This American Life (TAL) is one of the most successful shows on NPR, it started in 1995, has won numerous awards, and one of my conservative friends even described the show as “single-handedly justifying the existence of NPR.” I’ve heard shows from time to time over the years, but a few months ago I downloaded a torrent of every show in the cannon and have been completely hooked ever since. So when I heard Ira Glass’ was coming to Chrysler Hall in Norfolk I jumped at the chance to see him talk about the show, behind the scenes, and how the show is so effective at communicating and connecting with the audience.

Ira Glass started the show with the lights off, simulating the experience of radio as he spoke to the audience. When the lights came up, he joked, “You don’t look like what I expected either.” Carrying a touchpad filled with audio samples, Ira deftly played music, narrated, and mixed interview clips into his talk, oftentimes improvised.

He played a clip from the opening of a CNN special covering an aircraft carrier taking part in the war on terror. With deadly serious narration and a soundtrack Ira accurately described as “straight out of the opening credits of Battlestar Gallactica,” CNN was working overtime to make the story dramatic, working so hard as to be downright silly when you thought about it. News makes the world “scary, simple and small” Ira noted, and TAL wanted to take a different angle of life on the carrier, which he described as a “giant floating nuclear-powered dormitory.” So they started the story covering the kind of mundane work the majority of soldier on the carrier perform, specifically with a woman tasked with keeping the vending machines stocked and the day-to-day operations of that job.

Ira Glass emphasized the importance of storytelling in keeping the audience’s attention. Something happens, and then something, and then something, and then a universal principle is revealed. I recently heard the same advice from Jane Goodall that the best way to get people to see your side of things was to tell stories.

With this technique of storytelling TAL has made me see from the perspective of and sympathize with idealistic Tea Party members, stressed-out gang members, alleged terrorists, and wide wide world of diverse backgrounds and cultures. One show convinced me of the ideological diversity in the Republican Party by taking a varied perspective on the party at that time. At one point in the talk, Ira Glass described Iraq as Ireland with the Shias being the Catholics and the Sunnis the Protestants, a perfect analogy that explained the cultural conflict there better than any mainstream news story I’ve ever heard on the situation.

With the way the news makes the world so simplistic, caricatured, and tiny, is it any wonder the public getting its information from these sources seems to grow increasingly cynical about the state of things? News sources like NPR and the Economist try to convey the complexity, but their droll, elitist tone really turns people off to them. Ira Glass has spent years trying to convince someone in the media to do a news show in the format of TAL, and the show itself has even tried an episode focused on the events of the previous week.

The episode This Week, covering current events, also happened to be the week Osama Bin Laden was assassinated. So they sent a reporter to Cairo to interview people’s reactions there, but the lives of Egyptians were much too busied with the task of rebuilding their country after the recent revolutions. So the story from Cairo was about the Muslim fundamentalists and the liberals getting together to try and find some way to coexist in a functional Democracy. It’s easy to see how such a weekly portrayal of current events could not just be popular, but could calm people down by giving them a peek into the complex worlds everyone else out there is dealing with as well.

Additional Notes

During the question and answer session an audience member asked Ira if there were any other programs that had adopted TAL’s storytelling style, and, to my great pleasure, he mentioned one of my favorite recent discoveries RadioLab, a show about science that uses storytelling to make the factually-fascinating subject matter engaging on a personal level (Ira has a very nice essay about the show).

A funny moment in the talk was when Ira declared “Radio is your most visual media…” which made sense in respect to the way the show must paint a picture in your mind, but then, after a long pause, he said, “That’s not actually true… Turns out having pictures is very very visual.”

Ira invoked Arabian Nights in expressing the importance of storytelling. He described Scheherazade as “very Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 3″ and how she used storytelling to keep the king from killing her for years, after which he could not kill her because the many stories had made him sensitive to the perspective of others, especially Sheherazade’s father, who had spent night after night wondering if this would be the morning he would find his daughter dead.

For a man with a memorable career that spans three decades Albert Brooks doesn’t seem to have that many credits to his name in IMDB. The writer/director of Real Life, Defending Your Life, Mother, and Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World has brought us only a handful of films, but they are all memorable for the characters and social insights they bring to the screen. For his most recent work, he has dropped the ‘director’ part of his title to deliver us his first novel, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, a remarkably prescient bit of futurism that will deserve a revisit two decades from now.

Many of the overwhelmingly positive reviews of 2030 on Amazon describe Brooks’ futurist portrayal of the United States with words like “dystopian” and “black comedy,” but I felt these terms undermine the dire warnings about America’s direction the book presages. There was nothing comedic, even darkly comedic, about the situations in which Brooks’ characters find themselves, only tragedy. To call the world Brooks foretells “dystopian” makes it sound fantastical, extreme, like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but everything Brooks describes is not only plausible, but predicted by economic, political, and historical experts in the media on a weekly basis.

2030 is a work of science fiction, but only minimally. Brooks does a great job predicting the tech of the future in that he simply extends the tech of today. Information technology has gone a little further, with more sophisticated GPS devices, more advanced electric cars, real time translation devices, movie theaters that use streaming video, rudimentary robots that are basically animatronic real dolls, and other innovations that are easy to envision from where we stand today. Good science fiction uses technological innovations to explore ideas and concepts that speak to our own time, and Brooks takes our current tech to its logical next step to convincingly paint a world of very real social dilemmas the United States will face two decades from now.

2030 takes place in an America with debt so unimaginable that, while a figure is only hinted at, when “the big one” finally hits Los Angeles and all the insurance companies declare bankruptcy rather than handle the deluge of claims, America is faced with the prospect that the city must be abandoned and its citizens relocated to other cities because there is no way to fund its reconstruction. In this very plausible future, politicians are legislating all they can to keep the country going long enough so that the Baby Boomers can continue to enjoy the lifestyles to which they are accustomed at the expense of the following generations’ quality of life. This is the core social conflict of Brooks’ description of the future, not a culture war or class warfare, but strife between two generations: an older generation that won’t let go of what it has and a younger generation that has nothing.

Albert Brooks at a Book Signing in LA
Credit: Dave Malkoff

Brooks’ (born 1947) intuitiveness on this issue is supported by America’s recent political dialogs over tackling the deficit. Baby Boomer Democrats refuse to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits because it is their generation that is starting to make use of them, and when Democrats and Republicans talk about raising the age for receiving Social Security benefits, they are invariably talking about the change being imposed on the generations following the Baby Boomers. Meanwhile, states are cutting spending on public schools to balance their budgets, setting a quality of education below that which they themselves enjoyed thanks to the hard work of their parents “The Greatest Generation.” It’s interesting to consider that former Clinton adviser Paul Begala (born 1961) calls the Baby Boomers “The Worst Generation,” describing them as “the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history.”

But Brooks doesn’t fall into such an easy, broad condemnation of an entire generation. Instead, he wisely lays the blame on the larger forces at work in our massive political machine. In his future the AARP has become the most powerful lobby in the United States, while every new medical advancement, from curing cancer to strengthening bones, extends the lifespans of its members and swells its ranks even further. Like a union, corporation, or any other kind of lobby, the organization fights for the benefits of its members at the expense of outsiders. This makes seniors the target of terrorism from younger generations, such as the fictional “Youth for Equality” movement.

Brooks’ characters are everyday individuals living out their lives like ants subject to these colossal forces of which they can barely see the big picture. Brooks skillfully weaves the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people into one another effortlessly so that nothing feels contrived. We can understand every character’s perspective, sympathizing with the hopeless youth, established seniors, entrepreneurs, innovators, politicians, and naive terrorists. It is this weaving of personal tragedies that makes the book so effective.

I would love to see this book made into a movie, but it does not seem like something Hollywood’s escapist fare could do justice. Brooks doesn’t simplify complex issues into right and wrong. End of life care, assisted suicide, national debt, and a myriad of other issues are portrayed as the abstruse ethical and social conundrums that they really are. If our politicians and pundits had the same clarity of vision instead of postponing our problems down the road, maybe Brooks’ future wouldn’t seem quite as tragically inevitable.

Further Reading

A related sentiment can be found in what Roger Ebert wrote for his review of the film I.O.U.S.A.:

A letter to our grandchildren, Raven, Emil and Taylor: I see you growing up into such beautiful people, and I wish all good things to you as you make the leap into adulthood. But I have just seen a documentary titled “I.O.U.S.A.” that snapped into sharp focus why your lives may not be as pleasant as ours have been. Chaz and I had the blessing of growing up in an optimistic, bountiful America. We never fully realized that we were paying for many of our comforts with your money.

Several years ago I wrote an open letter to Baby Boomers asking them to clean up their national debt mess before leaving the workforce into retirement. It’s interesting to note that I recieved several critical emails from Conservatives at the time, because it was Bush’s debt then, who told me the deficit didn’t matter, debt was a good thing, and that I didn’t understand anything about economics. Oh how the times have changed.

Big Think has an interesting article on how America will handle its aging population, with cities becoming more senior-friendly in an attempt to incorporate the elderly into the productive class.

At Science Online 2011 I was introduced to the Prezi Presentation Paradigm by Stacy Baker of Extreme Biology. After getting past a surprisingly mild learning curve, I was able to produce the following presentation mixing a Prezi presentation with desktop video capture:

Keeping in mind this is not the best example of a Prezi demo, you can step through and play with the MemexPlex Prezi itself below (alternately, you can browse popular Prezis here). Don’t confine yourself to just click through the presentation, as you can click-and-drag, double-click, and zoom as well:

Stacy Baker advised us to start big and work into smaller displays to manage things, and she demonstrated some fantastic examples of this, zooming through the letter “o” in a sentence to reveal a high-quality image tucked away in the presentation. Prezi also allows you to break out of the linearity of slide show presentations. Baker explained how she could show her entire presentation to her class and then focus on the sections they were curious about, making the teaching flow more dynamic.

I tried to do something similar with an Amazon Studios Writer’s Pitch for a screenplay I submitted. I apologize for the audio, but it does demonstrate how Prezi can show your audience the entire outline of your presentation, take them full loop through it, and bring them back to the big picture:

You can play with the Prezi-only version of this presentation here:

There’s a real “WOW” factor in Prezi demos right now. They might be taken for granted in the near fuure, but they look like the death of Power Point today (or will be with a few more features like video and animation integration). Prezi is free to use through an online interface with nothing to download and it’s lots of fun to play with. So go check it out!

Notes:

If you’re looking to part a fool and their money, psychic readings are a great business*. Through the art of cold reading,by making statements that seem personal, but are true for most people, the psychic creates the illusion of having supernatural intuition about their client. For instance, they may say “I sense that you are sometimes insecure, especially with people you don’t know very well.” Who isn’t? Or, if the client is older, they may say, “Your father passed on due to problems in his chest or abdomen,” which would be true for the majority of causes of death. Psychics also use the rainbow ruse strategy of making a statement that is vague and contradictory about the client, such as “Most of the time you are positive and cheerful, but there has been a time in the past when you were very upset.” It’s probably not hard to find experiences in your life that match this statement to yourself, and if you can’t, the psychic can claim you need to look deeper or that you are suppressing something.

A favorite tool of psychics in performing their readings are tarot cards. These cards come in a wide variety of themes, with fantastic artwork, and generalized symbolism that takes on different meanings depending on where the card appears in a spread. They work because they exploit both the cold reading technique and generate rainbow statements in their symbolism.

Tarot Universal de Dali
Credit: Le.Mat

I occasionally do Tarot readings for myself. Over the years, when confronted with a challenging life issue, I would turn to The Mythic Tarot set for help figuring out what to do. This set portrays four different Greek Myths in the four different suits, and I always have to keep the book open when doing a reading because I find it impossible to remember what the cards mean.

I expect many scientists out there would say that my playing with the tarot harms my credibility as a skeptic, but I am completely aware of what makes the tarot work, and have no delusions that the meanings I appear to find in the cards are self-generated. The cards are like the old Principia Discordia quote about books, “…a mirror, when a monkey looks in, no apostle looks out.”

That doesn’t mean the cards are useless. The tarot meme has survived five centuries, in part for the solace it provides, but also because it serves a useful function. A tarot reading provides an exercise in deep, sustained thought on a subject, each new card challenging the practitioner to look at the subject of inquiry from a different angle. The tarot spread doesn’t answer any questions, but like a Rogerian Psychologist it prompts us to find the correct answers within ourselves.

Science Tarot

With this obligatory, “I am not a flake,” disclaimer out of the way, let me say how incredibly happy I was to discover the recently released Science Tarot set. That’s right, science-themed tarot cards, and they are absolutely delightful. All the traditional cards are here, but instead of wands, pentacles, swords, and cups, we have Bunsen burners, magnifying glasses, scalpels, and beakers. Filling the roles of king, queen, knight, and page in the various suits are science giants like Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Hypatia, Galileo, Herschel, Oppenheimer, Barbara McClintok, Carl Sagan, John Muir, and others. While the concepts surrounding science and academia fill in the major arcana, such as the student playing the Fool, Schrodinger’s Cat as the Wheel of Fortune, Conservation of Energy as Justice, and, most apropos, the Devil being unquestioning behavior. The cards tell a version of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey Monomyth adapted to the natural world, turning science into an epic hero’s quest, complete with discovery, strife, growth, and achievement.

The set also introduces three new spreads for tarot readings: the Chemical Reaction, Periodic Table, and, my new favorite, the Benzene Ring.

The Chemical Reaction Spread

This simple spread is actually pretty standard for most tarot sets. It consists of asking a question and laying out three cards. The leftmost card represents the past, middle the present, and rightmost the future. I’m not too big on this spread, as it isn’t as involved and challenging as others, lacking the deep, meditative immersion in a subject that makes tarot such a useful exercise. It does make for a useful example of a tarot reading, however:

My Chemical Reaction Spread

Here’s the breakdown of my reading, using the book as a reference:

1. Reactants Representing the Past: Seven of Wands (Expansion), a red giant star representing a maturing state, inner creation, “finding your voice.”
2. Transition State of the Present: The World (Grand Unified Theory), a theory of everything, the achievement of a “grand and profound goal,” attaining “wholeness and prosperity.”
3. Product Representing the Future: Eight of Wands (Big Bang), the climactic birth of the Universe, sending ideas out into the public sphere, a growing universe of ideas and influence.

This spread speaks pretty clearly to me. My past has been one of constantly working on my personal growth, my recent years have been filled with a sense of accomplishment as I fell into security with my soul mate and philosophy of science, and my future plans are to promote this worldview and contribute to it as much as possible. The message I get from the spread: keeping working at it. If the cards were reversed, I would probably find a way to read the same message in them. If I was unable to find a message in the cards relating to my life, then, as the authors say, “If a tarot reading seems to make little sense, another reading may speak more clearly instead.”

The Periodic Table Spread

The Periodic Table Spread

With 10 cards, each one prompting the practitioner to focus on a different aspect of the question, this spread provides a great mental tool for deep immersion on a topic. The positions of the cards relate to the elements on the periodic table in terms of being reactive, inert, transitory, and a place for the “undiscovered element.” I’ve found it a challenging spread at times, when a card appears in a position where I cannot find any connection to my own life, but everything up to that point had worked well, but the challenge itself provides deeper insights, even if it cannot be resolved.

The Benzene Ring Spread

Benzene Ring Spread

These six cards fall into place where the hydrogen atoms link on a benzene molecule, running in a full circle from perception of the subject to resolution. In the above spread, I have drawn the following:

1. Personal Perception: Four of Wands (Brown Dwarf), waiting at the threshold to become or fulfill one’s promise
2. Personal Intention: Ace of Swords (Reductionism), a path of discovery and insight, peeling away layers to find knowledge
3. External Perception: Six of Swords (Quantum Sea), immediate perceptions can be misleading, accepting apparent contradictions can provide guidance
4. Complication: Eight of Pentacles (Drift), experiences and knowledge gained in journey may be positive, but often traumatic in their transformative nature
5. Integrating two Perceptions: Seven of Swords (Chaos Theory), trying to maintain total control is futile, go with the flow
6. The Resolution: Eight of Wands (Big Bang), releasing creative energies, expanding the impact one has on the lives of others

Here’s the part I really like about this spread: you can run it again on the same question since the things you learn in the first run of the spread have changed your outlook on the topic, the second run of the spread can be interpreted in the context of these new insights:

Benzen Ring Spread, Second Run

1. Personal Perception: The Sun (Duality of Light), unification of opposing ideas into one reality, appreciating end result
2. Personal Intention: Three of Pentacles (Bonding), introduction of a new influence stimulating new growth and creativity
3. External Perception: The Lovers (Binary Star), balance in a relationship producing radiant energy
4. Complication: Nine of Pentacles (Aurora), brilliant, fleeting display of beauty on a grand scale, casting off of old for a new self
5. Integrating two Perceptions: Four of Cups (Dormancy), waiting at the threshold, rest and preservation that may lead to missed opportunity
6. The Resolution: King of Pentacles (Marie Curie, Visionary), “look into the distance, take command, and do what must be done”

I like how there are some mirror images in these two readings, a symmetry of concepts. The first reading has a personal perception of dormancy and being at a threshold of becoming in the brown dwarf, while the second reading has the same concepts in the integration of perceptions place with the dormancy of the lungfish. The resolution of the first reading is a brilliant burst of expression in the big bang, but this same kind of event is the second reading’s complication in the Aurora. Symmetry

What do these two readings mean? They mean whatever you find in them for yourself.

Being Creative

The book accompanying any tarot set is meant only as a starting point. From it, you can play with crafting your own spreads and semantic connections in the cards. My favorite aspect of Science Tarot is the familiarity of the people and concepts portrayed in the major and minor arcana. I know Carl Sagan far better than I know Odysseus, and will gain insights when he comes up in a reading from my personal experience with the Cosmos series and his many books. Lack of inquisitiveness speaks more to my personal philosophy than a supernatural lord of the underworld, just as the Conservation of Energy principle provides a more concrete concept than the sword and scales of Justice. I can lay these cards out and, based on what I know about the concepts, set the book down and make up my own interpretation of the spread.

* My mother was very into New Age belief when I was growing up, and I was heavily exposed to the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) culture in Virginia Beach, and I can attest, the majority of psychics have the best intentions. They don’t know they are doing cold readings and making rainbow statements, they truly believe they have insights. A great article by a former psychic about how the culture creates these beliefs is Karla McLaren’s Bridging the Chasm between Two Cultures. Just as no one consciously designed the tarot to be universal, psychic culture didn’t set out to defraud people. I perceive them the same way I percieve psychiatrists: well-meaning, but no scientific support.

Dr. Seymour Papert is best known as the inventor of the Logo programming language, a tool for teaching children problem solving, but his influence in education goes much further than that. Papert has always been a visionary where computers and education intersect, and it is incredible how glacially society has moved to embrace his proposed pedagogical recommendations.

30 years ago, Seymour Papert argued for integrating computers into the classroom as a means of accelerating learning and empowering children with the means to direct their own educations. In his classic text Mindstorms he postulates that the cost of having a computer system for every child would actually save the school system money because it would shorten the number of years required to educate each student:

The problem of cost has not gone away, but it may be overestimated how much it would cost to put a computer for every child in a school. $1,000 a child spread out over 12 years? Plus, the use of computers could accelerate learning, maybe even cut a year off of the amount of time it takes to educate a student, saving 1/12th the cost of a child’s total education.

Papert was talking about computers in 1980 dollars, before the home PC had dropped in price to today’s more accessible levels and magnified power, so today the above statement is even truer. One laptop for every child in America would cut the number of years necessary to educate our children and enhance the quality of their education dramatically.

LOGO Turtle

One of my favorite topics in Papert’s book is when he discusses how computers empower writing. Rewriting is an alien concept to most kids in a hand-written medium, because the process is too laborious. I recently dug up my high school essays and the many handwritten drafts I had to go through at the teacher’s prompting. What a boring way to spend my time. Once a child writes on a computer, the rewrite focuses on enhancing the finished product, not the tedium of rewriting it.

What if writing itself is a problem? Papert notes that “…a child who has become enamored of logical order is set up to be turned off by English spelling and to go on from there to develop a global dislike of writing.” Luckily, the computer allows so many other means of expression. A child turned off by writing may turn to audio, video, and graphical arts to express themselves.

“The educator must be an anthropologist. The educator as anthropologist must work to understand which cultural materials are relevant to intellectual development,” Papert argues in Mindstorms. Thirty years ago he warned of the impending divide between “computer cultures,” pre-computer vs computer-literate. While the gap between the computer haves and have nots has arguably narrowed in America, the importance of information technology in our lives means that anyone left out is left far far behind.

Lego Mindstorms NXT
Credit: eirikref

Papert recognizes that there are two possible means for children to interact with computers. Along one path, the computer is used to direct a child’s learning. In the other, the child chooses their own path of discovery. Either the computer programs the child or the child the computer. It’s the difference between knowing-that vs knowing-how, propositional-knowledge vs procedural knowledge, and facts vs skills as Papert describes it in so many ways.

There is tremendous potential here for children to learn in deeper and accelerated ways never before possible. A child who programs a computer is immersing themselves in logical problem solving, engaging in self-reflection in a way they can’t get from passively reading a book. “Thinking about thinking turns a child into an epistemologist,” Papert observes, “an experience not even shared by most adults.”

When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program. When they design an internet service that is edited by a vast anonymous crowd, they are suggesting that a random crowd of humans is an organism with a legitimate point of view. – Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget is a book that has infuriated the Information Age idealists who believe that the World Wide Web will solve all the world’s problems through the wisdom of crowds to leverage civilization into a new paradigm where all content is free open-access and anyone can make it big without the rusty old-media institutions with their profit-driven motivations blah, blah, blah… Let me avow upfront that I am one of those people, and so is Lanier, but Lanier has insights into where the vision has gone horribly wrong and how our favorite online innovations are actually institutions exploiting our free labors while simultaneously constraining our creativity.

Lanier often refers to the MIDI format for composing music on a computer as an example of how an initial idea constrains or “locks in” everything or that follows it, similar to the way America is locked into the standard measurement system or QWERTY keyboards. The MIDI format constrained musical notes within rigid format boundaries, while real-life musical notes have no such boundaries. While I knew that the World Wide Web was only one of many possible architectures for hosting content on the Internet, Lanier introduced me to the idea that the file was just one of many possible architectures for storing data, and that some earlier operating systems had considered having one large unit that stored everything. I can’t imagine how that would work in many aspects, but it does demonstrate that, once something becomes standard, other creative solutions fall out of our imaginations. Lanier observes that, “It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering.”

Lanier sees this technological lock-in phenomenon constraining our creativity through our use of social networking applications, where everyone’s freedom of expression is lost in the formalism of Facebook pages or extremely limited functionality of Twitter. I must agree with Lanier that I long for the early days of the Wild Wild Web, when it was just a bunch of webpages created by individuals. They were like children’s drawings, unbalanced, tacky, and wonderful. It wasn’t the formal, managed and constrained world of Facebook pages, where relationship dynamics are defined with a radio-button list of options and social-interaction games. Before Twitter, we had IRC, ICQ, MS Messenger, and Yahoo IM applications for tweeting our thoughts without the 140 character constraints, @-symbol hacks, and no option for tweeting to a smaller subset of our friends or opening private conversation with one.

Clint’s Homepage

Wikipedia is another example Lanier brings up. The wiki-encyclopedia comes up as the first result of most general-subject searches and is the site most people go straight to for a quick reference on a subject, but before Wikipedia, people had to read a variety of perspectives on a subject, with the most popular reaching the first page of results. With Wikipedia, we are accepting a standardized format and tone for our information, one that is neutral and bland. In contrast, Lanier reminds us of ThinkQuest, which was a site that held competitions for people to design the best content teaching specific subjects.

“…web 2.0 designs, like wikis, tend to promote the false idea that there is only one universal truth in some arenas where that isn’t so,” Lanier observes. When you browse its archives, Thinkquest still looks like the old Internet, from the days of the Wild Wild Web. There are multiple ways of communicating a concept, as anyone who clicks on the “discussion” tab on a Wikipedia article well knows from the endless debates going on behind the sterile facade of the online encyclopedia. The problem is that few people know that “discussion” button and that additional layer of diversity exists, and they take Wikipedia as the end truth:

The “wisdom of crowds” effect should be thought of as a tool. The value of a tool is its usefulness in accomplishing a task. The point should never be the glorification of the tool.

It’s the scarcity of media that makes it valuable. In a world where all music, movies, and books can be found online for free, such creative works become worthless, only the advertising surrounding them is valuable. Lanier notes the injustice of everyone producing content on the web for free, while the hosts of that content make billions, “Every penny Google earns suggests a failure of the crowd–and Google is earning a lot of pennies.” Lanier coined the term Digital Maoism to describe the open-source/free information philosophy we blindly accept today.

I find it apropos that, like the communist party, there are top-down overlords like Google, YouTube, and Facebook defining the rules of what content is acceptable and what makes it to the top, while reaping advertising dollars from our contributions. There is a popular folklore that anyone can make it big in the digital economy without the help of publishers, production companies, or record labels. Lanier talks about his quest to find just 300 musicians who were making a living in the new economy, simply selling their music directly to the public and playing live shows like Ani DiFranco. He found only a few.

Lanier’s skepticism of the digital-idealism is tempered, and he finds many examples of truly innovative creativity amongst the mashups and nostalgia that defines so much online culture, such as Will Wright’s brilliant game Spore and the new medium of creative expression it fosters with its species-design tools. Through advancing virtual reality, Lanier looks forward to what he calls “post symbolic communication,” where two or more people inhabit the same virtual world, and communicate ideas through the manipulation of the environment, such as a student turning his or herself into “triangles to learn trigonometry, or molecules to learn chemistry.” We are already moving toward such learning environments with games like Immune Attack and Fold It!.

Digital idealists, such as myself, have a responsibility to read Lanier’s manifesto. If we believe in shifting paradigms, then we must challenge our own. Too convincingly, Lanier describes a current state of the Internet that has grown incredibly stale in comparison to its vibrant beginnings. Unless we want to be complaining about Google and Facebook the way we complain about Microsoft, as an evil empire to which we are unfortunate slaves, we must take care to encourage true diversity online. Start by going somewhere other than Wikipedia or the first search result the next time you look something up.

Additional Information:

Jaron Lanier at Edge.

Roger Ebert absolutely loved it, Jim Emerson thought it was totally lame, and io9 has an essay up about it being a recapitulation of the “White Man’s Guilt” plotline. Here are my thought’s on James Cameron’s Avatar:

Uncanny Valley: Doesn’t apply to this movie at all, which was one of my disappointments with it. I wanted to see human beings move seamlessly between CGI and live action, but Cameron wisely avoided attempting this. The Navi are aliens, like LOTR’s Gollumn, they are sufficiently non-human to avoid creeping us out. Failing to attempt CGI humans makes the film significantly less revolutionary to my mind.

Alien life on Pandora: On the one hand, I was disappointed with the numerous earth-referencing aliens: the alien horses, alien lemurs, alien rhinoceroses, dogs, panthers, and such. On the other hand, I appreciated the alien twists on these species: nostrils on their chests, four forearms, and the bioluminescence of the plant life. The closer we look at Pandora’s life, the more alien it becomes in the details. We can clearly see a distinct evolutionary history in Pandora’s life forms’ shared traits.

Clichéd Storyline: Yes, the movie is “Dances With Wolves in space,” but that’s a good thing. It would have been foolishness to try out some experimental storyline with a $250 million budget. George Lucas demonstrated that with The Phantom Menace, a film that avoided all conventional plot devices in a sophomoric attempt at innovative storytelling to become the all-time epic fail of moviemaking ever¹.

Deux ex Machina: I believe this is a reference to the “Earth Mother” joining the fight at the film’s climax, as if the hand of god were coming down to thwart the antagonists; however, as a good bit of science fiction, we know that the planet is a living network, with all of its species connected through hubs, similar to several plant species on Earth. Yes, it’s a type of god, but a god with a scientific explanation. “Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization is indistinguishable from god.” If there’s a scientific explanation, then it’s not the hand of god coming down at the end.

Environmentalist Philosophy: I am bothered by the film’s hypocrisy of communicating a message of environmentalism and romanticizing a return to a more primitive time through an incredibly elaborate $250 million dollar fabrication produced by a farm of energy-ravenous networked computer systems. I am also disappointed with the film’s resolution, where the primitives win and the technologically-advanced civilization is sent back to its planet to die. Environmentalism is not a zero-sum game, and a more thoughtful story would have come up with a more sophisticated solution where both sides could have won. This film has an important environmental message; however, it is a useless message for our modern world. If all 6.9 billion of us on Earth gave up our technology and tried to live off the land, we would destroy our planet even more quickly and mostly starve away as a result. In this respect, Avatar is pure pseudo-environmentalist escapism, while the true environmentalists are out building solar, geothermal, and wind power stations to transition our civilization to a less environmentally-impactful lifestyle.

¹ I caught some flak for this point on Jim Emerson’s blog, to which I responded:

So Avatar is a good movie because it’s familiar and conventional, while The Phantom Menace is a bad movie because it’s new and unconventional? Sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense. When did writing a new story become “experimental”?

I’ll bite. TPM is a bad movie exactly for being unconventional. By unconventional, I mean George Lucas’ story included three to four protagonists competing for the spotlight, characters so formal and regal only a fanboy could love them, a plot the requires a political wonk to decipher it, and an overly-dazzling ending that tried to tie together four different action plot lines. These are all unconventional in the context of your average American action-theater fare, and they all detracted from what should have been an otherwise enjoyable film. Most people cared less about these failings because the film drowned us in, at the time, revolutionary special effects, but now, with those effects no longer being dazzling, people can see how truly awful TPM was.

Mind you, many of these same attributes have added up to some great filmmaking. Consider David Lynch’s Dune, a sci-fi epic both politically-heavy and filled with formal, regal characters. I and many of my friends consider Dune a fantastic film, but in cinematic history it is considered a spectacular flop. It was unconventional, it was awesome, but it had no mass appeal. What if Cameron had spent his revolutionary CGI effects on remaking such a film?

Now consider Star Wars, which was out and out space opera, knights and maidens in space. Was its story new? Innovative? No. It was a standard, cut-and-paste plotline–but also one with a proven track record. It’s movie making history because it had revolutionary special effects and a soundtrack to present that canned plot in a superiorly entertaining fashion.

Mind you, I’m not saying that it’s a good thing that directors can’t make awesomely-budgeted experimental films, but it’s naive to pretend they have a non-professional-harakiri choice in the matter. James Cameron made a wise choice in hijacking Dances With Wolves, a plotline with proven mass-appeal, as the vehicle for showcasing his special effects innovations. Avatar may not survive and be revered by fanboys the way Star Wars has over the decades, but by playing it safe in his storytelling, Cameron gives his film much better odds towards that end.

I strongly disagree with avid Plotz’s commentary, Dan Brown’s Washington, which argues that the real story of Washington is in the political players, not the spiritual and philosophical history which is the focus of The Lost Symbol. Dan Brown’s power as a writer is in having his characters take an intellectual adventure, travelling down pathways of obscure knowledge and history. The Lost Symbol is at its most intriguing when the characters are just standing around reasoning, however misrepresented their facts may be at times.

Rosicrucian Metaphor for the Invisible College
“The Temple of the Rosy Cross”
Credit: Teophilus Schweighardt Constantien

If you can remember that Dan Brown writes fiction and ride along with his storytelling with a notepad and a critical eye, you can discover some very fascinating things to look for in Washington DC and the Enlightenment Era. Thanks to Brown, I discovered the Invisible College, which was the precursor to the UK’s Royal Society, a society of scientists interested in understanding the world through empirical analysis. Today, the term serves to describe any method of attaining an education without going through an official academic route, similar to attending free courses online to get the knowledge, if not the course credit. The Rosicrucians was another fascinating concept, linked to the Invisible College, another secret society that may or may not have existed, but two anonymous manifestos were attributed to the organization, Fama fraternitatis and Confessio Fraternitatis, that stirred up much intellectual debate in Europe, and may have contributed to the Enlightenment movement. One individual rumored to have written the manifestos was Francis Bacon, who’s New Atlantis, also mentioned in Brown’s book, which depicted a utopian society founded on the principles of free inquiry and scientific research.

Library of Congress, Jefferson Reading Room

The Lost Symbol takes place across a wonderful variety of settings right around the Washington DC mall, which would be difficult to take in over the course of a week, much less during the single night in which Brown’s book takes place. He hits most of the science imagery found in the Jefferson Reading Room, a fantastic monument to science, knowledge, and Enlightenment values. The US Botanical Gardens, National Statuary Hall, and the Kryptos Sculpture outside CIA headquarters are just a few fascinating locations in the book and they serve as just a glance at the immense amount of history packed into the nation’s capital.

Kryptos
Credit: CIA

Brown has a penchant for silly academic scenes where Professor Robert Langdon wows awestruck students with seemingly incredible historical facts. The Lost Symbol delivers many of these, like when students mistake the pristine Smithsonian Castle for an ancient Norman castle so the Professor can correct them. But the Smithsonian is an incredible Institution, one that requires weeks to take in just what’s on display around the National Mall. Dan Brown introduces us to the Smithsonian Museum Support Center (SMSC), described in Smithsonian Magazine as the “Nation’s Attic,” which emphasizes that what the public can access in the museums is only a tiny fraction of the Smithsonian’s total collection. However, Brown’s book is a little out of date, as the squid and coelacanth referenced in the SMSC’s “Wet Pod” are currently on display at the Sant Ocean Hall in the Smithsonian museum of Natural History, which opened September 2008.

Smithsonian Museum Support Center (SMSC)
Via Google Maps

I never suspected there was anything at the Washington National Cathedral for me, an Enlightenment scholar, to appreciate; however, I am thankful to Dan Brown for introducing me to the Space Window, honoring the Moon landing, and includes a fragment of lunar rock brought back from an American lunar mission. The cathedral also features the head of Darth Vader as one of its gargoyles, voted by children as the scariest figure to fulfill the “role of the grotesque” in the architecture.

Washington National Cathedral Space Window

My favorite new Washington DC discovery in The Lost Symbol is the Apotheosis of Washington, the mural gracing the inside of the Capitol Building’s dome, which depicts the Founding Fathers and other great minds of their age receiving wisdom directly from the Roman gods. Ceres sits on a McCormick mechanical reaper, bringing agricultural science to Americans, Vulcan forges cannonballs in front of a steam engine, Venus helps to lay the transatlantic telegraph cable, and Minerva is shown bringing an electrical generator, batteries, and a printing press to the great American scientists Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Morse, and Robert Fulton.

Science in the Apotheosis of Washington

The problem is that all of these real-world settings and details prime us to believe other, wholly fabricated aspects of Brown’s storytelling. I unquestioningly swallowed the falsehood that the Founding Father’s originally planned to call our nation’s capital “New Rome,” because I knew they were heavily influenced by the Greek Democracy and Roman Republic; however, I have found no evidence that the FF intended this whatsoever, and must assume that it has no basis in fact¹.

Brown’s protagonist, Robert Langdon, asserts at one point that Google is not research. Maybe Brown fears his readers discovering snopes.com or other original sources where they can find out how he has exaggerated or misrepresented material. For instance, the way he overhypes the CIA’s Stargate Program, which experimented with remote viewing, but was cancelled without producing anything conclusive. Or the importance of the Noetic Sciences, which deals with supernatural ways of coming into knowledge, and, despite millions of books being sold on the subject, has yet to produce anything empirical. He mentions that meditating Yogis, produce a miraculous waxy substance from their pineal glands, but fails to mention this substance would be melatonin (there’s no evidence for Brown’s statement anyway). And, of course, 2012 has to make an appearance as well.

Brown ties together the facts that Isaac Newton’s temperature scale had 33 degrees (zero being freezing, 33 boiling), there are 33 Vertebrae in the human spine, and 33 degrees in the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry as proof that 33 is perceived as a powerful number in mysticism. If Dan Brown had wanted to weave the number into his storytelling a little more, he could have included Dante’s Divine Comedy (3 canticas with 33 cantos each), the number of segments in the United Nations’ symbol, and the coming of age for hobbits in the Lord of the Rings according to Wikipedia.

Where The DaVinci Code was focused on religious institutions suppressing knowledge to maintain their power, Lost Symbol focuses on ancient institutions trying to keep psychic powers out of mortal hands. Ancient societies had an awesome understanding of the universe that we modern folk are only just now beginning to discover, according to the book, and we simply aren’t ready for much of this forbidden knowledge. Everything we discover with modern physics was already written about in all the ancient texts. The Bible, for instance, contains this forbidden knowledge, but it’s hidden in the verse to prevent us from destroying ourselves with it. According to The Lost Symbol, America’s Founding Fathers were keenly aware of this:

It was here, Robert, at the very core of this young American nation, that our brightest forefathers–John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine–all warned of the profound dangers of interpreting the Bible literally. In fact, Thomas Jefferson was so convinced the Bible’s true message was hidden that he literally cut up the pages and reedited the book, attempting, in his words, ‘to do away with the artificial scaffolding and restore the genuine doctrines.’

These words are technically true, but are highly misleading for the context in which they appear in The Lost Symbol. Dan Brown is trying to make it seem as if the Founding Fathers thought there was a hidden mystical meaning in the Bible, but this was not Thomas Jefferson’s intent in crafting his own version of the Bible. Jefferson started out constructing a simplified version of the New Testament that American Indians could easily understand, but turned to extracting what he considered Jesus’ true philosophical intent from what he came to see as the morass of supernatural embellishment the evangelicals had brought into the scriptures. Thomas Paine was highly critical of the Bible, not seeing a hidden mystical meaning, but a philosophy that he found morally reprehensible.

Dan Brown, in trying to prop up Noetic Sciences, ends up perpetuating an historical urban legend instead:

Peter once compared Noetic Scientists to the early explorers who were mocked for embracing the heretical notion of a spherical earth. Almost overnight, these explorers went from fools to heroes, discovering uncharted worlds and expanding the horizons of everyone on the planet.

This is nonsense and bad history. In American public schools we are taught that Columbus’ journey to find a western route to India was all the more amazing because everyone at the time thought the Earth was flat. While this makes his story more compelling, the reality was that the Earth’s spherical nature was a well-established fact. Aristotle knew the Earth was round in the third-century BC by observing its shadow on the Moon, Alexandria philosopher Eratosthenes had estimated the size of the Earth, and the early Romans were the first to suggest the idea of a westward route to India. Columbus’ opponents knew the Earth was round; however, they believed the explorer had grossly underestimated its size. Dan Brown is himself guilty of underestimating the “wisdom of the ancients²” in not knowing that the ancients knew the Earth was round.

The problem is, if you believe the conspiracy theory that all this powerful forbidden knowledge is being obfuscated by secret societies, then the fact that original documents reveal a truth that is devoid of supernaturalism, however intriguing their philosophical debates, then the lack of evidence is merely more support for the conspiracy to hide the “truth.” It’s a catch-22: there’s no evidence of a conspiracy to hide what the conspiracy theorist wants to believe; therefore, the conspiracy theorist takes this as evidence that the knowledge is being effectively hidden³.

I do appreciate Dan Brown bringing up Albert Einstein’s concept of a “Cosmic Religion,” which was the sense of spirituality Einstein got from uncovering the workings of the natural world and was best explained in his 1930s essay in the New York Times Magazine, Religion and Science:

…the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts, and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics!

There is spirituality in this view of life, and there is hidden power to be revealed through scientific experimentation and empirical discovery. Just as “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” as Arthur C. Clarke said, Dan Brown is correct that “If our ancestors could see us today, surely they would think us gods.”

¹ The only reference I could find to America and “New Rome” was as a pejorative in a commentary by Osama Bin Laden.

² Part of the “wisdom of the ancients” Brown cites is the ingenuity of Alchemy, from which he conveniently leaves out the fact that his icon, Isaac “Jeova Sanctus Unus” Newton poisoned himself by playing with and tasting Mercury.

³ Full disclosure, I am a Discordian, so technically I am part of the conspiracy, but since organization is against the principles of Discordianism, it must purely be an emergent phenomenon.

I had previously covered a Carl Sagan cameo in the Atomic Robo comic book, where Sagan sends Dr. Atomic Robo Tesla to Mars with the Viking Lander in a dream sequence.

Well, this month’s issue features the real Carl Sagan and he opens a scientific can of whoop-ass on an extradimensional monster.

Carl Sagan in Atomic Robo

The authors really know their Sagan, and Sagan fans will really appreciate the dialog, which references many of Sagan’s books and ideas. This comic is currently renewing my enthusiasm for the medium, as guest appearances by Tesla, H.P. Lovecraft, and Charels Fort and references to various historical science locations and events really enhance the action and adventure.

I highly recommend digging into the graphic novels of this comic’s previous sets.

The 1938 version of Superman was stronger than human beings because his home world, Krypton, was larger than Earth. As a result, the Kryptonians had evolved adapted to survive a force of gravity many times that of the Earthlings. This was a popular idea at the time. H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds’ Martians flop about unimpressively, struggling in Earth’s stronger gravity.

Keeping with this scientific explanation, the original Superman could not fly, but rather leapt across great distances, beams did not shoot from his eyes, and he was not immune to sleeping gas. Over the years, this science fiction Superman of the 1940s was slowly morphed into the flying across the galaxy, x-ray-telescopic-microscopic visioning, refrigerant-breathing, nuclear-holocaust-surviving, godlike being we know today, powered by the Sun and rendered powerless by kryptonite.

I recently got sucked into an entire weekend of comic book reading after discovering what is arguably Superman’s most challenging enemy, Brainiac, and wanted to learn more about this character who was the origin of the slang term for “genius.” One graphic novel, Superman VS. Brainiac, which collects various Superman issues from the past 50 years featuring the many, extremely different portrayals of Brainiac was especially interesting, because I got to see Brainiac evolve with the scientific concepts that captured people’s imaginations over the decades.

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Krypton City’s Sun on Tracks 1958
Copyright: DC Comics

In the 1958 first appearance of the villain, Brainiac was an uber-intelligent extraterrestrial, flying about the cosmos miniaturizing cities to collect in bottles, eventually planning to rule over them. Superman finds the city of Krypton miniaturized on Brainiac’s ship, where the citizens give him a tour of their farms run by robots, many many missiles, and a makeshift sun, which is a fireball that passes over the city on tracks each day.

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Brainiac the Computer 1964
Copyright: DC Comics

After DC discovered that Berkeley had a DIY “electric brain” computer kit named “Brainiac,” they modified the villain’s origin in 1964. Brainiac was actually a robot of 11th-level intelligence built by other robots and given an organic exterior to fool other civilizations because… I’m not sure really. Maybe aliens are more trustworthy than robots in 1960′s culture. The comics featuring this new computer Brainiac also featured advertising for the Brainiac Electric Brain Kit.

Light from Krypton Reaches Earth
Copyright: DC Comics

The computer Brainiac evolved to have a web of networking nodes across his bald head. He made an appearance in a Superman comic noteworthy for its astronomy-driven plot, where Superman is dealing with the emotional challenges of his lost home world, as the light from Krypton’s destruction is just reaching Earth in 1978.

Omniscient Brainiac 1983
Copyright: DC Comics

In 1983, Brainiac gets a huge upgrade, as he is converted from matter to energy and learns all there is to know about the Universe, even going back in time to watch it all happen from the big bang. He/It learns of another intelligence in the Universe, a “Master Programmer,” which we may assume is supposed to be god, and it wants Brainiac, who is a virus taking over the system, dead. Brainiac finally takes physical form as a robot that looks suspiciously like the Terminator, but with a bigger dome-head.

There’s a period of time in the late 1980s and early 1990s where Brainiac appears to inhabit the body of a psychic. Perhaps writers felt this was a natural extension of the idea that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I wasn’t too fond of this twist on the character.

Brainiac 2000
Copyright: DC Comics

The year 2000 bug brought an awesome storyline where an upgraded Brainiac from the future comes to Metropolis, assimilates the populace into its network, and then begins “upgrading” the city so that the robot may conquer it. He even refers to it as his “motherboard.” Brainiac continues to evolve, with issues exploring his biological versus mechanical aspects, and the fact that he is an indestructible force because there will always be other copies of his consciousness out there. We’ve gone from robots, through missiles, through the boundary between science and supernatural, and into the information age.

Note: I believe I am within the bounds of fair use in displaying these copyrighted images in my blogpost as this blog is not-for-profit, the images were chosen because they best illustrate the subject-matter of my post, they are of low digital quality, and there are no non-copyrighted images that may be used instead.

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future is a worthwhile survey of the cultural, academic, entertainment, and political aspects of science in America, and how they all contribute to the steady decline of science primacy in our country. Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s writing benefits from their immersion in the Science Blogging culture, where they are on the frontlines of the debate about how to best communicate science and bring it into the public eye (Note: Because I’m already tired of writing the names “Mooney and Kirshenbaum,” I will heretofore refer to them as “the authors” or “Moonenbaum.”). Moonenbaum does well in expanding the scope of their book to include, not just the division between the scientifically literate and illiterate, but the divide between experts in specialized fields of science, and the differences of opinion between scientists concerning what is acceptable science coverage in the media.

For instance, the author’s mention Larry Moran of The Sandwalk blog, who I have mocked in the past with a great deal of emotional immaturity and who argues that it is fine for science journalism to die because he thinks it error-ridden and worthless. At the 2007 Science Blogging Conference I saw him take some representatives of the Science News Hour to task for not knowing the journal sources backing up the stories they were covering. Dr. Moran is pedantic and elitist, which is fine for a professor, who must guard the gates of his academic profession to make sure only those who will contribute to its integrity get in. There is a place for his writing, which takes the media to task for calling a fossil a “missing link” when the term is silly, for running a sensationalist article title that misrepresents the science content, and that science media outlets and even journals all pretty much FAIL.

Of course, if we got rid of all these aspects of popular science journalism, there would be no need for science sections in newspapers, documentary channels on cable tv, or ideonexuses (ideonexi?) on the Internet. This site thrives on “Gee Whiz” 30-seconds-or-less science news. I get enough hardcore science at work, and I want foo-foo science when I get home. Carl Sagan, Moonenbaum aptly notes, was the greatest foo-foo science popularizer of them all (I think their term was “Science Ambassador” or “Proponent”), and he was skewered by the scientific community for bringing science to the everyday person:

…Sagan was punished by the scientific community for his public endeavors… Harvard University denied him tenure. Nobel laureate Harold Urey, a chemist who had previously served as one of Sagan’s mentors, helped quash his chances with a nasty letter objecting to Sagan’s budding media and outreach efforts.

This is so tragic considering Sagan delivered that unique sense of wonder to the masses that comes from understanding the world a little better. Even if some of the details are out of context, we’re still benefiting from it. So I’m with Sagan and Moonenbaum in that I don’t want science news to die. I want people tuning into science programs all day long, science radio while they work, I want them talking science at the coffee shops like they did during the Enlightenment. I don’t care if they’re getting the details wrong or are talking about some discovery out of context or over-emphasizing the significance of a finding that really isn’t a big deal. I want people rejoicing in science daily, appreciating it the way they appreciate reality television shows or summer blockbusters.

So when Moonenbaum takes on science in Hollywood films, I was surprised to find myself falling on the side of being a little more lenient in my appraisals. For instance, the authors take the film The Core to task for its admittedly ridiculous premise, but ignore the fact that all of the film’s heroes were scientists, and that the film’s climax involved a physics solution scientists should appreciate. John Rogers, one of the six screenwriters on the film, explained his intent:

When I came on, I set out to make one of the 50′s/60′s “science hero” movies that inspired me to go into physics (it was those movies and Lucifer’s Hammer actually, that led me to my field). I probably should have told Paramount that’s what I was up to, but it’s more likely for the best they had no idea what I was up tp. The Core is an explicit rejection of the “scientists bad, blue collar/soldier boys good” ethos that seems to have taken over current cinematic science fiction… If one kid sees physicists saving the day with wave-interference formulas fer chrissake, as in our big finale, and thinks it’s cool, we did okay. [sic]

No matter what you think of The Core as a film, it did kick off an epic debate between David Brin and John Rogers about communicating science in film and the originality of ideas in Hollywood. Just like even though it misrepresented black holes, blood boiling in a vacuum, and the destructive force of supernovas, the new Star Trek was still a movie that made scientists the heroes. I got a near-sexual chill down my spine from the scene where Kirk tells Captain Pike, “I read your thesis.” Anything that provokes discussion about science is a good thing in my book.

I challenge any scientist to write an even halfway decent Science Fiction story with rock-solid science. I don’t care if the author spends an dissertation-length exposition on astrobiology explaining the metabolism of silicon-based extraterrestrials, I guarantee you a physics scientist is going to write a blog post making fun of the alien’s mode of space travel. This is exactly the reason why author Jo Walton quickly abandoned her attempts to write science fiction, because building a plausible SF world involves too much research and too much explaining details within details. Screw it, was her conclusion, it’s easier to write fantasy. That’s a writer scared off to the dark side by scientists the same way my gaggle of Dungeons and Dragons geeks will scared away the girls.

The point is that science fiction movies, even bad science fiction movies, provide teachable moments, a way to ride a little bit of science education onto a blockbuster movie’s coat tails. Moonenbaum points out how Phil Plait regularly does this on his Bad Astronomy blog (referenced in the above ST link), and he does it well, acknowledging that no science fiction story is going to get it all right and that storytelling trumps realism… until doing so violates the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Then they should be properly flamed, like 10,000 BC or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Science Debate 2008

The topic of flaming brings me to Moonenbaum’s research on science in politics, where they have much to be proud of through their involvement with Science Debate 2008, a movement that continues to be active (and a movement of which the Larry Moran’s of the world disapprove). They note how politicians are actually afraid to debate science because they don’t want to appear ignorant on the subject. Surveying the blogosphere’s opinions of politicians, how could they win? Even if they answered 90 percent of questions thoughtfully, they’d get burned for the one fact they got wrong.

But consider the alternative:

Representative Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), one of three physicists in Congress, describes having to rush to the floor to prevent fellow members from killing science programs they haven’t understood–assuming, for instance, that “game theory” research involves sports.

Scientists would rather abandon the control of public policy to this kind of ignorance rather than engage in public debate? If scientists represent the truth, what do they have to lose? As we can see in the author’s example, we have everything to lose by not debating.

Overall, Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s book is a fantastic survey of the many dimensions to consider when tackling the issue of waning interest in science for Americans. My concern for Unscientific America is that the book has a narrow audience. Non-scientists will pass it by, while scientists appear apathetic. I greatly appreciated the book despite much of it being old-news to me, and hope to see more books tackling the issue of bringing science back to the forefront of American imaginations once again.

Additional Thought

I’ve been a longtime fan of Chet Raymo’s Science Musings blog, a rich, wonderful merging of classical literature references and modern scientific awe I discovered not long after seeing the inspiring film he wrote Frankie Starlight. I’m sorry to say that When God is Gone, Everything is Holy is the first book of his that I have had the pleasure of reading, but it will not be the last.

The feeling I got reading this text is similar to the deep sense of peace I get reading Carl Sagan. Here is someone who echoes the thoughts in my mind, like when he refers to “truth with a lowercase t.” He even shares my fascination with the golden mean, finding a deep spiritual significance in it:

The golden mean is the secret of tolerance, of modesty, of a healthy skepticism–of knowing that every dogmatic definition of God is a pale intimation of the truth and, inevitably it seems, an excuse for jihad, pogrom or crusade.

Raymo was raised Catholic and went to a Catholic school, but reminds us, “The science I learned at Notre Dame was the same science that was taught at University of California at Los Angeles.” This is a sentiment echoed by my friends who attended private Catholic schools as children, that they were taught evolution and appreciation for the sciences that was completely secular.

Religion and science do not have to be at odds, and may, as John Updike notes, share in the wonder, when he wrote, “Ancient religion and modern science agree: We are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention.” Raymo knows exactly how to draw the line:

The religious naturalist foregoes a personal God. God defined in our own image. God invested with human qualities: justice, love, will, desire, jealousy, artifice, and so on–in short, the attributes of human personhood. To the agnostic, a personal God is the ultimate idolatry.

The word “God,” Raymo notes, “is indeed almost irretrievably burdened with personhood. It is our golden calf, our idol.” When I use the word “spiritual” in this sense, I am not referring to anything religious or supernatural, but rather a feeling. It’s the feeling I get when I see a sunset, a satellite photo of Earth, diagram of the solar system’s boundary, hear about some fascinating scientific fact, or anything else that instills a sense of awe at the world around me and inspires a profound appreciation for the simple fact of existing to experience it.

Raymo is a proponent of spiritual naturalism or naturalistic spirituality, and he finely articulates this sense of spiritualism:

So this is my Credo. I am an atheist, if by God one means a transcendent Person who acts willfully within the creation. I am an agnostic in that I believe our knowledge of “what is” is partial and tentative–a tiny flickering flame in the overwhelming shadows of our ignorance. I am a pantheist in that I believe empirical knowledge of the sensate world is the surest revelation of whatever is worth being called divine. I am a Catholic by accident of birth.

“Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.” Chet quotes Charles Darwin, and then Lewis Thomas, “The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.” Raymo stresses the importance of recognizing our ignorance, and remaining humble to the vast realms of knowledge currently beyond us. “Only when a few curious people said “I don’t know” did science begin.”

“The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer,” Charles Darwin wrote. At the core of the Intelligent Design movement, is an urging for us not to tolerate complexity, but rather throw up our hands and give up when faced with it. When Chet Raymo applies gentle scorn to the Intelligent Design movement, it is done with just the right rhetorical tone of persuasion, not mockery:

Gaps have a way of being filled. We no longer see God’s intervening will in the appearance of a comet, or look for divine meaning in the death of a child from disease. I would hate to think that my own faith in God depended upon scientists never figuring out exactly how the blood-clotting protein cascade evolved…

ID and other ideologies, both religious and political, stress humanity’s distinction from the natural world, and argue for our dominance over it. But Raymo argues that thinking ourselves separate from nature denies us total enjoyment of it. It almost sounds like a sin when he talks about it, just as humility about our ignorance sounds like a holy virtue.

This is the strength of Chet Raymo’s worldview, that he can find a spiritual sense of awe at the natural world, without having “imagine fairies beneath it,” to quote Douglas Adams. Enlightenment scholars look pessimistically around at all the churches, one on every other street corner, and despairs at the apparent overwhelming popularity of religion’s fantasy. Chet Raymo sees the opposite. Every school building, university, hospital, research corporation, space mission, car, streetlight, grocery store, museum, and other modern convenience is a monument to science and the natural world. A world we all share, and would all be better off if we simply appreciated it together.

I have hundreds of megabytes worth of free books that I’ve downloaded from Project Gutenberg and various other sources online, which presents me with the dilemma of finding a way to read all of them. Reading them at my desktop is uncomfortable, although I have done this, sitting at a computer monitor for hours to read a novel. I’ve gotten through a couple of books on my cell phone, but the small screen is also headache-inducing. My OLPC would make a great reading device, but it takes a long time to boot and crashes when I try to access large text files.

That’s why I decided to try out Amazon’s second-generation Kindle, an iPod for books. I was drawn to the fact that the screen is not backlit, which is easier on the eyes, and the device uses very little energy to render text, making it portable on long trips. Plus, as text-files are extremely small, I knew the device’s several gigs worth of storage space was something I would never exhaust. Could you imagine telling someone they’d be able to store thousands of books and hundreds of hours of music on devices smaller than a dimestore novella twenty years ago? Technology is magic.

Since this is a positive review, I’ll start with the bad and get that out of the way. At $360, the Kindle is very over-priced. I would value this device around $200 max, and there are cheaper e-readers out there with more features, such as the Sony PRS-700BC. Additionally, the Kindle should really be priced at $390 as you should absolutely buy a $30-$50 cover for it. I made the mistake of buying just the Kindle, and got a scratch on my screen within two weeks of owning it, just from carrying it around in my messenger bag with pens and a clipboard.

With the capacity to store thousands of books on the device, it’s an incredible oversight that Amazon provides no way to organize books on the Kindle. Despite organizing my library into folders by category on the device itself, all of my books are displayed in a single list sortable by title, author, and last accessed. This is fine now, while I only have four pages of books to flip through, but will become unacceptable years down the road, after I’ve downloaded dozens of public domain texts from Gutenberg and need to find that one passage in The Age of Reason to quote in a post.

One final gripe is that the Kindle offers an incredibly useless feature, the capability to subscribe to blogs. For a small monthly fee, you can subscribe to a wide selection of well-known blogs. Whoopdee-doo. What use is it to subscribe to a link-blog like Boing Boing on my Kindle, if I can’t navigate to anything the site links to? That would be as worthless as looking at ideonexus on the device.

Edgar Allan Poe Kindle Screensaver Credit: Stillframe

Which brings me to the cool stuff. I am enthralled with the idea of being able to download newspapers onto the kindle for a small monthly fee, even if I have no intention of using the feature. Unfortunately for me personally, I read the news with an open text editor to take notes and links for later reference on ideonexus. Had this device come out ten years ago, newspapers might have found a viable way to survive the Information Age. Reading a newspaper on the back porch or at the breakfast table is a very relaxing and enlightening habit, and the Kindle enables this, making it a great gift for the Baby Boomers in your life.

Another feature Boomers will appreciate is the thriftiness of the device. I easily blow through a couple-hundred dollars a month in (mostly used) books from Amazon. Two inconveniences of this practice is having to wait a week for books to arrive in the mail and having to pay delivery fees. The Kindle 2 comes with a free, built-in cellular connection, which allows for buying books from Amazon right from the device. The e-versions of books are usually about half the price, if you factor in the shipping, and the book downloads directly to the Kindle, restoring the all-important “instant gratification” factor that is missing from online shopping.

One bit of advice though, keep the connection turned off except to synch the device, as it drains the battery. Thanks to the Kindle’s E-Ink display, the device uses very little energy. After a week of heavy reading on it, my Kindle’s battery hadn’t even lost a quarter of its charge.

My favorite characteristic of the Kindle is how it enables active reading. I read paper-based books with my cell-phone on hand to take notes on everything I read, diligently copying passages down into word files (I hate to deface a paper book by highlighting pages) and summarizing important passages. The Kindle interweaves this practice into the e-book. With the keyboard built into the device, I can take notes directly in the book I’m reading and highlight passages on screen. It’s like I’m adventuring through realms of knowledge and taking photos of things I see along the way. : )

The Kindle is not for everyone, but my fellow bookworms out there should definately consider an e-reader to support their addiction.

Researchers are using the oceans of data in Everquest’s logs for psychological, sociological, anthropological, and other studies. Constance Steinkuehler, a game academic at the University of Wisconsin, has found clear evidence that gamers use the scientific method, experimenting and communicating results, to understand the virtual worlds in which they play.

Academia is finally standing up to take notice of gaming as cultural phenomenon, and Volume 2 of the Journal Transformative Works and Cultures focuses on Games as Transformative Works, dedicating all of the journal articles to various aspects of gaming from a variety of academic perspectives.

Casey O’Donnell’s The everyday lives of video game developers takes an anthropological eye towards the culture of video game developers and their technoscientific art. Rebecca Bryant’s Dungeons & Dragons: The gamers are revolting! explores the fascinating recent history of Wizards of the Coast’s buying the rights to the then waning D&D, making it open-source as a marketing strategy, attempting and failing to revoke the open-license, and finally releasing a new, copyrighted edition of the game and fans hated it. Joe Bisz’z The birth of a community, the death of the win: Player production of the Middle-earth Collectible Card Game explores the life of dedicated gamers after the company producing their game goes under, and makes the most succinct explanation for the appeal of collectible card games, “Though CCG cards are premade, players have the power to edit their own unique deck of 60 cards, a process that can be compared to writing one’s own dramatic television script for an established series.”

I thoroughly enjoyed all of these essays, but Will Brooker’s Maps of many worlds: Remembering computer game fandom in the 1980s resonated with me the most. In it, Brooker describes his experiences revisiting the video games of his youth from the mid 1980s:

I don’t remember Zzoom as a garish clutter of magenta airplanes and bright red tanks, like a kid’s poster painting of a war zone. I remember the way palm trees rushed toward your windscreen in the desert zone, and the way, between attack waves, the camera drifted up into the clouds in a brief, calm interlude. In both cases, I remember landscapes, skies, seas, and natural environments rather than military hardware.

Zork

Zork and other text-based adventures had no graphics at all, and I spent months adventuring in their dark dungeons and travelling in their fantastic starships. Wasteland was my all-time favorite game on the Commodore 64. It came out in 1986, and, despite being able to push a human-looking icon around on a map, the details of the world were all described in text.

Ultima II Cover VS Actual Game

The idea that a screen with stick people could serve as a rich, complex environment may seem silly to today’s gamers, but at the time games like Wasteland, Ultima I-IV, and others provided endless hours of engaging adventure. Brooker observes that these limited in-game graphics were enhanced with elaborate artwork on the box, like the way old arcade games were decorated with action-oriented cartoons to dress up the comparatively simple graphics on the screen. I remember games like the Ultima series coming with cloth maps, code wheels, miniature books, and coins to bring something tangible to the experience.

Ultima IV Map of Britannia

Some games were based on motion pictures, and relied on the player’s experiences watching the movie to enhance the game play. One of the scariest games I ever played on the C64 was Alien, where you must try and kill the alien running around on the ship before it kills all the crewmembers… or failing that, at least make it to the escape pod. Looking at the graphics now makes the fear the game evoked seem silly.

Alien

Brooker doesn’t fall into the trap of claiming modern games fail to provoke an imaginative response in the player. Rather, he argues that in games like Grand Theft Auto, “I could map my experiences of the simulated spaces—Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas—onto my memories of the real geography of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas.” So video games are still an imaginative adventure, requiring a suspension of disbelief, or “consensual hallucination” as William Gibson put it. Only the games today have more power to persuade us.

I found a video of someone running through Wasteland in 16 minutes (using cuts and speeded up play). Here’s the first part:

You can play all the old Infocom text-adventures online.