Sitting at the library outside their tiny MangaCon, where my son is taking his first tentative steps into his particular branch of fandom.  I don't use tentative to imply a lack of enthusiasm.  He fashion-hacked a bunch of Ohio State gear to make himself a Red costume (Ash Ketchum is from the show, not the manga).  I mean tentative in that he's cautious in new social situations.  Which is understandable; I'm not much of a joiner myself.  I'm sitting out here blogging instead of mixing with the manga geeks (who are not all children).

I've already seen several people peeking in but not hanging out.  I haven't heard anyone say "This is lame," but that's the body language vibe.  To me small is better.  You get to talk to people.  Even the line at Free Comic Book Day is longer than I like, but this year there was a super-duper science comix bonus to waiting in that line.  Maris Wicks, who drew the graphic novel Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, and Birute Galdikas, has agreed to be on the show!  Two of the subjects, are already famous, but I've never heard of the orangutan lady before.  I will have to ask about her, particularly how many levels she has in her machete skill.

***

I spent last weekend at a meditation retreat, organized by the Charlotte sangha of Thich Nhat Han’s Order of Interbeing. A sangha is kind of like a church, except that most seriously practicing Buddhists are not all that concerned with gods. One can be a practicing Buddhist and a Christian at the same time, for instance. One can also practice meditate without taking any specifically Buddhist vows of ethical behavior (which is also a practice, if you think about it). That has been my approach for the past 15 years or so, since I started meditating at the Rochester Zen Center occasionally. I’ve recently intensified my meditation practice to help me deal with work stress in a healthier way, but I have not “taken refuge” or “received any teachings.” I like eating meat, and I like drinking beer.

The retreat was held at the Catholic St. Francis Springs Prayer Center outside Stoneville. Lots of sanghas borrow or rent space. The Deep River Sangha that I have spent the spring practicing with meets on Wednesdays at a Quaker church here in Greensboro. In any case, it was a very pretty space, and except for a request for us to keep our shoes on (which most of us were happy to oblige), there was no friction between the two groups. Actually, Franciscans and Buddhists apparently agree on having reverence for wildlife and green spaces. They’ve built nature trails through the woods that we used for walking meditation. They’re working on chapels and hermitage spaces tucked away back into the woods as well.

Their library contained several books by Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who lived at Gethsemeni in western Kentucky and who wrote about the similarities and differences between Christianity and Buddhism. From their bookstore I picked up several well-worn used books, which I’m working my way through, and which I’ll post about as the summer progresses. Also a surprisingly delicious blueberry-lime jam. The citrus tang makes it really nice. . .

In any case, what I’m really getting to is the feature of Buddhism that makes it a religion, according to DS Wilson’s definition. No, it’s not a god. No, it’s not priests either. It’s the ethical code designed to increase cooperation. This was most obvious during the ceremony on Sunday morning where a half-dozen people received the Five Mindfulness Trainings, which is TNH’s specific mutation of the same general ethical principles that most Buddhists and most other religions follow. The aspirants (those who aspire) promised to follow these principles in their lives, and, very importantly, to reaffirm their commitment by repeating these trainings in public view of the sangha within three months, or the certificate (yes, an actual piece of paper) would be null and void. In other words, the sangha is expected to monitor one another’s behavior, as well as their own. Also note the concrete and practical sanction if the aspirant is falling down on the job. This is an important element. Being tossed out of the sangha is the most severe version, but there are intermediate sanctions, feedback to convince the person who is not cooperating to increase his or her efforts.

The Buddhists themselves are not necessarily conscious of this function. The dharma teacher of the weekend said, “This is not a performance.” I think I know what she meant, that she did not want anyone to consider what they were doing as empty ritual, a formality, something that didn’t really matter. But, as I was sitting there, on the sidelines, I realized that there was nothing to prevent me from taking the vows internally. If so, what was the point of a public ceremony? Exactly. The public nature of the ceremony is a way of creating accountability. It’s like a contract that the aspirant is signing, and that the sangha is supposed to enforce. It reminds me of an Episcopalian wedding that I attended many years ago. The service included language that required the community to keep this couple together. In other words, it spread the responsibility beyond just the couple, which as a twentyish American I found creepy and intrusive. I still find it creepy and intrusive, to be honest, but as I get older and learn more about humanity I’m beginning to see the necessity of those kinds of structures for maintaining any society with more staying power than a manga convention.

There are people who make their living on the convention circuit, hopping from one to another, just like musicians on tour, engaging in large numbers of individually shallow social interactions.  That's always seemed like a strange life to me, but there are certain benefits to it, I suppose.  It's difficult to be disappointed or betrayed by people you hardly know, except in the criminal sense.

***

I grew up in a rural area like the one described in Triad Stage's new production Tennessee Playboy: a Redneck Romance, where people know one another much better than convention-goers, but that knowledge is a double-edged sword.  People tend to remember bad interactions even better than they remember good interactions.  As in the story that inspired the book that inspired Episode 62

I was perfectly familiar with the nature of the rare villages in that region . . .  Families, crowded together in a climate that is excessively harsh both in winter and in summer, found no escape from the unceasing conflict of personalities. Irrational ambition reached inordinate proportions in the continual desire for escape . . . There was rivalry in everything, over the price of charcoal as over a pew in the church, over warring virtues as over warring vices as well as over the ceaseless combat between virtue and vice . . .  There were epidemics of suicide and frequent cases of insanity, usually homicidal.

The play was a whole lot funnier than that description, but where the story ends on a hopeful note, the play ends much more cynical about the difficulty of creating a society that is both stable and flexible enough to survive long-term, let alone the perfectly harmonious society that religious groups like the Order of Interbeing imagine.

***

Gonna go check on the boy.  From the yelling out of random facts, the shush-ing, and the squeals of joy, it sounds like they're playing anime trivia.

Just got back from an exhausting family day trip to the Carowinds amusement park, (92 degrees and 17 different rides!) and aside from a brief note about the weirdness of humans as thrill junkies, I won’t comment on it any further. In Zoobiquity: The Astonishing Connection between Human and Animal Health, an M.D. and a science writer describe evolutionary parallels of human disease, including several we think of as uniquely human, even ones that we think of as being caused by our toxic culture. Things like drug abuse, eating disorders, and deliberately injuring ourselves. Some (only some) kangaroos apparently prefer opium poppies to more nourishing foods. While I was in graduate school I personally saw caged monkeys biting themselves when they were upset. So I have to wonder what parallels there are in the animal kingdom to our habit deliberately putting ourselves in mortal peril, or at least fooling our bodies into reacting as though we were in mortal peril, for the fun of it.

References:

http://zoobiquity.com/ the website for the ongoing project

Liveblogging the BEACON video seminar.  Today, UT-Austin's international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM.org) team presents their summer projects on synthetic biology.

#1: Deodorizing dog crap, and later the horrid, horrid p-cresol odor of pig shit, which North Carolinians know more about than most.  There's an existing bacterial enzyme for breaking the stuff down that can be stuck into a standard contest bacterium.  Rob Pennock makes an excellent point: What if you accidentally disable the ability of flies and other scavengers to find their food and perform their normal ecological function? Students really not ready for that question, but I bet they will be by the time of the regional jamboree in Toronto.

#2:   In maybe a more technically ambitous project, mussels (not to be confused with muscles, says Wikipedia) secrete protein glues to stick themselves to rocks.  These would be really nice because they work underwater and maybe even inside the body.  It's also interesting to me as a neuroscientist because one of the sticky bits of the protein is L-Dopa, the stuff Oliver Sacks used to treat Parkinsonian patients (coincidentally played by Robin Williams in the movie Awakenings) .

We'll be following up on these two projects all summer, starting next week when the UT team arrives here on campus to help jump-start our own AggieGEM team.

I'm beginning work on a paper about the podcast and blog for this meeting.  A couple of years ago I read and was interested by Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History.

He wants to rescue literary criticism from postmodernism by injecting some more objective methods, borrowed from science rather than from rhetoric and philosophy.  Interesting idea.

My idea with this paper is to identify cross-cutting themes in the blog and relate them to the Google Analytics data, which track the number of people clicking on them (a proxy for actually reading them), post-by-post.  It's a way of trying to discover which broad themes people are interested in, and whether my personal strategies for generating interest are working better or worse than those of, say, our sister blog on the BEACON site.

My naive first attempt was to paste three month's worth of posts into the Text is Beautiful site's web tool.

Pretty, but notice how unimportant evolution is!  This "concept map" is based not simply on word frequency (although that's part of it) but also on correlations between words.  This is a different approach than deliberately tagging the posts with keywords that I think are important.

Still, it's  a little surprising that the major theme of the blog isn't captured or weighted accurately.  This may be because it's implied in lots of posts where I don't actually mention the word.  That's interesting in and of itself.  It also implies this is going to involve a learning curve, that despite the advertising the tools are still in a developmental stage, and not yet idiot-proof, not yet at the drag-and-drop "workflow" stage that both Scott Harrision and Luke Harmon have recently talked about as the ideal.

Liveblogging Luke Harmon from episodes 52 and 54 giving a "Tree of Life" talk.  Once we have a functional Tree of Life, what will we be able to do with it?

We could see how much of evolution, at the largest scale, is due to genetic drift, and how much of it is due to selection.  What the hell does that mean?  Well, you'd compare what randomness would predict for a trait like body size, vs. what actually happens in body size for a particular niche, like flying animals vs. walking animals vs. swimming animals.

We could ask which variables (polygamy, sexual coloring) cause speciations and adaptive radiations.  We could (and this is me, not Luke, thinking out loud) compare that data to cultural splits like language, religion, and politics.

This is really interesting to me because I'm just starting to try and make sense of how the blog works, how people are using it, and how to compare it with other blogs, and with the research literature.  As I currently spend my time teaching rather than programming, and because my students are likewise undergrads who don't even know how to program, that requires pre-built tools.  Luke's group is building tools to enable biological research that might be useful to undergrads, for conservation groups, even for citizen science projects.  The test cases were not Minority Report slick, but potentially that deep.

References

www.onezoom.org a fractal-based viewer that allows you to work with large numbers of species

Arbor, which doesn't actually exist yet

Watching Thundercats the other night reminded me of mankind’s constant struggle with the pros and cons of advanced technology. It’s a re-launched version of the show that takes place hundreds of thousands of years in Third Earth’s future, and deals more in issues of virtue rather than epic battle. Saturday’s episode dealt with the Necromechs, robotic beings who had achieved consciousness through the use of AI. The last Necromech, a once living being whom they made into a robot and who in return killed them all, was possessed by the idea of transmuting the souls of its deceased family into robotic vessels-effectively freeing them from the inconvenience of death. Having once been alive, the being was fully capable of feeling every emotion and even cried toward the end of the episode. It was a perfect robotic duplicate of organic life.

This is not a new idea in science fiction.  The idea of the technological singularity itself has taken form in anything from science fiction writings by authors like Vernor Vinge, to massive AI initiatives like the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. One of the key components that would lead the singularity is what’s explained in Moore's Law as the exponential growth in computer technology.

Even at today’s rate of advancement, doubling computing capabilities about every 14 months, the likelihood of an all-out biological exodus anytime soon is slim. However, what is in reach of technological assimilation is our way of life, predominantly our labor market.

In the PBS report, Video: Man vs. Machine: Will Human Workers Become Obsolete ..., the applications of labor-less machining methods like 3D printing, or DARPA’s search and seizure robots, or think bots like IBM’s Jeopardy champion Watson, become apparent as a means to bridge the gap between man and machine. So where does that leave us who stand at the edge of a new world? If manual labor becomes obsolete, where will that lead our current model of society? Will we finally strive towards idealistic principles-or will the world’s resources fall further into the grasp of greed and politics?

People like Singularity University professor, Vivek Wadhwa, and Dr. James Gates ( as cited from his seminar-coming soon…) believe the answer is in education. They believe the high tech cornucopia machine will be the solution to its own problem by creating entire job markets all-together. The question is, who will be familiar enough with the new technology to fill these positions and what about the vast majority that are not so technically inclined? Is this a new echelon of social evolution?

You may have noticed a new page on the website, the Contributors page.  This is because we now have a regular contributor (besides me).  Mike Hager did a single guest post a year ago, and we'd love to have more of those, from him or from other people, but this is a little more involved.

Richard Wade will spend the whole summer posting things to the blog, to Facebook, to Twitter.  I won't disappear; I'll keep posting things, too, but with tenure looming and a pair of barred owls attracting record crowds to the Bog Garden (every one of them potential Audubon members), I have to prioritize.  This also means that the podcast is taking the summer off.  I'm still recording interviews, but with Jahmal Tarpley off at a med school prep program, I'd have to do all the editing myself.  Being realistic, that simply isn't happening until my tenure portfolio is done.

But enough about me and my scheduling woes.  Let's get back to Richard, a Journalism & Mass Communications major (print concentration).  He's also a pop culture junkie, but he deepens our bench by being obsessed with other aspects of pop culture -- music, for one example.  He's working on a piece about evolution rapper Baba Brinkman that will be up soon.  He'll also be hanging out with A&T's BEACON-funded iGEM team and blogging about that experience.  He's a print journalist, not a scientist, so he should have some interesting perspective.

Print journalism, you say?  Isn't that a dead specialty?  Why is he training to be a dinosaur?  You'll have to ask him about that, but my own two cents is that maybe he's not training to be a dinosaur. Maybe he's training to be a bird.  A four-chambered heart, sharp eyes, curiosity -- those are design features that are useful in lots of environments.

Stay tuned tomorrow to hear about the first of Richard's obsessions, the new Thundercats series on Cartoon Network, which is hellaciously popular with my students (2 million Likes!)  but which I've never seen at all.  I'm steering him towards new things, too, so hopefully this is the first instance of a mutualistic symbiosis.

It’s quite difficult not to stereotype people. Stereotyping is exactly the sort of time- and energy-saving bias that gets built into decision-making systems, whether they are artificial or biological. Computer scientists call them heuristics, little rules that are right often enough to be useful, given how many cycles they save over computing the fully correct solution. “Good enough for government work,” is how my dad would put it when he was tired and wanted to quit whatever manual labor we were sweating over on the farm when I was a kid.

There are reliable statistical differences between male and female behavior, for instance.  Using those statistics leads to a certain number of mistakes, but they'll be right more often than they are wrong, and they're easy.  My students are always bothered by the idea that men are more violent than women, for instance.  The statistical bias is obvious -- men commit way more murders than women do -- but they come up with all kinds of individual counter-examples to try and prove that the statistic is wrong.  Apples and oranges.  Equality to them seems to mean identity.

An example is this online hissy-fit over Pixar’s Princess Merida, from the Pixar movie Brave, reviewed in episode 41.  Poor Merida has been Disney-fied too much for some 200,000 fans’ liking. Until John Stewart pointed out Disney’s explanation/non-apology, I wasn’t even sure that the tarting-up was deliberate (it's a different animation style and everything). I’m a biologist, not a fundamentalist. I think in terms of variation. Noone is perfectly consistent in their behavior. I have been known to dress up for special occasions, even beyond the very nice Hawaiian shirt I wore to my own wedding. I wear a tie on most class days, though not at other times. However, the transparent bullshit of Disney’s excuse for its marketing decision (“she wanted to look pretty for her coronation”) is easily three standard deviations away from the mean of Merida’s behavior. “Her mother made her wear that,” would have made much more sense.

I totally get the criticism of Disney’s one-dimensional princesses. My own favorites were Lilo & Nani (who was really more of a waitress than a princess).  I just disagree that the way to respond to a stereotype is with an equal and opposite stereotype. Pixar itself didn’t fall for this one-or-the-other choice. Merida grew during the film. She didn’t just shift the mean of her behavior from being daddy’s girl to being momma’s girl. The variance of her behavior became larger. She began to display her mother’s cleverness and refinement AND her father’s bravery and thirst for adventure. To me, that’s the way forward. To me, Disney’s princesses are boring not because they like pretty things, but because they are so sadly predictable. A sadly predictable tomboy is just as boring, as soon as the novelty wears off.

I hadn't been to Nancy Fulda's website in a while.  Sadly, she didn't win the Hugo last year.  Another very good story we mentioned on the blog, "The Paper Menagerie," snatched the title out from under her.  She's obviously staying busy, apparently writing flavor support for an online strategy game.

Anyway, she posted something interesting to her blog, a quick little insight about nature and nurture, which I've also been posting about here and here (that second one I had totally forgotten about until I did a search).  Also a neat bit about writing as thinking.

The story, "Dawn, and the Stars," had some other interesting game theory tie-ins, like a genetically set level of cooperation, which we'll explore later in the week.

I was Twittering away the time between playing ball with the boy and supper when I ran across this piece

http://web.ncsu.edu/abstract/science/iron-man-3-d-printing/

which reminded me of a BBC interview I heard in the car last week where the reporter had the techno anarchist guy who printed the plastic gun on the line and wanted him to justify having unleashed this technology into the world. I was annoyed at the time, thinking “How is this any different than selling any other cheap gun?” The piece above makes the case that these plastic guns are untraceable. Again, I say, “How is this different than any other sale?” We don’t track the sales of metal guns over the internet. We sell guns to parents to give to their five-year-olds. How is this different?  Argument from Analogy! (worst Pokemon move ever.)

Oh, I get the genie out of the bottle argument. Science fiction and comics are full of that argument. And I fundamentally disagree with the anarchist idea that no government is good government. But as a way of forcing us to confront our own ridiculous and inconsistent policies, this is a pretty great stunt. In my humble opinion, it beats the hell out of John Oliver’s 3-part trip to Australia, where gun controls have been in place for over a decade with zero mass shootings and a pretty big drop in gun homicides overall.  Although, download-wise, Oliver is winning (200K views vs. 100K gun downloads), I have to imagine that in this case fear will be more motivating than laughter.

How do we get from gun control to evolution? Simple – game theory. The very first thing people who have any technological advantage do is try to monopolize it, to prevent other groups from getting it and to maintain their advantage. This dynamic of asymmetry in power is what generates terrorism. Terrorist doesn’t mean “bad guy” or “suicide bomber.” Terrorist means a person who uses terror as a weapon because he doesn’t have prestige weapons like cruise missiles and attack helicopters (which was a ginormous hole in Iron Man 3, by the way).

Technology always proves disruptive to established power structures. There’s even a theory that humans are less hierarchical, more egalitarian, than other apes because of weapons. Egalitarian societies work to keep The Man down, by assassinating him if necessary.

“Egalitarianism is not based on mutual love and even less on passivity. It’s an actively maintained condition that recognizes the universal human desire to control and dominate. Instead of denying the will to power, egalitarians know it all too well. They deal with it every day….In egalitarian societies, men tying to dominate others are systematically undermined, and male pride is frowned upon.”

– Franz de Wall

I know that in my home culture, the biggest sin of all is trying to put yourself above other people. That’s a big chunk of the cultural bias against education. Intellectuals are seen as potential tyrants.  I couldn't understand that as a kid.  I was supposed to do well in school, but not too well.  I still don't, in a way.  Athletics are another path to elitism, and that's perfectly OK there.

Mr.  Stark went to Tennessee in this latest movie, which is only one state south of Kentucky.  I found out today that my parents' pony just had a colt, and that my dad named him Tony.  I have to imagine that's purely a coincidence.  Otherwise it would be just too ironic.

Speaking of not speaking Arabic, we've now got a bunch of Facebook Likes in the Middle East.  That's cool, but I can't read much on their pages.  Happy to be of service; just let me know what you'd like to hear on the show.  Suggest a guest, even.