Real Poetry in the Real World

The most recent video from John Boswell’s Symphony of Science could be the anthem of This Joyful Noise. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael Shermer, and Richard Dawkins join Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking this time around, the visuals are a step above A Glorious Dawn, and honestly, this is a much richer explanation of how science happens. Curious, collaborative, and filled with awe:

It’s always nice to hear the word “awesome” in its rightful place: no other word quite does the trick. As Jill Tarter says, “the story of humans is the story of ideas that shed light into dark corners.” Our joyful noise, in a dark, silent universe, must be celebrated and shared.

Boobquake Update

April 26th has come and gone. Did the explosion of immodestly Jen McCreight inspired cause the earth to shake?

No. Jen’s mockery of an Iranian cleric has gotten a lot of great press; when Stephen Colbert picks up your story, you know you’ve made it. I also loved hearing Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! interview Dr. Peggy Helwig, a research seismologist at the Berkely Seismology Lab in Berkeley, CA, who helpfully explained: “I am an expert in earthquakes because I study them, and I’m an expert in clevage because I have it.”

Unfortunately, a lot of the reporting, including Colbert’s, implied that a large earthquake in Taiwan on the 26th was a embarrassment to the whole project. This is not true. Let’s go to the tape:

That little red dot is Boobquake. McCreight wrote a great article for The Guardian called What I Learned from Boobquake that presents her statistical analysis. Her confidence that cleavage doesn’t have a geological effect was fully justified. “Not only did all of the earthquakes on Boobquake fall within the normal range of magnitudes,” she found, “but the mean magnitude actually decreased slightly! Maybe God actually approves of hot pants.”

The statistics this little jokey experiment uncovered are absolutely fascinating. Did you know there are an average of 134 earthquakes with a magnitude of 6 to 6.9 every year? That’s more than one every three days, and those are serious quakes. And there are over one thousand earthquakes with a magnitude of 5 to 5.9 every year: many more than one per day.

Many thanks to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe for (as always) providing entertaining and enlightening coverage of the Boobquake conversation. Since the internet is magic, actual Iranians have responded to Jen’s proposal; she’s collected a wonderful sampling of these comments here. I’m fully on board with the pact with Iranians that the Skeptic’s Guide crew proposed: we won’t judge you on your your wacko crazies if you don’t judge us on Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell.

Rebecca Watson of the Guide (and Skepchick) followed up with this great YouTube video: Iranian reactions & further discussion one minute in.

I’m with her. What is up with European countries banning articles of clothing recently? It’s unsettling to watch a continent that prides itself on tolerance and progress justify such stupid, illiberal laws. We’ve all got a way to go.

Boobquake

You may have heard that Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi blamed recent seismic activity on “women who do not dress modestly.” In an effort to test this claim, there will be a small experiment conducted Monday. Jen McCreight, and tens of thousands of fans, will wear revealing clothes and see if the earth moves.

Jen announced her intentions on her blog less than a week ago, inviting women to “join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your preferred form of immodesty.” Today the Facebook event is enormous and Boobquake has made it to CNN.com. There are t-shirts. Proceeds benefit charity. And the best part? In the photo of her that’s been appearing on all the news sites, Jen is wearing the XKCD shirt that reads, “Stand back, I’m going to try SCIENCE!”

Just a heads up.

Symphony of Science

Carl Sagan was a treasure and an inspiration. Autotune is more of a mixed bag. What happens when they join forces to remind us of the beauty and possibility of our moment in this universe?

Catchy, ain’t it? Get your daily dose of perspective and grace at Symphony of Science. Let John Boswell’s project remind you, as Sagan says, “how lucky we are to live in this time: the first moment in human history when we are in fact visiting other worlds.”

The Voices In Your Head

First, some background. Synesthesia is a surprisingly common condition that causes two different sensory pathways to interact in unusual ways. Synesthetes may perceive letters as having dedicated colors, or numbers as having personalities. Read more here. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is a neurologist: a doctor, a researcher, and an occasional Radiolab guest. Listen to him explain how he performed the first ever phantom-limb “amputation” here.

John Colapinto, in New Yorker profile of Ramachandran last May, found him speculating about the nature of creativity:

The most common synesthesia is number-color. Ramachandran believed it was not coincidental that the fusiform gyrus, where number shapes are processed in the brain, lies next to the area where colors are processed. He suspected that a cross-wiring in the brain, similar to that in phantom-limb patients, was responsible. Brain scans confirmed his hunch: in synesthetes, there are excess neural connections between the two brain centers. This suggested to Ramachandran that the syndrome arises from a defect in the gene responsible for pruning away the neural fibres that connect the various centers of the brain as it develops early in life. “What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common?” Ramachandran asked me. “The propensity to link seemingly unrelated things. It’s called metaphor. So what I’m arguing is, if the same gene, instead of being expressed only in the fusiform gyrus, is expressed diffusely throughout the brain, you’ve got a greater propensity to link seemingly unrelated brain areas in concepts and ideas. So it’s a very phrenological view of creativity.”

It can feel uncomfortable to examine the biology behind creative talent, which we’ve always treated as kind of magical, or divine. But science addressing questions that philosophers and priests once had a monopoly on is a wonderful thing. Nothing is more fascinating or important to us than our own nature, and beginning to build real, concrete knowledge about it is an enormous blessing. Reading about neurology leaves me awed, excited, and impatient. The brain is so marvellously complicated, as are the questions we ask, that our best efforts fall far short of sating our curiosity.

One of the most magnificent puzzles is consciousness itself: why we’re aware of our own thinking, and how we came to be this way. It’s a favorite subject for people who believe that some mental phenomena exist outside physical, testable reality, those who jeer at evidence-based approaches to these unknowns. But Ramachandran is willing to speculate on consciousness, too. Like his hypothesis about metaphors, these ideas are likely wrong, one of the many errors that “trial and error” requires. Still, it’s provocative stuff:

Mirror neurons play a role, he thinks. “One of the theories we put forward,” he said, as he packed up his bag, “is that the mirror-neuron system is used for modelling someone else’s behavior, putting yourself in another person’s shoes, looking at the world from another person’s point of view. This is called an allocentric view of the world, as opposed to the egocentric view. So I made the suggestion that at some point in evolution this system turned back and allowed you to create an allocentric view of yourself. This, I claim, is the dawn of self-awareness.”

I confess I find this possibility absolutely thrilling, especially compared to vague, untestable stories about “supernatural” mechanisms. But of course it doesn’t matter that it’s an appealing story; we have to figure out ways to challenge it, test it, until we know whether it’s true or false. “What we’re hoping,” Ramachandran says, “is that we can grope our way toward the answer, finding little bits and pieces, little clues, toward understanding what conciousness is. We’ve just scratched the surface of the problem.”

Amid insights on vision, autism, and the brain’s body-image map, one last passage caught my eye. “You know that when people think to themselves you get unconscious movement of the vocal chords?” Ramachandran asks. (It’s fun to try to notice this.) Well.

In the case of schizophrenia, whose sufferers often complain of “hearing voices,” Ramachandran suspected damage of deficit in a sensory mechanism in the vocal chords which, when normal people think, sends a signal to the brain indicating “This is simply a thought; no one is actually saying this.” If this mechanism was damaged, the subconscious movement of the vocal chords could be interpreted as an outside voice speaking in one’s head.

“By the way,” Ramachandran continued, “I have a theory that if you take people with carcinoma of the larynx, and you remove the vocal chords, and they think to themselves, they may actually start hallucinating. A prediction.”

A prediction. That’s where we start. Isn’t it great to be alive now?

The Color Changing Card Trick

I saw Richard Wiseman talk and perform on the Lower East Side a few weeks ago: standing room only, everyone sweaty and crushed and Gumbi necked. We had a blast.

The guy looks and sounds exactly like Wallace, of the claymation capers, and the resemblance has served Wiseman well in his unusual career. Trained as a magician, he turned an interest in psychology into a career researching and writing books, and has been terrifically entertaining about it.

This video was one of the highlights of the evening. Go ahead- try to figure out what’s going on.

Weisman “currently holds Britain’s only Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology.” We need more paying positions like that in the world. His website has links to all his many awesome projects.

Not Alone Anymore

When we find out we might be alone in thinking something, we tend to remember the sensation. Surprise, followed quickly by worry, or curiosity, or pride, can overshadow the actual topic of conversation. I remember one moment like this. I had just described to a friend how those unofficial, packed dirt trails that you find curling through every park are fascinating to me.

You see why, right? These trails are created by many people over many months if not years. The finished product looks intentional: there are clean lines between the path and the grass around it, the route confidently heads towards the place most people want to go, and it’s well maintained, routinely reinforced, sometimes in contrast to neglect, very close by, visible in some less popular park features. This is a collaboration, but the collaborators rarely see each other, generally don’t know each other, and never actually communicate about their shared project. It is an accident and unintended consequence of thousands of actions that this path gets made.

What struck me is how path makers are separated not by space but in time. When I walk down one of these paths I imagine all the people I’m following, and all those who will follow me. We influence each other, affect the steps others choose. Unseen, unknowingly, we transmit information across time, coordinating our efforts to produce an inviting little walkway. Membership in this secret, silent club tickles me. No one is aware of having joined or what their contribution was. Our members cannot be gathered by any imaginable technique or technology, because time moves only in the one direction, and the world soon forgets who made the first footfalls and where that person was headed. And without aiming to, we’ve created an informal institution, a monument to decentralized decision making. Dear reader, I give you: the well defined yet unsanctioned path, a whimsical and determined thing, fixture of parklands everywhere.

My unprepared attempt to communicate this and my wonder at it to a friend was halting, but after getting it out I saw immediately that my fascination wasn’t shared. Other people just don’t think like this, I realized, surprised. I was torn between feeling proud of how my clearly insightful observation separated me from the unwashed masses and being disappointed, like when a joke isn’t laughed at, or the personal anecdote you expected to be recognized as embodying something universal, isn’t. It was disappointing to find that the busy, complicated world I lived in was a lonely place. It’s not just paths in parks. I’m often paralyzed by visions of the countless roles we play, the endless connections and interactions between us, the infinite consequences of our smallest actions. I’m not infrequently dumbstruck with awe at the products of our undirected and unplanned efforts, overcome in public places with mute delight. I stare at the city around me like a caveman.

Although I never seriously believed that I was the only person with an active imagination and a ferocious curiosity about the world around me, I did feel separated from fellow awestruck path watchers by my inability to put my wonder into words, and therefore lonely. A path maker might feel the same way were one to become aware of his or her diffuse coworkers and wish to speak with them, if only to share introductions over a beer and pass around congratulations on a job well done. But while there’s no hope of traveling though time (except the usual way), there should be a way to overcome my less fundamental isolation. There must be others in the world with a passion for self organization and its power. Now just how do I meet one?

Podcasts. When it comes to emergent order, I recommend reading The Price of Everything by Russ Roberts, who I first heard as the host of the essential EconTalk and who also writes a great blog, Cafe Hayek. For more, and please trust me on this, it is never a bad idea to read Hayek himself. Discovering that there exists an entire academic discipline devoted to exploring the mechanisms, mediums, properties and consequences of our species’ constant creative interaction has been one of my life’s greatest pleasures. It turns out that not only am I not at all uniquely brilliant, but the men and women who have been thinking, writing, researching and debating about exchange, incentives, and externalities for centuries have so much to teach me that my learning will safely last my lifetime.

To complete this happy ending, I need to develop the ability to communicate my curiosity. A lifelong project to be sure, but one I want to start today. Writing, this past week, has engaged me terrifically, been welcome work of the kind my life recently has been sadly lacking. It’s hard, and for now, feels rewarding. My busy imagination is already telling me that if I really keep at it, by the time I’m sixty-four I might actually publish something valuable. I’m really looking forward to that.

Reading about writing, I ran across this lovely passage in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird:

I remember reading C.S. Lewis for the first time, Surprised by Joy, and how, looking inside himself, he found “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.” I felt elated and absolved. I had thought that the people one admired, the kind, smart people of the world, were not like that on the inside, were different from me…

The moments we discover we’re not alone, like the moments when we first fear that we are, get glued in our memories by adrenaline, and then stuck where we’re sure to see them, like favorite pictures on our wall. Remember this. We forget, of course. Like all important lessons in life, we have to learn it again and again. Fear of being the only one like you in the universe is, famously, universal.

Share your stories about the conversation where you discovered that you’re on your own. It’s a familiar beat: talking to a friend, the easy assumption that you’re on the same page is suddenly questioned. This tends to happen most frequently when the topic being discussed is certain superstitions, the status of a relationship, or Israel. The moment tends to be memorable. I can recall a half dozen conversations I’ve had that fit this description.

Alternately, share your stories about the time you suddenly no longer felt alone. Although it has taken me a thousand words to get around to it, the story I had in mind when I started this post falls into this category. Today I was listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe and they were discussing several recent articles in mainstream sources that are big wins for skepticism and evidence that an important campaign in Britain is having an impact. The mood was high. Then Rebecca said this, about the podcast’s audience:

There are 60,000 of you our there right now. I know that right now, like, you’re listening to this and it’s just you, riding the subway, but there are actually 60,000 of you…

The story of how I came to find the SGU, and organized skepticism, and how it felt and what it meant to me is another post entirely, if not a dozen. It’s quite something, discovering how powerful it is to name yourself, to share passions and fears, and to belong. It would be a large, heavy, dreadfully earnest story. Hearing Rebecca’s words this afternoon was different: the moment was delightful, simple, and deliciously specific.

I’ve often imagined that there are others who, like me, ride the subway with earbuds in not to drown out the crowd or zone out to music, but to learn about scientific breakthroughs, technological achievements, the latest paranormal claims, quackery, what is fact and what is, in fact, fiction. Looking around as I ride, however, it never seems like I’m sharing a subway car with one of them. Instead as I listen I feel like there’s an unfortunate chasm between me and my fellow riders, growing wider with every moment I absorb information which I seriously doubt they have, as I sure wouldn’t were I not standing there with the rogues in my ear. Our common ground is thin and our disagreements untowardly deep, my imaginary fellow passengers and I. It’s not a good feeling. Most people separate themselves from the city around them by simply ignoring it, distracting themselves, or through small harmless acts of rudeness, but here I am actually shoving a planet-sized ideological wedge between myself and all those around me. What a sad, bitter old man I will become!

In a species as numerous as ours, a club consisting of sixty thousand is not in the business of setting cultural norms or writing policy. But put sixty thousand people in a room and you’ve got yourself quite a party. A big thank you to Rebecca for a truly neat moment, when I allowed myself to imagine my friends and allies, in hundreds of different subway cars in dozens of cities across the world. I smiled, then, picturing us, we who are excited about the future, we who love and cherish “the Universe as it really is.” At once, we all hear “right now you’re listening to this and it’s just you, but” and look up, all thinking the same thing.

I know podcasts are not listened to simultaneously. I know my habit of inventing visuals to stand in for the intangible things I’m awed by can get more than a little silly. I’ve been known to picture the myriad cell phone conversations going on around me as long strings arcing through the air, attached at the other end to far away towns and other continents, wrapping around the world a dense, tangled ball of string. And ask me sometime about the make believe Kingsbridge Tofu Club. Still. Explaining what’s going on in my head makes me feel elated and absolved, and even if this never reaches the right person, I’m confident someone out there thinks the way I do.

Science is a great path making project, the greatest decentralized collaborative effort there will ever be, with partnerships spanning the globe and reaching across time, accumulating results step by step that shape our emerging understanding of reality. It is the undertaking of the human race, discovery, and no one is truly alone who understands that they belong to this great and curious species. I will never be a scientist, but I long to contribute something to the discussion, if only to stand to the side and remind people how beautiful it all is. I will talk science over dinner and over drinks, inviting more people to share in our collective accomplishments, reminding everyone, you need not be alone, and look at what we can do when we work together.

As It Really Is

I recently began listening to a charming, rambling, grumpy and self-righteous podcast called The Skeptic’s Guide To The Universe. Produced by the New England Skeptical Society, a hilariously inbred group of like minded grouches, it provides a forum for celebrating technological advances and scientific discoveries, ridiculing pseudoscience, myth, superstition and hoaxes, and congratulating the participants on their intellectual superiority to the majority of their fellow humans. I’ve learned about advancements in metamaterials with a negative index of refraction, heard the Bigfoot hoax made fun of, and listened to Adam Savage from Mythbusters interviewed. I recommend it.

The Skeptic’s Guide closes each week with a quote, and already I’ve come across two, and a passage from RadioLab, that I want to remember and pass on. Hokey as the cottage industry of quoting is, these words capture and reaffirm something I desperately want to pass on to my children, share with my fellow humans, find in my partner.

Robert Krulwich, giving the commencement address at CalTech, spoke about how professors at the school affirm certain values:

A deep respect for curiosity. For doubt, always doubt. For oped-mindedness. For going wherever the data leads no matter how uncomfortable. For honesty. For discipline. And most of all, the belief that anybody no matter where they’re from, no matter what their language, no matter what their religion, no matter what their politics, no matter what their age or their temperament… if you can learn how to sit down in a laboratory and think in an orderly way, and if you have the patience to stare, and stare, and stare, and stare, looking for a pattern in nature, you’re welcome here.

Something about this just thrills me. This is a pursuit which I truly believe is and can be increasingly universal, a pursuit awesome in its reach and power, able to build on its successes for ever and ever, where ideas survive or are overturned on their truth, their own intrinsic testable merit, only. However biased, fearful, and shortsighted its practitioners, science is objective, fearless, and wise. The truth is out there. Robert’s entire speech, beautifully framed by a choice between Newton’s intentional obfuscation and Galileo’s world-shaking clarity, can be heard here.

The 14th Dali Llama reminds us that “to defy the authority of empirical evidence is to disqualify oneself as someone worthy of critical engagement in a dialogue.”

Finally, the revered Carl Sagan is quoted, adoringly enshrined at the top of the Skeptic’s home page, as delivering this gem: “For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” A toast: to the Universe as it really is. Amen.