SMART for life.

Rebuilding a computer that's gone bad is not easy. It takes a lot of time and better-than-average familiarity with the inner workings of a computer.

I've been trying to do that now for two days for a colleague. But this computer presents its own set of issues. The hard drive (as most do) has a "health monitor" called SMART, which warns you when you boot it that the disk drive is pretty well on its last legs, and you best get your act together and save anything worth saving to another medium before the drive goes to the big recycle center in the sky.

Rather than get into the boring details, let me just say that we're on the way to recovery. It won't be perfect, but neither will it be a total loss.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had a SMART system built into our lives that would start flashing warnings like "Death is Nature's way of telling you to slow down" when you're veering towards self-destruction? I'm not talking, necessarily, about the physical part. There's tons of physicians willing to take your case if you are interested.

No, what I mean is, I guess, a kind of seventh sense that says "you know, given your future potential, you need to start wearing a helmet when you're on your Harley." And then, just in case you missed the message, it would accompany the text crawler with an in-skull video of a morgue drawer being pulled out, with you in a torn leather jacket sleeping the eternal sleep of the un-helmeted. And you'd see that vision periodically, like every time you turned the ignition key.

I don't think it's that we're by design inclined to ignore wisdom when it confronts us. It may be more that we obey the Law of Inertia more than we know: things like to keep on doing what they're already doing. Same holds true of those asteroids that are supposed to collide with earth over the next few decades. Ditto for beliefs, biases and bodies.

Trouble is, if you obey the Law of Inertia, the Law of Averages will gitcha.