Tertiarymatt

In June, a writer named Jonah Lehrer got busted for recycling material on a blog at the New Yorker. Lehrer, who specialized in writing about the brain, had been writing a blog called The Frontal Cortex for six years at that point; having just been appointed a staff writer at the New Yorker, he moved it to their web site, where he promptly cut and pasted material from old posts, as well as from magazine and newspaper pieces.

At the time, I just thought he was squandering a marvelous opportunity. When I was asked to comment on the situation, I wrote that some of the things Lehrer had done were uncool, while some were fairly harmless. But Lehrer himself acknowledged that what he was done was stupid, lazy, and wrong. So I figured he’d gotten the sort of school detention that wakes you up and keeps you from getting expelled.

Four months later, I’m struck by how wrong I was.

I’m quoted in the latest of a long string of articles about Lehrer’s misdeeds, a feature in this week’s issue of New York by Boris Kachka. Kachka talked to me for a long while, and it’s clear that he talked to a lot of other people–journalists and scientists alike. He’s ended up with the best account I’ve read of this sad, strange story.

A lot of the other stories and commentaries have been twisted to showcase people’s assorted bugaboos. I’ve lost count of how many times people fussed over Lehrer’s fancy jackets and haircut, as if they were tied up in his moral standing. If Lehrer had a mullet instead, it would not diminish his misdeeds. There was a fierce passion driving people to draw lessons from Lehrer’s story–lessons, I suspect, that they had already drawn and for which they were now just looking for evidence to confirm. In a rare misstep, for example, Reuters blogger Felix Salmon declared Lehrer the exemplar of all that is wrong with TED talks: “TED is a hugely successful franchise; its stars, like Jonah Lehrer, are going to continue to percolate into the world of journalism.” In fact, Lehrer has never given a TED talk. When you’re condemning a culture that promotes the distortion of facts to fit an easy story, it’s best not to distort the facts for an easy story.

In his densely reported piece, Kachka rightly sees two major aspects to this story: Lehrer’s own misdeeds and the culture that fostered and rewarded it.

I was willing to cut Lehrer some slack at first, but as the additional evidence came in, I wondered if I was making excuses for him. The breaking point came when I read about how he had warped a story about a memory prodigy, claiming that he had memorized all of Dante’s Inferno instead of just the first few lines. When someone noted the error, Lehrer blamed it on his editor, but kept on using the enhanced version of the story in his own blog and on Radiolab (which later had to correct their podcast). It’s easy to slip up with facts, but we have an obligation to admit when we’re wrong and not make the same mistake again. It would have been bad enough that Lehrer distorted the facts and continued to do so after having the facts pointed out to him. But he was also willing to damage other people’s reputations along the way. That’s when I signed off.

As for the other side of the story–the culture that fostered Lehrer–I appreciate that Kachka avoided silly sweeping generalizations–that all popular writing about neuroscience has become the worst form of self-help, that speaking about science in public is the intellectual equivalent of pole-dancing. Kachka instead reflects on the trouble that arises when a science writer reduces complex science to a glib lesson. He’s right to zero in on Lehrer’s 2010 New Yorker article “The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method” as an example of this error. For years, a lot of scientists and science writers alike have grown concerned that flashy studies often turn out to be wrong. But Lehrer leaped to a flashy conclusion that science itself is hopelessly flawed.

That makes for great copy (29,000 people liked the story on Facebook), for which I’m sure his editors were grateful. But Lehrer himself didn’t believe what he was writing. If scientific studies were fundamentally unreliable, then why did he continue to publish articles and a book full of emphatic claims about how the brain works–all based on those same supposedly unreliable studies?

The reality is more complicated. After Lehrer’s piece came out, the Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman was asked what he thought of it. “My answer is Yes, there is something wrong with the scientific method,” he wrote–adding (and this is crucial)–”if this method is defined as running experiments and doing data analysis in a patternless way and then reporting, as true, results that pass a statistical significance threshold.”

In other words, this is not a matter about which we should simply issue Milan-Kundera-like utterances, like Lehrer does in his article: “Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.” In fact, this is a matter of statistical power, experimental design, posterior Bayesian distributions, and other decidely unsexy issues (Gelman explains the gory details in this American Scientist article [pdf]).

Kachka understands there’s no easy way out of this dilemma, quoting Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-prize-winning, best-selling Princeton behavioral economist: “There’s no way to write a science book well. If you write it for a general audience and you are successful, your academic colleagues will hate you, and if you write it for academics, nobody would want to read it.”

I put it to Kachka in a similar way, referring to writers like Lehrer: “They find some research that seems to tell a compelling story and want to make that the lesson. But the fact is that science is usually a big old mess.”

And the very way we choose to read about science makes it hard to convey that messiness. I will use my own work as an example of that failure.

In the current issue of Discover, I examine electroconvulsive therapy. I had about 1500 words to write about it, and so I only focused on a single study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I think it’s an important piece of research, because it uses fMRI for the first time to look at what happens to the brain when ECT pulls people out of major depression.

But it’s also true that the study was necessarily small, that the particular method of fMRI they used is very new, that for now the study remains unreplicated, and that there’s a lot of debate in scientific circles (not to mention beyond) about some of the impacts of the treatment.

In the end, I probably oversimplified, leaving people with too much of a feeling that ECT is a perfect cure (it’s not) and an impression that we know exactly how it works (we don’t). But, to paraphrase Kahneman, there’s no way to write a science article well.

Still, the article I wrote was, I believe, the best of my options for discussing the subject. I didn’t have ten thousand words to use to explore its full complexity. I certainly wasn’t going to get many readers if I wrote a scientific journal paper. And waiting for fifty years to see if this research holds up seems like a worse option as well. So I had to fall short. Again. And I will take the criticism that my article triggers and try to do a better job the next time around.

I don’t mean to sound hopelessly fatalistic. Writers can either tackle this dilemma with eyes wide open, or they can look for a way to cut corners and pretend that the dilemma doesn’t exist. And readers can improve things too. When you find yourself captivated by someone talking to you about science in a way that makes you feel like everything’s wonderfully clear and simple (and conforms to your own way of looking at the world), turn away and go look for the big old mess.

Our skin is encased in a snug microbial suit, from our scalps to the tips of our toes. Bacteria begin to colonize our skin from the moment we are born, and they continue to coat us throughout life. They do us many favors. They moisturize our skin to keep it supple; they unleash anti-microbial toxins to ward off pathogens that might make us ill. Scientists know that our skin is home to many species, but they can’t yet say exactly how many–or why some species are found more often on the elbow than on the chin.

Two years ago at a conference in North Carolina, I ran into Rob Dunn, a biologist who was conducting a survey of this menagerie. He was interested in the life found in one particular spot on the human body: the belly button. At the conference, he was handing out Q-tips people could use to swab their navels, which he and his colleagues could then study to tally up the species dwelling there.

Five months later, Dunn sent me a preliminary report: “You, my friend, are a wonderland.” I was the proud host of 53 different types of bacteria, including some decidedly weird creatures, such as a microbe only known from the ocean, and another from the soils of Japan.

I was only one of many human hosts to offer up our navel’s residents to Dunn’s scrutiny. Today, Dunn and his colleagues published a scientific paper on the biological diversity found in 60 bellybuttons in the journal PLOS One. They show that the diversity of my navel was not freakish. Even in a tiny divot of human flesh, dozens or even hundreds of species of bacteria can coexist. All told, Dunn and his colleagues identified 2368 different species living in our 60 belly buttons. The average person had 67 species, with the number ranging from a low of 29 species to a swarming high of 107.

Out of those 2368 species, the majority–1458–are new to science. A few of them are very common, while most are exquisitely rare. Dunn and his colleagues found that eight types of bacteria made up nearly half the microbes the scientists detected. Each of them was present on over seventy percent of us. But the vast majority of the species–2188 all told–lived on six or fewer people. Most were found only on a single individual.

It’s possible that the rare microbes are only visitors, dropping by for a short stay in our navels before dying out or traveling on. The most common species the scientists found may have long-term leases, having evolved adaptation that help them thrive in the bellybutton’s distinctive habitat. Dunn and his colleagues found that these abundant species were also closely related to each other compared to the rarer ones. It’s a pattern similar to the one found in rain forests, were only a few lineages of trees dominate, with many species only contributing a few trees. Your belly button, in other words, really is a jungle.

For more information, read Dunn’s account of the study.

P.S. I refer to these bacteria as belonging to “species.” It’s a convenient term but, when it comes to bacteria, not a precise one. Feel free to mentally substitute “operational taxonomic unit” or “phylotype.”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been dipping into a project called “Moby Dick Big Read.” Plymouth University in England is posting a reading of Moby Dick, one chapter a day. The readers are a mix of writers, artists, and actors, including Tilda Swinton.  They are also posting the chapters on SoundCloud, which makes them very easy to embed. Here is one of my personal favorites, Chapter 32, “Cetology.”

When I was an English major in college, I read Moby Dick under the guidance of English professors and literary critics. They only paid attention to a fraction of the book–the fraction that followed Ishmael on his adventures with Captain Ahab. This was the part of the book that they could easily compare to other great novels, the part they could use for their vague critiques of imperialism, the part–in other words–that you could read without having to bother much with learning about the particulars of the world beyond people: about ships, about oceans, and, most of all, about whales. How many teachers, assigning Moby Dick to their students, have told them on the sly that they could skip over great slabs of the book? How many students have missed the fine passages of “Cetology”?

I’ve read Moby Dick several times since graduating college and becoming a science writer. I look back now at the way I was taught the book, and I can see it was a disaster, foisted upon me by people who either didn’t understand science or were hostile to it, or both. Of course the historical particulars of the book matter. It’s a book, in part, about globalization–the first worldwide energy network. But the biology of the book is essential to its whole point. Just as Ahab becomes obsessed with Moby Dick, the scientific mind of the nineteenth century became mad with whales.

“Cetology” reminds the reader that Melville came before Darwin. Ishmael tries to make sense of the diversity of whales, and he can only rely on the work of naturalists who lacked a theory of evolution to make sense of the mammalian features on what looked like fish. You couldn’t ask for a better subject for a writer looking for some absurd feature of the natural world that could serve as a wall against which Western science could bang its head.

The people I know who don’t like the “whale stuff” in Moby Dick probably hate this chapter. It seems to do nothing but grind the Ahab-centered story line to a halt. (No movie version of Moby Dick has put “Cetology” on film.) But do you really think that a writer like Melville would just randomly wedge a chapter like “Cetology” into a novel for no reason–not to mention the dozens of other chapters just like it? Or perhaps it would be worth trying to find out what Melville had in mind, even if you might have to do a bit of outside reading about Carl Linnaeus or Richard Owen? It would be quite something if students could be co-taught Moby Dick by English professors and biologists.

“Cetology” is organized, explicitly, as a catalog, but don’t let the systematic divisions of its catalog put you off. This is science writing of the highest order, before there was science writing. Listen to the words he uses to describe each species. If you go whale watching some day and are lucky enough to spot a fin whale raising its sundial-like dorsal fin above the water, chances are you will utter to yourself, “gnomon.” 

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kurt Vonnegut (by GottfriedGeist)

Charles vs. The Fake Fedora Fiends

Public anthropology is something any of us can do and its a practice we can engage in at any scale. I’ve written before about how anthropology helped me speak in front of city council to save the bookmobile and I’ve advocated for a public anthropology that is “fast, cheap, and out of control” — meaning it can be local, easy, and not professionally oriented.

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to do something new that was very rewarding for me. I gave a sermon! I’ve included the text of it here. It’s a long read (I had 20 minutes to fill), but if turning cultural relativism into a religion is your cup of tea you might enjoy it. What a treat it was for me to deliver it.

If you’re nostalgic about church but are too anti-authoritarian to put your kids in Sunday school, if you’re interested in your spiritual well-being but can’t stand rules, if you don’t mind a little New Age hugging then check out your local UU. You’ll meet a lot of misfits, hippies, New Englanders, and people who for whatever reason had to walk away from other religions. As my friend Ayla, who grew up in the UU, describes it, “It’s a little bit of Christianity, a little bit of rock and roll.”

Chances are you’ll find other anthropologists, scientists, and professors too. For example my minister has a PhD in physics from Princeton. When I shared with him this story about how some Christian fundamentalists reject Set Theory he said, “Well then, they must object to Godel’s incompleteness theorem as well.” UU’s are a bunch of smartypants.

This sermon was part of a month long series on the theme of Harry Potter…

Harry Potter and Magical Thinking

I must admit I was a little baffled at first when I was invited to give a sermon on the theme of Harry Potter. Why me? Had I lost some kind of bet? I am a cultural anthropologist by training and if there’s one thing we anthropologists are good at it is not feeling uncomfortable in places where we don’t belong and muddling our way through things we have no business doing. “Just figure it out along the way,” is the anthropologist’s maxim.

Imagine that the inhabitants of Hogwarts are like some far-flung tribe and after an exhausting journey from Newport News to this hidden and out of the way place; after having successfully navigated a humiliating and Kafka-esque gauntlet through the Ministry of Magic’s bureaucracy of customs and inspections you, the anthropologist, have arrived in khakis and pith helmet to study this community you know nothing about. You are lonely, far from your friends and family, your bed is hard and the food here tastes funny. You’re a stranger to everyone and can’t seem to make it through a single day without embarrassing yourself by transgressing some to you as yet unknown code of conduct.

Your mission is to learn what you can about this community, about its culture. A slippery topic that. Every human community has a culture and if you made a list of what that entailed exactly, well, you’d have a very long list. But whatever angle you use to get ahold of it, anthropologists are in agreement that culture is by definition something you learn by virtue of your membership in a group. For example, everybody needs to eat. That’s a biological fact. But what you eat, that’s culture. Proteins, carbs, and vitamins are inherent qualities of food. But who is cooking and cleaning, and who is being served, that’s culture.

So out of sheer boredom and loneliness you go out to be with your tribe and make some observations. You observe that everyone at Hogwarts is engaged in this activity called “magic.” You start to look for a pattern and notice that magic always has practical application. There’s a point to it, you’re trying to achieve some end. The function of Alohomora is to unlock doors, the function of Oculus Reparo is to mend eyeglasses. Now you’re ready to make a generalization, magical spells serve a purpose. The magician is trying to achieve something by means of magic. In this way magic replicates what in our culture we call “technology” it is a tool that allows you to do something in the world.

Being that you are at a school for the training of witches and wizards you are able to observe apprentice magicians being trained by masters. It becomes clear that magic is systematic and rule bound, the masters know how to do it properly and must teach technique to their young charges. There is a right way to cast a spell and a wrong way. The first time Harry Potter travels by flue powder he goes with the Weasley family to Diagon Alley he mispronounces the name of his destination (Diagon Illy) and winds up in the wrong place by mistake. When Gilderoy Lockhart attempts to mend Harry Potter’s broken arm he only succeeds in removing the bones from his arm altogether. So, spells can fail.

If there is a right and wrong way to do magic, there must be certain rules a proper spell should follow. Being ignorant of magic you ask, “Where do these rules of magic come from?” Judging from the behavior of the inhabitants of Hogwarts, magic is an inherent property of the universe. Like gravity, magic is an invisible force that is omnipresent and real although intangible. Through concentrated study one can learn the rules of magic in order to command its power, it reveals to the student something about the nature of the universe. In this way the study of magic has much in common with the study of what we call “science,” if one only follows some basic assumptions magic provides an orderly and logical way to understand and explore the universe. Magic, being rule bound, produces outcomes that are, to a wizard at least, predictable and repeatable.

You notice that in order for the witches and wizards of Hogwarts to do magic properly they must be in possession of certain required artifacts. All the students and professors have their various books, some of them have animal familiars too: a cat, an owl, a toad, a rat. To cast a spell a wizard must have a wand. To concoct a potion a witch must have a caldron. When Ronald Weasley’s wand breaks and he pathetically tries to tape the bits back together he can no longer cast a proper spell. So while it may be that magic is invisible, it is still definitely bound up in important ways with tangible objects. Things.

So far we’ve got magic requiring certain mental operations – knowledges and beliefs that you must learn, casting a spell requires certain behaviors that you must practice – principally speech, and to do magic you need to be in possession of magical artifacts like wands, brooms, and caldrons.

II.

Of course, there are also important differences between magic and science in terms of how they explain cause and effect. In today’s children’s focus we saw how sensible Frog gave his moody friend Toad practical advice on how to grow a garden. You give it water and sun and leave it alone. But the way Toad acts is more in keeping with magic. Starting from the base assumption that his seeds are scared Toad proceeds in a logical manner to make them feel safe with stories, poems, and songs. In the end Toad’s garden grows, although he and Frog might have different explanations for what caused the flowers to grow. We might call Toad’s conclusion that it was in fact, very hard work a correct misinterpretation.

Everyone goes through life making certain assumptions about the world and magic is no exception. And though magical thinking may seem exotic at first, as it turns out, it is not so unfamiliar. Sir James George Frazer lays out some good advice for us in his book “The Golden Bough.” Generally speaking there are two sorts of magic: the sympathetic and the contagious, although there is so much overlap it is nearly pointless to keep them separate as discreet categories.

The sympathetic principle states that like produces like and it allows for action at a distance. So, for example, while Harry Potter fights the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets and things are going quite badly for him Fawkes the Phoenix flies in and drops the Sorting Hat into their melee. Harry draws from the Hat the sword of Godrick Gryffindor. He is only able to do this because of the great similarity, or sympathy, between his bravery and the bravery of Godrick Gryffindor.

Harry also shares many uncanny similarities with Lord Voldemort, his ambition makes the Sorting Hat pause and consider placing him in Syltherin House, his parselmouth allows him to talk to snakes, his rage leads him to seek revenge against Sirius Black before he learns his innocence. When Harry first departs for Hogwarts at age eleven, the proprietor of Ollivander’s Wand Shop selects for him the same magic wand that Lord Voldemort possesses. Harry Potter’s lightening bolt scar throbs painfully on his forehead when Voldemort is near.

This is action at a distance. Harry shares this sympathetic relationship with Voldemort, one which binds them together even when they are apart, because something of his essence transferred to Harry when The Dark Lord first attacked him as an infant. Contagious magic explains why this should happen. The contagious principle allows for transference and transformation, a wave of a wand and one thing changes into another. In killing Voldemort as an infant, Harry Potter takes on some of his qualities by virtue of having made contact with him.

Another example of contagious magic is the Polyjuice Potion brewed up by Hermione Granger. In order to dupe class bully Draco Malfoy into revealing who has opened up the Chamber of Secrets, Harry and Ron transform themselves into Draco’s henchmen, Crab and Goyle. The Polyjuice Potion allows one to temporarily take on the physical appearance of another and the final ingredient the boys need to collect is a bit of their hair. By virtue of having been in contact with Crab and Goyle the victim’s hair transfers their essence to the potion, the potion then transfers that to the boys who drink it and transforms them into Draco’s cronies. One thing passes to another like a contagion. Contagious magic.

What magical thinking allows is for one to recognize connections where there are no obvious connections, to create likeness where the likeness is not necessarily real. In poetic contexts we would call such reasoning metaphorical. Why exactly humans have evolved the ability to think in terms of metaphor is an interesting question to ponder. Maybe it goes back to the way we learn language and culture as children, that gift of mimicry is physical – learning to copy the sounds coming out of adult’s mouths is how we all learned to speak – but also intellectual – that is we learned to copy their thoughts and values as well. In anthropology we call the human disposition towards interaction with the world by copying it “mimesis” and it is what allows us the gift of creating representations in art, in poetry, in play.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin muses, “Children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behavior, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train. Of what use to him is this schooling of his mimetic faculty?”

There is a close relationship between the human propensity towards magical thinking and the fact that we all possess a language. What language is and where it came from is rather mysterious. And being that, like magic or gravity it too is intangible, we are in need of a way to get a hold of this immateriality. We need to focus on speech because through speech language becomes observable. I cannot know what other people are thinking, but I can observe people engaged in conversation and get a pretty good idea.

As we noted earlier every magical spell includes words that must be spoken and, moreover, they must be spoken correctly. If I were to wave a wand and say the words of a spell before you right now that would not necessarily “cause” anything to happen. But then again, maybe I’m just not doing it right. After all, there is a type of speech act the linguists call performatives where this actually does happen.

Along with magical spells the performatives include bets, promises, oaths, and curses – they are speech acts that are neither true nor false but instead do things by virtue of being spoken. The classic example of this is wedding vows, which now that we look at them from this new perspective seem a lot like something from Hogwarts. Here’s how it went at my wedding. My fiancée and I had been living together for some time yet on the day of the wedding we were forbidden to see each other, that would be “bad luck” so she did not sleep in my bed the night before. Then at the wedding I got dressed up in these strange clothes that I would never wear in ordinary life. I was standing in front of this ritual official whose job it is to mediate between the living and the supernatural, he was also wearing strange clothes. I spoke some ritualized words and gave her a ring made of yellow metal, she did the same to me.

Abracadabra! We were married. What happened? All we did was speak a few words! In Hogwarts using words to transform on thing into another requires a passing grade in Professor McGonagall’s Transfiguration class. Through the speaking of words we were transformed. Performativity allows you to do the greatest magic trick of all, create something out of nothing – watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat – or make something real disappear. Now you see it, now you don’t. Just a boyfriend and girlfriend, nothing up my sleeves, and then presto-changeo, a married couple. Performatives make the man-made seem natural. Of course saying “I do” and exchanging metal circles with rocks in them is how you get married. Isn’t that how everyone does it?

Perhaps nowhere is the power of productive speech on clearer display than in giving a person, place, or thing its name. Like a spell our ability to name creates something out nothing and in many folkloric traditions knowledge of a person or thing’s True Name allows power over them. Of course the seminal instance of this in the European cannon is Rumplestiltskin. And it continues to be common element in fantasy fiction from “The Hobbit” to Ursula LeGuin’s “Earthsea” series.

Names play a prominent role in the Harry Potter series as well. In the first book, Harry is suffering under the petty tyranny of the Dursley family, he is nothing, a nobody. With the revelation that he is a wizard Harry is stunned to find that there exists an alternate reality where everyone already knows his name. He’s not a nobody, he’s famous. He is The Boy Who Lived. Likewise, Lord Voldemort wields power over wizarding kind as You Know Who and He Who Shall Not Be Named. They do not speak his name, of course, because names summon. Who has not heard a person cry out to God in a moment of pain, shock, or irritation? Saying the name of God draws him nearer to you. Speak of the Devil and he shall appear. Harry does speak the name of Lord Voldemort because he is not afraid of him, his disdain for his enemy is manifested in his refusal to acknowledge his power.

III.

Does the strange world of the Hogwarts tribe now seem more familiar? The fantastic feats of magic that permeate the fictional world of Harry Potter have much in common with the way real people think and act, even if, most of the time, we don’t notice we’ve been doing it since childhood. And we’re left to ponder, what’s the difference between magic and religion anyway? Not much it turns out. JK Rowling anticipated this too. In an attempt to head off accusations that her novels were pagan propaganda Christmas was made to figure prominently in the early books. The Fundamentalists skewered her anyway.

From anthropological standpoint casting transfiguration spells is no different than turning bread into the body of Christ, but then the power of magic to heal is no less than that of the Eucharist. Both magic and religion give the user a sense of confidence in moments when the world seems beyond control. And who wouldn’t want a little extra control when it seems utterly random that one job applicant is picked over another or that one person can be healed of cancer while another dies? Who wouldn’t want the hurricane winds to spare that tree branch that hangs precipitously over the roof or for their team to score one more goal? Magic helps us feel better about living in a world where chance and risk can have costly consequences.

The difference between magic and religion is all in the rhetoric, it is part of the story Europeans told themselves about the rest of the world in the age of empire. We have religion, they magic. We have history, they have myth. We are modern, they are primitive. Magic is as perfectly utilitarian as any technology and magical thinking as logical as any science although, clearly, they fare better in different domains. Why are we here? What is a good life? What is the difference between right and wrong? Science isn’t very effective at answering those sorts of questions.

It’s a funny thing belief. It would seem there’s something about us humans such that we can’t not to do it. We have to believe. There’s a great diversity, of course, in terms of what that is. In what fills that belief shaped slot in our heads. And if you’ve tuned into any of the public debates around politics and religion, two domains where belief is paramount, it would seem that there’s nothing more important than what you believe in. Sticking to your principles! Having strong convictions! But do your convictions serve a practical end? Are they a way for you to do something in the world?

To me the Unitarian Universalist church offers a refreshing, comforting, almost Zen-like alternative. It says: what you believe doesn’t matter so much as how you treat others. The UU ethic is, like magic, focused on the practical. What good are your principles and convictions if you can’t treat others with civility, if they lead to the self instead of towards feeding the world? Through our ethical mode of being we seek to transform the world, to create something out of nothing.

Two weeks ago Reverend Andrew advised us to turn our concentration away from what we believe and towards what we do. Remember that magic is active, that it is something to be performed in particular by means of carefully chosen and powerful words. I think this is the great promise of our UU fellowship and the way in which we lay claim to our own kind of magic. By being conscious and intentional in the way that we act and the way that we speak. Those beliefs are but intangible, your deeds are for everyone to see.

These are the boiling mud pots of Rotorua, a city in New Zealand known for its Māori culture and geothermal activity. It is the only city in the world that is located on an active geothermal field.

Geothermal activity, from the Greek geo meaning earth and therme meaning heat, seethes from cracks in the streets, steams from backyard hot pools, bursts from geysers throughout the area, and bubbles from cauldron-like mud pools.

In this video by SightsForSeeing, watch as the sulfurous steam belches up through the thick liquid, sending drops of volcanic ash and clay splattering and plopping everywhere. It smells of H2S (Hydrogen Sulphide) there; imagine the smell of rotten eggs. To hear the boiling, listen to these mudpots in Yellowstone.

Related watching: geysers.

U. VIRGINIA (US) — A new biography tackles the complex legacy of enigmatic inventor Nikola Tesla.

W. Bernard Carlson has just published Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton University Press), which focuses on Tesla’s life from 1884 to 1905.

Last Friday, we unfurled a brief history of golf ball design, but this post is gonna be all eye candy. Did you ever wonder what that crunchy urethane coating and creamy synthetic resin looks like from the inside? Well, so did photographer James Friedman, who found the inspiration for his latest photo series, "Interior Design," in an unusual place:

Curiosity led me to cut my collection of golf balls in half to see what the cores looked like. To my surprise, what I found inside inspired me to consider that I could discover, in the unlikeliest of places, elegant formal qualities and surprising metaphorical possibilities. Interior Design has moved me to be enthusiastic about abstraction, an exciting corollary to my work as a documentary photographer.

Apparently in an effort to tweak the performance of golf balls, manufacturers have different "recipes" for the resin ingredients, leading to these wonderfully colorful blends:

We've looked at carbon fiber in 3D-printed bikes, in furniture design, and coming out of Lexus' crazy 360-degree loom. The stuff has long been vaunted for its high strength-to-weight ratio. And now, for the first time in decades, carbon fiber could experience a big change, thanks to one of the more popular breakthroughs in material science, graphene.

We've looked at graphene's application in battery-ending supercapacitors before, but for those who don't remember: Graphene is a one-atom thick layer of graphite (carbon) that is strong, and very, very light. And the tricky thing about graphene is making it, since it is so thin.

Recently, scientists at Rice University have managed to weave flakes of graphene oxide into carbon fiber. The result is something that surprised even the scientists who created it. The new fiber is considered to be extraordinarily strong, because knots created using the material are unusually strong.

We might think of knots as a handy way to tie something up. But in materials science they are way of measuring strength. Typically most fibers snap under the tension created at a knot. But with this new carbon fiber the strength at the knot is as strong as anywhere else along the thread of fiber.

We've seen umbrellas stuck into car doors; optimized for wind resistance; slapped onto bikes; and the design potential for this simple device is so great that we even ran a series on umbrella innovations earlier this year (here's Part 1, here's Part 2). The umbrella is one of the longest-lived objects I can think of (and a great example of early design). We know the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians had parasols for sun blockage, and that the Chinese had developed a collapsible umbrella design as early as 21 A.D. But who came up with the idea of the umbrella in the first place?

The amazing photos here, captured by Indonesia-based photographer Penkdix Palme, make you wonder: Was the umbrella's invention biomimetic in the sense that we saw an animal doing this and then emulated them? Or is it simply common sense that early man, caught in the rain, seeks to block it by holding a deflective object above their head?

In most parts of the world, we can't exactly say that new architecture has been kind to our feathered friends (or any part of our environment for that matter). In a time of urban sprawl, pollution and environmental degradation, London-based Aaron Dunkerton's project "Bird Brick" is a nice nod to the role design could be playing in our less than healthy relationship with the environment. We've seen some similar projects, most notably the Brick Biotope by Micaelaa Nardella and Oana Tudose at "FABRIKAAT" during Salone Milan 2012, but Kingston University grad's approach seems to bypassing some potential structural issues by sticking to the brick making basics.

Using a traditional brick-making process and the help of MGH Freshfield Lane in West Sussex, UK, Dunkerton created a five-part brick system that provides a cavity for House Sparrows to nest. The house sparrow population in the UK has decreased by an alarming 70% in the last 50 years. Not surprisingly, pairing well-considered design with an endangered species is a pretty simple recipe for a project that strikes that sweet spot between design and doing good.

So here's a rather painful video of musician and Director of Creative Innovation at Intel will.i.am sharing his thoughts on logo design. Watch... if you dare:

Michael Bierut surmises that he lost a bet, but it turns out that it's kind of a real thing: apparently Mr., um, am is involved in a 20-week Wall Street Journal initiative in which startups are competing for the title Startup of the Year with the guidance of several well-known entrepreneurs. The entire process, which kicked off about five weeks ago, will ultimately be chronicled in a documentary; the call for entries (for which the deadline was back in April) notes that the startups must have less than $10 million in revenue and have a proof-of-concept or prototype to qualify.

Don't call them layers. What we found this week were stacks—perfectly conceived piles of objects as inventive as they are inviting.

To compose his Stack chair's casually tossed cushions, the Milan-based designer Stefan Krivokapic varied their thickness, color and alignment. Designed for the Italian furniture purveyor Contempo, the cushy arrangement rests atop a metal and wood frame, which makes the seat look at once stable and slippery. It's a tower of mattresses worthy of a princess—with or without the pea.

U. TORONTO (CAN) — To make it more difficult for unreceptive females to get away during mating, male guppies have evolved a pair of claws.

The findings are just one example of how some males will go to great lengths to pursue a female and take extreme measures to hold on once they find one that interests them, even if the female is uninterested, researchers say.

Each year I run a workshop for science graduate students at Yale, encouraging them to write clearly, compellingly, and effectively. I’m tempted next year to just cue up this video of Steven Pinker discussing his next book–a psychology-based guide to good writing–and kick back.

[via]

STANFORD (US) — Natural habitats such as dunes and reefs are the best protection against storms and rising sea levels along the US coastline, a new study reports.

Extreme weather, sea level rise, and degraded coastal systems are placing people and property at greater risk along the coasts. Natural habitats are critical to protecting millions of US residents and billions of dollars in property.

Sexual Fluidity and the Lesbian Community

Here is the video of my conversation yesterday with Nancy Redd at HuffPost Live yesterday in which we talked about sexual fluidity and the myth of the Lesbian Until Graduation. I was joined by Brooke Sopelsa, Marcie Bianco, Myisha Cherry and
Lisa Diamond.

I wish I’d had time to include a few more statements, so I’ll just add them here.

People who want to police and act as gatekeepers to any identity (sexual or otherwise) are useless and ineffective. As Marcie brought up in the discussion, an argument used against homosexual marriage is that same-gender couples marrying somehow diminishes (“waters down”, if you will) the marriages of oppositely-gendered couples. Obviously that is a bullshit concept. So why are homosexuals so quick to adopt it when it comes to sexual identity? “If THOSE people identify as my sexuality, it damages the legitimacy of MY identity!” No. No, it really does not.

My identity as a woman is not damaged even though there are some truly terrible women out there. My identity as a cartoonist is not damaged even though there are some truly terrible cartoonists out there. An individual’s identity is their own, regardless if other people you don’t like identify as the same thing as you.

Homosexual identity has ALWAYS been under attack and disrespected as valid, long before there was a stereotype of college girls “experimenting” and the introduction of the word “bicurious”. If you removed from the world every person who’s ever experimented or “gone through a phase”, THERE WOULD STILL BE PEOPLE ATTACKING AND INVALIDATING HOMOSEXUAL IDENTITY. Don’t blame those that “experiment” or are attracted to multiple genders for other people’s homophobia. Blame the homophobes.

Biphobia is not how you combat homophobia, but it does make those that are biphobic act just as bullying and reprehensible as homophobes.

Other people do not get to define your sexual identity. There is no such thing as a REAL [sexual ID] and a FAKE [sexual ID].

Your sexual identity HAS NO IMPACT on somebody else’s sexual identity. NONE AT ALL. There is no “watering down” of identity.

There is no test, no threshold, no status quo you have to meet to identify as your sexuality. You are the ONE PERSON who knows truly and can accurately name your sexual identity.

Nobody else.