connection between me and the 127.  Then I moved one end of string from Obama to me.  Now 127 was mine but now Obama didn’t have a serum porcelain level.  Was this the way things really worked?  Or more philosophically, is this the way things should work?

Days passed and then it came to me.  What if I took a second piece of string and attached it from Obama to 127?  Now we both had a serum porcelain level.  Share and share alike my Momma always said and I knew she was smiling down on me and suspected she was guiding me.

Now the astute reader has no doubt already seen the problem here.  Who owned that value?  Did I own it or did Obama own it?  Whose was it?  At this moment I felt my mother’s hand at work.  I realized I didn’t own that value and neither did Obama.  I decided that I owned the string that connected me to 127 and Obama owned the string that connected him to 127.  That had to be the answer.  I didn’t own the data.  Data couldn’t be owned.  I owned the thing that connected the metaphysical me to the data.

Just like Einstein, I then said, that takes care of the special case, but what about the general model?  I grabbed my note pad and made up a whole bunch of additional numbers and letters and tacked them onto the board.  These would be additional data in my general model.   I then attached strings from each of these to me.  Some of them I attached to Obama but others I didn’t.  It seems that Obama and I have a number of things in common (that made me feel important, I have to admit).  I stepped back and looked at the crisscrossing of strings between data and people.  The same solution seemed to hold in the general case.

I don’t know what made me do it (it was probably my Momma again) but I then took down my picture and that of Obama but left all of the data and the relationship strings up there.  I had thought I would see all of the stuff that belonged to me and all of the stuff that belonged to Obama.  But I was surprised.  The strings that spread out from the hole where I had been looked different from the strings that spread out from the hole where Obama had been.  But I wasn’t there anymore.  My pattern was different than Obama’s but I wasn’t there.  I could tell which was which because I had other information (I remembered where my picture was).

So did those strings belong to me or not? Maybe another experiment would make it clear.  First I took down all of Obama’s strings.  Then I grabbed a spool of string of a different color.  Everywhere there was one of my strings (I still thought of them as my strings at that point) I put a string of the new color.  These were for Joe Biden.  Hmmm.  The patterns were identical.  Now there was nothing that told me which of the collection of strings should go to me and which to Joe Biden.  I suppose I could add another data point that might have a string to me that would differentiate me from Joe.  Unless, that is, he also had a relationship to that same data point.  Einstein and I shared the same experience. The general case was much harder.  I could not tell which strings were mine and which were Joe’s.  If I couldn’t tell the difference between them then perhaps the strings don’t belong to me either.  Since the patterns of strings (for the data I had access to at this point) were the same I could not even claim ownership of the pattern of strings.  Joe and I had the same pattern.

But wait a minute.  Something in here belongs to me.  It must, this is America after all.  Again the days wore on until one cold winter night I was cleaning up my desk and saw my picture laying there.  I picked it up and put in back on the clue board.  Then it struck me.  I could tell which pattern of strings was mine.  It was the one that attached to me.  I took my picture down and as if by magic it the pattern was again generic.  I put it up and the pattern was mine.  I was at the center of the solution.  It was all about me.

What I “owned” was the tack that attached all of the strings that attach to all of the data.  The tack in the center of my picture was what I owned.  That magical item that established the relationships between me as a person and the collection of data linkages was mine.  Not the data written on the slips of paper.  No one could own them.  Not the actual strings because they could be linking data together from lots of people.  No one could own the strings.  Not even the pattern of strings because other people could have the same pattern.  No one could own the patterns.  What I could own, nay what I do own, is the tack that links me to the pattern.

I felt so silly in retrospect.  That day my doctor told me that my serum porcelain was 127 I had thought that datum was mine.  Thank goodness I didn’t try and protect my property.  Just think, I might have kept some other poor soul with a cracked pot from getting the news that they would be fine.  I might have even impeded efforts by my servants (government workers are civil servants after all) to keep track of how many people suffer from this terrible affliction.  It is even possible that this very day someone is researching cracked pots and without that datum might not find a way to prevent this kind of medical travesty.  They can now do all of those things without ever having to know I am the person that has a cracked pot (that I want to keep private and will ask the reader to please ignore that information).

Yet another mystery solved with my clue board and this one didn’t even involve a conspiracy.  Thanks Momma.