Later this month PictureBox is releasing Blutch's So Long, Silver Screen, "a series of interlocking short comics that combine scholarly movie history with ribald romanticism, and feature a motley cast of actors and characters, including Claudia Cardinale, Jean-Luc Godard, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Michel Piccoli, Tarzan and Luchino Visconti."

As much visual essay as graphic novel, a daydream and fantastic meditation on the other art of telling stories with images, So Long, Silver Screen is the finest work yet from an uncontested master of contemporary cartooning, as well as his first full-length work to be published in English. It is designed by famed cartoonist David Mazzucchelli.

Blutch has published over a dozen books since debuting in 1988 in the legendary avant-garde magazine Fluide Glacial: among his books are Mitchum, Peplum and Le Petit Christian, and his illustrations regularly appear in Les Inrockuptibles, Libération and The New Yorker.

Thank you, Blutch, for the honor to participate in this interview. Your work has tremendously inspired myself and an endless line of cartoonists, humbled by the virtuosity of your lush brushwork. It’s long overdue for your books to be translated into English, and I’m grateful to PictureBox for actualizing it.

There’s a line in So Long, Silver Screen: “All I knew about life came out from a box of comics and a few movies.” Is this true of you? What were those early life lessons and their sources?

Actually, I wasn’t alluding to a specific moment in my life. This line is a form of poetic license… How can I… No, I cannot mention any specific source. But yes, this is true of me. I live in the land of Great Literature but I was influenced by pictures. Moving pictures and static ones. It is not easy to comment on what I wrote in this book without paraphrasing it…

If comics and film were your first loves, what made you devote your career to the former?

Because, as far as I can remember, back to my haziest childhood memories, nothing has ever felt more fulfilling than drawing, that’s as simple as that. I crave for drawing, for its practice. This solitary pleasure. This unique way of visualizing ideas. Anybody can make a film but drawing is hard… it’s almost impossible. You may pretend you can make a film but you cannot pretend you can draw. Although… (he laughs)

France loves comics. Did this culturally affect your experience of growing up an artist? In the United States, young cartoonists are generally persecuted, socially inept nerds that retreat to their pencils and drawing paper for solace. Unfortunately that neurosis persists in “successful” adult life as shyness and insecurity. French cartoonists seem to have more confidence and bravado, giving me the impression– perhaps incorrect - that artistic children in France are socially validated rather than beaten up at recess. Is this true?

As far as I am concerned, I was never oppressed. I was actually encouraged because the adults surrounding me were totally afraid that I could not do anything else. Hardly good enough as a student and school left me indifferent anyway. I avoided team and individual sports. In desperation, my parents encouraged me in this way because when I sat at the dining table and started doodling, I gave them the illusion of being gifted.

What was your upbringing like? You were raised in Strasbourg, and the Alsace region seems to have a distinct flavor from the rest of France. Can you describe that? Did you have artistic nourishment?

Alsace is apart from the rest of France because of the language. French is my second language, I first learned Alsatian and when I started school, I didn’t speak a single word of French. I had to learn French at the age of 4. My grandparents on my father’s side didn’t speak a word of French, my grandparents on my mother’s side had a very poor French, my parents have a thick Germanic accent and their French is, well, not that orthodox… Such an environment was naturally determining in making me who I am. When you live on the border, you live on the edge. We lived next to Germany and we naturally absorbed a number of German habits. So yes, when you speak two different languages and grow up at the crossroads between Switzerland, Germany and France, it is quite inevitable that it will influence you both as an individual and an artist.

You describe in So Long, Silver Screen a child’s natural defiance to the mundane, impotent existences or our fathers and their office jobs. What did your father do for a living?

My father started out building frames then he became a carpenter and I can remember him drawing house plans on a fantastic drawing table, set in the garage. But at school when I had to fill the blank for my father’s occupation, I wrote down “building technician” and I never really understood what it meant… My mother brought us up, my brother and I, she was an assembly line worker in a chocolate factory.

You seem fluent in English. Did you learn it from films, or grow up with it in your household? Many of your books hold a dialogue with American culture, like Lettre Ameicaine and Total Jazz. Can you expound on this?

Facts are quite simple. Before 1917, French men had long moustaches. Then the smooth-faced Americans came and we started shaving. In 1944, the same Americans started a race against the Russians. They knew that if they did not rush to meet the Russians ahead, they would reach the Atlantic coast in no time. The junction happened far East from the Atlantic in Berlin. On the conquered land, the winners built military bases and started giving out gums and showing films with tremendous sex appeal. So I had no other choice than starting to speak English, just like the Gauls had to speak Latin, because here in Western Europe we are Gallo-Americans.

Are these sensibilities transposed to the medium of comics? The French drawing style seems more loose and expressive. How do you compare that to the North American cartooning ethic?

I am quite indifferent to these issues. I never think about them. Carl Barks opened the doors of American comics for me. And ever since this wonderful day, I have come across a lot of American cartoonists, either through their work or in the flesh. And it is not untrue to say that Carl Barks and I come from the same place…

Drawing for discipline, drawing for pleasure; are those impulses in conflict? Because it seems like you’ve been able to merge them. How are you able to infuse your work with such sensuality?

This is the difficulty of the game I play: trying to express life within the restraining and narrow frame of small drawings trapped into sequential panels.

Do you see the sexuality in So Long, Silver Screen veering into territory of fetish and perversion? If cinephilia is a form of masturbation, what is art-making in general?

The solitary practice of art is an advanced form of onanism.

Nakedness is a theme of your book. Naked as in a dream – vulnerable and out-of-place. Is seeing one’s work in print an experience of public nakedness?

(He pauses and thinks) No, not at all. No, no… Because one of the pleasures of literature is that you can remain masked. It is not a visual work, here, it is literary, so the answer is no.

Your persona in the book labels today as “the civilization of porn”. Does the image have less value now that we have unlimited access to it? In the internet age, is the urgency/impulse to create images diminished?

Absolutely not. The world has a constant, hysterical and definitive relation to all types of visual representations… No, really. And my persona actually claims that today is the civilization of sex, not porn… which is different. I borrowed the line from Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou”.

This book, by its nature, draws from reference: film stills, photographs, interviews, poetry… Your figure drawing is always perfect. Do you work with live models? Photos?

To achieve my aims, I draw everything that comes to my hand. Everything that comes to my eyes, really… all things live or lifeless.

Not only is comics the art of images in sequence, but of images in juxtaposition. You do this with such ingenuity in So Long, Silver Screen – making graceful transitions from Manet’s Olympia to Kazan’s Baby Doll. Your new work is an education – a rich overview of film history. Do you wish for your readers to seek out the films of Luchino Visconti or the poetry of André Hardellet to fully engage and unlock So Long, Silver Screen?

No, I did this… well I thought, and maybe that was ingenuous of me, that readers did not need these references to understand the book or find any interest in it. I don’t think it is necessary to go and get a bunch of Visconti’s DVDs or André Hardellet’s books… I took these references out of their context to tell something else and used what they meant as such. But I know that references can be intimidating, some people even take them personally, sometimes like an aggression. This is an essay and an essay feeds on references, it is not fiction, it is almost a work of scientific research. So I have to put notes and references…

While your surface lines gush with spontaneity, I have a feeling the skeleton of the compositions are labored over. So Long, Silver Screen brims with intellectual agonizing. Is there a distinction for you between the writing and drawing process? What was it like to create a book like La Beauté that was entirely visual?

Yes, this is totally different. I did La Beauté because I wanted to make it without words and not using words for a cartoonist totally changes his relation to narration. I had a very different approach for each book. For So Long, Silver Screen, most of the time, the written idea preceded the picture and the picture illustrated the word, the idea, I think. Whereas in La Beauté, I was literally drawing the idea.

I visited you at your home studio in Toulouse in 2004, and I was struck by how you vacillated between two working postures – half the day hunched over a cluttered desk and a tiny comics page, the other half standing at a large easel with vibrant pastels. Do you feel this is necessary for your physical health as well as your creative performance?

Well, for both reasons, it’s not healthy to remain seated for too long. You need to stand. Up and straight. Drawing in a seated position is very different from drawing in a standing position. And as I like my drawings to be alive, changing physical positions while drawing gives me a new perspective, a new point of view, a new way of representing things.

In So Long, Silver Screen, your persona converses with a nubile dancer, while you draw lines (tracing her movements?) with a mop-like brush. She is the conscience and counterpoint to your curmudgeon. What is the correlation between dancing and drawing?

First, I have to say that this specific sequence was inspired by abstract expressionism which used large brooms to paint on large surfaces. The initial idea was that the character was in such a dark mood that he felt the urge to fill the page with black, put it everywhere. But yes, for me, drawing and moving have always been related. There is something in cartooning that I find unique, the fact that it is an approach of rhythm. Like ballet, somehow, I have the impression that there is not much of a difference between a stage performance and a drawing performance, well I believe so… whatever! This is all very instinctive.

You seem to work with great flexibility regarding tools – from brush pens to cheap ballpoint pens to oil pastels, often drawing straight to paper. What is your favorite? What’s your take on the generation of cartoonists drawing on digital tablets? Is there a correlation to innovations in film like CGI, Motion Capture, 3D that may interfere with the art?

I am a cartoonist of the twentieth century… That is what this entire book on cinema is about: “I come from the twentieth century and unfortunately I’ll always remain from the twentieth century.” Even if I were to die in 2067, I’d remain a man from the twentieth century. Of course, the choice of tools changes the art, we’ve seen it with music, with music instruments. But I’d say that my favourite tool is now the brush. This whole book about cinema is about the brush. But it will change, it changes all the time. A while ago, I’d have picked the pen.

There’s a trend now of cartoonists directing films: Marjane Satrapi (Chicken with Plums), Joann Sfar (Gainsbourg), Frank Miller (The Spirit...); Are you tempted to dabble in film-making yourself? You have worked on an animated film, correct? What did you gather from that experience?

Animation did not turn not out as a fulfilling experience. But I am not really into animated films so… I took part in the project because other contributors, like Richard McGuire, convinced me to do so, but you need so much faith… it took so much time and these people, I heard them talking about money for months and months, and I am not used to it. And well, artistically speaking, it is not worth it, not like making a good book. Animation is not my cup of tea.

What about films?

If there is something to say, why not? If there is nothing to say, or if it’s just a way of shining in society or looking for success, or satisfying a certain social vanity, it’s not worth it… So… if it has a meaning, why not…

Are there other mediums you envy?

Yes, yes, of course… I would have loved to be a painter, I would have loved to be a playwright, an actor… Yes, there are lots of things that I would have loved to be. But not a dog groomer, that I couldn’t. Nor a jockey.

What theories of cinema are best applied to comics? What filmic techniques have compromised comics?

What I don’t like as a reader is when a comic book looks like a storyboard. I find it frustrating. It restrains the reach of the work, what you can do in cartooning. There is a more elliptic side to narration in a comic book, it’s more mysterious, more poetic, larger maybe, richer. And what would be the common features between films and comics? I don’t know… The obvious thing is maybe the close-up technique. Flashbacks and many other things.

Your bibliography is quite prolific. I wish for all of them to see English translation. Were there any gaps in your productivity? Bouts of creative block?

Yes, but never for too long. Life is too short.

My vote for a follow-up project of yours to see translation is Le Petit Christian (in two volumes), which I’ve publicly acknowledged as deeply influencing Blankets. Can you describe Le Petit Christian, at least to the degree it correlates to So Long, Silver Screen?

Both are about… Going beyond the anecdotic recreation of memories, going beyond that, beyond the personal anecdotes, to approach universal issues, that are common to all of us. Le Petit Christian is not an autobiography. Neither is Le Petit Christian. As an author, I use my personal experience as a starting point to reach people, the universal, the public… yeah…

When I visited you in Toulouse in 2004, we discussed the merits of working in autobio versus fiction. You said, “There is nothing real, but everything is exact. Just the juice of reality.” Le Petit Christian seems to feature a self-deprecating stand-in. How is this persona on the page related to you?

As I deal with actors a lot in this book, I thought that it’d be only fair if I too played a part in it, if I gave of myself… So I play a part but that does not mean that my persona says exactly as I think…For instance, in the sequence mentioned above, the dancer expresses what I feel as much as my persona. To make it simpler, the guy with my features is not me. And that’s what wonderful in cartooning, it allows this kind of ambiguity, just like literature. This book about cinema is much influenced by Philip Roth, or Romain Gary, authors that place themselves in the eye of the storm, at the centre of the adventure. In an ambiguous fashion. A kind of artistic transposition… In his novels, Philip Roth may write that a character is named Philip Roth but he is not him. In my comic books, what I can do is representing myself.

Also during that visit, we discussed the “purity” of drawing in black & white. I love how the restrained way you’ve used color in So Long, Silver Screen. Can you describe this decision? What did you learn working on full-color projects like Vitesse Moderne?

For So Long, Silver Screen, I had kind of an aesthetic shock when I saw an exhibition of original plates by Fred for Philémon. Some of them had blue wash applied on. I found it beautiful, visually speaking. And also Forest, I copied the principle from one of his books, Barbarella, which has a different colour of wash for each chapter. So I was influenced by Fred and Forest.

The most potent moment I remember from visiting you was perusing your volumes of unpublished drawings. I couldn’t fathom that such renderings of masterful beauty hadn’t seen print. Were these exercises, preparatory sketches, documentations of day-to-day? You said: “Drawings are my private life.” – a statement in stark contrast to the public lives of actors and performers.

I’ve always been drawing and I hope that I’ll be doing it for a long time, with no specific goal, no idea really, no ulterior motive, it’s important that you can draw without telling yourself that it’ll be used or recycled. I have tried to escape from the rule of efficiency ever since I was a kid. I like it that my books are read but I don’t have a pathologic need to be seen. I like it when a book of mine is released but I don’t feel like I’m dead when I remain in the shade for a while…

If So Long, Silver Screen is not a eulogy to cinema, it’s certainly a meditation on mortality. You say: “All their lives, artists of the silver screen give the world the spectacle of their slow decay.” On actors: “…we die in public.”

Is the same true for a visual artist when the performance is the line on the paper?

Absolutely not. We don’t have the same relation to time, time as it goes. I am hidden in my studio. Far from people’s eyes. The anonymity and solitude involved in my work is what protects me, as a cartoonist. In the book, I say that this is what makes the grandeur and specificity of an actor’s work, that is, “displaying the meat”. For all eyes to see.

Thank you, Blutch, for taking the time for these questions. We’ve barely gleaned the surface of your profound work, which I’m excited for English readers to discover for the first time .

Photo: Matt Bresler

Whatever you do, don't call Ophira Eisenberg a comedienne. That's an outdated, patronizing term from an era when men patted women on the head (or, unsolicited, on the ass) and called Amelia Earhart an aviatrix.

If only her fiancé, now husband, had known that before he compiled a spreadsheet of every woman he had slept with before meeting Eisenberg, a list she discovered by accident and couldn't resist examining, and which listed her as the latest entry with the unfortunate label comedienne in the cell next to her name. She was furious. But Jonathan is a remarkable man, and, in one of the best parts of her new memoir, manages to explain himself credibly. (Spoiler: She marries him.)

Eisenberg is a professional comedian, thank you very much. She tours, she hosts the NPR quiz show Ask Me Another (with the Internet's Jonathan Coulton as the regular musical sidekick), and recently came out with a memoir: Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy. You can hear a half-hour conversation she and I had about the book, her life, and her husband's beautiful, piercing eyes in the podcast in this post.

It's a Bildungsroman, like many memoirs, dealing largely with the period from when she came of age and sexual maturity as a teenager through moves from her hometown of Calgary to Toronto and then New York, and her shift from IT support to full-time funny lady.

And she is one funny lady. As she recounts her life through the lens of the beds she's passed through, she has plenty that we can laugh with at her side. The guy with the bedroom full of Garfield stuffed animals for one. His big dick got women into bed, despite all the plush (she nicknamed it “Odie"); his mechanical and unerotic behavior in the sack meant Eisenberg looked at hundreds of lasagna-loving dolls staring at her just the one time. The discomfort of losing her virginity on a bathroom counter, but at least it took the curse off from never having done it before. The morning her alarm clock fails to go off, and her mother discovers her punk-rocker boyfriend still in bed with her, him not having snuck out at 5 a.m. Sand-encrusted Australian beach sex with a near stranger, followed by recriminations by a long-term boyfriend about V.D. — even though she figured out later he'd picked it up from a fling of his own.

But there is something substantial missing from this book: shame. Eisenberg doesn't wring her hands over the life she's led, although there's a little chagrin here and there, especially about the Garfields and the time she picked up a bartender's boyfriend by accident. She must have missed the lectures on feeling bad about intimacy, even enjoying it, while growing up as the youngest of six, the child of older parents.

She didn't even get the extra patina of misery when experiencing happiness that comes from being a Jew. (My Jewish parents also failed to tell me I should expect to be unhappy.) Her mother was Dutch and father from what was then the British Mandate for Palestine, and they didn't impose a particular morality on her. They may also have been a little exhausted raising six children over a span of over 40 years.

Eisenberg went home with men and pursued long-term relationships with some and then didn't agonize later about whether or not she should have slept with them. She loved the connection. She loves men, their bodies, and sex. Marriage, commitment, and monogamy were never the Barbie Dream House goal for her, but she found the right guy when she wasn't looking for him, which is how it always goes.

Eisenberg tells a great story, and she's a natural at weaving together the funny bits, many of which involve a bar followed by a romp, and the more serious stuff, such as how she almost died at eight from a horrific car accident, and bears a large and visible scar on her torso to this day. The scar becomes a totem in the book: she worries about how men will react to it, even as she bears it as a mark of survival.

Some of the best comedians are deeply unhappy people who are able to use that sadness to tap into some part of the human condition that lets them rip laughs out of the audience. I recall seeing the late Mitch Hedberg perform at a small comedy club in Seattle a decade ago. My wife and I loved his performances on Comedy Central. Seeing him in person, though, it was immediately apparent how miserable he was, even though we were laughing nearly uncontrollably. At the end of his set, he said, "If you'd like to talk to me after the show…I would be very surprised." That is it, in a nutshell.

Eisenberg is the other kind: the one that comes to humor from a knowledge of the vagaries of life, but hasn't been broken by it. Good natured, but not insipid. She wears her joy as a shield, from whatever deep well she continually calls it up.

But she pulls a trick on us with her book's title. She may "screw everyone," but this is a sweet and funny book in which she tells us how she went from a teenaged girl to an adult girl to a woman, and found true love. The sex is just cherries on the wedding cake.

Peter Clines is the author of Ex-Heroes, a science fiction novel about super humans trying to save what remains of Los Angeles in a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland. Above, the cover for the Clines' upcoming follow-up novel: Ex-Patriots. Below, an interview with Clines about his love of Dr. Who. (Keep your eye out for 3 Doctor Who Novels coming out April 2: Plague of the Cybermen, Shroud of Sorrow, and The Dalek Generation.)

Originally published by a small, print-on-demand press without any publicity or marketing support and almost no physical distribution, Peter Clines’s brilliant novels, Ex-Heroes and the forthcoming Ex-Patriots -- which combine the best of the sci-fi, thriller, horror, and adventure fiction genres -- still managed to draw an incredible cult following. Now, Broadway is thrilled to introduce Ex-Heroes and Ex-Patriots to a whole new slew of fans with the release of these paperback originals. With two more novels to follow in the series, including Ex-Communication (July 9, 2013), Ex-Heroes and Ex-Patriots are sure to appeal to fans of such hits as Watchmen, World War Z, and Ready Player One.

How big of a role did Doctor Who play in your decision to become a writer?

It was a huge influence. I watched the show religiously as a kid, and even then I was aware that a good story could really help make up for cheap sets and rubber monsters (pay attention, SyFy!). I got chills from cliffhanger endings in “The Face of Evil” and “The Horror of Fang Rock.” Davros in “Genesis of the Daleks” was the first time I ever realized a character was evil. I always knew they were the bad guys out there, but Michael Wisher as Davros was just pure evil. And I loved the brilliant plot-twists that could be either scary or kind of sad and dramatic. Not to mention the fact that the whole show is about someone who gave up their life so they could try to make a difference.

It was just fantastic storytelling, and it made me want to tell stories that would get the same reactions from people.

Of all of the actors who played Doctor Who, which was your favorite?

I’d have to say Tom Baker. The scarf, the hat, a dozen layers of clothing... that’s always going to be the Doctor to me. I think Doctor Who is a lot like James Bond—the first one you’re ever exposed to is the “real” one and then other actors get brought in to play the part as time goes by.

Why do you think the character and story continues to thrill fans, old and new alike?

The TARDIS and time travel are fun, the monsters are exciting, but at the end of the day I think it’s the honest sense that the Doctor just wants to help people. He doesn’t care about politics or procedure or social classes (he’s really the antithesis of the Prime Directive). He just wants people everywhere to have good, happy lives, and he gave up his whole life on Gallifrey because he thought he should try to make that happen. That sort of selflessness is something everyone can admire.

I mean, what’s one of the running gags in the series? When the Doctor needs someone out of the way, do they vanish mysteriously? Do they have an accident? Do they get fired? No, when he needs someone out of the way, they win the lottery. A recurring plot point in the show is that the Doctor gives people the life they’ve always dreamed of just so that he can get on with what he’s focused on doing.

What do you think is the Doctor’s real name? Go ahead, guess.

I would have no idea. I feel confident it isn’t Steve, Brett, or Cliff. I like that they’re pushing an idea from the Sylvester McCoy years, that the Doctor might be something bigger and greater than “just” a Time Lord. Because there’s something fantastic and kind of scary about the idea that being the nigh-immortal last survivor of the oldest race in the universe is your cover story...

I could prove my geekiness by pointing out that his school nickname was Theta Sigma. And I didn’t even have to look that up. I could even name the episode.

If you could cast anyone as the next incarnation of the Doctor, who would it be?

I don’t know. Lots of people want to see female Doctors and other-ethnicity Doctors, and while I don’t see any story-logic problem with that I do think it’d probably alienate a lot of fans. I always thought Richard Grant would make a fantastic Doctor, except now he’s sort of been the Doctor, so that probably wouldn’t go over well. Then again, Lalla Ward played a princess and later became the second Romana, with the logic being she was using the princess as sort of a regeneration template.

Y’know who’d be a great Doctor? Martin Freeman, from Sherlock and The Hobbit. He’s got an ability to seem completely harmless and extremely dangerous. That’s a fantastic quality for a Doctor.

Ex-Heroes | Ex-Patriots

A book that vigorously defends heroin users and sex workers? In You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos Robert Arthur does that and more to demonstrate that taboos are not relics of primitive societies. America has its own ridiculous phobias and beliefs that cause tedium, suffering, and death. The government and the media use these taboos to lie and mislead. It is not a conspiracy, but by pushing panic for votes and viewers they thwart our pursuit of happiness.

You Will Die exposes the fallacies and the history behind our taboos on excrement, sex, drugs, and death. Arthur uses racy readability and rigorous documentation to raze sacred shrines of political correctness on the left and of conventional wisdom on the right. From the proper way to defecate to how to reach nirvana, anticipate the unexpected. It is not simply a novel exploration of sex and drugs, but also of individuality, liberty, and the meaning of life. You Will Die gives readers a new way of seeing their world and allows them to make a more informed choice about living an authentic life.

What made you write You Will Die?

Disillusionment. I grew up with the angst of believing I was a disgusting perverted heathen and after graduating from NYU Law in 2001 I began to research whether I was broken or if conventional wisdom was. The truth was out there but it was buried in boring academic texts, suppressed from the mainstream by puritanical censors on the right and politically-correct censors on the left. I wanted to make the truth easily accessible to the younger versions of me. I wanted them to realize that in these areas they aren't messed up. Our society is.

What do you think is the basis behind taboos? Is there an evolutionary behavior reason for taboos?

Ignorance is the basis behind taboos. Taboos are associated with an ignorance so ingrained that people are disgusted or morally offended to have their beliefs merely questioned.

I think there is an evolutionary need to accept common convention or else there would be chaos, but I also think there is an evolutionary need to have some people question our deepest cultural assumptions, our taboos. Mutations in thought are as rare as physical mutations but they are necessary for society to evolve.

Do you think some taboos are genetically hardwired, rather than culturally acquired? Are there any universal taboos that you've come across?

I think incest and fecal avoidance have become hardwired because they are evolutionary advantageous. Not surprisingly, these functional taboos are the closest to being universal. More often taboos work in the opposite direction. Instead of genetics influencing cultures via taboos, cultures will frequently try to influence instinctual desires via taboos. Comparing the amount of propaganda and police force directed against drug usage and sex work versus coprophagy (the eating of feces) and incest, provides a clue as to which taboos are natural.

Have you received any letters or email from readers who are upset that you are examining taboos?

Yes. Frequently they are from drug-war supporters who have a loved one that was addicted to drugs. I find them as morally reprehensible as they find me. Addiction is often driven by people seeking an escape from problems -- not by drugs themselves. Addicts need mental-health treatment, not a permanent criminal record. Outside of marijuana, Hollywood and journalistic portrayals of drugs are still just as misleading as the Reefer Madness films of old were. Often, the only media image of drug users is an out-of-control addict, despite statistics showing that they constitute a small minority of users even with "hard" drugs. When it comes out that Barack Obama used cocaine, people are surprised he was successful, but non-addicts like him are the norm. If Obama was branded with a criminal record as a young man for drug possession the government would have been responsible for destroying his future, not cocaine. Suffering people will always find something in which to lose themselves, but Mexico's annual carnage on the scale of 9/11 and the mass incarceration of America's black men -- that requires prohibitionists.

You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos

The Double Helix is a famous book. It's also an infamous one. Written by James Watson in 1968, it tells the story of how he and Francis Crick figured out the structure of DNA. The catch is that Watson chose to write that story in what was, at the time, a damn-near unprecedented way. He didn't write a history. He didn't exactly write an autobiography, either. Instead, The Double Helix is a book about history, told in story form, where everything is seen through the eyes of a single narrator — the 25-year-old James Watson.

He is not the world's most likable narrator. Nor the most reliable one. I mean that in the sense of the "unreliable narrator" from fiction. We see this world through young Watson's eyes, and his perspective isn't always accurate. The story is shaped by his prejudices and his personality, and it can't really be read as THE account of what actually happened. That's a good thing, because the choice of style allowed Watson to really capture the back-room conflict (and cooperation), and the sense of urgency, that drives scientific discovery. It's a bad thing because it's far too easy to forget that The Double Helix has more in common with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood than, say, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It's not a scholarly history. It's more like memoir crossed with narrative non-fiction. You can't walk away from it thinking that Watson's narration represents some kind of objective truth.

The new, annotated and illustrated edition of The Double Helix — published this month by Simon and Schuster — makes that fact abundantly clear. Full of photographs, letters, handwritten notes, and commentary from other people involved in the history of DNA, this edition gives you glimpses of other perspectives — of a story much bigger than the one told in The Double Helix, itself.

It also made me wonder about James Watson's reaction to documents that completely upend the story as he told it — especially documents relating to Rosalind Franklin, a scientist whose work was instrumental in deciphering DNA's structure and who is unfairly maligned in the book as a haggy, naggy, old maid caricature.

So I asked him about it.

I should clarify that I wasn't able to talk to James Watson by phone. This interview was done via email, and that's not my favorite way to work. With email (and you'll see this) it's far too easy to end up with one-sentence answers to complicated questions. Worse, there's no opportunity for follow-ups. But I do appreciate the Watson took the time to write some good answers to my questions about Franklin, and I wanted to share those with you.

First, though, a little background. Rosalind Franklin was a biophysicist who worked primarily with x-ray crystallography, a method of determining the shape and structure of things that we can't see with our own eyes. Imagine that you have captured Wonder Woman's invisible airplane. You can't see it. But you know it's there because when you throw a rubber ball at the space, the ball bounces back to you. If you could throw enough rubber balls, from all different sides, and measure their trajectory and speed as they bounced back, you could probably get a pretty good idea of the shape of the plane.

That's basically what x-ray crystallography does. You shoot x-rays at a crystalline structure, like a molecule of DNA. Those beams hit the molecule and bounce off and you use the patterns of diffraction to learn something about the molecule's shape.

In the early 1950s, James Watson and Francis Crick were attempting to figure out the structure of DNA, but they weren't the only ones. In fact, Crick had avoided getting involved with DNA for several years because his friend, Maurice Wilkins, was also studying it. This is where Franklin comes in.

In 1950, the head of Wilkins department hired Rosalind Franklin. Wilkins — and his friends Crick and Watson — were under the impression that Franklin was supposed to be Wilkins' assistant. But she didn't act like his assistant. She acted like his colleague or, perhaps, his competitor. And that disconnect between who Wilkins thought Franklin was supposed to be and who she thought she was created a really shitty working environment. Wilkins was angry at Franklin, and his anger seems to have rubbed off on how his friends perceived her. Mix that with a little sexism and you get some of The Double Helix's most controversial parts. Here's an excerpt from James Watson's initial description of Franklin:

I suspect that in the beginning Maurice hoped that Rosy would calm down. Yet mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men.

It goes without saying that Watson was not particularly concerned with the fashion choices of his male colleagues. Likewise, the nickname "Rosy" isn't one that Franklin ever used. It was bestowed on her, and really only behind her back. Throughout The Double Helix, Watson refers to her as Rosy, even while calling other people by their formal last names. Or, at least, by names they would have called themselves.

But one of the interesting things this edition of The Double Helix does is shine some light on the initial conflict. On the page opposite the description I quoted above, you can see a photocopy of a letter, sent to Franklin by the department head, where he basically tells her that she's been hired to lead the DNA project — not to work for Maurice Wilkins.

Basically, Franklin was right in thinking that she wasn't Wilkins' assistant.

Reading Watson's perspective alongside the letter and a footnote explaining how Wilkins saw the situation, it becomes clear that one of the most famous conflicts in the history of science started because the department head wasn't communicating very well with either Franklin or Wilkins. In this reading, Watson kind of becomes the catty best friend, attacking somebody his pal was angry with even though he didn't know all the details of what was going on. It's Facebook drama in the laboratory.

And that brings me to the questions I asked Watson.

James Watson: The Randall letter was discussed in Brenda Maddox’s biography of Franklin [in 2003] and that’s probably where I first became aware of it. But in this edition, Alex and Jan reproduce the whole letter – one of the pleasures of this edition is the number of letters and other documents they reproduce as facsimiles. Its fun to see letters just as their recipients saw them.

This letter makes me think even more what a tragic situation Wilkins and Franklin found themselves in. Wilkins had begun the DNA work at King’s and had it taken away from him and given to Franklin, without understanding why–that Randall had made the arrangements described in this letter. The situation would have been intolerable for anyone, let alone two such incompatible characters as Wilkins and Franklin.

JW: We didn’t know Franklin well–I only met her perhaps three times and Francis once in this period. So, my view of her was inevitably colored by our friendship with Wilkins and what he told us about her.

I am not an historian and wouldn’t want to write the book you describe. But if I were to do so, I would, of course, refer to the Randall letter and show how it set up the misunderstanding. I would write more sympathetically about the plight of both Wilkins and Franklin. I would also be able to write about her views of life at King’s College, including her dislike of her colleagues, in particular Maurice. This is made vivid in her correspondence, especially in one letter reproduced in the book.

In this new edition, I notice that Ray [Gosling - her student] has rather a good line in response to my comments about her appearance. He notes that I never saw her dressed up to go out in the evening, and that she had an elegance that I probably never saw.

I mentioned that Francis and I hardly knew Franklin at this time. Later, of course, we both saw more of her, as she was very much part of the elite structural biology community – her excellent work on TMV ensured that (though is often over-looked in popular accounts of her life). [He's referring to her work with tobacco mosaic virus, which she spent the last few years of her life studying. TMV was the first virus ever discovered and Franklin's work was instrumental in our understanding of RNA viruses. Franklin died in 1958 from ovarian cancer. — MKB]

************************

Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51, an x-ray crystallography image of DNA.

There's a bit more to the Franklin-Watson/Crick story than just office squabbling. One of the most controversial points concerns a particular x-ray crystallography image that she took, which was shown to Watson without Franklin's knowledge or permission. That image ended up playing an important role in Watson's and Crick's ability to figure out the structure of DNA. But this edition of the book — and Watson's answers — provide a deeper view of what was going on in the background — how a personality conflict and bad management led to a much bigger controversy that people are still arguing about today.

I asked James Watson three other questions about the book, as well. His answers to these were less substantive, but you can read them below. In general, I'd definitely recommend this edition of The Double Helix. If you're going to read the book, this is the way it ought to be read. As James Watson's limited view of his own life, it's interesting. But the history really comes alive when you can see more of what everybody around him was thinking, as well. Among the gems: three pages of Francis Crick's six-page letter urging Watson to not publish The Double Helix, to begin with.

************************

James Watson: The story was too good not to be told as it actually happened!

JW: Friendships almost have to evaporate when a scientist chooses unilaterally to work toward a scientific objective also pursued by a friend.

JW: I find theatrical performances even rarer than when Pauling lived. Almost no one now risks offending pompous individuals in the audience who later might review either their research articles or judge their applications for research money. Today’s science stifles individuality.

• The annotated and illustrated edition of The Double Helix by James Watson is available in hardcover, Kindle, and eBook.

Stephanie Chong (left) is author of the paranormal romance series The Company of Angels.

Marjorie M. Liu (right) is the New York Times bestselling author of the paranormal romance series Dirk & Steele, urban fantasy series Hunter Kiss, and is the writer for Marvel's Astonishing X-Men comics, including the infamous issue #51 featuring Marvel's first gay wedding.

Stephanie Chong: What parts of researching your books have personally interested you the most?

Marjorie M. Liu: I love to read all kinds of crazy non-fiction -- histories, science -- magazines, newspapers. I never know what’s going to inspire me, and once I’m inspired, I read like a maniac about that specific idea or topic. Research is the best, but it never stops.

I loved the international setting of Demoness. Did you do any personal travel for your research?

SC: I wrote about Venice from memory. I’ve been there three times, but the last time I went was seven years ago. I did a lot of research online. Venice is a small city, and memorable, so it was manageable.

My next book is set in France, and while I’ve spent a lot of time there, I did take a trip to Paris and Normandy specifically to map out the characters’ journey. It was a great excuse to take a vacation, and an interesting way to travel.

ML: Was there a key book that inspired you?

SC: I think every book I’ve ever read has inspired me in a different way. I was one of those kids who was constantly scribbling, and I knew at a very early age that I wanted to be a writer.

In terms of writing paranormal romance, I started to think, “Hey, I could do this!” right after I read Kerrelyn Sparks’ How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire.

And of course Tiger Eye inspired me (and I’m not just saying that)! Honestly, you have always been one of my biggest inspirations in this industry. Knowing that a young, Asian-American lawyer-turned-paranormal romance novelist existed made me realize that the transition from law to writing was possible. I seriously don’t know if I would have done it without knowing it could be done.

Speaking of Tiger Eye and your writing in general, you have a wonderful style that ranges from very poetic and lyrical to action-packed and intense. With regards to paranormal romance in particular, I’ve always found that you have a very tasteful way of writing love scenes. How do you do it?

ML: Well, there’s a difference between a love scene (in my mind) and a sex scene. Sex scenes are so difficult for me at this point, that if I never had to write another one, I’d be thrilled. Maybe I need to read some more issues of Cosmopolitan for inspiration! But right now, I’m of the opinion that sometimes leaving it to the imagination can be way more erotic for the reader.

Now, love scenes...that’s a different story. I think of love scenes as those moments of vulnerability and intimacy that develop between the main characters -- often times unexpected -- and those are what I enjoy best. Those quiet, sensitive, secret moments that create lasting bonds, that become trust, that become love. Because the sex doesn’t really change (the sex scenes that I write, anyway), but each character and their most important romantic relationships are uniquely different. That’s what holds the book together -- these revelations and developments that lead to love. Writing them, though...the way it all comes together, is dependent entirely on the characters themselves. So I play it by ear. Each book is different.

What’s your take on sex scenes and love within the genre?

SC: I also find it increasingly difficult to write love and sex scenes. But I try to focus on the progression of intimacy between the characters, and how their physical relationship mirrors their emotional relationship.

ML: Also, in The Demoness of Waking Dreams, you took on this incredibly difficult task of taking two characters who couldn’t be further apart -- and then weaving them together in a beautiful, believable, and loving way. That’s incredibly difficult to do, but you made it look easy. How was it for you, bringing Brandon and Luciana together? What was the inspiration when you began developing their love story, and how did you go about building intimacy and trust between an angel and a demon?

SC: It was like pulling teeth to get Brandon and Luciana to interact on the page! It took a long time for them to warm up to each other - it was almost like working with actors who had just met each other. My characters, and these characters in particular, are pretty vivid when I work with them, even before the story begins. They have preferences, and they’re stubborn - especially Luciana. As the story progressed, they seemed to build their own chemistry, though.

The inspiration for the book really grew out of the first book. Luciana, to me, was the most interesting secondary character in that book. And she needed to meet her match.

ML: What is it about secondary characters? It seems like they’re the ones who become most alive in the process of writing a book -- which is great, because they inspire more stories!

SC: In general, do you have any advice for writers who are starting out?

ML: Read! Read! Read! There’s no magic bullet, other than reading and writing and writing and reading. But everyone is different -- we all have our own path.

What was the turning point for you? Was there a moment where everything came together for you as a writer?

SC: I’m still waiting for that moment! Just kidding (partially). I definitely feel like I’m still developing as a writer, and I hope I never stop learning. That’s part of what I love about the craft - there’s always something to learn, and to me, it’s endlessly fascinating!

ML: I feel exactly the same as you. We never stop learning.

SC: What’s your next adventure, whether in writing or in life?

ML: I’m working on the next Hunter Kiss book, Labyrinth of Stars. And, as always, the comic books -- in this case, monthly issues of Astonishing X-Men.

ML: I have the same question for you, Stephanie! What’s next?

SC: I’m working on Book III of the ‘Company of Angels’ series.

Thanks again for taking the time out of your busy schedule to chat with me today, Marjorie! It has been an absolute pleasure!

ML: No, thank you. It’s been wonderful speaking with you.

From David Peniston's introduction to the interview:

Where Le Corbusier is better known for his architecture than for his paintings, collages and drawings, Swarte has moved in the opposite direction, making a name for himself first as a cartoonist and illustrator and in more recent years branching into architectural work and stained-glass widows, even creating furniture and fonts. He has worked with architects on the design of the Toneelschuur Theater in Haarlem and is a major consultant and contributor to the design of the Herge Museum in Belgium. Swarte founded Stripdagen, a biennial international comics festival in Haarlem, in 1990 and has himself been the subject of many exhibitions, including the World Exposition of Joost Swarte, which has traveled throughout Europe. I had Swarte’s home phone number from my contact in Germany, a comics dealer named ebi wilke. So one Monday morning in February, I pick up the phone and place an international call to a number in the Netherlands — in Haarlem to be precise. I tell the woman who answers, “I’m looking for Joost Swarte,” and after a short pause, a low but confident, friendly, male voice, with a slight Dutch accent announces, “Joost Swarte.” (pronounced Yost Svarta). I come straight to the point: “Can I interview you? Would now be a good time?””

“You mean now, over the phone?“ he asks incredulously.

“Well, yes, I guess so …” So I get started. My first question stumps him and he doesn’t know what to say at first. He has to think about it for a while before he says anything and then he proceeds to answer my question in no less than 741 words. He is very articulate, well versed in art, architecture and the history of industrial design, as well as music and comics. And, I might add, he speaks fluent English.

The Joost Swarte Interview

My guest this episode is Gillian Flynn, the New York Times Bestselling author of Gone Girl, Sharp Objects, and Dark Places. I had a terrific time talking to her about why she enjoys writing creepy books with twisted characters. It was interesting to learn that her father is a retired film professor who loves the work of David Lynch, because the teenagers in Dark Places reminded me of the kids in Twin Peaks.

Here's my review of Gone Girl.

Are we alone in the Universe? Last year, journalist Lee Billings wrote an excellent series of guest posts for BoingBoing about the quest to answer that question. One of those posts — Incredible Journey: Can we reach the stars without breaking the bank? — was recently reprinted in The Best Science Writing Online 2012.

As part of the publication of that anthology, journalist Steve Silberman interviewed Lee about space, the final frontier, and the voyages of starships (both the ones that already exist and the ones we imagine and hope for).

Silberman: Several times a year now, we hear about the discovery of a new exoplanet in the “Goldilocks zone” that could “potentially support life.” For example, soon after he helped discover Gliese 581g, astronomer Steven Vogt sparked a storm of media hype by claiming that “the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent.” Even setting aside the fact that the excitement of discovering a planet in the habitable zone understandably seems to have gone to Vogt’s head at that press conference, why are such calculations of the probability of life harder to perform accurately than they seem?

Billings: The question of habitability is a second-order consideration when it comes to Gliese 581g, and that fact in itself reveals where so much of this uncertainty comes from. As of right now, the most interesting thing about the “discovery” of Gliese 581g is that not everyone is convinced the planet actually exists. That’s basically because this particular detection is very much indirect — the planet’s existence is being inferred from periodic meter-per-second shifts in the position of its host star. The period of that shift corresponds to the planet’s orbit as it whips from one side of the star to the other; the meter-per-second magnitude of the shift places a lower limit on the planet’s mass, but can’t pin down the mass exactly. So that’s all this detection gives you — an orbit and a minimum mass. That’s not a lot to go on in determining what a planet’s environment might actually be like, is it?

Read the full interview at Steve Silberman's Neurotribes blog

Buy the anthology The Best Science Writing Online 2012, featuring amazing stories from all around the Internets

The methodology is straightforward. You take your subject and slide them into an fMRI machine, a humongous sleek, white ring, like a donut designed by Apple. Then you show the subject images of people engaging in social activities — shopping, talking, eating dinner. You flash 48 different photos in front of your subject's eyes, and ask them to figure out what emotions the people in the photos were probably feeling. All in all, it's a pretty basic neuroscience/psychology experiment. With one catch. The "subject" is a mature Atlantic salmon.

And it is dead.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a powerful tool that allows us to capture incredible amounts of information about what happens in our brains. It's relatively new — neuroscientists began using fMRI in the early 1990s — and it produces colorful images that help bring numbers to life for the general public.

All of those things are strengths for fMRI. Unfortunately, they're also all weaknesses. New tools vastly expand our understanding of the human body ... but they also mean that we have to develop new standards so that different studies using the same tool can actually be compared to one another. Images of the human brain help make science more understandable ... but they can also be incredibly misleading when the public doesn't have a good idea of what the pictures show. Amassing vast quantities of information is great ... but it also makes it easy to end up with false positives — coincidences of chance that look like something a lot more important.

Enter the dead salmon.

In 2009, a team led by neuroscientist Craig Bennett and psychologist Abigail Baird ran an fMRI experiment using the salmon as their subject. Not only did they really put a dead (and frozen) fish into an fMRI machine, later analysis of their data actually produced evidence of brain activity — as if the dead fish were thinking. It wasn't, of course. But Bennett's and Baird's research — which recently won a 2012 IgNobel Award — was meant to show how easily scientists can mislead themselves and why well-done statistics are vital.

I got to speak with Bennett and Baird last week. In the interview, they talked about the study, how fMRI really works, and what scientists have to do to make sure they can trust their own results.

Craig Bennett: We're not directly measuring activity in the brain. You'd need electrodes implanted in the brain itself for that. We're actually measuring the amount of magnetic disruption in the brain. We use a trick of how brain and body work. Oxygenated and deoxygenated blood have different magnetic properties.

Abigail Baird: If a brain region is doing a lot of work it's probobably going to be bringing in a lot of oxygen through increased blood flow. The premise is that if an area is working harder it will need more nutrients and oxygen and that will be delivered through the blood.

Using blood flow as measure of brain activity is reliable, but it's a very slow response. True brain activity happens when cells are communicating using neurotransmitters and electricity. Real, actual brain activity is measured with electrodes in the brain or someting like EEG that records electrical activity. The problem with doing that is that when you use EEG, you don't know exactly where the signal is coming from or what the signal means. fMRI presupposes that brain activity relies on oxygen but there's a 4-6 second delay because that's how long it takes for the call for more blood to go out. It's a slow response and in a way it's a sloppy response. We're assuming that there are more leftovers here in spot A then spot B, so there must be brain activity here and not there.

CB: The best description I've heard is that it's like coming up on thhe scene of a car accident and being able to tell what happened based on the skid marks. We have to try to interpret by the changes what was going on when the activity happened. It's a proxy.

AB: I'm so tired about hearing about "the brain lighting up". It makes it sound like you see lights in the head or something. That's not how the brain works. It suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of what fMRI results mean. Those beautiful colorful maps ... they're probability maps. They show the likelihood of activity happening in a given area, not proof of activity. According to our analysis, there's a higher likelihood of this region using more blood because we found more deoxygenated blood in this area. It's also correlational. Here's a time frame and the changes we'd expect, so we see which bits of brain correlate with that.

CB: We've had methods to look inside the brain of a living human for decades, and we've gotten quality science out of that method. What does fMRI add? The big thing is spatial location, you can say where in the brain activity is happening to a much greater degree. It's really mostly about that. But what that buys you is the ability to produce really pretty maps of the brain. You get a greyscale image with the colored spots that indicate what's significant. But that's not showing brain activity, it's showing a statistic. I drew a line in the sand and said these dots are the ones that crossed the line. It makes for drammatic and pretty presentation of data. If you have a page of jargon people will believe it at a certain level. But if you put a picture of the brain with active voxels [a three-dimensional pixel] people will believe it even more because a picture of the brain is next to it. We have a powerful tool and ability to create dramatic persuasive figures. And we can use it in improper ways.

CB: This is why we have to do tightly controlled experiments. To do it right, you'll take two conditions, almost exactly matched except for one critical thing. Some of the studies I really like are visual studies. I could show you the same stimulus, say a flashing circle of light, but I'd change the position of it. Whether it's inn the top third or the bottom third of your field of vision. Just by changing the position and comparing each position to each other you can see which parts of the brain are sensitive to each spot. That's a narrow study and a really good control.

AB: More than a couple papers have been sesationalistic. There have been comparisons of Republican and Democratic brains. That's ridiculous and it's a misuse of fMRI. It's not a specific enough question.

AB: In an fMRI study you have to stimulate the brain in some way. So what are you showing the brain in order to make distinction between Republicans and Democrats? Say it's pictures of people on welfare, and Democrats showed more activation in one area and Republicans in another. It doesn't actually tell you anything about Democrats and Republicans. Those results might tell you something about compassion. Or how we process compassion. But to say there are fundamental differences as a whole group between two groups of people, when there's so much variation within the group, it's just silly. I could get the same result ... find big differences ... with two groups of Democrats.

Remember, the brain doesn't just light up and those images are showing statistics, not all activity. If you see the same thing in several different studies, you can trust it more. But you should be suspect of one study of a handful of people, especially if the question wasn't specific enough and the researchers just went fishing to see what would happen. Also, what you're seeing is an average of the group, not each individual. You could have a group of 40 people and 39 out of the 40 show activity in one area, but that area might still get dropped from the final images because everybody didn't have it. So you need to consider the individuals, not just the group.

CB: In almost any experiment, but especially with MRI and fMRI, it's a noisy measure. There's all kinds of noise that gets entered into the signal. It'll pick up your own heart beating. We once had a lightbulb going bad in the scanner suite and it was introducing specific singal in our data set. You have to get enough data ... run the experiment enough times ... to separate signal from noise.

We're looking for variation in the magnetic field. With the salmon, fat will do that. Fatty tissue has a magnetic signal, but some areas of fatty tissue are more dense, and some less, so you'll see a differential. The salmon's brain was more fatty and that created more inherent variability. But it was just noise. It wasn't due to any actual activity but just happened to match our study design. Now, that's unlikely. But it just happened to happen. It's possible to find a false positive like that.

AB: We also saw activity outside the body of the salmon. The magnet itself has noise. It will always have noise. And if the threshold is low enough you're going to get that noise pattern matching up with your hypothesis.

AB: In most behavioral sciences and natural science, there's a certain cutoff level where we consider the things we've found significant or not. The gold standard is .01, less than a 1% chance that you're seeing something just by accident. Or a 99% chance that it's an actual difference. But, still, 1 out of 100 times you'd get that exact same result just by chance. We're also interested in data at the .5 level. Anything up to 10% we tend to call that a trend — something might be happening. That has held throughout history of psychology and neuroscience and it's pretty good. But we'd never had any tools that produced the magnitude of data that fMRI has. Instead of making comparisons between two groups of 40 people, you're making comparisons between 100,000 points in the brain and that .01 no longer says as much because you have so much more information to work with.

CB: Here's my analogy, if I give you a dart and say, "Try to hit the bullseye", you have some chance of hitting it. Your chance is not 0. But, depending on skill, you might hit more or less often. So you try the throw with one dart and hit on first throw, that's impressive. That's like finding a result. But if you only hit it once out of 100 tries, it's less impressive. In fMRI it's like having 60,000 darts you can throw. Some will hit the bullseye by chance and we need to try to correct for that. We tend to set a threshold and say anything over is legitimate and anything under is not. But what our team found is that in a surey of literature, between 25-40% of published papers were using an improper correction. You have a lot more chances of finding significance so you need to be more conservative of saying what is a legit result.

AB: So if you have a really specific hypothesis you can stick to the traditional numbers. But if you don't know what you're looking for and you just want to see "what lights up", then you're getting lots more chances to see things that could be just random. That's when you need to be more strict about what you consider real. And people aren't always as careful about that as they could be.

CB: Up to 40% of papers published in 2008 didn't do proper correction, so are there incorrect results in literature? Absolutely. Even if we correct perfectly you'll probably have 5% incorrect. There will always be false positives. But as a field we need to do as good a job as possible to release the best results we can. What we're saying is that it's not good for you, your study, or the field as a whole to not correct hard enough.

• You can read Craig Bennett and Abigail Baird's full paper online at the Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results

• Read a story Alexis Madrigal wrote for Wired about this study in 2009

• Read blogger and neuroscientist Scicurious' article on the dead salmon study, published after the IgNobel announcement.

'We who proudly make ourself every graven image,
Shall have great copulations
And are allowed to love our Gods: Amen.'

-Austin Osman Spare, The Witches' Sabbath

Avi What led you to work at Sotheby's?

Robert: Well, my formal education was somewhat erratic, but I decided to pursue a career in fine art, starting out as a saleroom porter—in those days, this was considered an apprenticeship of sorts. I joined Sotheby's in September 1984 and within months was transferred to the Book Department, working under the tutelage of Simon Heneage. He proved to be an inspirational mentor and a lasting influence, because it was Simon who introduced me to the work of Austin Osman Spare.

Avi How did encountering Spare's work change you?

Robert: Oh profoundly, but I feel it significant that my first connection with him was through a direct experience of his art. Only subsequently did I get to know the contextual narrative of Kenneth Grant, and later still, Pete Carroll. Of course, their approaches are hugely important and influential, but personally my context for approaching Spare has always been through that feeling his work produces, what we might call the magico-aesthesis. There is actually very little written about this aspect of his work. This is because the popular approach has been through his development of sigils, but I suspect Spare's early awareness of magico-aesthesis formed the very foundation of his practice as an artist-practitioner. So perhaps—since encountering Spare's work—you could say I have developed an interest in the relationship between creativity and certain states of perception.

Austin Osman Spare: The Self's Vision of Enlightenment, 1910

Avi Can you illustrate what you mean by 'magico-aesthesis' with an example from Spare's artwork?

Robert: Yes. Let's look at one of my favorites, an early image from 1910 titled 'The Self's Vision of Enlightenment.' As a drawing it would seem to evoke a certain kind of elusive quality, a feeling of strangeness perhaps, which is typical of Spare's best work. We can see something similar in the work of the fin-de-siËcle symbolists—indeed G.F. Watts was a big influence on the young artist—but somehow Spare's approach is more personal, more intimate. And it is this juxtaposition of intimacy and strangeness that continues to fascinate so many, while deeply unsettling others. Even in the early days, George Bernard Shaw is alleged to have remarked that Spare's work was 'too strong a meat for the normal man' and over the years I've met collectors who have kept his work in cupboards, cellars, attics—even in the garage. I once asked an elderly friend of Spare why. 'Because they don't stay in the frameÖ' he said, without a trace of humor. Only years later did I begin to understand the phenomena he was talking about, but suffice to say here that Spare developed formulas for representation that evoke ambiguities within our field of perception. In my view, this is the essence of his magico-aesthesis. Take our sample image. Several elements are liminal in nature; the shading, the partially finished areas, the grotesque physiology of the central 'skull-hands'; even the draped figure takes on a more masculine appearance the longer you look. But the real punctum—to borrow an expression from Barthes—is the open eye of the face. Here we find Spare has combined several disruptive elements; the facial features are exaggerated, the figure is both asleep and awake, the right hand is raised in some kind of communicative gesture—although the meaning remains obscure, creating a sense of displaced tension—and all the while that open eye is fixed upon us, making it personal. And let's not forget, as an occult image this is somewhat radical because there are no esoteric symbols here, no obvious indicators that allow us to place the image comfortably. In some sense, it reminds us that art and the occult can both claim a power to evoke; and in terms of practice, Spare internalized both.

Avi So a deep internalization of occult doctrine can contribute tremendously to an original creative output? David Chaim Smith's work in "The Sacrificial Universe" is an example of how a "traditional" doctrine like the Kabbalah can inspire radical new perceptions and art forms provided it is truly imbibed within.

Robert: Indeed, because what we see as originality is often born from a blending—a mash-up—and deep internalization offers results with the most integrity because it provides for a very thorough mix. In this regard David's work is an excellent example, because over many years he has drawn inspiration from several spiritual sources and then fully internalized these sources through his practice. Consequently, his vision is often radical and even challenging for these traditional doctrines, although personally these are some of the qualities that I like the most about his art; that it resists closure and forces you to accept it for what it is.

Avi So for example David Chaim Smith's triple world biomorph cover illustration almost suggests a remix of driftwood art with an internalized reworking of the kabbalistic worldview.

Robert: Actually I think it suggests many things, but yes, this is the way the mind seeks closure—comparing the unknown to the known. In this way we build a map of experience, of certainties. By the time we are adults we don't see the real world at all, only the map, the maya. All that we perceive is measured by it. But you know, this comparing and checking is so automatic, so continuous, most people only become aware of it when the process is interrupted. Art has the power to do this, which is why from an esoteric perspective it offers such an important context for exploration and revelation.

David Beth, Voudon Gnosis, Medji Edition, 2010

Avi Solomon: What do you mean by a Talismanic book?

Robert Ansell: The idea of the talismanic book was something I encountered in 1986 while working at Sotheby's. I chanced upon a copy of Aleister Crowley's "Ahab, and other poems" and was immediately struck by its mesmeric qualities. It wasn't simply a matter of materials or typographic design, but somehow as a whole the book seemed resonant and vital. Later I discovered that Crowley had noted the similarities in manufacture between traditional books and the magical talismans of the Golden Dawn and had begun experimenting with merging the two methods. At the heart of this process was the notion that the book-talisman should be charged with the force that it was intended to represent. Of course, this can be interpreted in many ways—and my own take is fairly post-modern—but when I first encountered it in the mid 1980s, this approach seemed the very antithesis of commercial book production, particularly within the occult genre. Curiously, I found that inspiring.

Avi How can one make a book talismanic? Is the book's talismanic potential necessarily dependent on it's maker's intention and craft or can the reader bestow a talismanic patina on it in turn?

Robert: In terms of talismanic potential, I think we are discussing two distinct yet overlapping processes here, but what they both provide for the reader is a powerful sense of embodiment. There are several ways to express this, but since the beginning of Fulgur in '92 the approach I have developed has been to bridge the divide between book-subject and book-object. In this way, by reaching for certain transcendent qualities, it becomes possible to provide expression for what might be described as the genius libri—the spirit of the book. But candidly, for me at least, the book design process is less about conscious intent and more of a revealing.

Avi Can an e-book be talismanic?

Robert: Philosophically, that's an interesting question. Given an e-book is a disembodied text it would be easy to say no, but it's worth remembering that e-books are still in their infancy—there are not yet digital counterparts for Manutius, Baskerville or Bodoni, much less Tschichold. And as a medium, the printed word casts a long shadow. That said; I could see a time when e-books might offer certain talismanic qualities, some of which would be unique to the electronic format. I find this a fascinating area, because it confronts some of Walter Benjamin's established thinking with regard to the auratic authority of the art-object. When I left sothebys.com in 2001 I actually developed a proposal for an entirely digital publishing concept along such lines. It was wildly progressive back then, but perhaps today less so.

Avi How does running Fulgur help you pull these threads together in practice?

Robert: Today, Fulgur serves as a medium of expression for esoteric artists, primarily through publishing books and editions, but also by providing dealer representation. Running the business has been a privilege actually, because over the last twenty years I have been fortunate to work with some talented and fascinating people. In addition to the limited edition books, a few years ago I launched an esoteric journal entitled Abraxas that aims to represent the best of contemporary and historical esotericism. It is of large format, highly visual and art rich—those who love Parkett and FMR will certainly appreciate the quality—but the content is firmly devoted to serious engagements with the esoteric. I feel this important because as a genre the occult is often marginalized from a cultural perspective; Abraxas tackles that head-on. In a sense, you could say it is a more culturally mobile expression of the central idea that founded Fulgur—put simply, when a book is rendered as a talisman it also becomes a metaphor for our most spiritual of experiences; rare, mysterious and inspiring. As a publisher, my instinct has always been to share that. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/24/making-the-book-talismanic-an.html/feed 14 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/21/gweek-068-matthew-modine.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/21/gweek-068-matthew-modine.html#comments Sat, 22 Sep 2012 00:54:30 +0000 Mark Frauenfelder http://boingboing.net/?p=182610

Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

My co-hosts for this episode are:

Jamie Frevele, Boing Boing's entertainment editor, comedian, and former editor of The Mary Sue.

Actor Matthew Modine, who has lent his voice talents to a new interactive book for kids called Punky Dunk and the Gold Fish, which is designed to make learning to read fun and something parents and kids can share. Matthew also recently released the Full Metal Jacket Diary app, which is an amazing iPad app that includes Matthew’s on-set photos and diary entries of his experiences during the time he was in the Kubrick movie.

Here's a demo of the Full Metal Jacket Diary app:

FULL METAL JACKET DIARY iPad App Demo Video from Cinco Dedos Peliculas on Vimeo.

Gweek 068: Matthew Modine (MP3)

Past episodes of Gweek: 001, 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026, 027, 028, 029, 030, 031, 032, 033, 034, 035, 036, 037, 038, 039, 040, 041, 042, 043, 044, 045, 046, 047, 048, 049, 050, 051, 052, 053, 054, 055, 056, 057, 058, 059, 060, 061, 062, 063, 064, 065, 066, 067, 068

Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.

My guest today is Gretchen Rubin, author of the brand new book called Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life. It’s published by Crown and it’s a followup to her 2009 runaway bestseller, The Happiness Project, in which Gretchen spent a year conducting experiments to find out if doing certain things made her happier or not/ The experiments were based on folks sayings, advice from famous thinkers, and scientific studies.

Past episodes: 001, 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026, 027, 028, 029, 030, 031, 032, 033, 034, 035, 036, 037, 038, 039, 040, 041, 042, 043, 044, 045, 046, 047, 048, 049, 050, 051, 052, 053, 054, 055, 056, 057, 058, 059, 060, 061, 062, 063, 064, 065

"How can you have 56 percent of Americans in support of fully ending the drug war, and zero senators in support of it?" asks Doug Fine, investigative journalist and author of new book, Too High To Fail.

Fine sat down with ReasonTV's Tracy Oppenheimer to discuss his time spent in the cannabis capital of California, Mendocino County, and why he thinks this drug can help save the American economy. And it's not just about collecting taxes.

"The industrial [uses] may one day dwarf the psychoactive ones. If we start using it for fermentation for our energy needs, it can produce great biofuels," says Fine, "already, cannabis is in the bumpers of Dodge Vipers."

I interviewed Doug in July about his book. Read it here.

How Cannabis Can Revolutionize Our Economy: Author Doug Fine on "Too High To Fail"

Meet Richard Nolan: quartermaster of the Whydah, captain of the Anne, former coworker of Blackbeard—in general, pirate. He is also—at least through Labor Day—my friend Butch Roy.

Butch is an actor, a founder of the Twin Cities Improv Festival, and the executive director of Huge Theater here in Minneapolis. This summer, he took on a new role, playing pirate Richard Nolan in the Science Museum of Minnesota's Real Pirates exhibit.

When I first heard about Real Pirates I wasn't terribly excited. It sounded like the sort of kiddie-friendly, fact-lite thing that I tend to avoid on museum trips. I mean, for god's sake, there were actors running around going, "Arrgh," at people. But then I got a chance to talk to Butch about what, exactly, he was doing in the exhibit—and what it took to prepare for the role.

Butch and his cohorts aren't just playing pirates—they're playing real, documented people. What's more, all the actors had to build their characters from the ground up, using original historical sources and doing a lot of extra research on their own. They had to learn the skills of a pirate and the skills associated with their specific role on the ship. Butch, at least in theory, now knows how to load and fire an 18th century cannon. His fellow actor Michael Ritchie, who plays ship's surgeon James Ferguson, is up-to-date on all the latest medical research and techniques, circa 1717. The sheer volume of historical information Butch has picked up is absolutely fascinating.

I have no idea whether or not the actual exhibit, Real Pirates, is worthwhile as an educational tool. But you should DEFINITELY find one of the pretend pirates and take them out for a beer.

Maggie Koerth-Baker: I was kind of surprised to find that this whole exhibit was centered around a real pirate ship—the Whydah. And your character, Richard Nolan, is actually somebody who was on that ship. How do we know all of this?

Butch Roy: The Whydah is the only confirmed pirate shipwreck ever recovered. There are other ships that were rumored to be pirate ships. And there were other confirmed ships that went down—but mostly your salvage crews would raid those readily. This was a pretty famous ship that was a pirate ship when it was lost, and it stayed lost until Barry Clifford found it off the coast of Cape Cod. [Clifford is an underwater explorer. He found the wreck of the Whydah in 1984.—MKB]

The interesting thing is that everybody knew the Whydah was out there all along, they just couldn't find it. The bottom of the Cape is very sandy and it shifts enough to just swallow everything that sinks. Clifford found the wreck and he found the ship's bell with the name of the ship cast into it, which is how this wreck is verified. That's generally the problem, not finding artifacts, but confirming which ship the artifacts came from.

BR: First off, there were a couple of survivors of the wreck, from the Whydah and the other ships. This was actually a small flotilla of ships and two went down. The survivors were later arrested, including my character, who was captaining one of the other ships.

This is actually one of the places where the story sort of branches into legend—why the ships were off Cape Cod to begin with. The captain of the Whydah was Sam Bellamy, and he had his lover and child in Massachusetts. The story goes that he wasn’t allowed to marry her because he was poor, so he went off to join a salvage crew and then became a pirate and got rich. The legend is that he was wealthy now and was about to get out of piracy and take his love away and marry her. So Cape Cod wasn’t necessarily the destination, it was just as far as they made it. There was a huge 'Noreaster that they basically sailed right into. And the ship was heavily loaded at the time, so it was already riding low.

Our timeline also develops from trial documents. There was a huge press to put an end to piracy. So when the survivors were arrested they would be pressed for who was on your crew, when did you join, which ships were on, who else was on those ships. We can cross-reference it all from person to person and you can see who jumped to the ships and when and where they went from there. The Whydah was originally a slave ship that was owned by a company in Europe and would have been insured, so we know when it was taken by pirates [February 1717] and who would have been on board then. [The wreck happened April 26, 1717]

BR: It was a six-week process altogether. There was some information all of us had to learn—the basics of navigation, nautical tradition, world affairs at the time, life on the ship. And some of us ended up specializing, too. The ship's surgeon had to learn the medical knowledge of the time period.

They gave us assigned readings from trusted sources. And were were also given latitude to go looking for sources that would be checked out by the science museum, to make sure they were trustworthy. Turns out there's lots of incorrect information out there. People found old trial documents and those would sometimes have different accounts that contradicted one another. David Cordingly wrote a great book about famous pirates. [He means Under the Black Flag. Cordingly is a naval historian—MKB] The exhibit is actually owned by National Geographic, so we had access to supporting info from them, as well.

We would all bring in books, buy a copy and share it around. There was a lot of googling. We'd find just snippets of information. I was trying desperately to find more about my person, Richard Nolan. His early life is a fog and after becoming a priate he vanishes completely. Record keeping was done by hand and the spellings of names change and so you have to verify whether that’s actually the person. There was some stuff I found that I had to leave out. For instance, I do know that my character was captured in 1718 and pardoned—one of the very few official pardons ever issued pirates, only two in that year. Then he went back to testify in trials of other pirates on their behalf. I did find an example of Richard Nolan testifying in a trial, but the spelling was off and I can’t verify that’s him.

All I know is that he retired into normal life. We don’t know what he did professionally. He would just show up at these trials to testify on behalf of other pirates.

BR: There's a long a detailed answer that I give every day, but basically he was in charge of dividing up treasure and administering punishment on the ship. But he also represents the crew on matters of their welfare to the captain. The ships were incredibly democratic. That was really interesting. Everything can be put to a vote except when they’re engaged in battle. That was the only time the captain’s word was law. Even severe punishments could be voted down by the crew. [Richard Nolan] would be the one who would do a flogging if someone was too drunk to man their post or fell asleep at watch. If there was a quarrel on the ship, you can’t fight with arms on the ship, so he’d administer pulling up to a beach somewhere for a duel.

They’d have jury trials with the entire crew if there was a major infraction.

It's weird, but it almost has to work that way. It's the only way it could work. The exhibit leans pretty hard on the brotherhood between sailors. And that’s very evident for sure. For instance, if there were not enough hammocks to go around then everybody slept on the floor. But, then again, if you’re running a ship crewed by 180 outlaws and you start handing out 30 hammocks to 50 men you’re going to have a riot. Democracy was the only way it could work for survival's sake.

BR: There’s that, yeah. In a way, it's a funny microcosm for democracy in general. Here's another example. Sam Bellamy became a captain when he challenged the old captain, Benjamin Hornigold. Bellamy and Nolan were originally on another ship captained by another guy who wouldn’t attack English ships out of patriotism. Bellamy put it to a vote of the crew. Sort of market forces at work. And they voted Bellamy captain. Horingold was allowed to choose, he could rejoin the crew or be sent on his merry way. He ended up leaving, so they parted ways and he went off to a different ship. Edward Teach, who later became Blackbeard, went with him. But originally, Blackbeard and Nolan and Bellamy were all on the same boat.

People have a hard time digesting the democratic nature of piracy. The Whydah was originally a slave ship and pirates would free slaves all the time ... if they could sail. If you were a sailor, you were a sailor. Race didn't matter. Sixty percent of Blackbeard’s crew was black. And they weren't only free, but free and equal. Really, actually equal. If they knew how to sail. If there were slaves on a ship they took, and those slaves didn't know how to sail, the pirates would let them go with the ship and the rest of the crew to continue being slaves.

That's actually another thing. None of us use the term "nitty gritty" anymore. Not since we found out what it means. When you had people packed into a slave ship, they'd just be lying in their own filth for months. Months of this horrible passage. And all of that would build up. When the ship reached port and sold the people, someone had to go down below decks and clean all that out. That was getting down to the nitty gritty. All that waste and puke and everything that would be caked on the floorboards of the ship.

BR: Female pirates were included out of overwhelming demand and curiosity. The two that we have are the two that there's a lot of information about. [Mary Read and Anne Bonny] They were documented so well because they were an anomaly. There weren’t any women on the Whydah.

And there really was the idea that women are bad luck. But the flexibility of those notions is very bizarre. There’s no religion on the ship, but they replace it with really strong superstitions. But the superstitions are strangely flexible. You have accounts of women disguised as men, but there also are accounts of them being found out but being allowed to stay on because they’d proven themselves and once you’re in the crew, you’re in the crew.

Mary Reed joined the army as a man and she lived as a man for large chunks of her life. But they’d sail to other areas of the world that had different expectations of female dress and people would pick her out instantly as a woman because the differences were that clear. So were people ever really fooled really? It’s hard to pin that stuff down. We know they were willing to go along with it in some cases.

BR: Crews came from all over. This is one of those things that would be really divisive. You could have religion if you kept it to yourself. You weren’t forced to renounce it or anything. But there was no practice on the ship. In fact, clergy who were captured were treated very, very poorly. These men operated outside normal institutions and with a disdain for them as well. But, again, the superstition is weird. It was bad luck to have a woman on the ship—but if you do, and she gives birth, that’s good luck. And some of it was practical. Gambling wasn’t allowed either on the ship. That’s a safety issue. There's a practical side to some of these things that seem superstitious.

BR: The Navy is basically jail. Press gangs would press men into service in the Navy. You’d be bullied or threatened, if you're in debt. It was kind of a form of debtor's prison. And you’d come back from a tour in the Navy and then they’d charge you for your food and ammunition, so you could end up actually owing them money. Those were the ships that they couldn’t even bring to port because if they let men off they wouldn’t come back. So they’d anchor a mile out and send in the upper crew to pick up provisions. The lower crew would escape if given half a chance. Pirates could go to port without worry, because the boat is making them rich. They have more money than any honest sailor would make in a lifetime.

You get a vote with the pirates, and you don’t with the Navy, of course. In the Navy, the first mate would carry a starter, which is basically a lead weight wrapped in a cable that they were allowed to beat sailors with. There were regulations about where they were allowed to hit you. But no rules about why. So they’d just beat sailors half to death if you weren’t moving fast enough. You were basically an owned part of the ship. It was a system that gave way to very cruel conditions to work under. A lot of pirates were coming from that, and the articles of the ship [a contract/constitution document that every pirate on a ship had to sign] developed out of men coming from that. Flogging was the worst regular punishment you’d find on the pirate ship. But, even then, crew could vote to give you a pass.

And the pay: If you’re in the Navy, you could end up in debt or with nothing. Ditto for merchant ships, you were working for a couple coins a week. But every time a pirate ship takes another ship, you get an equal share. Merchant ships wouldn’t even put up a fight often. They don’t own the cargo. They have no personal investment. What do they care if the pirates take it?

BR: Obviously it doesn’t appear in any of the ships' articles, but it was sort of a known thing that if you were arrested you were going to say that you were forced into piracy. It didn’t help actually in court. But very few pirates didn’t say it. People went to the gallows saying that they were forced into it. But if you look at the conditions, it just doesn’t stand up to a whole lot of scrutiny. "They forced me at gunpoint to join this ship where I work less, get paid more, and nobody beats me. Oh, no! They made me do it!"

In fact, the carpenter was often the only guy on a captured pirate ship to be pardoned. Carpenters don’t need to resort to piracy to make a lot of money. But pirates need skilled carpenters. So it was actually believable that they’d be forced into working for a pirate ship.

I don’t know why Richard Nolan got pardoned. The anecdote is that he was just that persuasive and charming. There's no factual proof of that though.

BR: We have to speak in the present tense in the exhibit. We are acting like we're pirates from 1717, not modern guys dressed up as pirates. And that gets weird. I get kids poking me, going, "You're not real." Yes. I'm real. "Really?" Really. "Really, really?" Yes. Really. Really. Real.

Sometimes we have to convey the information we know to be wrong now in a way that states that, in character, you think it’s correct. So the latest paper published about scurvy at this time period goes back to saying that it’s caused by eating too many fruits and vegetables. Our surgeon looked at a lot of medical literature from the time and he found several times, multiple instances where people would figure out what was causing survey. But then the information wouldn’t get out there, or some crazy home remedy would come into vogue, and the knowledge would disappear again. But he has to portray somebody who believes incorrect information.

We also get a lot of people who want to show us how much they know and that’s goddam irritating. I had a guy who came in literally stroking his goatee. And he points to a gun in the display case where they say "powder" was loaded in it. And he asks, "Is that black powder or gun powder?" And I knew what he was doing. Those are technically different things and actual gun powder wasn’t widely used outside of China until 18-something. They used black powder on the Whydah. But the beauty of speaking in the present tense of 1717 is that I can say “Oh, you mean the powder we put in our guns. Yes.” And he’s like, "No they’re different things." And I’m like, "No they aren’t. We take that powder and we put it in our guns. It's gun powder." And he’s like, "I see what you’re doing. You're just arguing semantics." But it’s not, really. I'm being in character. And I love arguing with those people.

BR: Not remotely. I get asked the same questions a lot, over and over. I get asked about the food. I get asked where we go to the bathroom. That whole segment of questions. Lots of the audience is kids, of course. I practiced with my kids before the exhibit opened, and given all the things you could possibly want to know—the bathroom was number two on their list.

The awesome stuff is information people don't even know to ask about. We've gotten good at finding ways to lead people to it. Like the great sea turtles. For many years, giant sea turtles defied efforts by Royal Academy in England to subject them to taxonomy. That is because giant sea turtles are delicious. They’d try to get these specimens delivered to them by merchant ships or Navy ships and they would repeatedly end up with an empty shell and reports of how tasty it was. The turtles are great. They don’t eat often. All you had to do was turn them upside down and stack them up on each other. Keep them wet sometimes and you get fresh meat for a whole voyage. Apparently they were kind of fatty and a lot like lobster only gigantic.

And the sailors loved it. Their only other choice is hardtack, which you have to cut in half with a knife and bang the bugs out on the table before you eat, and then you have this captive sea turtle and several months where nobody is getting enough food. Furthering science wasn’t the first thing on their minds. So the Academy would send them out again and they'd come back with the empty shells again, like, "Here's the inedible part. Man, that was delicious. Happy science-ing!"

BR: I've not gotten a chance to try it out in the real world. Navigation, I think I have a fair grip on. I could talk my way through it. Our captain could do it, for sure. He could probably find his heading given the sun and stars. I spend a lot of time talking through how to load and fire a cannon, though, so I probably could do that if I had to. I rest easy knowing that, when the zombies rise up, I’ll know how to fire a cannon and sail a ship. Mostly. We all now know a ridiculous amount about this thing we will never actually do. It's weird.

The Real Pirates exhibit runs through Labor Day at the Science Museum of Minnesota. If you were to ask Richard Nolan, he would have to tell you that the Whydah is headed for Massachusetts after it finishes this layover in Barbados. Luckily, I can tell you that the exhibit will next be in Milwaukee.

Read a 1999 National Geographic story about the Whydah.

Check out Barry Clifford's Whydah page. His museum dedicated to the Whydah is located in Provincetown, Mass.

Too High to Fail covers everything from a brief history of hemp to an insider’s perspective on a growing season in Mendocino County, where cannabis drives 80 percent of the economy (to the tune of $6 billion annually). Investigative journalist Doug Fine follows one plant from seed to patient in the first American county to fully legalize and regulate cannabis farming. He profiles an issue of critical importance to lawmakers, media pundits, and ordinary Americans -- whether or not they inhale. It’s a wild ride that includes swooping helicopters, college tuitions paid with cash, cannabis-friendly sheriffs, and never-before-gained access to the world of the emerging legitimate, taxpaying “ganjaprenneur.”

While researching the book, what did you learn about cannabis and the use of it that surprised you?

Probably the most surprising revelation to me after a year spent on the front lines of the Drug War is how ready Middle America is for the coming Drug Peace -- especially with regard to legalizing cannabis. One collective I researched, in Orange County, CA (yep, Nixon's stomping grounds) had seniors as the majority of membership. These were people for whom cannabis was not political. It was medicine that worked: for arthritis, glaucoma, appetite stimulation. Americans recently polled at 56% in favor of regulating cannabis like alcohol, up from 49% a year ago. So we could be close to the kind of mainstream tipping point that ended alcohol Prohibition. And that surprised me. The "Brains on Drugs" stigma is disappearing, even in the heartland.

Who stands to profit from keeping cannabis illegal, and who will profit if it is regulated like alcohol?

Well, I first off like to always impart a sort of Humility Preface before prognostication. We don't know exactly what the future may bring, but we do have a lot of history as an example. Prohibition breeds organized crime. That's who profits from the status quo, on the business side. With the regulation of cannabis like alcohol, I heard some of today's farmers worry that we'll get a few Coors type overlords. That may be, but when Jimmy Carter changed the brewing rules, the microbrewery age exploded, and the farmers I cover in Too High to Fail are confident that there will likewise always be room for the top shelf craft farmer, the way that there's always room for Sierra Nevada or New Belgium today. I agree with them: we're talking about a multibillion dollar industry that's already bigger than corn and wheat combined. Imagine the tax revenue! Another beneficiary of the coming Drug Peace era is the American people, in the form of energy independence: a USDA biologist told me that when it comes to cannabis as a biofuel source, “It’s magnitudes more productive than corn- or soy-based ethanol. But it’s not even on our blackboard because it’s a federal crime.” Thus were the farmers I followed practicing a kind of patriotic civil disobedience. One day they'll be teaching university courses to students dubious that their crop was ever really illegal.

You spent a year in Mendocino County, and you hung out with farmers, and law enforcement. What did you do to gain their trust?

One of the most astonishing parts of researching this book for me was how open everyone was, especially in Mendocino County. Generally speaking, second or third generation farmees are sick of being considered criminals, and are ready to be recognized as sustainably farmer's of Americas #1 cash crop (and one of humanity's longest used). Specifically, in the "Zip-tie Program" I was following in Mendocino County (whereby farmers paid permitting fees which bestowed a yellow bracelet -- a Zip-tie -- on every one of their plants), farmers are courageous activists, defying federal law to come aboveboard and support their community. The Zip-tie program, in 2011, raised $600,000 and saved seven deputy jobs. So gaining trust wasn't very difficult, especially once I had the trust of several prominent farmers. In truth, though, everyone was happy to talk to me, including the back barn geneticist who developed the strain that I followed from farm to patient. The farmer and I called the individual plant "Lucille," for reasons that become humorously clear in Too High to Fail. I will say that because of this openness it's been a huge sigh of relief to have the farmers I covered in the book one by one tell me they like it. The Drug War is a war like any other, and it's these brave front line soldiers, putting themselves at risk for what they know is right, for the good of patients and of the country, who are playing one of the most dangerous and prominent roles. One of the farmers I covered, Matt Cohen, was raided near the end of the book. The other, Tomas Balogh, was able to get Lucille to patients, including to a liver cancer patient I visited. Will these farmers benefit financially when cannabis prohibition ends? Sure, why shouldn't they?

What was the specific incident that made you want to write this book?

There were two. One was a massive multiagency raid of a neighbor of mine that netted all of 13 plants and zero jail time (not that it should have netted jail time). I was particularly irked by this as my normal alarm clock in my remote valley near the Mexican border is hummingbirds at the feeder, and this particular Thursday I'm in a scene out of Goodfellas. Literally millions of taxpayer dollars were spent NOT to go after the Cartels that day. The second, related incident, was that the mayor of one of the nearest towns to my ranch, a border village called Columbus, was arrested as a Cartel member. The Drug War isn't working, and anyone can complain about bad policy, but I wanted to research an alternative. A solution. And I found a pretty easy one: tax cannabis like alcohol and you cut out 70% of the Cartel's profits. There are other benefits, too, to the American tax base, to public safety, to public health, and even to creativity: as the Digerati know, this is the idea era, and a U.S. which is friendly to cannabis, I argue in Too High to Fail, is a country more cerebral than one on alcohol or our nation's real epidemic: pills. Even with all of this, though, I needed to feel like the topic was important enough to spend a year of my working life researching. What I found out about cannabis' soil restoration uses and potential role in America's energy independence sealed the deal: it's a plant that should and I hope soon will be a valuable part of our economy and society.

For the 150 million plus people who think America should legalize cannabis, what should be done to make it happen?

From a political perspective, I would say call your congressperson and senators and tell them you are voting based on their support for getting cannabis out of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and letting states regulate the plant like alcohol (and also that you won't tolerate sneaky permitting of pharmaceutical derivatives, only the whole plant). How is it that 56% of American support regulating cannabis like alcohol (and 80% support medicinal cannabis) and yet virtually no U.S. Senators support it? They aren't hearing from Americans demanding that this trillion dollar, 40-year boondoggle end. In your personal life, speak openly about how serious and important an issue ending the Drug War is -- it's not some college stoner issue. It's crucial for America. And that will help finally dissipate the stigma that's still attached to cannabis after decades of misinformation until it's considered not just as safe as alcohol, but safer. Which is not to say one must absolutely advocate its use in all circumstances. Rather it's to say that responsible adult Americans who choose to use cannabis should have the same rights as those who choose to drink a glass of wine. Furthermore, that sigma erasing will help inject billions of tax dollars into the economy and return small American farmers to the land. It might even help us become energy independent.

Doug adds: The Too High to Fail pre-order is on now everywhere for hardcover and e-book: Amazon, iTunes, your local bookstore, Barnes and Noble, etc. And if we sell 100,000 first run hardcovers I'll request my publisher come out with a hemp edition -- saving several hundred thousand trees. Too bad it can't be American grown...yet. Continuous dispatches on sustainability and the coming Drug Peace Era, plus nationwide live event The Too High to Fail Pax Cannabis Tour dates for August and September and a short film about the book are at www.dougfine.com.

Buy Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution on Amazon

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Last month, I spent several days in Harvard Forest, 3500 acres of woods dedicated to scientific research. The forest is home to dozens of research projects, some short-term, others stretching over decades. I told you a little about how I got to participate in some of these studies, learning how to collect and analyze data in the same ways that ecologists do. Along the way, I ran into something a little weird—trees that were very much alive, but weren't growing.

If those of us who are not tree experts know anything at all about tree life cycles it's probably centered on tree rings. We learned back in grade school that trees form a new ring every year. Chop down the tree, and you can see a record sometimes stretching back hundreds of years—burn marks indicating fire, fat rings during times of plenty, and thin rings showing resource scarcity. And we know that scientists use these rings to learn about the past, to find out what was happening in local environments before human beings started to painstakingly record that information.

When it makes a new ring, a tree becomes a little fatter. Over decades, you should see a change in its diameter. So I was surprised, during my time in Harvard Forest, to run across several red maple trees that hadn't grown an inch in 11 years. Scientists had measured the trees in 2001. We came back and measured them in 2012. In that time, the diameters hadn't changed at all.

Turns out, this was not mere mis-measurement on my part. Neil Pederson is an assistant research professor in Columbia University's Tree Ring Laboratory. He's also found red maples (and other trees) that are living, but not growing, in the Harvard Forest. Pederson calls them zombie maples. He says these trees are really representative of the fact that individual plants can vary from one another as much as individual people—something scientists have to account for in their work. It's also a great example of how complicated even seemingly simple science can become once you start to dig into the details.

Neil Pederson: I was doing research at the Eddy Flux Tower plot to see if we could match tree rings to the carbon flux. The Eddy Flux Tower plot is this highly engineered system of taking up samples above, below, and winthin the canopy of the forest to see how carbon is moving through the forest. There are samples taken constantly, 24-7. I was there in 2003 or 2004 and it had been going for about 11 years at the time. They’d seen that the forest was continually taking up carbon in the form of new growth, and every few years they were going out and measuring the forest to document that. We went out to take cores and look at the tree rings. My idea was to take those tree rings and put them in a regional context by measuring similar trees across the Northeast. I initially focused on red oak because those were the biggest and most dominant trees in the plot.

The Eddy Flux Tower plot is thought to reflect ecosystem productivity. Normally, they measure all the trees. When we did our measurements, we decided to be efficient and see if we could get at the same number by measuring only the most dominant and largest trees. Maybe those would be the most important. Our tree rings didn’t quite agree with Eddy Flux Tower measurements, so that suggested that there were other trees we needed to core to get a good idea of ecosystem productivity.

So we went back and we cored the red maple. These trees aren't big, but they are the most numerous in the understory. With those two species we had a significant percentage of the forest in terms of biomass and numbers of trees. And that’s how I stumbled into it—maples sitting there alive, but not growing.

NP: When we core trees, everyone understand that rings say something about age and growth. But not every tree produces a new ring around the base of the stem each you. You can have missing rings or locally absent rings during times of stress on the tree. Because of that you have to cross date trees. We core different trees and make sure the patterns match. By comparing them you can get a good idea of whether each individual ring is correctly dated. Then you just keep adding trees to the comparison and building up this profile within a population and a species.

I worked up the first five red maples really quick. In like a day. They have a ring structure that isn’t as easy to see as that of a pine or hemlock, but I figured I’d be done in four days.

But then I got to the next tree, and I cross-dated it as best I could but it wasn’t behaving the same. It wasn’t growing there as well. We have a statistical program that helps us cross date and spot the patterns that eyes might miss. The program said we were missing five rings and I thought, "That can’t be right."

I put that core down and went through two or three other trees with no problem. But then the next tree was missing seven rings. And these weren’t old trees, either. They weren't in old age decline. They were maybe only 50 or 60 years old. I started recognizing that in 1981 the trees had a white ring, not caramel like red maple can look. That was the year of the gypsy moth defoliation event. The moth removed leaves. Without the leaves, the tree can't feed itself as well and the wood is less dense. So that's where the white ring comes from.

Once I had found that white ring as a marker ring I started realizing that in the last decade or so before I cored them the trees had just stopped growing.

I presented the info to my committee at the time. and they said, “Are they alive?” And I said, "Yeah, but they must be zombies." That’s why I was excited when I saw your tweet about zombie maples. It confirmed that somebody else had seen this through direct measurements. That’s important. It's not our only corroborating evidence. We had a technician here almost 30 years ago who cored red maples in the catskill mountains. I pulled out his cores and measured them and he has scores of missing rings in the decade before those trees were cored. The trees were still alive, but not growing at the base of the tree.

NP: An eco-physiologist on my Ph.D. committee just got fascinated by this and what it means. Are they adding growth higher up the trunk someplace? Are they reusing the old tubes for passing water and nutrients up and down the tree? Usually each new growth ring replaces the old tubes. There’s a a lot of plant physiology questions that could be looked into here. It's an interesting phenomenon.

And we don't know exactly what's causing it. It's not the run-in with gypsy moths. In surviving red oak, for instance, after the gypsy moth defoliation they were growing back like nothing had happened within three to five years. Trees can get back to normal in a few years depending on severity of the disturbance. An earthquake can knock trees back for a decade or more before they recover. Some really severe defoliation events can take a decade or more. But trees are amazingly resilient. They have to be. They can’t run from anything.

We've not found any sign of climactic stress on these trees, either. If anything, since the 1990s in the Northeast winters have gotten warmer and that’s actually less stressful. My hypothesis is that ecology is driving this. These trees are small. They're in the understory and suppressed and they’re getting beat out by much faster growing red oak trees. I’ve seen a lot of missing rings in trees since I first spotted the zombie maples. It's a lot more frequent then the literature would suggest. And I think it’s simply competition. They’re losing out to bigger trees.

NP: Who wants to die? That’s kind of a joke, but it’s kind of not. Trees have the tenacity to grow in unbelievalble conditions. A white cedar can grow for 200 years under normal conditions, but they can also take root on cliff faces and live there for 800 to 1000 years. A chestnut oak I was looking at yesterday, it grew maybe two inches in diameter in 100 years. That's incredibly slow growth. It’s not what you think of when you think of oak.

But it makes sense. In general, trees can’t improve their condition actively the way that things like beavers or alligators can. Some trees can drop needles and promote fires that kill competitors in the understory. Other trees leach out toxins that kill nearby plants. We're finding more and more plants that do have abilities like that, but they're still not as capable as animals to change or move the environment around them. So they just persist. They keep on living for another day.

Forests here in the Northeast are dense. This might just be one survival strategy where you sit in the understory for as long as you can hoping that a neighbor will fall over and give you light and space. That’s painting some very human feelings on a tree, but you get the idea. They’re programmed to survive and reproduce and being a zombie is not a bad strategy for doing that. How they persist in that state, though, that's a really interesting question.

Unfortunately, no. Tree rings have become famous and infamous lately. Dendrochronology has really exploded in the last couple decades because it’s a really good way to understand our climate past. Tree records are so good and they can inform us of so much information and tell us whether today's conditions are normal or unusual. So we core trees for so many reasons and along the way we find all these other things, like zombies. It’s fascinating. But it’s not the main focus of my work. I just learn about it enough to make my work better.

For instance, we have this 36-year-old pitch pine planted in a plantation. We found that after looking at 200 trees, 80-90% of the trees were missing the 1992 ring. We think it was another defoliation event that happened. So we’re going to take cross sections at half meter intervals up the trunk of the trees. We can’t analyze all 600 samples, but we’ll be able to look at enough to see whether those trees formed rings higher up the trunk. Maybe they formed a ring at 5 meters, even if they didn’t form at 1 meter. That will help answer that one question about zombie trees. We do know that trees are more likely to form rings higher up and missing rings become less of a problem as you move up a stem. We know this stuff, but we don’t always have the time or motivation to publish on every detail we learn. We can’t publish on everything, there's not enough time in the day.

Not really. Not if you're doing dendrochronology correctly. Remember when I was talking about cross-dating? That's the key. You have to pay attention to populations, not just individuals.

When we found the zombie maples, we were coring trees in an understory and we were looking at all of the trees. When you're looking for climate signals, you look at the trees that are most likely to capture the aspect you're trying to study. You try to isolate the signal in the environment first. So you find the trees that are less influenced by competition. We target overstory trees that are getting full sunlight and those are much less likely to drop rings like this.

Now there are missing rings even in those kind of trees, but it’s really rare for it to happen across a population. So then we core 20 trees or more in a population. This is how we control for this potential issue. We’ve collected a lot of samples from all around the world. There are times when they’re more or less prone to forming rings, but I can’t think of a single population where all the trees in the population missed a ring.

The only time I know of where all but two didn’t form a ring was in a population that experienced an insect defoliation in 1748. All the trees but two failed to produce a ring that year. But we don’t use that population for climate studies precisely because we know that the insect signal disrupted the growth.

In 2005, my husband I bought a house in Birmingham, Alabama. I was working for mental_floss and we thought we'd live there for a few years. But, in 2006, my husband got an amazing job opportunity in Minneapolis. So we moved and we sold our house. After a few months in the Twin Cities, we bought another one. In order for me to buy the house I now live in, somebody else had to move. When I left my house in Birmingham, I opened a spot in my neighborhood there that was filled by somebody else.

This is one of those things that seems so basic and "duh" that it's easy to overlook. It's easy to think that it isn't important. But sociologists, and economists, care a lot about these patterns—called vacancy chains. That's because vacancy chains end up describing very similar situations that occur in all sorts of social systems across many, many species.

When a resource is exchanged in a sequence from one individual to another, and every individual in the sequence benefits from the exchange, that's a vacancy chain. You see these patterns in human home sales—I, the people I bought my house from, and the people who bought my old house all ended up with a home that better met our needs. And you see the same thing when hermit crabs trade out their old shells for new ones.

Ivan Chase, emeritus professor at Stony Brook University, studies vacancy chains in hermit crabs and people. He's written about his work for the June issue of Scientific American, and he recently spoke with me about how vacancy chains work and what we can learn about human social systems from watching animals like crabs.

Ivan Chase: People at least in some way knew that hermit crabs used other crab's shells. They would have said that might happen. But nobody thought about it as an organized thing that could be compared to humans. We were the first people to study hermit crab shell use as vacancy chains and describe them as that.

IC: Oh, yeah. Sometimes they’ll actually get into it while holding onto their old shell. They'll try the new one out, but end up walking away and getting back into the old shell.

There is also evidence that hermit crabs will fight over shells if two of them want the same one. Sometimes a guy will bop someone else with his big claw, then he'll run away with the shell so he can inspect it in peace. There's even some documentation that crabs can negotiate a shell swap.

IC: There is some indication that crabs will wait by the side of a vacant shell that might be too large for them. In that case, it's as if they understand something about there being a possible vacancy chain they can take advantage of.

Vacancy chains are one of the ways that crabs get shells, but there are other ways. The negotiations I mentioned, for instance. Also, somebody might not get the shell they want, but that’s still a vacancy chain. If you had two people putting in bids for a house, only one person gets the house. But the chain continues on down the line, even though we both want it and only one gets it.

IC: In all the studies that I’ve looked at it’s the rule. There’ve only been a few studies of vacancy chains in crabs. But other studies of vacancy chains in getting jobs, and housing, and cars ... that’s all that I’ve seen. You can get to a higher number if you look at particular kinds of situations. Those chains that started with really big houses and really high level jobs for instance. Then you can get around four moves up. You can also get particular situations where you get fewer moves than that. For instance, really low level housing.

IC: I really wish I had a great answer to that. If I did I’d have another paper. An organization can be too big. If you think about most chains, what you see is that the vacancy is moving from one status down to another. Mostly moving down a little bit in size. One crab is moving to something a little bigger, and vacancy is going down the chain a little bit. But it gets unweildy after too many levels of control.

This is speculating, but think about a crab population. They start off very small in very small shells the size of a pencil. The biggest ones are the size of a thumb. The sizes of the shells don't encompass an infinite range. There’s a limit on how big and how small a crab can be. The biggest shell is going to move down to the next smallest crab. Pretty soon you’re at a small shell.

IC: One of the interesting things is that some kinds of resources go by vacancy chains. But some don’t. You have to have certain prerequisites. Freelance work doesn’t produce vacancy chains. It’s a different situation and it's more complicated.

IC: I think that animals, just like us, aren’t perfect at making decisions. We’re fairly good and they’re fairly good. Like us, though, they probably make better decisions with time to slowly check things out.

IC: A classic case comes from the 1800s or 1900s in Ireland. Tenant farmers held a lot of the land at that time. When they died, the land was often taken over by a son or daughter. But when that happens, the son or daughter doesn't have anything to leave behind available for someone else. They start farming their parents land, but already there on that land. If I get rid of my shirt, somebody might pick it up, but they don’t necessarily leave their shirt behind at the same time.

IC: No. I don’t think I have. In particular cases we might have a rotten shell that ends the chain or a good shell that nobody finds. But those cases are blips here and there. Here’s sort of an example of that, though: In the summer there’s a lot of vacant shells lying around because snails die over the winter. If you had a population of crabs that has access to all the shells they wanted, then it would be harder to start a vacancy chain.

IC: I think at a certain level it’s just a really interesting observation to make. There's entertainment value. But you also have to think about why something like a crab would have vacancy chains. They’re nothing like us. And it's from there that you get real insights.

If we can find a simple social system, then we can do experiments and observations with these simple animals that we could never do with humans.

For instance, think about the question, "Why do people get jobs?" Usually, we concentrate on the individuals and what helps them to move. But vacancy chain research in crabs is a way of turning that around. I don’t care too much about individuals, I care about the processes. Certain kinds of resources can be distributed in certain ways. It allows us to see social systems in a way we never could if we’re just looking at individuals. It’s weird to say that we’re in some ways like hermit crabs, but that's what we see if we're looking at society and resource distribution without all the stuff we layer onto human society. I’m looking at the processes that form social systems and it seems that the individuals aren’t always as important as we think.

Read Ivan Chase's article in the June issue of Scientific American (Full story is behind a paywall).

When we talk about energy, we often talk about it in very disconnected ways. By that, I mean we talk about new renewable generation projects, we talk about cleaning up dirty old power plants, and we talk about personal decisions you and I can make to use less energy, or get more benefits from the same amount.

What we fail to talk about is how all those ideas fit together into a coherent whole. And that matters, because our energy problems (and our energy solutions) are about more than just swapping sources of power or making individual choices. We have to fix the systems, not just the symptoms.

Back in April, I got to go on Minnesota Public Radio's "Bright Ideas" to talk about my book, Before the Lights Go Out. Now MPR has the entire hour-long interview up on video. You can watch the whole thing if you want. But, if you're short on time, I'd recommend the stretch from about minute 8:30 to 10:50. That's where I explain in more detail why systems—infrastructures—are so important and why we can't solve our energy problems without focusing on how choices and sources fit into those larger issues.

Watch that clip, then read this Minneapolis Star-Tribune article about how investments in transportation-oriented bicycle infrastructure have changed the way Minneapolites think about biking and dramatically increased the number of people who choose to bike. I think you'll see some thematic connections.

Learn more about how our energy infrastructures shape our choices and our lives by reading Before the Lights Go Out.

Video Link

Avi Solomon: What do you see in your childhood that pointed you onto the path that your life took?

Lloyd Kahn: When I was a kid I had a little workbench with holes in it, and the holes were square or round or triangular. And you had to pick the right little piece of wood block and hammer it in with a little wooden hammer. And so I'd hammer with it, put the round dowel into the round hole, and hammer it through. And then maybe the most formative thing was when I was twelve - I helped my dad build a house. It had a concrete slab floor, and concrete block walls. And my job was shoveling sand and gravel and cement into the concrete mixer for quite a while. We'd go up there and work on weekends. One day we got the walls all finished, and we were putting a roof on the carport, and I got to go up on the roof. They gave me a canvas carpenter's belt, a hammer and nails, and I got to nail down the 1" sheeting. And I still remember that, kneeling on the roof nailing, the smell of wood on a sunny day. And then I worked as a carpenter when I was in college, on the docks. I just always loved doing stuff with my hands.

Lloyd Kahn Interview Audio Excerpt

I like the smell of wood, and the moment I like best when I'm building is when I get the foundation done and get the floor joists on and nail down the flooring and stand on the floor. That's just a wonderful moment: I did this myself. You have these good experiences when you grow up that carry over. So even while I was a businessman I was still leaning towards building. I like builders and I like farmers, because they have to deal with the real world. It's not like buying and selling stock options. The farmer's crops have to grow, and he has to deal with the wind and the sun, the temperature and rain. The building has to stand up. It can't fall down on people.

Avi: You made an interesting career change in 1965 from working as an insurance broker to being a carpenter.

Lloyd: Things were starting to happen then in San Francisco! The cultural revolution really started in 1963. People started moving to San Francisco and living in the Haight-Ashbury district. When I was an insurance broker, I used to go up to upper Grant Avenue which was kind of the artistic and beatnik center of the city, at a place called the Coexistence Bagel Shop. In 1965 I decided I wanted to think about what I was doing with my life, and I hitchhiked across the country, and went to New York, and went out to Cape Cod, and came back about a month later and quit my job and went to work as a carpenter. I was a lot happier working with my hands than I was wearing a suit. I was making pretty good money then, and I would have made a lot of money if I'd stayed in the business world, but it just wasn't what I was interested in doing.

Avi: What was the first day like working as a carpenter?

Lloyd: There wasn't any first day. It was just that I worked on odd jobs, and also did gardening work. As soon as I got out of the Air Force in 1960 I had started doing an extensive remodel on my house which was in Mill Valley about a half hour out of San Francisco. So I'd been building all along. I would come home from my job early and work on the house, and I'd work on weekends. So when I quit, I just kept on working on the house, and I got jobs doing gardening and carpentry. It was a welcome change.

Avi: You got into building domes and then wrote an remarkable essay called "Smart But Not Wise" .

Lloyd: I'd been building domes and after a few years of building them, started to see that there were problems with them, and with using plastics. And also seeing problems with Buckminster Fuller's ideas, that they weren't really the kind of ideas that I was in favor of. So then I went to a conference at MIT on shelter. And at that conference I saw the scientifically oriented people, architects who were working with plastics and things like that. It was somewhat of an epiphany. By that time I'd seen that there were a lot of drawbacks to using plastics, and to using mathematical formulas for making the frameworks of buildings. So I wrote "Smart But Not Wise", whose title was based on the saying of the Indian Ishi, who was the last of a tribe discovered in California probably in the late 1800s or early 1900s. He said that the white men were smart, but not wise. We had the mathematics and the plastics, and the technology, but it just didn't work out with homes. And so I wrote that essay saying hey, you know, we were wrong here. And shortly after that I stopped the printing of Domebook 2, which had sold about 160,000 copies by then.

Avi: How did your audience react?

Lloyd: Well the Dome groupies were not very happy with me. When I took the Dome book out of print, I had an audience of maybe a quarter of a million people, and Domes were the countercultural icon of building in those years. I thought well, I'd better show these people that there are lots of other ways to build. So I took off and went to Europe with cameras, and traveled across the U.S., and photographed all styles of buildings. I came back and went to a Los Angeles conference in 1967 called Habitat For Humanity, and people were expecting me to talk about Domes, but by that time I was completely off Domes. The place was packed and for my presentation there I showed slides of Irish thatched cottages. I said, you see that cottage in the field there? You see how good it looks? It just looks like it's part of the surroundings. And I said, that's because the materials all came from the area. They planted barley in the fields, and after they harvested the barley, they took what was left over, which was the straw, and they made the thatched roof out of that. And they also built the walls out of stones that came from the fields when they cleared the fields so they could plow them. And they also used the stones for the fences around the fields. Everything is harmonious, and everything looks right because the materials are local. And this is totally different with Domes, which are made out of highly manufactured materials. So people were pretty upset with me for going in that direction. It was kind of the math science guys who really wanted to use an abstract concept like icosahedrons, that appealed to people who were left-brain oriented.

Avi: So you rediscovered vernacular architecture?

Lloyd: Yes, I discovered it for myself. And building Domes for five years was good in a way, because then I went out and looked at all these other ways of building. I'd drive down a country road and see farmers' buildings and I'd think gee, that's got a vertical wall, and it's rectangular, and building materials are rectangular. And you don't have problems sealing the roof. Especially in England, I kind of went back to the roots of building from the times when people started farming. They were living in round houses and then they expanded to rectangular houses when they had to have shelter for the animals. So it was this wonderful rich world of all these different styles of building all over the world. They were not alternatives to Domes, because Domes were really pretty silly as far as homes go. And that's when we did the book "Shelter", which became a great popular favorite.

Avi: What's the strangest place that people have read "Shelter" in?

Lloyd: I don't know! I'm sure there's plenty of strange places because it sold over a quarter of a million copies, and we get feedback two or three times a week even now from the book. People saying that it changed their lives. And it wasn't me, it was all the people that we showed in the book that were inspiring to people. It was translated into French, German, and Spanish. And more recently it's been translated into Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. The thing about "Shelter" is that it captured the spirit of the times. It had primitive building in it, builders making mud huts in Africa, or thatched buildings in the South Seas. But it also had the young people from the hippies, the counterculture of the day, and what they were doing. So it was a combination that just everybody loved, and they still do almost forty years later.

Avi: Your new book "Tiny Homes" is kind of similar, but different.

Lloyd: It's similar to "Shelter" in the fact that the heart of the book was small buildings. We drew up five small buildings with different roof shapes, and showed people exactly how to make the structure. How to frame the buildings. And we wrote in the book, start out small if you're going to build a house. And if you have a piece of land, everybody isn't going to be able to have their own land to build on, but if you do, build something small and have a kitchen and bathroom back-to-back so that you can live in there, and then you can expand. But the small house was really sort of the heart of that book. So now forty years later, we do a book on very small houses. And the four building books we've done all kind of have a connection between them. And this book has a connection back to "Builders of the Pacific Coast" and then the book "Home Work", and then back to "Shelter". If you look through "Tiny Homes", you'll see all the people in there saying that they were inspired to do this by one of our books. And it's also similar in the sense that the way we do books is with a lot of photographs and interviews. It's kind of a scrapbook in a certain way, although there is an underlying order of things. Nobody really does the kinds of books that we do, and it takes us a really long time to get them done. It took around four years of work in between each of these last three building books.

Avi: You have a unique way of editing your books.

Lloyd: For years I 've used a $175 color copy machine that I could blow things up and reduce things on. So say I'm working on a section about a woman from Hornby Island in Canada who is building caravans on wheels to sell to people. I'll get out all the photos of her and I'll print them out like a contact sheet, and then I'll lay everything out on a table and I'll have a two-page spread in front of me and I'll decide what to do, and then I'll blow up or reduce the photos on my color copy machine and I'll tape them down with removable Scotch tape. Then I'll write the text if it's not written already. I'll print it out in two and three columns and I'll paste it, I'll tape it down and move things around until I get things the way I like them, and I'll maybe sketch in the headline in pencil. For the earlier books, I had a portable Adler typewriter on a table I made out of recycled wood with wheels on it. I would type stuff on that. The way I would do cut and paste was I would cut and paste! I would cut up the manuscript with scissors, and then I would tape it back together. I'd say oh, I want this paragraph up here, so I'd cut it out and tape it in. I would get these manuscripts of maybe eight feet, ten feet long flowing text. When I get things the way I want them, and if they're good enough, they go straight to Rick, our digital maven, who imports the photos into the computer and gets things ready for the printer. But maybe half or more of them go to David, our artist, who will go over them and refine them, and shift things around, and make them look better.

It's a pretty good process because I think there's a different quality you get when you're not working on the computer. I have coffee and play rock and roll, and get inspiration that way, and so I have fun when I'm doing the layouts. So it's kind of delaying the entrance into the digital world. It's not like you're going to start doing everything the old way, but it's taking another look at some of the old ways of doing things and seeing how you can blend those with the modern world. Maybe I can do a few of these things to connect with the real world, or do things the way they were done before, while I've still got my MacBook Air and InDesign and Photoshop, and am in touch with the world instantly.

Brian "Ziggy" Loloia built his cob house for less than $3,000.

Avi: "Tiny Homes" has a very interesting subtitle "Scaling Back in the 21st Century". It points to the importance of not having debt and having creative ways to get access to land.

Lloyd: One of the powerful things about the concept is not to get involved with a bank. Don't get a mortgage if you can. Tiny homes may not be for a whole lot of people. But if you're young, and you're facing either getting a mortgage, and we've all seen how that worked, or paying high rents, here's an alternative. And it doesn't have to be that you build a house on a piece of land. It can be that you build a house on wheels. You build a house on a float and have it in the water. Or you have an apartment in the city that's small. You just kind of go the opposite direction from what they call McMansions. It's a different way of approaching life. I mean, I don't live in a tiny home, but I'm in my seventies. But you can start out small. And it's an incredibly powerful movement right now. I like the idea of starting out with your core, which is your kitchen and bathroom, and your wood heat if that's what you're going to do, and your solar heated water, all in this core. Then you've got a place to sleep and cook and eat. And then you start adding on. With rectangles, they're easy to add onto, as opposed to polyhedral shapes. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/15/making-shelter-simple-an-inte.html/feed 8 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/15/bones-of-turkana-meave-and-ri.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/15/bones-of-turkana-meave-and-ri.html#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 12:30:45 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=160775

The Leakey family is like the Kennedys, but for paleoanthropology instead of politics. Think about any hominin fossil or artifact you can name. Chances are, there was a Leakey involved in its discovery. Louis Leakey was one of the first scientists to champion the idea that humans had their origins in Africa. For three generations now, his family has carried out active paleo excavations in eastern Africa, especially the countries of Tanzania and Kenya.

The first generation—Louis Leakey and his wife Mary—were most associated with Tanzania's Oldupai Gorge. But their son Richard, his wife Meave, and their daughter Louise have all spent their careers focused on Lake Turkana, on the border between Kenya and Ethiopia. The site is the world's largest, permanent desert lake. Undisturbed by modern development, in a spot where millions of years of flowing water have washed deposits and fossils down from the rift valley—Lake Turkana is an excellent place to search for human ancestors and our ancient relatives.

On Wednesday, PBS will air an hour-long documentary on the Leakeys' work at Lake Turkana. Part biography of Richard Leakey and part exploration of human history—Bones of Turkana will air May 16th at 9:00 pm central and again on May 21st at the same time. Yesterday, I got the opportunity to speak with Richard and Meave Leakey. We talked about human evolution, the scientific promise of Lake Turkana, the process of paleo fieldwork, and the lasting impression of the Leakey legacy.

First, a bit of context. Although he's the more famous of the two, Richard Leakey hasn't really been doing paleoanthropology for 20 years. Instead, he's worked in wildlife conservation—especially with elephants. He's also participated in Kenyan politics, including helping to found a new political party there in the late 1990s. Currently, he's focused on fundraising for the Turkana Basin Institute, an organization aimed at providing logistical and financial support to researchers from many disciplines working in remote parts of Kenya. Previously the site of a base camp for Leakey work at Lake Turkana, the Turkana Basin Institute will soon be home to a permanent building. "Now it’s a place where scientists can do research without having to live in tents and eat sand," Richard Leakey told me. "And we can give local nomadic people permanent jobs in curatorial duties with collections on site. Traditionally, people found fossils and took them away. We’re turning that around now, so that the local economy gains as well."

Maggie Koerth-Baker: Richard, what drew you to Lake Turkana in the first place?

Richard Leakey: I had been working in southern Ethiopia representing my father in 1968 and 1967 [He would have been around 24 at the time—MKB]. I didn’t really enjoy it, I was very much the junior person on the expedition. But I had dropped out of high school and didn’t have any credentials except my experience. I knew that to go any further in my career I'd either have to go to university or I’d need a to find a really good site and build team around me. So that’s what I chose to do. I happened to notice that Lake Turkana looked very promising geologically—there were formations suggesting that the lake had fluctuated in depth and size over millions of years. There was sediment from river systems that often contains fossils. You had exposure through modern erosion, and there was very little vegetation. In 1968, I went in to check it out more closely. Immediately, we started finding fossils and lots of them.

What’s important about Lake Turkana is that it’s been there, growing and shrinking, for four million years, if not longer. There's this continuous record that exists in other places, but perhaps not as broad and rich. The work that’s been done so far suggests that other places aren’t as extensive. That’s what makes Turkana different from other sites we know of at the moment. But that's not to say that the other sites don't matter. It’s the combination of work done in South Africa, Tanzania, work being done in Ethiopia. It all adds up to a comprehensive picture. We’ve accumulated a huge amount of data at Lake Turkana but it would be less important than it is without that bigger continental sample.

Meave Leakey: It did entirely. I was doing marine zoology in university. I can’t think of anything further removed from paleontology. But my initial contact with Richard’s father led to me getting a job in his primate research center. I ended up doing my Ph.D. on modern monkey skeletons, and I got so interested in that that I left marine sciences behind entirely.

Then I met Richard and he invited me up to Turkana to look at fossil monkeys. It was entirely Richard who got me started in the field work. As soon as I got there I really loved it. In that sense, the Leakeys directed the opportunities that led to what I do today. Being married to Richard led to my interest in fossil human ancestors. I was mostly interested in monkeys for years, that was what I studied. But in 1989 he went into wildlife conservation and that left me in the position of leading the fieldwork.

ML: I think the thing to understand about Turkana is that it’s very huge. We work with many colleagues in different disciplines, looking at lots of different angles and that’s what makes it exciting. You have geologists interpreting the lake’s history. Geochemists looking at dominant vegetation. The main overall focus is how and why our ancestors evolved and how they became us. The big questions relate to that. But climate is important. Environments are important. Extinctions are important. There’s many different questions and aspects and approaches to the one main focus.

We have an enormous backlog of work that’s been done there, 45 years worth or so. We have a huge amount of information about the lake basin. On the other hand, when someone comes up with a new site in Africa, you have no idea what you’ll find and that gives you a better idea of what you’re seeing in Turkana. We tend to think that Turkana gives you the right picture of our past, but it doesn’t. It’s just a little pinhole view. The rest of Africa might have something entirely different going on. Personally, I wouldn’t want to work anywhere else because my expertise is in that specific lake basin. But I think we should be finding as many sites as possible all over the world. That's how you get the big picture.

RL: I would say that people have generally gone about explaining this backwards. The very earliest things that are our ancestors, quite frankly they don’t look like us at all. I think it’s much more important to look from the present and go back. When you find 10,000-year-old old skeletons they look just like us. In fact, modern looking goes back to 200,000 years. Then, I think we tend to go further and start really seeing the differences. At 1.5 million years ago, it’s not like us at all. If we presented it this other way, from present back, I think we’d have more understanding from the public.

ML: It really is a lot of work to establish that you’ve got something different and that it’s not just variation within the species. The main comparative example you use is to take the gorilla, which has a huge size and shape difference between males and females. Gorillas have the most variation within a species of all modern primates. You look at that very extreme variation and you assume you're unlikely get a much higher degree of variation within a species than that. Then you compare all the points on your new specimen with known species and you see if it fits within that range of variation. If it exceeds the gorilla level of variation you’ve got a pretty good case for a new species.

And the truth, with this method, is that you're likely missing species. If you were to take a series of modern monkey skulls and break them apart the way we find them in the fossil record, there’s no way you’d call them different species. But you know in the modern situation that they are different. If anything, we’re conservative on this.

RL: It’s quite subtle. We know birds use tools and chimps and insects and lots of mammals. But to take a block of very hard stone and to take another stone and fashion an object from it, that's something different. You have to "see within" the stone to know what you’re fashioning before you fashion it. You have to project an idea. That's a step that no other tool maker uses. It’s an almost soft science definition but I can see a fundamental difference.

ML: I'd agree. Kanzi is a chimp that humans tried to teach to make stone tools. But his hands were simply the wrong shape. They don’t have the precision of grip we have and they have less flexible grip. It wouldn’t have been possible for Kanzi to make a tool as professionally as our ancestors did. We haven’t found tools older than 2.5 million years old. I’m sure that’s not the last word on this. There might be ones found that are older, but as you go back, the hand then becomes less and less flexible. The limiting factor would be the morphology of the hand. It's more that and less the morphology of the brain, in my opinion. This aspect of being human very much depends on hand flexibility.

ML: We do find more skulls than you’d expect. I think it has to do with the size of the brain, or rather the size of the actual skull. Other remains can get chewed up by carnivores. They aren’t as complete. But the skulls we do find in greater number than you might expect. Maybe it's becuase carnivores couldn’t get their mouths around the skull and cruch it up, because the brain was so big. I'm speculating, but when you get back to something like Lucy, you don’t find more skulls than other bones, maybe because the brain was smaller and the carnivores were bigger. We do find other peices but they’re usually pretty fragmentary. And we're missing lower jaws a lot, because those can be chewed up. Monkeys are another good example. There are fewer fossil monkey skulls as complete as hominid skulls, and that's even though we find far more monkey specimens.

RL: If you have an opportunity to be involved in fieldwork it's hugely exciting and rewarding. You’re out in the open in nature, unbothered by emails and telephones. And once you enjoy fieldwork, paleontology is one of the professions where you can devote a lot of time to that. I think that's what draws you back into it as an adult. as A result of my childhood is that I always had a natural curiosity about origins, extinction, and evolution. It’s a natural part of my life. It’s not the only thing that interests me, obviously, but fully understanding why we are what we are—I think it adds to the whole human experience.

ML: You also have to understand that we're only three months of the year in the field and those months tend to fall within school holidays. Our children were in the field with us the entire time, from the time they were babies. They were in the camp or in the base. We'd take them out now and again and they'd get very excited about finding things. When they were older, they were able to start helping in camp, picking out bone fragments. The result of all of that exposure is that they say they definitely won’t get into the subject as adults. Of course, Louise said exactly that, but now she’s fully involved. Our other daughter said no and kept her word.

Watch the documentary Bones of Turkana on PBS

Photo: Michelle Gray

Image courtesy of Boaz Rottem.

Avinoam Danin is Professor Emeritus of Botany in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He curates Flora of Israel Online. His latest book is Botany of the Shroud: The Story of Floral Images on the Shroud of Turin.

Avi Solomon: What first sparked your lifelong fascination with botany?

Avinoam Danin: My parents told me that when I was 3 years old I always said "Look father, I found a flower". My grandparents gave me the book "Analytical Flora of Palestine" on my 13 birthday - I checked off every plant I determined in the book's index of plant names.

Avi: How did you get to know the flora of Israel so intimately?

Avinoam: When I was a high school student, as a personal project I determined all plants growing in a 1000 square meter area and followed it by determining all plants I found on my way anywhere. Mapping the vegetation of the Negev Highlands for my graduate and doctoral theses increased the list of species I knew.

Being the plant taxonomist of a Hebrew University team during the Sinai investigations added much to my knowledge. Writing together with Prof. N. Feinbrun the Analytical Flora of Eretz Israel (1991) and later, after several botanical visits in Jordan, the 5th part of Flora Palaestina (2004) was my way to obtain intimate knowledge of the flora of the region.

Satureja nabateorum

Avi: Which is the most interesting of the new species that you have found?

Avinoam: It is very hard to say "which is the most". We botanists consider the new plants we describe as new-born children and love them all. I have now 42 such plants and it is hard to say whom I love more. A new species is Capparis ramonensis I discovered on the gypsum outcrop of Makhtesh Ramon.

It is confined to a 3.5 square km area on our planet. A plant of an even smaller area is Hormuzakia negevensis found near Dimona. I named an Origanum new to science as Origanum jordanicum to honour His Majesty King Hussein who signed a peace agreement with our prime minister Yitzhak Rabin at the time of the discovery. We were searching a Nabatean path from the Arava Valley to Petra and a new savory was discovered then.

It became my beloved Satureja nabateorum which has beautiful trunks when becoming old in the sandstone crevices of SW Jordan.

Portulaca oleracea seed

Avi: What makes the amazingly nutricious "weed" Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) so common all over the globe?

Avinoam: The plant which was known as Portulaca oleracea is in fact an aggregate of more than 20 entities which look like Portulaca oleracea. However, there are many forms (we regard them at present in the scientific community as "microspecies") that look like the "regular" Portulaca oleracea, but differ in the microscopic morphology of their seeds. They all share the property of need for light, moisture, and high temperatures for germination.

Many sites created by human activity are available with the necessary conditions. It may float on sea water for more than half a year and germinate when landing on non-saline soil. Hence it may be distributed independently. Producing plenty of minute seeds makes it an efficient invader.

Avi: What are Cretan Apples?

Avinoam: As concluded by researchers from the HaReuveni family who sought out the botanical inspirations of the Menorah, Cretan Apples are galls developing at the tips of branches of two Salvia (Sage) species--Salvia fruticosa and Salvia pommifera. Salvia fruticosa grows in several east Mediterranean countries, including Israel and Crete; Salvia pommifera grows in Crete and in Turkey. The galls look like small apples and have a sweet taste when young. The Greek name of the two sage species has the Greek name of apple (milo) in their names (fascomilo).

Avi: What led you to examine the Shroud of Turin for botanical evidence?

Avinoam: Dr. Alan and Mary Whanger had discovered images of plants on the Shroud. They came to my home in 1995 and showed me their findings. I concurred with them and visited them in Durham, NC, in 1997 and discovered additional plant images. I repeated their studies and continued my own observations.

Avi: What were your findings?

Avinoam: Four plant species, the images of which are found on the Shroud, indicate the geographical origin of the Shroud. Fresh stems of the plants Gundelia tournefortii, Zygophyllum dumosum, Cistus creticus and Capparis aegyptia could be placed on the dead Man's body only in a strip of land, a few kilometers wide between Jerusalem and Hebron. Nine blooming species found on good photographs of the Shroud share blooming months of March and April, thus indicating that the event of covering the man with the plants in the Shroud took place during that time of the year.

The Man of the Shroud was possibly tortured with thorns of Rhamnus lycioides, Ziziphus spina-christi and Gundelia tournefortii. A cane of Arundo donax was inserted to the Shroud covering the Man as well.

Avi: What has been the reaction from your colleagues in the scientific community?

Avinoam: Of the botanists who glanced at the plant images, there were those who objected to my interpretation of these images and others who agreed and supported this. A first dose of encouragement came from my friends, botanists themselves, Dr. Peter H. Raven and Dr. Michael G. Barbour.

They are well known American scientists and their agreement with much of what I showed them was an important component of the strength I needed to stand against potential criticizers. In June 2006, I presented my findings to the staff of an important European botanical garden. At the end of my lecture, one of the attendees declared that as a botanist who is used to seeing and identifying plants, said he does not support my findings. Later that day three botanists having a similar position in that institute arrived incognito and warmly supported my findings and interpretation.

I can mention the response of three Israeli archaeologists. One of them, a good friend of mine and my family for more than 30 years, changes the subject whenever I try to confront him with the whole subject. Another colleague opened our conversation by saying that according to his experience there were no people as tall as the image of the man of the Shroud. He therefore was not ready to talk about my findings, and I thanked him for the short conversation I had with him. However, there were several Israeli archaeologists who were ready to hear what I said with appreciation for the interesting findings.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/the-botany-of-bible-lands-an.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2011/11/23/robert-sapolsky-on-stress-an.html http://boingboing.net/2011/11/23/robert-sapolsky-on-stress-an.html#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:00:17 +0000 Avi Solomon http://boingboing.net/?p=131091
Prof. Robert Sapolsky on Coping with Stress (Audio link) Photo Courtesy of Indiana University

Robert Sapolsky is a Professor of Biological Sciences and Neurology at Stanford University. He is the author of A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons.

Avi Solomon:

What event or person influenced your decision to study Primatology?

Robert Sapolsky:

Reading The Year of the Gorilla, by George Schaller, when I was in middle school. Schaller was the first person to do field work with gorillas (long before Dian Fossey). I had a vague sense of wanting to do primatology before that (sufficiently so to be reading the book), but that book cemented it.

Avi

What led you to research Stress?

Robert

My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution. If you are in that world, evolution really feels like it is about adaptation - when there are changes in the environment, new challenges, the critical issue becomes whether there is the genetic variability in a population that will allow for survival - will there be individuals with the means to adapt to the changing environment?

As I became more interested in behavior from the standpoint of neurobiology, the stress-response became really interesting. What stress physiology is about is - when there is a new environmental challenge, how does an individual adapt? It seemed like a natural transition.

Another reason is intellectual temperament. There is a classic study (by Tversky and Kahneman) in which people are given two scenarios. You have a population in which there are two diseases; each disease accounts for 50% of the deaths. Scenario A: you come up with something which completely cures one of the diseases, without having any effect on the other. Scenario B: you come up with something which cuts the mortality rate in half for each disease. The two are equivalent: 1 x 50% = 2 x 25%. The vast majority of people prefer Scenario A, for the sense of closure that it gives. My temperament has always been more for Scenario B. Stress, all on its own, doesn't directly kill people in the way that, say, cancer does. What it does is make lots and lots of different diseases 2% worse, 5% worse, whatever. Distributed impact. Going after that is much more to my taste as an intellectual problem (rather than, say, coming up with a vaccine or identifying a mutation that underlies a disease - those are Scenario A's).

Avi

How do you define Stress? Is Stress necessarily a bad thing?

Robert

If you are a normal mammal, a stressor is a challenge to homeostatic balance - a real physical challenge in the world - and the stress-response is the adaptation your body mobilizes to re-establish homeostasis.

For a cognitively complex species (like humans and other primates), stressor is also the ANTICIPATION that a a real physical challenge is about to happen. If there really is not the threat of a physical stressor coming, then you are setting yourself up for increased risk of stress-related disease.

Is stress always bad? No - if a stressor isn't too extreme, is only transient, and occurs in what overall feels like a benevolent environment, it's great, we love it - that's what play and stimulation are.

Avi

Why are Baboons good human analogs for the study of Stress?

Robert

Baboons are perfect models for the ecosystem I study. They live in the Serengeti in East Africa, which is a wonderful place for a baboon to live. They're in big troops, so predators don't hassle them much. Infant mortality is low. Most importantly, it takes baboons only about 3 hours of foraging to get their day's calories. Critical implication of this - if you are spending only 3 hours in a day getting food, that means you have 9 hours of free time each day to devote to being miserable to some other baboon. Like us, they are ecologically privileged enough so that they can devote their time to generating psychological stress for each other. If a baboon in the Serengeti is miserable, it is because another baboon has worked very hard to bring that state about.

Avi

What are the most important science-based strategies for coping with Stress?

Robert

Successful stress management heavily revolves around combating the building blocks of psychological stress - a feeling as if you have no control over the adversities in your life, a feeling that you have no predictive information about the stressors, if you lack outlets for the frustrations caused by the stressors, if you have no social support.

Avi

How do you use them in your own life?

Robert

As for me - I'm terrible at applying any of this. Why else would I study the subject?

Avi

How has doing regular fieldwork in Africa affected you?

Robert

It has been one of the most important things in my life. I am very very happy when I am there.

Avi

You grew up an orthodox Jew in New York. What is your opinion of God now?

Robert

What's God? For me, God died when I was around 14, and I haven't been capable of anything resembling "spirituality" since then either. I wish I could—life would be easier—but I can't.

Previously at Boing Boing

Toxoplasma (cat-poo parasite) hypnotizes rats by making them horny for cat pee
Sapolsky's outstanding Stanford lecture on "The Uniqueness of Humans"
Stanford's Sapolsky on primate sexuality: funny, fascinating, educational
Sapolsky on primate sexuality part two: required viewing for the horny
Evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality
Stanford's Sapolsky and National Geo produce a documentary on stress
Mind-opening lectures on the physiology of stress ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/23/robert-sapolsky-on-stress-an.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2011/11/04/interview-with-a-stoic-william-o-stephens.html http://boingboing.net/2011/11/04/interview-with-a-stoic-william-o-stephens.html#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:46:23 +0000 Avi Solomon http://boingboing.net/?p=127732

William O. Stephens is Professor of Philosophy and of Classical & Near Eastern Studies at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He plays tennis and chess, is a vegetarian, and tries to be Stoic about being a big Chicago Cubs fan.

Avi Solomon

What drew you to studying the Stoic philosophers?

William O. Stephens

In graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, my professor, Charles Kahn, thought I would enjoy reading the lectures, 'discourses,' of the Stoic teacher Epictetus. When I did, I was hooked on Stoicism and chose to write my dissertation on Epictetus. I've been fascinated by Stoicism ever since.

Avi

Could you summarize the essence of Stoicism in one paragraph?

William

Stoics believe that the goal in life is to live in agreement with nature, which for human beings means living in agreement with reason. The perfection of reason is virtue. So Stoics believe it is reasonable to responding to every event virtuously, to do the very best you can under the circumstances, and accept the rest. A Stoic focuses on what is up to her and doesn't worry about anything that is not up to her. The Serenity Prayer expresses the essence of Stoicism: 'God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage the change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.' Stoics believe that the only real good, the only thing that guarantees happiness, is virtue, while the only really bad thing is wickedness. Health, sickness, wealth, poverty, fame, ignominy, life, death, and all such things are neither good nor bad in themselves, because each can be used well and virtuously or badly and wickedly. How we deal with these things which are indifferent to happiness determines our happiness or misery. Our happiness, therefore, is up to us, it is not up to luck, according to the Stoics.

Avi

Stoicism is sometimes labelled a "prison philosophy". Why is this so?

William

Because people fail to understand what Stoicism really is. Stoicism equips you to deal with every circumstance in life, applying for a job, relationships with others, parenting, competing in sports, illness, everything. Stoics believe that people imprison themselves when they choose to make their happiness depend on things beyond their control, whether those things are controlled by other people, the weather, the stock market, or whatever.

Avi

Why are spiritual exercises important in Stoicism?

William

Seneca, a famous ancient Stoic, wrote that a Stoic must, at the end of each day, reflect on every decision and action he performed that day. He must scrutinize his deeds, one by one, and evaluate whether they were done well or poorly. Thus, Stoics are very serious about training themselves to apply their (Stoic) judgments about what is good (virtue), what is bad (wickedness), and what is neither (everything else) to their daily living. This intensive spiritual exercise, or introspective meditation, is vital for making progress in the art of living the good life as a Stoic. Studying the ideas, theories, and arguments in Stoicism is easy enough. Applying Stoic judgments to every single decision, action, and reaction to events around us is very difficult. It requires great discipline and years of rigorous practice to apply Stoicism to all our beliefs, value judgments, decisions, intentions, and actions.

Avi

What Stoic exercises do you find most useful in dealing with the pressures of daily life?

William

Teaching Stoicism to my students on a regular basis helps. Reminding myself about what is up to me and what is not up to me helps. It helps to remind myself that I alone am responsible for how I choose to think about what others do and what happens, and that no one has the power to make me angry, afraid, or sad. My anger results from the judgments that (1) someone tried to harm me, and that (2) I ought to retaliate. I can I freely choose to refrain from making these twin judgments. My fear results from my judging that something beyond my control is an imminent danger to me. My sadness results from the attitude I choose to have. Also, reading Epictetus, Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius is always a good Stoic exercise.

Avi

Why do you think Stoicism is undergoing a renewal in our time?

William

Stoicism has undergone renewals at different times in history for centuries. Whenever people judge that they are living in particularly hard times, whenever the going gets tough, the tough turn to the wisdom of Stoicism.

Photo: qwrrty]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/04/interview-with-a-stoic-william-o-stephens.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2011/10/24/tools-to-not-die-with-an-interview-with-vinay-gupta.html http://boingboing.net/2011/10/24/tools-to-not-die-with-an-interview-with-vinay-gupta.html#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:44:27 +0000 Woody Evans http://boingboing.net/?p=125683

Photo: Jay Springett

Vinay Gupta is a man between worlds, and he’s got a lot of arms. Born to Scottish and Indian parents, he was programming from a young age. But looking back on the advent of web-culture in the late 90s, he found that he wasn’t satisfied with the thought of sitting around on .com cash and helping to empower the same old corrupt systems of power and influence just because they’d now found homes online.

No, no. Vinay packed up and went west to the American desert. There he did work with the Rocky Mountain Institute (he was on the editorial team for Small is Profitable and Winning the Oil Endgame by Amory Lovins et.al.), spent years meditating and learning Nepalese magical practices, and found himself on the playa trying to live out of a cardboard box. That struggle with the box lead him to make observations about a sort of pixelated version of the yurt, that ancient and highly efficient house of the high Mongolian desert. Thereby: the hexayurt.

Now it’s been ten years of struggle for Vinay, and he’s shown his invention (and the many conclusions that follow from it) to .biz high-rollers, .mil doves, and .org worldchangers. He has become a worldchanger. We caught up by email in October.

Woody

Give us a quick history of the hexayurt.

Vinay

So the Hexayurt Project story starts on The Farm, the 70s era hippie commune linked to midwives, tofu and The Well. I visited The Farm pretty much as soon as I got to America in 1995, seeking understanding of what had happened in the 1960s. I don't know what I was expecting, exactly, some chance to bathe in the afterglow of the golden age perhaps.

Instead they ruined my life! Albert Bates of Worldwatch and Permaculture fame introduced me to environmentalism, and some of the guys on the farm asked me to fix a minor mathematical bug in one of their domes. I knew the math - I used to be a rendermonkey - but by the time it was fixed, the question which came to dominate the rest of my life had been asked: "how do we make a geodesic dome with less waste?"

Six years later, I was working a little on the Sustainable Settlements Charrette and something clicked in my head. "What's the simplest thing which could possibly work?" and fifteen minutes later I had a sketch of the firsthexayurt. SketchUp, before they were part of Google, donated us a license, and a very nice man, Mark Jacobson of Pactive, sent us some materials. We were in business!

Woody

You've written about shelter design in connection to Gandhi and Buckminster Fuller - why are they important figures for these concerns, and how are they connected?

Vinay

So the Hexayurt Project could have been simple. I could have incarnated the hexayurt as a company, or as a charity, and taken a conventional path through the world. But those things never seemed to deliver the worldchanging bang-for-the-buck that I craved, where as Free Software movement seemed, even in 2002, like it was going to deliver its particular brand of global good. So I decided to copy the Free Software model as closely as possible whenever possible, understanding that hardware would work a little differently. So far it has worked.

It's been hard. I've been putting this thing first in my life, in all kinds of obvious and subtle ways, since 2003. I knew when I was in the first hexayurt, in the middle of a dust storm on the playa, feeling completely safe and sheltered, that it was going to go all the way, and it's been like my kid ever since. I just keep it available, keep it moving forwards, and slowly the people who need it and want it pull it towards them. The deep model of change is actually Stallman, when you get right down to it, but the political analysis is pure Gandhi, with Fuller's core perspective. Let me explain.

From Stallman we take the Four Freedoms approach to owning your technology, but in this case, the non-patented commodities like screws and plywood give us an non-restrictive foundation to build on, unlike most computing equipment. But we have to run naked, without patent or copyright protection, because neither is suitable for hexayurts - patent is too expensive for us to use to defend the freedom of the hexayurt, so we use defensive publication to thwart attempts to patent the goodness!

From Gandhi comes the fundamental goal: everybody in the world gets a bowl of rice and a place to sleep, everybody in the world owns what they need to survive. At the deepest core: we accept poverty as a fact, but we insist on universal human dignity regardless of wealth. That means that everybody works and everybody eats, no exceptions. Gandhi's goals are much broader and subtler, but I'm a lump-hammer type of a guy, so I just took the simple stuff and started to do it with whatever meager capabilities I could bring to the table. I get by mostly on luck and persistence. Because of the meditation practice it's all personal to me: I feel like everybody's kids are my kids, like the whole world is crying out for some basic common sense, and I can't separate myself from what is happening to and in the world. And I have to live with that, every single day.

From Fuller comes the potential of engineering as a spiritual practice: build what is good, commit no evil, design the options we need to lift ourselves out of suffering and into safety, not in a transhumanist way, at least not at first, but in a simple housing-water-and-sanitation type way. I think that Bucky's techno-utopian political strategy is good, but without Gandhi's deep humanity and deep humility, I'm not sure any good was ever going to come of it.

So we get down to basics: Stallman's approach to human cooperation, Gandhi's goals, and Fuller's methods.

It's a potent combination.

Woody

The military keeps dabbing a toe into your work, doesn't it? What are they up to?

Vinay

There was a period around 2006 when, as far as I can tell, about half the money in appropriate technology research globally was coming from the US Department of Defense. My take on the DoD has always been that it's actually got a dual nature: the world's best technology development house on one hand, paired to an archaic war machine on the other. 5000 years from now they are going to remember three things about the 20th century: first nuclear bomb, first man on the moon, first computer networks. That's all the technology development side of the house.

The warfighting side is, frankly, a bit useless these days: it was configured to defeat the Soviets, built from the ground up over generations for that task, and its Failure To Adapt is largely responsible for the financial collapse which seems to be all around us: they needed to either stay at peace, or win quickly and efficiently, but this long, drawn-out, expensive, inconclusive war has burned the financial surplus of the world for nothing but pain and sorrow. Real power in the 21st century is tech power, not killing power, and I don't mean nanotech robots, I mean algal turf scrubber biobutanol factories are worth 500,000 tanks.

So the DoD saw the hexayurt and said "that's neat, how much?" and I said "Free!" and, at that point, they don't see many well-intentioned, non-hostile faces who aren't trying to make a buck from them or the people they're trying to help on the humanitarian / protector side. They think in really large terms, about huge needs, so the "as much as you could ever need" availability of plywood hexayurts suited some of their contingency thinking rather well. It was just an easy piece of capability to pick up, and it's slowly diffusing through the organization as needed. I think that if the DoD had been more involved in sheltering in Haiti there is a good chance we could have seen hexayurts deployed there. It might still happen, in fact.

More broadly, and this is fundamentally important, it's worth remembering that nobody winds up in very senior positions of power inside the services if they don't treat their peers and subordinates well. They have a pretty refined promotion process which seems to produce very high quality leadership, often real philosopher-kings, unlike many other branches of government. So I think there's a basic level of "well, this makes sense, it's not exactly our core business, but we're well-intentioned towards it" and that's about where it stands, really. Maybe there'll be a humanitarian crisis the DoD encounters one day that needs hexayurts, and maybe there won't.

They do build them every year in the garden in the middle of the Pentagon every year, though, as part of the STAR-TIDES program, though.

Woody

Is it fair to see the hexayurt as just another tool in a larger set? I mean, you've got CheapID, you link up with the Appropedia crowd... What would you call the whole package of these solutions?

Vinay

I wrote a short story a few years ago called TheUnplugged. It's really all about that. We need a lifestyle which works for nine billion people.

Let me break that down: you take the sustainable harvest of the earth, and you take the share of that we're allocating to humans, and then you divide by nine billion. So much carbon, so much steel, so much bamboo. It's not quite that simple: some places are cold, other places rain a lot, but the basic framework is that we have to share the inputs the world generates nine billion ways. Right now we're sharing them so badly that a billion of us are regularly hungry to the point where they get hunger diseases. Really that's not OK. I know we all have our struggles, but this is not OK. So we have to fix this: design a good lifestyle which uses that amount of resources, and then adopt it.

Sounds simple, I know, right? But there's no way around this: we're at four times consumption in Europe, and something like eight times consumption in America. Can you imagine us cutting our consumption, on average, by 80%? That's what we need to do. Maybe we'll get the Hail Mary pass on Nanosolar or Konarka, I think there's a very good chance we're going to get to the Cheap Energy, Cheap Information future, but even then, it's still going to be about a nine billion person split. I think we can produce a very good hexayurt out of about 100 lbs of paper and thick aluminium foil, all recycled and recyclable. I think the biosand filter and the rocket stove are pretty much ready for prime time technologies for our basic human needs, and the toilets are only a little further behind. And that's a standard of living, that and a cheap Android tablet that's been engineered to last for three decades, that's a standard of living which you can make sense of at nine billion, which is our likely peak population. We're going to hit seven billion right around the time this piece is published, and it's important to think about it in these big number terms, because that's the world we really live in.

So the future I see works like this. We make cheap things - a house for villagers who want something a bit more solid than woven grass over sticks, say. They could save for a decade for concrete, or take paper-and-foil today, bought cash. They could wait for plumbing, or make a biosand filter. They skip hypercapitalism completely, go directly to local production plus sophisticated-but-simple technologies, STAY SUSTAINABLE, right where they are, as organic farmers on land their ancestors have tilled for centuries, and that's a world which seems to measure up numerically. I can't make those sums work for any variant of the way we live in the West: either we're going to fix it through as-yet-unknown technologies, or we're going to be the caboose, the last part of the human race to live in a sustainable way. We're the last, not the first, and we have to face the fact that our lack of sustainability is a crimeand a shame, a black mark on our nations and our own lives.

So that's my vision: get the poor to a comfortable sustainability with sophisticated-but-simple technologies, so that the people who are actually sustainable get a much better standard of living, and as that standard of living rises, as Gandhi envisaged, perhaps we can adopt it by degrees, one by one as the occasion allows, and eventually fix the planet that way.

It may not seem like much of a hope now, but after a really major economic collapse comes through, we might not be able to afford to live at this incredibly unsustainable fossil fueled burn rate. How many of America's homeless would rather be smallholding farmers with access to first world medical care? We need to start thinking about what's next, because this is going away. In fact, for many of us, for the fifty million Americans on food stamps, it has already gone.

Vinay Gupta’s current work includes a collaborative e-book, The Future We Deserve, and related talks (beginning November 1st @ Hub Westminster, London). There have been up to 500 hexyaurts at Burning Man (including innovations such as these nearodesic polyhedrons), and his work to promote the technology continues.

Woody Evans is a librarian living on the south side of Dubai. He’s written for American Libraries, H+ Magazine, Juked, Public Scrutiny, Library Journal, Rain Taxi Review of Books, 971 Menu, ACCELER8OR, and others. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/10/24/tools-to-not-die-with-an-interview-with-vinay-gupta.html/feed 40 http://boingboing.net/2011/10/19/an-interview-with-david-eagleman-neuroscientist.html http://boingboing.net/2011/10/19/an-interview-with-david-eagleman-neuroscientist.html#comments Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:00:20 +0000 Avi Solomon http://boingboing.net/?p=124073
Photo: Poptech

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and author.

Avi Solomon

What fascinates you about the nature of time?

David Eagleman

We all go through life assuming that time is an external river that flows past us. But experiments in my laboratory over the past decade have shown that this is not precisely the case. Time is an active construction of the brain. We can set up simple experiments to make you believe that a flashed image lasted longer or shorter than it actually did, or that a burst of light happened before you pressed a button (even though you actually caused it with the button), or that a sound is beeping at a faster or slower rate than it actually is, and so on. Time is a rubbery thing.

David Eagleman reads his short story "Sum"

Avi

How do you account for testimonies of consciousness extending beyond cardiac arrest? What could they imply about the brain?

David

It's hard to know what to make of these claims. On the one hand, we know that the brain is easily coaxed into hallucinatory states that are taken to be reality: just think of your visually rich, bizarre-but-fully-believed nighttime dreams. On the other hand, although we know a great deal about the details of neurobiology, we have little scientific insight into the existence of private subjective experience -- that is, how cells and chemicals achieve consciousness.

So in the end, most scientists will (probably correctly) dismiss a near-death experience as a trick of the brain in a low-oxygen state. However, the vastness of the mysteries before us requires us to keep a tiny bit of room open for a continual re-visiting of the question. As my colleague Ara 13 writes, “No theory is Babe Ruth. Their numbers never get retired.”

Avi

How would you account for the testimonies of a Panoramic Life Review during near-death experiences?

David

I’ve been collecting people’s experiences about this for a while. When people find themselves in an optionless, life-threatening situation (such a sliding on ice toward an oncoming truck, or skidding toward the edge of a cliff on a motorcycle), they will commonly describe the experience of having all their memories present at once. This is not so much a cinematographic "flashing" of their life before their eyes, but instead a simultaneously present "panorama" of memories. And not necessarily big, important memories, but instead small, banal, perhaps meaningless ones. How can we understand what’s going on here?

First, in the 1950s, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield stimulated the temporal lobe of patients undergoing brain surgery, and he discovered that a little buzz of electricity in the right spot in the temporal lobe could trigger a vividly experienced memory—such as standing in a parking lot speaking with someone, or listening to a particular symphony. So we know the memories are stored in there. When the brain is driven into an extraordinary situation of impending doom, it moves out of its normal operating range and somehow all these memories bubble into conscious awareness. It may well be that the brain is 'searching' for any possible solution to a very bad problem, and in its desperation pulls out all the stops. I see panoramic memory as a terrific inroad into understanding consciousness.

Avi

What do you make of the experience of Deja Vu?

David

It seems clear that people experiencing deja vu are not actually detecting the future. This is easily demonstrable: the next time a friend says she's experiencing deja vu, quickly pull out twenty dollars and offer it to give it to her if she can tell you what's going to happen next. You won't lose. Instead, your friend will merely be able to report that after something happened she feels as though she knew it was going to happen. So there appears to be nothing time-violating about it. Instead, deja vu appears to be a hiccup of the familiarity systems in the brain -- the same systems that tell you a bizarre situation in a dream is something normal, something you've seen before.

Avi

Do you have a generic method for thinking up innovative experiments?

David

The only general strategy I employ is to avoid the places where everyone else is going. The most delicious fruits in science are often found in the places where no one else is looking. Relatedly, it's an old axiom in science that the exclamation that signals a rich discovery is not "Eureka!", but more often "That's strange." So that's where I try to position myself, around the "that's strange" phenomena.

Avi

There are roughly 50 galaxies or 10 trillion stars per person in the currently known universe. Why do you think we all glibly forget this amazing fact? How can we keep wonder alive everyday?

David

Indeed, I'm often surprised that people aren't talking about these issues all the time. But the reason seems clear enough. Our brains have evolved to deal with issues at our own scales: mates, rivers, apples, rabbits, and so on. Our brains simply weren't built to understand the fabric of reality at the very small scales (quantum mechnics) or the very large (the cosmos). As Blaise Pascal put it, “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”

Avi

What advice would you give to a smart kid who's now in high school?

David

Watch TED talks: smart people will distill their life’s work down to 20 minutes for you. Follow links through infinite trajectories of Wikipedia. Watch educational videos on topics that resonate with you.

There are a million ways to waste time on the net; reject those in favor of ways that teach you exactly what you want to know. Never before have we enjoyed such an opportunity for tailored, individualized education.

And be sure to get off-line often, to take digital sabbaths. As much as the net provides a platter of mankind's learning, there is a different kind of learning to be had from a hike in the woods, the climbing of a tree, an afternoon building a dam in a stream. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/10/19/an-interview-with-david-eagleman-neuroscientist.html/feed 20