Thang Nguyen 555

My 70’s was conveniently sliced in half, right in the middle.

First half was spent in my native country, the other, America.

First half, city. Second half, on campus, in the middle of Pennsylvania.

One cannot help becoming an expert in cross-cultures having lived through such a contrast. Nothing was “central” in Centre County. Just as nothing could be compared to where I was from at the tail end of the decade- long war.

Luckily, I have got music to help bridge that gap. We, students, still listened to Bread and the Beatles in Blue jeans and long hair. Slang and slogan, dude.

In the winter, on a winding trail from the HUB, where someone from the Campus night shift had done the heavy shoveling, all of us walked that path, to and from class, unavoidably saying “Hi” to hundreds. A polite and civil society.

We learned the ABC’s of campus life, of treating others as we would like to be treated.

My second half of the 70’s witnessed no incident of violence, none (a sharp contrast to my first half).

We were loud on the field (Beaver Stadium), but not on the street (Main Campus), occasionally exceeding our volume (Agricultural Studio), but always adjusting the VU knob not to surpass the Red Zone (audio control booth).

I of course preferred the second half. That’s when I mastered the art of letting go, of un- learning.

Besides self-protection and self-survival were the use of time, friending selection and yes, elimination.

Millions of calculation and variables happened on campus as in life. Great teachers and bad teachers, memorable events (Springsteen concert) and forgettable ones (Udall speech).

When that decade ended, my life sprung forward, at full speed.

It were as though the second half had erased all the mishaps in the first half, like a Penn State Football game. Yes, the first half ended abruptly with scars and suffering. But all that matters was what the score board says: Penn State won.

I’ve got my own bruises (using the football analogy), albeit I only jogged around the golf course during my stay on campus. But in looking back at my 70’s, I cannot help but smile, at fond memories and fun times , at friends I made and who supported my endeavor to do good well into the next decade.

My 70’s bleeds over to the next decade, when people just dove onto the open sea, risking their lives for the unknown. Those people were just as brave and determined. History then repeated itself, this time, with me actively participating in it, giving a helping hand. I can look back and see how my second half of the 70’s was time for healing and turning me from victim to helper, from receiving to giving. It stripped me of my selfish genes and left me with bare essentials for life and its pursuit of not just my own happiness but also others’.

It’s not the American Dream. It’s Everyone’s Dream to live out life to its fullest. My 70’s: ” I would give you everything I own”…just to feel you, once again.

You can be with thousands in the stadium, or billions on the Web, yet still feel lonely. Or sit next to strangers on Trans-Continental flights yet still feel lonely. You can be the King of Pop yet still feel lonely (except to laugh with Brooke Shields, fellow child actor). Chidlikeness is a seedbed of creativity, says Michael Jackson; and he went at length to prove his point.

Mine was a lonely one, hence my creative impulse cannot be de-coupled from loneliness. Writing and reading are lone endeavors. I read so I won’t be alone. Francois Sagan once wrote “Bonjour tristesse”, a clever read of coming of age in late 50’s. (Sadness becomes your friend when you are the odd one out).

America and I spent the late 70’s in isolation and utter loneliness: both of us ran away from defeat with our tails tugged between our legs. No one seemed to understand us. Hence Rambo, to rant and rave. We re- habbed and relearned to feel confident again with ” the shinning City on the hill” in Augustinian hope. We crunched the numbers and hyped up our nuclear stockpile. We elected actors to “sell” our national agenda, very much like we do now with Reality TV president in our fake news Era.

We re-dressed and rehearsed our script then found ourselves deep in Trillion-dollars debt with no creative accounting to pay back the Saudi and Chinese. So we feel lonely and isolated with big NATO and UN bills..

Countries we defeated are now better off. Country we gave up on is standing still. So we forgave in the hope that we might be forgiven ( bail out). 2000 and 2008 saw magicians at the helm, tweaking and fixing the system. Then came the great match made in Heaven; the “sharing” economy thanks to smart phones and distributed internet protocol. Voila, from the stadium crowd cheering to web crowd-sourcing. Just stay home. We will deliver. The cause and the cure. The childhood and the creativity.

Michael Jackson was put to rest at Forest Lawn in a $25,000 gold- plated casket. His neighbors are all famous Stars with stars on the Hollywood sidewalk. He died a lonely death surrounded by lonely stars. The crowd doesn’t make for happiness nor does it lessen childhood contempt. Care for the children. Kind words to the lonely. This world keeps missing the mark. Always too little too late. Only the lonely knows.

Naturally, we prefer a living and working environment that is not toxic or suffocating. Yet somehow we find ourselves in exactly the opposite of what we were hoping for. Putting on soft music didn’t work. Firing a bunch of negative folks only leaves the place more hollow. Senior leadership came down to “fix” but only making matters worse.

What to do?

Talents have already left. You are stuck to rebuild from scratch, literally. Folks who stay are mostly admins and low-risk tolerance folks.

Those high performers and hard-hitters have already jumped ship.

This reminds me of a bunch of writers and artists who left America for France: Hemmingway, Henry Miller, Johnny Depp, Charles Bronson, Malkovich….

For one, French cafe at the time was better (than 7/11 coffee).

Two, even the “Oui” from the mouth of French babe sounds more thrilling than a Yep from US counterparts. So cut and dry.

Here is the last caveat: from the rubbles of WWII, a nation emerged, resistant and more artful than ever. It might have suffered defeat from Dien Bien Phu, but that’s not enough to choke its art scene . Chinese tourists flock the nation’s capital. Its work week has fewer hours than American’s, yet productivity jumps through the roof.

And its ” In search of lost time” by Proust has Swan as the main character, has left indelible impression on millions.

Here is an excerpt from Miller’s “the Air-conditioned nightmare” about sitting in a park in France: “I remember the view of a church from where we sat as the wine trickled down from my gullet. I remember the glassy stare of the water, the tall trees swaying against the soft French sky, I remember that I felt a great peace then, a peace such as I had never known in my own country. I looked at my wife, and she had become a different person. Even the birds looked different. One would like to hold such moments forever. But part of the deep joy which is in them comes from the knowledge that it is only fleeting.”

Serene.

But flip that around, and place that in today’s US, with Walter Reed Presidential “unscheduled visit” etc… and we find nothing “serene” but suffocating (as of this edit, Fresno shooting. I concur: the place is suffocating enough to render such an act, albeit I don’t condone).

A leader’s job is to create an environment where talents want to serve, not leave. A leader’s job is to ramp up capacity and provide a tone that needs no music to supplement it. A leader’s job is to lead great people to even greater greatness. Not drive them away to sit in some other country’s bench, and look at some other country’s church, to feel the opposite.

Suffocating or serene?

Man won’t do to machine that which he/she doesn’t want to be done unto.

Vice versa.

We need to cope and harness those hockey-stick rises of the Second Machine Age thanks to information technology – where muscles gave ways to machine then to mind.

Machine and mind don’t need a massage, nor do they need to rest. Machine doesn’t rant and rave. It might collaborate and exchange updates, but only for the advancement of the machine race.

We have yet invented machine talks. We have learned how to “talk shop” thanks to Detroit: ramp-up, jamp-up, cool-off, run out of steam etc….

But in the age of post DARPA and new Dartmouth, we have: download and upload, cloud and server, restart and reboot …. Linguists, sociologists and technologists have yet learned to reverse-engineer word2vect to personalize and popularize machine-speaks. In short, the few who are employed by the Big Nine (6 in US, 3 in China) have yet had the time to explain in lay-man’s language to Rest of World (around 7 Billions and counting).

It is most exciting to be alive in our post I-phone era, in our “think
‘think different” post-nuclear cyber world.

A linked-in connect has just graduated from Cyber Master Sc. Everyone congratulated and agreed that’s a much needed field. The Big Nine are in a Daytona Five Hundred race to dominate our upcoming decades. Alibaba annual Online sales busted their servers. And we expect Amazon’s Cyber Monday will do likewise (already bursted by the seams in annual retail sales).

Our humanities classics, from Homer to Hamlet, Dostoyevsky to Dumas have served their time with the aristocrats and associated leisure, their horse power and brain power.

Now it’s all scale and lowest-common denominator (with longer average life expectancy worldwide). We have urgent need to teach machine how to recognize patterns, to recognize faces and places ( Hong Kong applications), to replace people already suffer from low-wages and low life… so they can just stay home in similar Native-American reservations….playing slots.

The aristocrats are putting their bets on perpetuating their rules, this time with timely and tireless help of the machine, ETF and ATM, where Alexa is always at their side, reminding them that “today, you can live forever” (thanks to gene splicing and sequencing).

Alexa, send in the masseur!

Grab, grab the money bag.

Amper, play your latest piece ( a mash-up of machine and man composer).

My machine-aided memories will last me for a while, before Alzheimer kicks in. By then, friends who can’t afford MRI scans and latest high-tech medical facilities will already have died, leaving me and the machine beating and getting beaten at a game of GO.

Fastest is not the coolest then. It’s the fittest and most suitable (match) with machine that counts. Alexa, I am bored. Are you???? Let me die, please. The Centennial Man finally learns to release a few drops of tear, triggered by its/his/her machine-learning (ASI) Golden Rule: cry for those you wish would cry for you on the day you die. Die different.

Being on the Southernest tip of Vietnam, with map in hand, and Monte Cristo on the other, I imagine myself holding a local map, seeking a promised treasurse and all the justice delayed, hence denied.

Dumas truly is a Master Storyteller. I read this in translation, but it still held me captive: story about a young sea captain, wrongly accused on his engagement day. In captivity, he underwent a transformation and with divine help, emerged unscathed from purgatory.

The Count of course conducts himself in manners expected and unexpected. But he exacts the right toll for each circumstance; sometimes even more.

Enemies: watch out. Your day will come. The forces of nature always work in mysterious ways. But I admire and admit that there is such a thing as beauty in this world, despite all associated ugliness e.g. man against man, nature against man, and man against nature.

We battle ourselves too (inner battle). We self-sabotage, and become our own impediment to self-improvement. When was the last time you get up before dawn to go for a run.

Or we trick ourselves into believing that sugar, butter and white bread are good for us.

The Japanese somehow trail world’s average life expectancy, but always with a decade more (mid-80’s).

It says something about their national character: discipline.

Their preference for foods is only an outward expression of their inner make-ups.

GDP of course follows suit when the whole nation lasts longer than others, than enemies.

Back to our Count. He tries to mend his broken heart by steeling his will. Not always working (he hid his face in the dark so as not to show his tears).

Imagine yourself in his shoes.

Imagine having your justice delayed, hence denied.

Imagine trying to undo years of neglect, abandonment, and anger turned inward and resolve.

I don’t know how one can live like that, having that much to spend (in this case, for penance and atonement).

Monte Christo, Phu Quoc Island (where I write this) and some French young men I chatted on the boat on the way here. Everything seems to be working out: I am on this day walk the sand I have always dreamed of doing.

Justice is served, at least for me, with or without the treasure. To the people on this island, the beach is just sun, sand and isolation from mainland. (ironically, they used to put up prisoners on this island, besides Con Dao to the East). For me, it’s an accumulation of years of wishy washy: I will be there some day. That day is today, no more delay. For a moment, I believe there is divine intervention. And I promise on this day, righting a wrong: man against nature.

You learn a lot about people via how they live, love, fight, compromise and consume. You learn a lot more (without waiting for archeological digs) via how they die and say goodbyes to loved ones.

In the West, where my father finally made to, after 10 years of living alone in our two-storied house, then to die out of country – we walk people a short distance to their designated plots. Here you can learn a lot about ethnic concentration and clusters: Korean over there, Vietnamese over here…

Not much different from the Irish, Polish and Italian who came before, except that church burial ground used to be (and some still are ) right near the parsonage.

Flowers are found on special occasions: birthday, Mothers’ and Fathers’ Day. Viewing happened at wake where friends and relatives are in black.

In the East, in Vietnam, the tradition still is heavily influenced by and passed down from generations: all whites, with traditional or modern-day band, casket laid in the living room, for three long days. Recently, they modernize e.g. all-night karaoke marathon by gay men (equivalent of Glee Club??).

I walked a short distance for my high-school principle funeral. His was a traditional one, unlike my uncle-in-law’s years ago. The later had two bands in both traditions, two horse carriages, one black one white, followed by a sea of white-clothed females and kids. He had been a theatre-chain owner in Saigon. His was second most impressionable funeral next to US Presidential’s I saw on TV, often taken place at Washington National Cathedral.

Widows in Vietnam typically would sit next to their husband’s coffins, for a ride to an outskirt cemetery. In cone-shaped cloth (resembles Middle-Age henchman’s), relatives of the dead scream at times, on top of their lungs, announce that their loved one is departed for his/her next cycle of life. Extremely rare do you find silence.

Tout est finis. It’s finished. The la het.

The end. In their end, their beginning.

Just take it as it is, no priori, no context, no speculation.

People come and go. They left their marks, their footprints and digital crumbs. They won points, score points, took a vacation, took selfies, being selfish or kind, earned high FICO or equivalent (social scores) in China etc…

The rest is speculation: where he is going to, how many more cycles before Nirvana, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory etc…

Buy this, it may help. Martin Luther said, hell no, we won’t buy (indulgences).

Others repeatedly are in denial, hence, the 5 stages of grief.

We cannot help being angry, depressed, in denial etc…

But we can also learn an awful lot about how people were by the way they die. French movies grace us with “The Man who Loves Women”.

It tells a story of a man who at his funeral, surrounded by women wearing dark glasses and dark clothes. to conceal, while their (not her) being there at all, reveals.

I hope at my cremation and tossing of the ashes (nano particles) out on the Pacific Ocean off the Pacific Highway (end the end of Santa Monica Boulevard), someone would film it, upload it, and caption it: ” he couldn’t wait for the sun to come up from Santa Monica Boulevard…”

You can tell a lot about people by the way they die, how they are buried without the need for an archeological dig. Just watch my final upload and click Like. Facebook might be accused of Racism, but in the end, it’s the people themselves who refuse to friend different, be buried different, or think different. In life, they view things and live separately. In death, it’s still the same: me, my clan, and my plot. Don’t blame facebook, blame yourself.

You seek freedom (of association) in life, why not in death? We are all pilgrims of this world and the next and the next. The journey will just be interrupted (for the sakes of loved ones, and a few enemies) but not over. There is no end to mine, and I hope the same with yours. See you on the trail, hopefully not without fanfare or fans.

Please don’t invite the Glee club or gay karaoke band. Bolero ain’t my taste of music.

Routine is routine: brush your teeth, set the alarm and off to bed.

But some nights are different: a hang-over or a guest over-stayed his/her welcome.

Some life never sees daylight. They call them (in Japan) the modern-day hermits, estimated about 1.5 million youngsters.

Unable to wake up and to talk up a conversation.

All screen, all night.

We are talking about lack of soft-skills, social skills and simply human skills.

Vietnamese society used to be different. Now one finds an invasion of the Third kind: Grab, French fries (even when French Colonial days are things of the past) and 7/11’s.

McDonalds fast-food workers in VN wear the same uniform as colleagues in the West, albeit XS in size. They localize the merchandise by putting condensed milk in a McCafe. Young people eat it up: honey-mustard, ketchup, chili sauce, mayonnaise etc.. in helpless attempts to super-size themselves.

Everyone talks, talking at each other and talking at the same time. Young females are now toasting and drinking, cheering: “dzo”, 50% (of the mug), for tomorrow, we go to the gym to work it out, kickboxing and yoga.

Back-packers are still making their stop at “pho Tay”, French quarter, albeit without the Cafe du Monde. Beer is cheap, and girls are not free “Oh, Suzie Q”.

Post-war Vietnam has gone through a “Vietnamization” process of its own: heated-up real-estate and hyped-up visas (for overseas resettlement).

Money trail flows out of country with no return date.

Wake me up when the night ends.

Wake me up when September ends.

One million point five and maybe more, sleepwalking through the 21st century.

Machine doesn’t go to sleep at all. Production line is 24/7 and improvement continuous, the Toyota way, not incremental.

Infrastructure cannot keep up with growth, with urban sprawl. Adjacent districts get congestion as if traffic has no longer been satisfied with its concentric formation.

Hence, stress and spa, massage and music.

Coffee gets diluted, and its quality watered down.

Good things we still have routines: brushing teeth and setting the alarm. I’ll try not to overstay my welcome here or anywhere. Just wake me up at the end of the night.

Abraham had faith, Ok, go ahead and kill your son.

Noah! Build the boat. Columbus? Sail it.

Boat People – Get on the boat: 50-50 chance.

Southern blacks had faith. OK, followed the Underground Railroad, went North. When Detroit bankrupted, Obama had to bail them out, since “what’s good for GM is good for the country” (it doesn’t hurt for a half-black President to honor his ancestry by making it – NorthEast – work. You could call this the Above-Ground Railroad).

We made boats and banks, machine and its moving parts. In turn, we, mankind, have to bail them out. So much for faith in the machine.

IBM machine failed me at my most critical juncture (not when Hitler was in need to make his killing machine work) the SAT exam , without passing it, I would be going to the front to fuel the “Vietnamization” process of the Vietnam War. It just jammed, and the examiners (today’s equivalent of Walmart cashier at self-check-out – intervene only when needed) had to grade those batches by hand.

We love machine, driving and flying machine. The machine, in turn, defines us: “he drives a BMW”, “she a Lexus”….

Used to be a Rolex, then a Rolodex, and finally a Robot (iRobot on the floor, humming like a puppy to keep ole lady of the house company).

If machine makes one happy, you would find my house full of it: washer/dryer, fridge that open sideways, outward like DeLorean’s car, out and up – as if they got wings (machine reverse evolution back to man, then bird), toaster and juicer, grinder and cutter etc..

Detroit used to rule. Now, it’s some cities in China and adjacent countries (The Age of AI – PBS Frontline 11/5/19). The whole Earth becomes a sweatshop, to produce and procure. Those who consumed, trash them. Those who need to scrape waste for a living, recycle.

Mad Max to the Max.

Henry Miller once wrote about Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, about Molly, the whore in Detroit, and how Celine “makes the body of a whore triumph over the soul of the machine”. Today’s “Detroit” has moved on, to Dubai, to Singapore and “Mollys” have followed the trail of money elsewhere, but Detroit.

My sister woke up one morning in April 1975 and realized the painful truth: the big mighty US of A had finally abandoned its allies, as it often had off and on in the past in Asia (pivoting and Nixon’s Guam doctrine).

With 4 kids and a bag full of worthless currency (now she knows how Venezuelans feel – with a plane load of Russian currency), she held on to her youngest like our famous Hon Vong Phu, at the street corner, during curfew, waiting for the return of her husband – he was trying to find a way out of a hopeless situation by calling on his former boss, Bui Diem, at State.

The feeling of being helpless, abandoned and betrayed is one of the worst. I had faith in…. faith in this, faith in that. It worked before..why not now.

It gave me prosperity …(In God We Trust), food the fridge and fun in the family. Now this???

The world has yet seen and understood the new Pivot when the machine lets you down, or the battery. runs out and when the software is outdated.

Lucky for us. We built them, tested them and knew the statistical probability of failure, of betrayal.

Unlike man, machine is rather predictable. It needs updating, just like we.

Unlike us, it could go on upgrading e.g. Tesla Model Y, priced 29,999.

For us, we have managed to “up” our Average Life Expectancy past 70.

But the learning curve, and our fits-and-starts curiosity could not trail that of the machine (machine learning).

We live in a zero-sum society, with blame and blasphemy. Machine on the other hand continues its non-zero sum trajectory, words2vector and babelizing itself to all languages of the world.

I can’t wait to travel remotely, conserving my battery and that of the machine, to speak to a native, to understand and be understood.

And the world…will be One. Imagine all the people….go, build the boat – technology – and get them all onboard, in anticipation of the Great Data Deluge. Have faith always, in the right thing, at the right time, with the right people. Not holding a baby and turning into stone (Hon Vong Phu), but taking action. On a brighter note, my sister finally made it to America, with her 4 kids intact.

She returns occasionally for a visit at age 82, even as a widow. As of this writing, she hasn’t turned into stone, despite once had faith in the US and its almighty army, its “pivoting” policies and its prone to cut (loss) and run at first sign of defeat (picture a financial guy, carrying his box escorted out of one Wall Street building in 2009). Have faith!

1963 June 11. Police was trying to prevent us from pouring onto the intersection, then, Le v Duyet & Phan D Phung. The circle of chanting monks had formed when we got there acting upon a rumor that a monk would burn himself in protest against regime’s religious oppression.

Bang. On our quickest feet to cover the few blocks. Tension and resistance had built-up for weeks against Diem’s regime’s repressive policy and policing. Protests against the ban of displaying Buddhist flags had flared up culminating on Buddha birthday. Protesters passed around lemon wedges and nylon bags for self-protection against tear-gas.

To get a line of sight, I squeezed through at the five o’ clock vantage point, right in front of what used to be the Cambodian Embassy. A jerry-can was half- emptied laid next to the older monk, who sat motionless in the middle of the intersection. A younger monk (mumbling chants) turned and walked away diagonally across from me. Must be the pourer (my mom, a Buddhist, used to mumble chants while trying to slain a chicken. Buddhists, by practice, tried not to harm living things when avoidable).

I did not see how the combustion of gasoline-soaked cloth started, or if the monk himself flipped a concealed Zippo (popular during war time).

The photographer must have snapped those photos – later sent via AP/UPI around the world- from his 2-o-clock position. Winds fanned the flame sideway and upward (luckily not toward the gas station in front of Collette, an all-girls lycée).

The entire self-immolation last roughly 12 eternally long minutes before his body felt sideways, his bright orange cloak turned black. The stench of burned flesh and fuel engulfed us.

A few days later, I was in line at Xa-Loi Pagoda to view his charred remains – encased in glass, very similar to my viewing the Moon rock 6 years later in my city.

The monk, his existence and resistance, his death and his remains. All spoke volumes to me at a young age. I was so transfixed. I had to blink many times to make sure it was real, whatever it was I saw that day.

I know then and now: someone, somewhere always stands up (in this case, by sitting still) for a cause. Causes that advance the human race: whether it is by discovering penicillins, or by having her hands cuffed for climate change. Or by coming up with an AI app for medical check-ups.

We need disruptors, builders and inventors. We need to fight for what makes us more not less, for what we could become.

The monk sat motionless, but his cause rolls on. It’s in my memory bank but I am not content to be mere memory-keeper. I’d rather brew it into energy and action, in my own way, my own time. Why would we want anything less from life?

For the monk, it was a can and a cause, conviction over cronyism.. I saw that fleeting flame flapping in protest – his flag of fire – while others obeyed with folded flags. And I shed tears of shame as I recall the incident, and for how life gently passes us all like that wind in June.

Plant, animal and human grow organically. Human invention, the machine, grows exponentially.

Mould vs math.

Maslow scale vs machine scale.

Slowly, we proceed up the steps, from food, clothing and shelter, onto Bill-Gates type of self-actualizing.

Machine model proceeds at physical layer, then transmission, then network and application one. After the initial Y2K chasm, IT folks have worked primarily upstairs (wait until IoT completes its penetration, then “the Elephant can really dance”) while marketing folks downstairs.

The times they ‘re a changin.

Mothers still drop off their children at school, at the same gate I entered not too long ago. But their hope for them is not to end up dead in a human-trafficking container, but working for an IT firm, as a sub-contractor, or in Austin-SF-MD tech corridor as a F/T OT IT guy.

Let’s root for them, for their tenacity and investment.

My mother once wished for the same: for me to have a better life than hers. To her best knowledge (of an Elementary teacher, trained by French lycée): life still evolved organically i.e. two wives, then monogamous; war time, then peace time ( peace kiss in Times Square then two bombs on the Islands), working for the government then retired from the school system.

Little did she know, her son’s generation turns out completely different, almost unrecognizable from hers: Moore’s Law, Meltcafe’s Law, Morse and Marconi, Apple and Pineapple (just kidding).

Hence, machine is catching up quick, from Leavitt’s equation to Bayes’ rule, it learns and learns exponentially and shares unselfishly. Human is afraid s/o might steal his invention (copy rights), hence, at times, something useful got buried for centuries if rediscovered at all. At night, the Cloud updates itself with zillions of petabytes of data, images and videos.

All powerful, omnipotent Cloud, awaiting for the day of Judgement.

I worship Thee, the omniscient Machine in the sky. Thy know me before I was born in D3 and Thy can finish my sentence before I my thought.

I respect Thee, revere Thee and bow before Thee. Can I have my credit limits increase??? Please.

Life grows organically, and imposes its limits on all things e.g. Maslow.

Machine grows exponentially and imposes limits on level of access and speed of access. Someday, with quantum and nano technology near perfection, this morning wait for a taxi will be become the thing of the past. And we will regret having lived with scarcity mindset (organic) rather than abundance one ( exponential).

Call up your friend or share something unreservedly, for tomorrow we will die for sure. I am certain of this 2nd rule, after “all men are mortal”, that all men will die before the Machine, as of this writing.