A long, strange trip

You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.
(Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four, as quoted from Chapter 1 - Probability Theory, Statistical Inference 2nd Ed. by Casella & Berger)

I am not a listener of the Grateful Dead like many fellow John Mayer listeners (I consider myself an undergraduate in the field compared to full fledged fans), but I was surprised to see the following first paragraph from the above text book's preface:

Although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is responsible for most of the quotes in this book, perhaps the best description of the life of this book can be attributed to the Grateful Dead sentiment, "What a long, strange trip it's been."
(Casella & Berger)

A long, strange trip--an apropos description of where I am; where we are. Surely, there are stranger moments in human history filled with unimaginable circumstances that we only read or watch today from recorded material. Nonetheless, this is the unique case in which most (if not all) humans contribute to historical documentation, even up to the minute. Good luck to our future historians and their AI assistants. 

Despite the provocative posts I recently uploaded, filled with emotion and frustration--and without full consideration of the sentiments of this tiny cyber nook's readership--I think it's worthwhile to add a bit of a digital 'mindprint'. I know I should say digital footprint like a trail. The kinds of trails we leave behind are mostly from our heads, isn't it? What an extremely precious ability, this is. To have thoughts and opinions and be able to concretize it akin to the way artists interpret life. I hope that with the incredible technological acceleration we are currently experiencing and enjoying today, no massively destructive man-made event will potentially cause us to end up like the creatures from H.G. Wells's "Time Machine", where instead of advanced development, the future humans are primitive-like and have become divided into naive surface creatures and sinister underworld dwellers...another text that you may be interested in reading.