By A. R. Clark

"Serendipity" is the "faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries," according to its 1754 creator. (Source) It's also a good description of what happens when one surfs the WWW. This offering is about today's serendipitous experience, which calls forth a possible solution to all our problems. It’s election year, so please be generous should I digress.

Part One: Coincidence

Yesterday I had a conversation with Charles, who happens to be from Cameroon. The subject arose of a website I created with colleagues in the 1990s (aabl.com) with an African news theme. That site is not well developed, but it remains in the realm of possibilities.

This morning I realized I had forgotten much of what I once learned about Cameroon, so I looked it up in the CIA Factbook. I was reminded that when I was a child there were two European colonies there, an English one called Cameroon and a French one called Cameroun. (Yes, it means prawn or shrimp, after a local river estuary. It has nothing whatsoever to do with certain Camerons of Scotland, to whom I may be distantly related.) The two were merged into the modern state in the 1960s.

End of Part One, and we're through with Cameroon for now.

Part Two: Random Walking

Next on the agenda was to read my usual News feed, which led me to the Reuters website and an article on the MPOX or MPVX virus with intent to excerpt for AABL. I looked it up on NIH and CDC, curious about recent US incidence, which remains low.

Leap! I recognized that serendipity was in play.

1. I knew a bit about Africa due to my studies in economic geography in the 1960s and '70s.
2. Other linkages were due to past "travel" through Africa (vicariously through sons and friends, though I still hope to go there someday).
3. My late father-in-law Robert Lincoln Smith was a physician who attuned me to certain aspects of medical and public health matters.

It all adds up.

I remembered the meaning and origin of "serendipity" generally; I looked it up in an etymological dictionary.

"Serendip" was a fictional land in a novel from early 18th Century; the word was adapted by Horace Walpole from the story of the people of that land, who often experienced happily finding something wonderful that they were not seeking. I had known but forgotten that "Serendip" was also an old name for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.

In the dictionary, the author mentions that Serendip is also a variant of the Arabic name for the island (Serendib, Sarandib, Arabic substitutes vowels freely), but that the local name is derived from Sanskrit: Simhaladvipa "Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island."

My eye fell on the two syllables "sim-ha" and the word "lion." My mind flashed to Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan, calling the lions "simba," the Swahili word for lion.

Leap! Too much coincidence for one day. My guess is that hundreds of years ago, a traveling Arab trader met a South Asian merchant and asked of him, "where you come from, what do you call the big, tan cats that live on the grasslands?" "Why, 'simha' of course," the merchant replied.

Leap! As it happens, one of the languages in my family is Japanese, in which the sounds H, B and P replace one another in some circumstances. This happens also in Korean, though the two are unrelated. It's similar to the English word "hall" and the Spanish "sala" having the same Indo-European root. (More)

Leap! And the Arab trader's next stop happened to be Dar-es-Salaam on the east coast of Africa, and the word made its way into Ki-Swahili, thence by an improbable journey over land and sea to American science-fiction’s Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Tarzan, Hollywood, and my childhood neighbor George's nine-inch TV.

So I says to me'self, it's the same word!

End of Part Two

Part Three: Synthesis

Which is exactly what happens to millions of people every day on the WWW.

Example: You require an "A" (a thing) that you need to repair your broken "B" (another thing that uses As).

• You go to the Web to find a local dealer in replacement As.
• As you scroll through the search results, your eye falls on a nearby store that sells As that it buys from "C" (a company in Florida).
• Knowing who lives in Florida, you are moved to look up "orange," leading to this article and on to the author's biography, where you discover that the author of this piece grew up amid a grove of Valencia oranges and spent his summers pruning and harvesting.
• You conclude that one can stretch a metaphor too far, eroding its value.

End of Part Three

Take-aways

• Thus was created Serendipiday, a day on which one "clicks here" to traverse the Web, hoping to happen happily onto something helpful along the horizonless highway of humanity. Or at the very least assemble an amusing if affectatious alliteration.
• This is a game that every human over the age of five can play, assuming we teach everyone to read and given access to the resources. Imagine endowing everyone, individually or in public places, with the ability to let one's mind wander over the whole of human knowledge. Imagine that each learns one thing from each of the others in our lifetime. That's N-squared minus N learning events, or eight billion squared - eight billion or 6.4e19 (approx. 6.4 x 10 plus 19 zeroes) new fragments of shared knowledge per generation. And then our children do it all again, discovering a whole new set of random connections. Instead of waiting for the next genius to emerge by chance, suppose we make it happen. One or many of those children will realize the Grand Unified Theory, and their children will expand to inhabit the galaxy.

All this happens spontaneously and sporadically. We can still feed ourselves, love our children, our neighbors and even our former enemies, build roads and houses, cure disease and extend lifetimes. As the saying goes we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Perhaps if we stopped bickering about whose ancestors discovered some sacred truth and about who gets to drive the bus today — or this election cycle, we could take on this challenge instead. The universe, which we may share or which may be ours alone, awaits our decision. Vote wisely.