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.

NPR sort of bemoaned the fact that CGI has displaced and surpassed stop-motion models.  You know, the same artisanal argument they’re always making.  Personally, I love the fact that stop-motion technology is now in easy reach of kids, what with the cheap cameras and computer programs.

And CGI has surpassed stop-motion.  We’re right now watching the first Iron Man, in preparation for IM3 this weekend, and it is a pretty, pretty movie.  It suffers from Sucky Villain Syndrome.  Jim Kramer from Mad Money is the scariest thing in it.  It is a supremely pretty movie, though, and funny — he just crashed through his roof after the first Mark 2 flight.

Morally, Iron Man is a little more sophisticated than most of Harryhausen’s work, but only a little.  Which just goes to show that the writing is still the hardest part, and not yet hackable, though they’re working on it.  Don’t misunderstand.  I’m all about quantifying the unquantifiable.  Moneyball is my favorite sports movie ever (more on that later in the week).  This is a different issue, not one of science and technology, but one of consensus.  I like Steven Soderbergh’s take on individual creativity, which I ran across through an upcoming guest whom I follow on Twitter.

The simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made. It has nothing to do with the captured medium, it doesn’t have anything to do with the where the screen is, if it’s in your bedroom, your iPad—it doesn’t even really have to be a movie: it could be a commercial, it could be something on YouTube. Cinema is a specificity of vision, it’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form.

Thank you for your vision, Mr. Harryhausen.  “Stop-motion has a strange quality, like a dream, like a nightmare,” he said in another NPR interview from 2004.

Lots of genetic predispositions are like that, invisible until the environment reveals them.  Don’t worry; I won’t go off on the whole “dominant is not dominant” thing again.  However, I will go off on something.  I’ve spent the whole semester repeatedly hammering on the point that we should say Nature TIMES Nurture.  Most people’s assumption is that it’s Nature OR Nurture, or at most, Nature PLUS Nurture.  Really, though, it’s not a choice between them, except in really extreme cases.  Most of the time it works more like this.

If the environmental effect increases the phenotype, then it’s multiplying by a number bigger than 1.  If it decreases the phenotype, the multiplier is less than 1.  Of course, this assumes sunlight’s effect is linear, not a nonlinear power function (exponent) or something.  Most effects are nonlinear (sunlight’s is certainly one of them, since it saturates at a melanin maximum), but there’s a limit of what I’m willing to do to freshmen.  Oh, and I totally made those numbers up, based on no research at all.  The pic was just a slide from my class that I made to illustrate a point.

So how to relate this skin pigment example to mood?  What is the function that relates amount of sunlight to mood level?  What is the mechanism of that relationship?  I’ve been downing vitamin D to keep my mood from tanking during the winter, but that’s still a little controversial.

People have been dressing up as animals, gods, and heroes since we were human.  Famous cave paintings show half-animal shamans dancing.  So why do we do it?  What is it with costumes?

Clearly there’s some element of sexual selection going on at FCBD.  Women’s costumes tend to emphasize the cheesecake.  There was a tall Poison Ivy there this morning who was just about to pop out of her bustier.  Men’s costumes emphasize strength and violence.  I didn’t see Wolverine in a wife-beater today, but there was an armored Thor carrying a big hammer.  Not an absolute, and not mutually exclusive, as there was also a female Deadpool there, with tiny derringers strapped to her thighs.  But evolution doesn’t work by absolutes, most of the time.  Catastrophes do happen, but most of the time, biological evolution works by slower adjustment of gene frequencies, generation by generation.

Will any of the geeks out in the Acme parking lot actually get laid because of a costume?  I can’t calculate the odds exactly, but I do know that just being out of the basement and off the Xbox, meeting other actual humans, can only increase the chances.  It only takes one sperm meeting one egg to create a new geek.

***

Comic books are also possibly the clearest example of how much of cultural evolution is driven by copying.  The fans copy the artists, and the artists copy one another.  Even the true elites of the comic book community like Alan Moore and Kurt Busiek work that way.  The characters from Watchmen were based on the old Charlton characters.  Astro City is an amalgamation of many different influences.  As a more specific example, my son is a big fan of G-Man, Chris Giarusso, who drew the Super-Skrull that currently graces our Facebook page.  Chris G’s SunTroopers are clearly a mutation of the Green Lantern Corps, which (reaching back to pulp SF) were clearly mutated from the Lensmen.  Each step is just different enough to avoid getting sued, but not so different that the audience can’t classify it or understand it easily.

In the US, we developed our intellectual property laws to reward innovation.  Originally this made sense.  We wanted innovation; therefore we gave inventors a temporary advantage by preventing other people from copying their work too closely.  This rewarded the inventor and forced others to innovate as well.  Now, we’ve hugely extended the time period and lost sight of the original purpose of intellectual property.  We’ve blindly attached a moral significance to copying.  We call any and all copying theft.  Therefore, “honest” creativity is supposed to somehow come from nothing, and “creativity” is somehow not copying.  That makes no sense. All chemical and biological processes work by rearranging elements into more complicated structures.  We don’t talk about children stealing their genetic inheritance from their parents.  Because we’ve decided as a society to make some specific acts of copying illegal does not mean that they are not copying.

Every artist copies the masters in learning his trade.  I did it myself in making up my own comic book characters as a kid.  I had one called The Scarecrow, who was not based on the Batman villain, but on the Disney film, The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, which I saw one time when I was very small.  I was a fan of George Perez’s work on Wonder Woman, and I had both a Greek-themed tech heroine named Ariel and a magic-based one called the Hunter, mined from Amerindian motifs.  All told, there were probably fifty characters that I had extensive back stories for, and not one of them was in any way “original.”

Actually playing the defunct MMORPG City of Heroes was not that much fun, for me – beating up street punks and snake men got really old after a while – but making up characters was an absolute blast.  The constraint was that you had to find a name that wasn’t already taken, at least on that particular server.  The names I wanted were weird enough that they were only occasionally taken.  I made a couple of fire blasters named Burnt Umbral and Old King Coal, a tiny female scrapper named Pygmy Shrew, a villain brute called the Turnip Truck who carried a mace, and twin star-spangled soccer-themed characters (I don’t remember what class) Left Winger and Right Winger, meant to be an homage to DC’s Hawk and Dove (Wikipedia cautions: this page may be written from a fan’s point of view.  Well, duh.).  I think the only one I played past 10^th level during the free 2-week trial period was a regenerating claw scrapper in nasty pink camouflage pattern fatigues, who I called Beaded Lizard (because Gila Monster was taken).  Right now I’m sorry that I never took any screenshots of them, because I’m terribly out of practice at drawing, and the sketches from memory that I just put up on Facebook pretty much suck, but I wasn’t planning for posterity when I created them.  They were just throwaway summer fun, almost jokes.  Almost, but not quite.  Like most CoH players I know, I put more time into their costumes than I like to admit.

Yes, I write scripts.  It’s not that hard, since I write them in my own voice, and I’m as fluent and fluid on a keyboard as my nephew Matt is on a game controller.  Also, I feel free to modify them on the fly as I’m recording, if something good occurs to me in the moment, but it’s very useful to have the structure to start from.

In that script I use the phrase “joyful hard work,” like I know what it means.  And I do; I have moments. As for today, it’s the second rainy day in a row at the end of a semester, when all the students suddenly realize that they’re being graded on their performance, and the stress levels rise.  It’s very easy to focus only on that stress, and to begin acting in ways that are designed to reduce stress, short-term, rather than advance your goals, long-term.  Continually avoiding stressors, restricting your life to smaller and smaller “safe” areas, is, according to one psychological school of thought, the very definition of depression.

What?  Depression?  Isn’t that biochemical?  Don’t we take drugs to relieve it?  Aren’t depressive thoughts the result of the biochemical state of the brain?  Yes.  However, they are also the cause.  A feedback loop can be entered from any point along the loop, and once the loop is active, cause and effect don’t mean much anymore.  Each stage of the loop is both an effect of the previous stages and a cause of the next stages.  A change in any stage can trigger changes in all of the others, and even in itself, after a delay.  So avoidance of stressors can lead to further avoidance of stressors.

I mentioned some of this research about 3 weeks ago in an earlier post (4/8) because of a particularly nasty side effect.  Again, avoidance of negative emotion doesn’t operate purely at the behavioral level.  The expression of emotion feeds back into the chemical state and even the physical structure of the brain.  Here’s the worst part.  Blunting of negative emotional responses seems to lead to a blunting of positive emotional responses as well.  Not crying leads eventually to not laughing, which reinforces that dead-inside feeling, which clinicians call anhedonia, and which patients find so crippling.  Their attempts to reduce emotional pain directly through avoidance, rather than offsetting it with joy, just make them more miserable.

The EP people on Wikipedia say that evolutionary science can unite all of psychology, the way it has united all of biology.  That statement is a little inaccurate, as we heard last week with forestry, and as we’ll hear again this week with medicine.  And really, evolution is just one branch of nonlinear dynamics.

First off, I want to give my take on Erik’s statements before the talk in plain English, because the grad students here at A&T were very confused.  This is a common problem.  Audience members have different opinions, so being painfully clears about your positions usually means that at least some of those people will disagree with you.  That’s why politicians get so skilled at saying a lot of words that don’t mean anything specific — it allows them to “agree” with large numbers of people, to be popular, and to get elected.

I don’t want to put words in Erik’s mouth, so I will use my own words and opinions, and he can agree or disagree.  The problem is not speaking about evolution to skeptical or even hostile audiences.  The problem is being hostile ourselves.  Getting into a wise-ass flame war on the internet, in writing (or in audio recording), with people who will use ill-considered words against you, is not a professional thing to do.  It tarnishes not just your credibility, but the credibility of your professional community.  Go back and listen to Episode 14, with my old buddy Mike Hager, about his hobby of baiting creationists.  He can pull protests and stunts to piss people off, but that’s because he is an amateur, a hobbyist — a bright and passionate guy, but not a professional.  He has no responsibility to the scientific community.  That frees him to do whatever he wants.

I’m not saying that reformers don’t piss people off through their actions, or that you have to agree with your community all the time.  Angelo Volandes and Aretha Davis, featured in this month’s Atlantic Magazine, are being deliberately provocative when they call their medical colleagues out on unwanted medical treatments.  The difference is that they not calling people names on the Internet (which is fun, no doubt about that); they are instead running clinical trials of their patient-education videos, to prove  that they reduce unwanted treatments by changing the patient’s preferences.

I showed their sample CPR video to my 102 students on Friday afternoon.  They were surprised at how boring the video was.  That was apparently a deliberate design choice.  According to the Atlantic article, they want to remove emotion from the decision-making process.  Based on how human decision-making works, that may deserve some follow-up.

Whoops.  I got distracted from the actual talks by my ranting, but they were on one of my other favorite neglected but potentially revolutionary medical technologies, bacteria-killing viruses, referenced before here and here.  Even so, I heard enough to say that I want to send  some students to Idaho.  One of the main benefits of these seminars is to introduce us to the work of people who don’t always attend the yearly congresses.

***

Quick follow-up as I post this on Sunday morning.  There are times when emotion is helpful in making your point, and times when it is not.  The two major slide-talks at this year’s WFW were on bees.  Friday night was about what plants they like, and Saturday night was about the causes of the die-off in the honeybee population.  There was a small group of Monsanto conspiracy theorists in the audience.  You might think that a group of herbalists would be ripe for anger against a pesticide company.  But their reaction was more one of annoyance, of  “Hey, we’re celebrating here.  We don’t need antagonism.  We just want some information.” So maybe Volandes and Davis are right after all.  Maybe, depending on the decision to be made, there are different optimal amounts of emotional arousal.  Maybe individuals and groups require different amounts of emotional arousal to make the best decisions.  I should find someone to ask about those issues for the podcast.  Drop me a line if you know anyone who would be good.

It’s Wild Foods Weekend! Here’s my description of last year’s experience.

Ritually gathering, preparing, and eating wildlife might seem like a bizarre way to express the same concerns and passions as Earth Day. I won’t argue with that. But it works for me, and apparently for at least 150 other people from several states.

It’s an odd group in other ways. Hunters and other sportspeople are often politically conservative, but there’s also plenty of hippie-style live folk music going on at the same time. Last year I helped cut up a groundhog to a live soundtrack. Which reminds me, I need to recharge the Flip camera and clear some room in its memory.

My students have been posting pictures of their dissections to their own Facebook pages (hit the links on the podcast page to see them). This week we did perch and sharks. I’m pretty sure I can top that this weekend. Personally, I find the idea of dissecting something and throwing it away to be more distasteful than preparing the same thing and then eating it (the formaldehyde smell doesn’t help). Talk about a better way to run a species diversity class. . .

But back to the supposed inconsistency of political ideals. I’m sitting at Starbucks, which has this sign up on the wall.

April is Starbucks’s Global Month of Service. Look at the iconography. Male following female on the path. Wind power for the sailboat.

Compare that to this blurb from the Wild Foods Weekend brochure.

“To earn YOUR ticket to the feast you must participate in the preparation of a cooking group of your choice. Your Wild Chef will distribute your free ticket at completion of class. However, if you choose not to help prepare the feast the purchase price of this ticket is only $25.” [emphasis in the original]

Despite the cosmetic differences, both groups are hoping to inspire the exact same set of cooperative behaviors. The only difference appears to be in the game theory assumptions. The “liberal” assumption appears to be that giving always leads to giving. In terms of a Prisoner’s Dilemma game, that’s always being cooperative on the first turn, when you first encounter the other person. The “conservative” assumption appears to be that it’s the other player’s responsibility to cooperate first, to gain entrance to the community. Not that they’re unwilling to be generous, but they’re unwilling to be suckers. I disagree with the idea that conservatives are defectors in general. On the first round, maybe, but I would like to see some data on that.

In my experience at WFW last year, the earning of the ticket was more nuanced.  I didn’t see anyone turned down for a ticket to the feast.  I also didn’t see anyone who clearly did absolutely nothing.  Even the musicians were kind of helping.  My son’s contribution was small, and he got a ticket.  He was frustrated and bored that he didn’t get to do more (that’s what he says now, anyway), and spent a lot of the afternoon playing with the other kids.

But there were a lot of people there, and it was one meal, on one weekend.  The difficulty is always in maintaining high levels of cooperation day in and day out.  I can spring Pictionary Vocabulary Review on my students for one day and get universal cooperation, but only once.

PS.  I have no idea what the equivalent Starbuckista phrase for light and foamy is, or I would have gone that way for the title joke.  Shows how little attention I’m paying, despite the fact that I’ve been here 3 or 4 days a week this semester on my way to work.  I’ve practically replaced breakfast with high-calorie hot drinks, which is not a good idea, either nutritionally or financially. Hopefully I can get some of those wild-food micronutrients back this weekend.

***

In researching the etymology of the word ent last night, I ran across another, more modern definition of the word.  I was not aware of this definition, but I have to imagine Peter Jackson & co. did know about it, because there are a number of weed-smoking jokes scattered throughout their version of the LoTR trilogy.  They are deliberately vague on what the weed is.  It might be tobacco; it might not.

There’s a little bit of talk during the episode about plant communication.  I joked about the Society of Plant Neurobiology (now the Society of Plant Signaling and Behavior), but it’s a serious field.  Plants don’t rely much on electricity, so their signals are slow, but they do communicate.  There’s a really fun  episode of Nature: What Plants Talk About, where they use animations and time-lapse photography to render plant behaviors on a time-scale that is intuitive to us hasty humans.  Wild tobacco features prominently, which I found especially interesting not just because of the funny ent tie-in because I was raised on a tobacco farm.

References:

Journalist Jim Robbins’s website (which has a whole portfolio of his environmental articles)

http://www.jim-robbins.net/

Darwin’s book on plants, which Jim Robbins mentions during the show

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Movement_in_Plants

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5605

Archangel Ancient Tree Archive (formerly the Champion Tree Project), a 5013c donation-driven organization

http://www.ancienttreearchive.org/

USDA’s projected climate change maps for plant hardiness zones

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/story/2012-01-26/USDA-climate-zone-map/52787142/1

The Champion Tree Registry (this is the national one, which probably overlaps with the various state registries, but don’t ignore those)

http://www.americanforests.org/our-programs/bigtree/

Despite the crazy “end of the world” response to the chestnut blight, the American Chestnut is not gone, and is being brought back through a different method–not cloning but classical hybrid breeding.  I really, really want to put some of these on my old home farm.

http://www.acf.org/

The Daniel Boone National Forest, in my native Kentucky, which does allow a lot of logging, and which ironically grows a lot of that illegal smoking weed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Boone_National_Forest

There’s another Anglo-Saxon word that relates even better to the  episode I still can’t post (Podbean giveth the Facebook app, and Podbean taketh away the disk space). JRR Tolkien took the Anglo-Saxon word for giant, ENT, and mutated its definition. Not to mean an otolaryngologist, either. Tolkien’s Ents are walking, talking trees with eyes, the shepherds of the forests. My favorite sequence in the whole nine hours of Jackson’s LoTR movies is when the Ents storm Isengard, flinging Orcs hither and thither, and reroute a river to flood the whole evil military industrial complex and turn it into a lake (probably a really toxic lake, but still).

Tolkien talked about the shrunken remnants of old growth forests in the Old Forest where Tom Bombadil lived, and in Mirkwood, and in Fangorn. The rest of the forests of the Shire are the sickly tame trees that David Milarch describes during the show. That’s a part of Tolkien’s larger “twilight of the Elves” narrative, which is pretty fatalistic, really. It’s similar in some ways to the “end of the world” narrative, which says why take care of this world, when God’s just going to make a new one anyway? I prefer the newer story, which says that decline is not inevitable, that the future can be better than the past — the recent past, anyway.

In the meantime, happy Earth day.  Check out the video for “The Man Who Planted Trees,” the short story referenced in Jim Robbins’s book.

Or, if you’re not in the mood for optimism, the first few slides of my talk “Bird Mortality Studies,” over at Greensboro Science Cafe’s Facebook page, should be just the thing to get your bile flowing.  Just the first few, though — it gets more optimistic towards the end.

It’s not that the Russians and Ket (native Asians) are against technology; they use snowmobiles, for instance.  It’s that they’re snowed in for half the year, and any tech that is not easily replaceable is useless to them.  Actually worse than useless, if it makes them forget their old skills.  Culturally, they’re like the old pine trees that make up a lot of the forest – less efficient, perhaps, with their clunky old needles and windblown pollen – but winterproof.  Their needles gather less sunlight than a flat leaf, but they shed snow, they don’t suffer frost damage, and they don’t have to be replaced as often.  They waste some energy on broadcasting their pollen, but they don’t have to bribe insects with nectar or birds with fruit to get their reproduction done.  They lose out in softer, warmer environments, but in their element they’re hard to beat.  Evolution hasn’t come up with anything yet that can.  It may, someday, but for now it’s nice to know that competition can preserve as well as replace.

Those Russians reminded me of my own farming people in some ways.  They don’t think much of government and organization.  They don’t like to change the way they do things.  Herzog presents this as sort of heroic, but it can be pretty frustrating and dangerous, too.  These people lived through the Dust Bowl years, although in my wetter, hillier areas it was more flood-based erosion, and they still regard soil conservation regulations as interference.  Earth Day is over 40 years old now, all grown up.  I know plenty of people who would dismiss it just because the guy who founded it was named Gaylord.

Herzog says nothing about global warming in this film, although these people are right in the cross-hairs of it.  The colder parts of the earth are changing far more rapidly than the tropics are.

Stay tuned tomorrow for my special Earth Day interview with the authors of a new book, which shares a title with this famous French short story, whose main character has some traits in common with those Russian fur trappers, and which apparently inspired a lot of people around the developing world.  It was also made into an Academy Award-winning cartoon, which you can see here.

-Ser Jorah Mormont

I have seen far too many fully automatic weapons over the past week.  Last Friday during the lockdown on A&T’s campus, I was evacuated from two different buildings by the boys in black (when did cops all start dressing like crows?  whatever happened to the “boys in blue?”).  Then, two nights in a row, my street was visited, after dark, by heavily armed police.  I won’t go into details, largely because I don’t know any.

In my nonmajors class today we looked at Baba Brinkman’s “Survival of the Fittest.”  People like me, who live in stable blue-collar neighborhoods, with some measure of community, and some expectation that the system actually works for us, react differently to a disruption than those who live in other neighborhoods, with other expectations.  One of my students from Liberia described a country where drug laws are only enforced when the bribes are not paid (which is rare).  People who live in those places don’t plan so much for the future, and that is a tragically rational response to an unpredictable environment.

Which is roughly where Game of Thrones is at right now.  As we enter Book 3, and the Seven Kingdoms descend into total war, the only people looking after the smallfolk are Thoros of Myr and his merry band of counter-brigands.  Most of the armed men roaming the south are predators, like France in the 14th century.  Unpaid soldiers and deserters find other ways to support themselves.  And there’s not much point in calling the police if you can’t pay them yourself.

We don’t live in that kind of environment, and I for one am glad of it.  I’d rather read about wars than live through them.  It’s an interesting social engineering question, though.  What do we as a society do with those young thrill-seekers who don’t mind a bit of the old ultraviolence, particularly if there aren’t enough women around to marry them off and crush their fighting spirit under the heavy weight of monogamy and family (just kidding, honey)?  Do we have to send young men off to war to get rid of them before they turn on us?  Or can we, through ritual and respect, put their talents and personalities to work for us, as the people of Westeros have done?

“Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.“

Realistically, it’s kind of the same thing.  The Night’s Watch has a pretty high turnover, death-wise.  And there are definitely individual Black Brothers who are no better than the mercenaries and criminals  pillaging the South.  In fact, they “recruit” from the dungeons of King’s Landing, if you recall Yorin from Season 2.  But most of them choose to turn their exile into something meaningful, to grow into the oath.  For all out sakes, I hope China (and India, too) gets its demographic act together.  Otherwise we’ll have to invent sexbots, just to keep them busy.  I suppose one could see that as a Crisis = Danger + Opportunity thing.

Good luck out there to our own boys and girls in black, and blue, and camouflage.  Some of us at least do appreciate your sacrifice, and sleep better at night because of it, even if we grumble about the flashing blue lights.

Production note: The clumsy Spanish Inquisition reference was entirely coincidental to John Stewart’s more subtle reference a couple weeks ago (which I can’t find now, or remember what it was in reference to, because I’m old).

References:

There are tons of videos on vowel tones alone.  I watched several, one of which (by a native Chinese speaker) said that tones are unconscious.  They don’t consciously think about which tone they’re using, any more than we spell every word mentally in composing spoken sentences.  I chose this particular one to post because I found Fiona Tian’s Australian accent hilarious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZB9-vZFesk

Biopsychosocial model of medicine:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopsychosocial_model

http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/education/students/student-life/street-medicine/previous-episodes.cfm

Steven Brill’s Time Magazine article on powerless patients and the price gouging of “nonprofit” hospitals:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136864,00.html

Karate Kid (the good one) fruits of manual labor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWMtUDJQfYs

I refer of course to Dr. Henry Higgins, phonologist, who could place a man to within two miles of his birthplace in London (sometimes to within six streets) by his accent.  I personally am a Kentucky briar-hopper who spent half of my teen years getting rid of my own accent (though it creeps out when I’m on the phone with my mom), and the other half copying other people’s accents, doing impressions.  I’ve always been fascinated by languages, though I don’t actually speak anything other than English.

Professor Higgins is also a teacher, one who drives his students to do great things, but it’s not a fun process for anyone involved.  Sort of the anti-Michael Wesch, who I wrote about earlier this week.  Higgins relies heavily on sarcasm and insult to motivate people.  He’s not a physical bully, but definitely an intellectual bully.  And yet he has both morals and a sense of humor.  There’s a great scene where he recommends his pupil Eliza Dolittle’s drunken bum of a father, quite eloquent in his own dialect, as a “moral philosopher” to a rich American who wants a speaker to promote.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not much into musicals, but my wife and I do have season tickets to Triad Stage.  In this particular musical, the singing and even the dancing actually helped to move the story along.  I particularly liked their stately, almost mechanical approach to watching horse racing.  My old buddy Hager and I used to go to the track at Keeneland occasionally.  We likewise never paid much attention to the horses.  It was just a pleasant way to blow our plasma money out in the open air.  We definitely had more in common with the Dolittles of Covent Garden than the Higginses of Wimpole Street back then.  Still do, I guess.

In any case, the theme of the play is transformation.  Over dinner, before we knicked out to the play, the table had been talking (as we do at every A&T social function) around the issues of minority students getting in to Ph.D. programs.  Prof Higgins is more worried about class distinctions than race, but all through the play I kept wondering how to update it for a younger audience, without turning Eliza Dolittle into a prostitute.  Could one do a hip-hop version?  With the girl as a scrappy, plucky bench scientist, pipetting her way into the heart and onto the last nerve of an older, colder Nobel holder?

Wow.  I really need to go to sleep.  But before I go, the program told me that the actor who played Higgins was on Babylon 5 (Hey, if I can brave a musical, you can try some science fiction).  I didn’t recognize his face, so that must mean he was he was one of the Latex Brigade, those guys who wear the uncomfortable alien makeup.

I went over to UNCG today to hear Michael Wesch, who is apparently the Rafe Esquith of the college set. He inspires his students to do fairly amazing things, and then posts videos of them doing it on YouTube.

Other people have noticed the fact that children are more scheduled and controlled. While reading Antifragile, which is about accidentally making systems fragile by trying to make them safe and predictable, I had even made the connection with anxiety. Wesch went a step further in his talk today and laid out a whole vicious cycle of societal disengagement, which (though he didn’t say this) had quite a lot in common with the personal vicious cycle of disengagement that characterizes depression.

These were some really good insights. I was particularly impressed that he didn’t simply blame the technology, but rather the way we’ve chosen to use the technology to wall ourselves off from fear and pain. Unfortunately, “You can’t selectively numb emotion.” Numbness to fear bleeds over to cut the legs out from under joy, too.  It’s what biologists call a trade-off.

That bolded quote from Wesch’s led me to my new favorite TED talk.  It is my new favorite because I had a good experience at Triad Startup Weekend, an almost uplifting experience.  There was a touch of joy at throwing myself into a project for two days, not even wholeheartedly, but just not cynically.  And you know what?  I felt the backlash today.  My emotions were just raw.  As I walked from the car to Aycock Auditorium to hear Wesch’s talk, I stopped across from the Presbyterian Church to watch the cherry blossom petals swirl in the wind.  They were so glorious that I  almost burst into tears.  If there hadn’t been other people out walking, I probably would have.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because my son, who’s 11, says things like, “Daddy doesn’t cry.  I’ve never seen him  cry.  Not ever.”  And I can tell that he’s confused.  He’s not sure whether I’m an unfeeling monster and he’s normal, or whether I’m normal and he’s a weakling.

Wesch pointed out that the rising intonation at the end of a question is similar to the whine of an animal displaying submission.  Likewise, crying is above all a display of vulnerability, a request for help.  Our ancestors actively used vulnerability to enhance in-group cooperation.  They were smarter than we are.

I think I mentioned having recently ramped up my meditation practice, which also has the effect of un-numbing people.  Brene Brown’s list of unhealthy coping behaviors — addiction, fundamentalist religion, political partisanship — all have the effect of tamping down on uncertainty.

Why are we so anxious, when our lives are more predictable than ever?  I get Taleb’s point, but I’m not seeing the neurological mechanism for “the belief that we’re worthy,” and that bothers me.  Not enough to spend ten years working on it like Brown has, but some.

Resources:

http://www.stevenchayes.com/

http://www.brenebrown.com/frsm/

http://inside.wfu.edu/2013/04/wake-forest-hosts-eugenics-conference/

I only heard about it this afternoon on the local NPR affiliate as I was driving home.  I have previous commitments, so I can’t go myself.

Most people don’t realize that the Nazis did not come up with the idea of forcibly sterilizing people (this was before they started simply murdering them).  Eugenics started here, in the U.S., and only later made its way to Nazi Germany.

The conference is going on as the legislature ponders whether or not to compensate the people who were sterilized against their will for being “genetically inferior,” as understood in the 1920s (meaning badly).  It follows up on a five-part series in the Winston-Salem Journal.  The writer of that series is one of the speakers at the conference.

http://www.journalnow.com/specialreports/againsttheirwill/

Tonight is a film and panel discussion focusing on the NC program; tomorrow switches to other examples from the broader U.S. and around the world.

Hey, it’s free, and there’s a reception (I’ll bet they have cheese!).  What else are you going to do on a cold and rainy Thursday night?

In a Ph.D. program, you take classes for about two years.  After that you’re working on your own research, which is usually a sub-project of your advisor’s research, but still, by the time you’ve finished, you should know more about your sub-project than your boss does.  That situation necessarily involves tinkering, since there’s no experts to appeal to.  Lab scientists generally recognize this, amongst ourselves, at least.  Most of our internal labbie bitch sessions are about troubleshooting some technique or experiment that isn’t working.  It’s only in presenting outside the immediate lab group or in writing papers that things get “cleaned up.”

My latest paper is an example of that.  The reviewers and the editor made me reduce the troubleshooting discussions, which to me were the most interesting and useful parts, because they thought those parts were too negative.

Taleb generally presents these distortions of reality, these “clean-ups,” as based in cowardice, dishonesty, and personal selfishness.  Oh, and stupidity – definitely stupidity.  I personally am thinking of them more in terms of game theory and in-group vs. out-group social dynamics.  We’re more honest and complete with our in-groups, during lab meetings, for instance.  That seems rational to me.  Honesty is not black and white but a spectrum.  There’s perfect honesty, complete honesty based on current information, honest enough for now, etc.

So if apprenticeship is better, why don’t we all do that?  Apprenticeship is expensive, that’s why.  I currently spend almost as much time in one mentoring session with my undergraduate researcher as I spend doing one class with 75 students.  That’s why I’m constantly trying to set up internships and other mentoring-type experiences for my students that don’t involve me, because  I can’t do everything.

It’s really similar to the dilemma of parents in r-selection vs. k-selection.  We can produce lots of mediocre graduates, many of whom will not be successful in economic competition, or a few really good ones.  American public education has always been biased towards educating everyone to some minimum standard, like  Readin’, ‘Ritin’, & ‘Rithmetic (or Reckoning).

Hey, I never noticed that before.  I’m sure r-selection was not named for the three Rs from education, but it’s a neat coincidence.  Why is it called r-selection, anyway?  As opposed to J or Q or sigma or something?

The community aspect of the podcast has been slower to take off than I had hoped.  That’s and one reason we launched the Facebook page (with 122 followers), a Twitter feed (which has about 20 followers) and the new Greensboro Science Cafe, to try and get some more community going.  Journalism student Richard Wade is going to be working a different angle with that, both by posting things here, and by doing more interactive poll-type stuff through Facebook.

I’m thinking about those numbers more than usual because I’m up for tenure in the fall.  In the academic calendar/lifepath/journeything that means I’ve been working here for 5 years, longer than I’ve stayed at any other job, any other place except graduate school.  Will I be recognized for my work, or will I have to move on to something else?

There’s a whole category of Cerebral or Social & Cultural Documentaries on Netflix.  With the wife and son having left for their Spring Break trip to LegoLand, I’ve been watching one called Mythic Journeys.  This is a recurring theme on this blog, that science needs a story to give it the emotional resonance of myth, that people don’t make their decisions based on facts so much as they do on whether it fits their personal narrative.  So in one sense, it doesn’t matter what the numbers are.  What matters is whether they like me enough to accept the numbers that I have, or whether they’ll knowingly ask for different numbers, numbers that fit the story they want to tell.

What’s with all the reflection?  Well, as it happens, this time of year is also the anniversary of my older brother’s death.  I don’t have the exact date memorized.  The whole experience was like a bad dream. To be honest, even the year is a little fuzzy.  I know that I was already working at A&T, because one of my colleagues at the time found me at lunch in the cafeteria one day, sat down, and said,

“When my brother died, I drank too much.  Don’t do that.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” I said.

Then he got up and left.  Which to my mind was way more useful than the outpouring of e-mails that normally follows a funeral announcement on the campus network.  I certainly did remember it, at least.

That weird little moment was a mythological experience, an emotional experience.  The exact time and date are irrelevant to the experience.   The exact words used are irrelevant to the experience.  I’m sure, absolutely sure, that my imperfect memory changed them from what an audio recording of that event would sound like.  Anyone who repeated the story would be likely (and welcome) to change them again.  Stories evolve.  The details are selected by the current listening environment.  A story that’s written down is dead, a fossil, until it’s read and regenerated or mutated imperfectly into a human brain.  The changes are in fact what keep it alive.

***

The original title of this post was Anniversaries (Good and Bad), but at the farmer’s market this morning I was talking to the coffee guy about how  I don’t have much of a palate.  He gives me some Rwandan blend and to me it tastes like coffee.  I like something or I don’t.  He was talking about how being able to describe flavors is a skill, based on practice, which got me to thinking a bit more about emotional reactions to other events.  Writing is thinking, and all that.

If it’s a skill, then you have to develop it.  There are many things that I do not have the time to develop skills in.  So I’m recruiting subject matter experts to help me.  Modern music is one of those areas.  Richard Wade is going to be my music snob for a while.  I also have a game snob in mind, but I’ll have to ask him, or more accurately threaten him, maybe.

About a dozen people showed up to hear Corbin Jones fr0m episodes 7-9.  I knew the first time would likely be a little rough, and so I went deep into the bench for someone I knew would be antifragile, someone who actually thrives on chaos.

It was a good choice.  We had foolishly assumed that the projector would be cabled for laptop inputs in addition to video (we’re academics; that’s what we do — show slides).  Geek In Charge Joe Scott, super-accomodating professional that he is, offered to run over to the Apple store and find an appropriate dongle.  It’s actually better that we didn’t show slides, as the place was coffee-house loud, and the audience had to focus on Corbin exclusively to hear what he was saying.  But that’s no different from a high school or a non-majors classroom.

I did introductions and plugged the blog here, before letting CJ ramble on about Neanderthals and the wisdom of marrying your third cousins and deleterious alleles for about 15 minutes.  Then the real fun began with questions.  At first it was just me and my co-organizer, Diedrich Schmidt, peppering him but soon enough other people joined in.

Most people there seemed to have a grasp on the basics of speciation, though there were some very interesting questions about exactly how many genes have to be different before two populations lose the ability to interbreed.  That’s a complicated question, since not all genes are equal (some genes control other genes, so those control points are more important).  With sexual organisms, who use meiosis, that number is somewhere below 10%.  Humans and chimps, who cannot as far as we know interbreed, the differences in sequence are only 1-2%, though the differences in protein expression are obviously going to be larger than that once we figure them out.  For bacteria it can be much higher.  Some strains of the same bacterial “species” have only 30% of their genes in common (100-30=70% different!).  That’s not even in the sequences of the same genes, that’s different genes.  I’m trying to line up an interview about that very subject.

The most common questions were actually on epigenetics and the false dichotomy between nature and nurture.  That’s the nature of dealing with the public.  Again, CJ just rolled with the punches and answered every question, although with new stuff like epigenetics some of his answers were “Nobody really knows.”

So, all in all, a good start, I think.  Comments?

What do you think of our first slogan?

“More fun than a lecture; more educational than a good beating.”

Yeah, we’re going to have to work on that.  Come on out and help us think of a good name for the series.

Tonight’s event features Corbin Jones, whom you may remember from Episodes 7, 8, and 9, if you’ve been listening since May 2011.  If not, he’s a fruit fly genetics guy by training, who studies different examples of how one species can split into two species.

***

While we’re plugging, an update.  My first peer-reviewed paper in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is now out, along with two others (actually funded by BEACON) on fusing art and science into a delicious, nutritious learning experience.  All three can be found here, in the current issue of Evos: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium.  Make sure you check out the extra goodies that go with my paper, making it practically effortless to implement in your own classroom (please please please let me know if you do so).