I did not want the officer, a former shiftmate and personal friend, out there alone.

Optimism is a notion that there's sufficient evidence that would allow us to infer that if we keep doing what we're doing, things will get better. I don't believe that. I'm a prisoner of hope, that's something else. Cutting against the grain, against the evidence'.

Clearly, our first guess for a, b, c, and d will probably produce results that are way off, with the predicted wine qualities differing greatly from the actual ones. But the nice thing is that we can easily measure how far off we are.

But it is evident that many of these are juristic rationalizings of what had been done for a long time through formal transactions.