Fried salami equilibrium

Too bad! Now that you’ve encountered that unlikely phrase, you can no longer concatenate those words into an uncrackable password.

It actually means something important to me. Years ago, I read a strange news account. One day, a man was frying up some salami for breakfast, and he noticed the burn marks formed the image of the face of Christ. He interpreted this as a miracle, a sign from God.

Reading the full news account, you learned further that his family ate fried salami for breakfast every day for the previous 20 years. Aha! This immediately brought two thoughts to mind.

First, as a matter of basic math, that means over 7,000 instances of serving fried salami, and unclear how many servings for how many different family members. But after that many iterations of frying salami, it stands to reason that eventually you’ll encounter a burn mark that resembles a face, possibly resembling Jesus Christ as popularly conceived.

Second, basic intuition tells you this. Anyone who eats fried salami every day for breakfast for 20 years straight is in desperate need of a sign from God. I mean, let’s get real here. In stories like this, you can often read between the lines to get a sense of the situation these people are in. Another time there was a story about the Virgin Mary appearing in a mold pattern on someone’s bathroom wall. It makes you ask, where do these people live, and can someone please send them a gallon of bleach and a scrub brush for crying out loud?

But thinking about this some more, I wondered: what a great system this is! People who clearly need a sign from God are, in the very manifestation of their desperate situation, provided the means to get the sign they need. You can see it as a state of self-correcting equilibrium. And the very elegance and symmetry of this feedback mechanism suggests a grand design.

If you’re so inclined, you may interpret that as a sign from God.

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