For your listening pleasure. Hopefully.
12.27.2008
Stephen
My friends and I heard that you were seriously tempted to come to the New Years Eve celebration in Austin. Make it happen.
12.19.2008
12.16.2008
Today I realized
Anytime I hear the phrase "who's house" I cannnot resist following it with "Run's house". It's seriously become some weird obsessive-compulsive tick. Thank you Run-DMC.
12.14.2008
for the inner-man in all of us
Who knew a couple teaspoons of cum could add a healthy dose to any old dish.
the semen cookbook
So when Dad asks what you want for Christmas, you know what to say.
the semen cookbook
So when Dad asks what you want for Christmas, you know what to say.
12.11.2008
Don't forget to adjust your clocks! Ha.
Leap second to be added to the official world time
Posted by David Pescovitz, December 10, 2008 12:14 PM |
On December 31, at 23:59:59 UTC, a leap second will be added to the official timekeeping clocks of the world. That's because the timescales of atomic clocks and the earth's rotation aren't perfectly in synch. The last leap second was added in 2005.
From Smithsonian:
Earth’s rotation is the traditional form of timekeeping. It is what defines a day. However, while we call a day 86,400 seconds, it is really 86,400.02 seconds. All those .02 seconds add up over time. In addition, the earth’s rotation is not constant (it has been slightly slowing, and 900 million years ago a day was only 18 of our hours). Time as we know it changes. Trippy.
Posted by David Pescovitz, December 10, 2008 12:14 PM |
On December 31, at 23:59:59 UTC, a leap second will be added to the official timekeeping clocks of the world. That's because the timescales of atomic clocks and the earth's rotation aren't perfectly in synch. The last leap second was added in 2005.
From Smithsonian:
Earth’s rotation is the traditional form of timekeeping. It is what defines a day. However, while we call a day 86,400 seconds, it is really 86,400.02 seconds. All those .02 seconds add up over time. In addition, the earth’s rotation is not constant (it has been slightly slowing, and 900 million years ago a day was only 18 of our hours). Time as we know it changes. Trippy.
12.10.2008
Speaking of walruses
The interview is so-so (the kid's only 14 afterall) but the animation is totally diggable.
I Met the Walrus
I Met the Walrus
Something to take your mind off the pain.
You are encouraged to watch this video while flossing so as to make the experience of flossing more pleasurable. Especially you Stephen.
12.09.2008
Where's the Inner Circle theme song?
Kopbusters -- reality show that busts cops for conducting illegal drug raids
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, December 8, 2008 1:29 PM
Former drug office Barry Cooper has launched an online reality TV show that sets up corrupt cops who conduct illegal drug raids.
KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.
The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster’s attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster’s secret mobile office nearby.
On the Agitator blog, Radley Balko says:
To clarify just a bit, according to Cooper, there was nothing illegal going on the bait house, just two evergreen trees and some grow lamps. There was no probable cause. So a couple of questions come up. First, how did the cops get turned on to the house in the first place? Cooper suspects they were using thermal imaging equipment to detect the grow lamps, a practice the Supreme Court has said is illegal. The second question is, what probable cause did the police put on the affidavit to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant? If there was nothing illegal going on in the house, it’s difficult to conceive of a scenario where either the police or one of their informants didn’t lie to get a warrant.
Cooper chose to bait the Odessa police department because he believes police there instructed an informant to plant marijuana on a woman named Yolanda Madden. She’s currently serving an eight-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute. According to Cooper, the informant actually admitted in federal court that he planted the marijuana. Madden was convicted anyway.
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, December 8, 2008 1:29 PM
Former drug office Barry Cooper has launched an online reality TV show that sets up corrupt cops who conduct illegal drug raids.
KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.
The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster’s attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster’s secret mobile office nearby.
On the Agitator blog, Radley Balko says:
To clarify just a bit, according to Cooper, there was nothing illegal going on the bait house, just two evergreen trees and some grow lamps. There was no probable cause. So a couple of questions come up. First, how did the cops get turned on to the house in the first place? Cooper suspects they were using thermal imaging equipment to detect the grow lamps, a practice the Supreme Court has said is illegal. The second question is, what probable cause did the police put on the affidavit to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant? If there was nothing illegal going on in the house, it’s difficult to conceive of a scenario where either the police or one of their informants didn’t lie to get a warrant.
Cooper chose to bait the Odessa police department because he believes police there instructed an informant to plant marijuana on a woman named Yolanda Madden. She’s currently serving an eight-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute. According to Cooper, the informant actually admitted in federal court that he planted the marijuana. Madden was convicted anyway.
Somebody, please!!
Christmas gift for real this time - an electric toy piano; I'll take care of the rest.
HOW TO turn a toy piano into a playable shirt
Posted by Cory Doctorow, December 8, 2008 10:18 PM
Here's an Instructable from Mikamika explaining how to rip apart an electric toy piano and wire it into a shirt, turning your chest into a playable instrument.
A Toy Piano embedded on a T-shirt. It has 8 keys from Do to Do (1 octave). You can play simple music by wearing the shirt and pushing the fabric button on the shirt. All the components from the toy piano (batteries, speaker, circuit board) are placed on the shirt and connected with poppers. All these hard components are detachable so that you can wash it if you wish.
Wearable Toy Piano (via Craft)
What are the odds you'll get electrocuted?
HOW TO turn a toy piano into a playable shirt
Posted by Cory Doctorow, December 8, 2008 10:18 PM
Here's an Instructable from Mikamika explaining how to rip apart an electric toy piano and wire it into a shirt, turning your chest into a playable instrument.
A Toy Piano embedded on a T-shirt. It has 8 keys from Do to Do (1 octave). You can play simple music by wearing the shirt and pushing the fabric button on the shirt. All the components from the toy piano (batteries, speaker, circuit board) are placed on the shirt and connected with poppers. All these hard components are detachable so that you can wash it if you wish.
Wearable Toy Piano (via Craft)
What are the odds you'll get electrocuted?
12.07.2008
Getting to know your local links.
I've added a few more links off to the left.
The first three links take you to the blogs of friends' (is that where the apostrophe goes?). Give these blogs a read every now and again. They are way above par.
The next four links focus on stories beautifully, eloquently, cleverly told. Please oh please listen to them!
Sunday Dinner Potluck is obvious. Feed me = Free Rice. And me talk pretty one day should be able to assist you with many of your spelling and grammar questions.
The first three links take you to the blogs of friends' (is that where the apostrophe goes?). Give these blogs a read every now and again. They are way above par.
The next four links focus on stories beautifully, eloquently, cleverly told. Please oh please listen to them!
Sunday Dinner Potluck is obvious. Feed me = Free Rice. And me talk pretty one day should be able to assist you with many of your spelling and grammar questions.
12.06.2008
I'm naming my next cat Creme Puff.
World's oldest cat celebrates 125th birthday
A feline believed to be the world's oldest cat has celebrated his 125th birthday.
Last Updated: 6:37PM GMT 03 Dec 2008 With musings by yours truly in bold.
Mischief, the world's oldest cat, is 100 Photo: SWNS.COM
And at 27 human years, (oh well that's just plain misleading! i knew a cat couldn't be 125 years old. and i was right.) Mischief is still living up to his name despite "slowing down a little", according to owners Chris and Donna Thorne.
The Guinness World Records has confirmed there is no record holder in the UK at the moment but the previous oldest cat was 29.
Mrs Thorne, 33, of St Austell, Cornwall, said: "It's amazing - he just keeps going on and on."
Mr Thorne, 51, (someone likes 'em young) got the black cat from a friend in nearby Launceston as a kitten in 1981. Yet another reason why '81 is a badass year.
He still has photographs of Mischief at just a few months old being cuddled at Christmas the same year.
Almost three decades later, he is still a vital part of the Thorne family, and is adored by the couple's 20-month-old baby Skye.
"She loves him to bits," said Mrs Thorne. "When he eventually goes we'll have to get another one because she'll be devastated."
She said that despite Mischief's advanced years, he still has a spring in his step.
"His name says it all," she said. "He may be 27 but he still manages to jump over the stair gate and he's round your ankles constantly for food.
"He's an indoor cat now, and he's losing big clumps of fur, but he's still going."
She added: "We'd love to know if there are any older cats in Cornwall. He's lost a couple of his nine lives over the years but it doesn't seem to have affected him."
A spokesman from Guinness World Records said a ginger cat called Spike was the last feline to hold the title of UK's oldest cat but since he died in 2001, there had been no further record holder. He encouraged Mr and Mrs Thorne to get in contact with Guinness World Records.
The oldest cat ever is Creme Puff, who was born on August 3, 1967 and lived until August 6, 2005 an amazing 38 years and three days.
Creme Puff lived with her owner, Jake Perry, in Austin, Texas. (What what!!)
What I want to know is, what are they feeding these cats and where can I buy it?
A feline believed to be the world's oldest cat has celebrated his 125th birthday.
Last Updated: 6:37PM GMT 03 Dec 2008 With musings by yours truly in bold.
Mischief, the world's oldest cat, is 100 Photo: SWNS.COM
And at 27 human years, (oh well that's just plain misleading! i knew a cat couldn't be 125 years old. and i was right.) Mischief is still living up to his name despite "slowing down a little", according to owners Chris and Donna Thorne.
The Guinness World Records has confirmed there is no record holder in the UK at the moment but the previous oldest cat was 29.
Mrs Thorne, 33, of St Austell, Cornwall, said: "It's amazing - he just keeps going on and on."
Mr Thorne, 51, (someone likes 'em young) got the black cat from a friend in nearby Launceston as a kitten in 1981. Yet another reason why '81 is a badass year.
He still has photographs of Mischief at just a few months old being cuddled at Christmas the same year.
Almost three decades later, he is still a vital part of the Thorne family, and is adored by the couple's 20-month-old baby Skye.
"She loves him to bits," said Mrs Thorne. "When he eventually goes we'll have to get another one because she'll be devastated."
She said that despite Mischief's advanced years, he still has a spring in his step.
"His name says it all," she said. "He may be 27 but he still manages to jump over the stair gate and he's round your ankles constantly for food.
"He's an indoor cat now, and he's losing big clumps of fur, but he's still going."
She added: "We'd love to know if there are any older cats in Cornwall. He's lost a couple of his nine lives over the years but it doesn't seem to have affected him."
A spokesman from Guinness World Records said a ginger cat called Spike was the last feline to hold the title of UK's oldest cat but since he died in 2001, there had been no further record holder. He encouraged Mr and Mrs Thorne to get in contact with Guinness World Records.
The oldest cat ever is Creme Puff, who was born on August 3, 1967 and lived until August 6, 2005 an amazing 38 years and three days.
Creme Puff lived with her owner, Jake Perry, in Austin, Texas. (What what!!)
What I want to know is, what are they feeding these cats and where can I buy it?
12.05.2008
Ahhoh!!!
Wilhelm makes me laugh. But I should warn you that it gets a little old after the first minute.
12.01.2008
Gay Feet!
Gay penguins steal eggs from straight couples
A couple of gay penguins are attempting to steal eggs from straight birds in an effort to become "fathers", it has been reported.
Last Updated: 2:06PM GMT 27 Nov 2008
There are known to be several gay penguin couples in zoos across the world Photo: GETTY
The two penguins have started placing stones at the feet of parents before waddling away with their eggs, in a bid to hide their theft.
But the deception has been noticed by other penguins at the zoo, who have ostracised the gay couple from their group. Now keepers have decided to segregate the pair of three-year-old male birds to avoid disrupting the rest of the community during the hatching season.
A keeper at Polar Land in Harbin, north east China explained that the gay couple had the natural urge to become fathers, despite their sexuality.
"One of the responsibilities of being a male adult is looking after the eggs. Despite this being a biological impossibility for this couple, the natural desire is still there," a keeper told the Austrian Times newspaper.
"It's not discrimination. We have to fence them separately, otherwise the whole group will be disturbed during hatching time," he added.
There are numerous examples of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, but gay penguins have captured the public's attention more than any other species.
A German zoo provoked outrage from gay lobby groups after attempting to mate a group of gay male penguins with Swedish female birds who were flown in especially to seduce them. But the project was abandoned after the males refused to be "turned", showing no interest in their would-be mates.
In 2002 a couple of penguins at a New York zoo who had been together for eight years were "outed" when keepers noticed that they were both males.
A couple of gay penguins are attempting to steal eggs from straight birds in an effort to become "fathers", it has been reported.
Last Updated: 2:06PM GMT 27 Nov 2008
There are known to be several gay penguin couples in zoos across the world Photo: GETTY
The two penguins have started placing stones at the feet of parents before waddling away with their eggs, in a bid to hide their theft.
But the deception has been noticed by other penguins at the zoo, who have ostracised the gay couple from their group. Now keepers have decided to segregate the pair of three-year-old male birds to avoid disrupting the rest of the community during the hatching season.
A keeper at Polar Land in Harbin, north east China explained that the gay couple had the natural urge to become fathers, despite their sexuality.
"One of the responsibilities of being a male adult is looking after the eggs. Despite this being a biological impossibility for this couple, the natural desire is still there," a keeper told the Austrian Times newspaper.
"It's not discrimination. We have to fence them separately, otherwise the whole group will be disturbed during hatching time," he added.
There are numerous examples of homosexuality in the animal kingdom, but gay penguins have captured the public's attention more than any other species.
A German zoo provoked outrage from gay lobby groups after attempting to mate a group of gay male penguins with Swedish female birds who were flown in especially to seduce them. But the project was abandoned after the males refused to be "turned", showing no interest in their would-be mates.
In 2002 a couple of penguins at a New York zoo who had been together for eight years were "outed" when keepers noticed that they were both males.
Damn.
The two villages where mothers killed EVERY baby born a boy for ten years
By RICHARD SHEARS
Last updated at 8:30 AM on 28th November 2008
Comments (22)
Add to My Stories
The Papua New Guinea jungle has given up one of its darkest secrets - the systematic slaughter of every male baby born in two villages to prevent future tribal clashes.
By virtually wiping out the 'male stock', tribal women hope they can avoid deadly bow-and-arrow wars between the villages in the future.
'Babies grow into men and men turn into warriors,' said Rona Luke, a village wife who is attending a special 'peace and reconciliation' meeting in the mountain village of Goroka.
Slaughter: The Papua New Guinea Eastern Highlands where it has been claimed women in two villages killed all their male children for a decade to prevent tribal warfare
'It's because of the terrible fights that have brought death and destruction to our villages for the past 20 years that all the womenfolk have agreed to have all new-born male babies killed,' said Mrs Luke.
'The women have had enough of men engaging in tribal conflicts and bringing misery to them.'
The sensational claims recall the Biblical story of the Old Testament pharaoh who ordered all midwives to kill Israelite baby boys because he wanted to ensure there were never enough young men to fight in an army against the Egyptians.
Mrs Luke said that the village women agreed that if they stopped producing males, allowing only female babies to survive, their tribe's stock of boys would go down and there would be no men in future to fight.
A resident of Agibu village, Mrs Luke said she did not know how many male babies were killed by being smothered, but it had happened to all males over a 10 year period - and she suggested it was still happening.
Choking back tears she added: 'It's a terrible, unbearable crime, but the women had to do it.
'The women have really being forced into it as it's the only means available to them as women to bring an end to tribal fights.'
Confirming the shocking infanticide claims, Mrs Kipiyona Belas from the rival Amosa village, told a newspaper that getting food for their families was difficult because husbands were fighting other tribes with bows-and- arrows and spears.
Often the men did not come back, having been killed on the 'battle field', usually a clearing in the jungle.
Now, with the help of the Salvation Army and the initiative of local Pastor Michael Hemuno, the tribal women hope the slaughter of babies can end and those men who are still warriors will lay down their weapons and talk peace.
'We are trying to get them to live peacefully and end all the deaths of young and old,' said Pastor Hemuno.
Tribal fighting in the region of Gimi, in the country's Eastern Highlands, has been going on since 1986, many of the clashes arising over claims of sorcery.
Papua New Guinea tribes, who dress up in warrior paint and feathered finery for special occasions, are strong believers in sorcery and often blame their enemies for bringing about deaths through witchcraft.
By RICHARD SHEARS
Last updated at 8:30 AM on 28th November 2008
Comments (22)
Add to My Stories
The Papua New Guinea jungle has given up one of its darkest secrets - the systematic slaughter of every male baby born in two villages to prevent future tribal clashes.
By virtually wiping out the 'male stock', tribal women hope they can avoid deadly bow-and-arrow wars between the villages in the future.
'Babies grow into men and men turn into warriors,' said Rona Luke, a village wife who is attending a special 'peace and reconciliation' meeting in the mountain village of Goroka.
Slaughter: The Papua New Guinea Eastern Highlands where it has been claimed women in two villages killed all their male children for a decade to prevent tribal warfare
'It's because of the terrible fights that have brought death and destruction to our villages for the past 20 years that all the womenfolk have agreed to have all new-born male babies killed,' said Mrs Luke.
'The women have had enough of men engaging in tribal conflicts and bringing misery to them.'
The sensational claims recall the Biblical story of the Old Testament pharaoh who ordered all midwives to kill Israelite baby boys because he wanted to ensure there were never enough young men to fight in an army against the Egyptians.
Mrs Luke said that the village women agreed that if they stopped producing males, allowing only female babies to survive, their tribe's stock of boys would go down and there would be no men in future to fight.
A resident of Agibu village, Mrs Luke said she did not know how many male babies were killed by being smothered, but it had happened to all males over a 10 year period - and she suggested it was still happening.
Choking back tears she added: 'It's a terrible, unbearable crime, but the women had to do it.
'The women have really being forced into it as it's the only means available to them as women to bring an end to tribal fights.'
Confirming the shocking infanticide claims, Mrs Kipiyona Belas from the rival Amosa village, told a newspaper that getting food for their families was difficult because husbands were fighting other tribes with bows-and- arrows and spears.
Often the men did not come back, having been killed on the 'battle field', usually a clearing in the jungle.
Now, with the help of the Salvation Army and the initiative of local Pastor Michael Hemuno, the tribal women hope the slaughter of babies can end and those men who are still warriors will lay down their weapons and talk peace.
'We are trying to get them to live peacefully and end all the deaths of young and old,' said Pastor Hemuno.
Tribal fighting in the region of Gimi, in the country's Eastern Highlands, has been going on since 1986, many of the clashes arising over claims of sorcery.
Papua New Guinea tribes, who dress up in warrior paint and feathered finery for special occasions, are strong believers in sorcery and often blame their enemies for bringing about deaths through witchcraft.
11.26.2008
Spider vs. Me
I noticed recently there's been a lot of talk about spiders and how everyone wet themselves because there was a black widow in Donovan's sleeping bag in Arkansas, so I thought "Hey, I can talk about spiders too."
In Australia, where every damn thing is poisonous, I worked in a Redback spider (related to the black widow) infested greenhouse. Before fumigation and subsequent extermination of the spiders, I would frequently encounter them, and after a time, got annoyed by them enough to just flick them with my finger, thus knocking them out of their web, then step on them to kill them. That is just how awesome I am. There was also a plan to get bit by one of the spiders to get out of some annoying work that had to be done, but after some consideration it was concluded that this was a bad idea. Anyway, here's a picture of one of the redbacks I took in the greenhouse.
Also, redback is the name of a good wheat beer they brew around here.
Sign me up
Wikipedia says:
Dancing mania (or choreomania,[1] from the Greek: χορεία (khoreia = 'dance') + μανία (mania = 'madness’)) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 18th centuries; it involved groups of people, sometimes thousands at a time, who danced uncontrollably and bizarrely, seemingly possessed by the devil. Men, women, and children would dance through the streets of towns or cities, sometimes foaming at the mouth until they collapsed from fatigue.
One of the first major outbreaks was in Aachen, Germany, on June 24, 1374; the populace danced wildly through the streets, screaming of visions and hallucinations, and even continued to writhe and twist after they were too exhausted to stand.[citation needed] The dancing mania quickly spread throughout Europe, said to be "propagated in epidemic fashion by sight" by Dr. Justus Hecker.[2]
Having occurred to thousands of people across several centuries, dancing mania was not a local event, and was, therefore, well-documented in contemporary writings. More outbreaks were reported in the Netherlands, Cologne, Metz, and later Strasburg (Dancing Plague of 1518), apparently following pilgrimage routes.[3]
Paloma says:
Read the rest of the article on wikipedia. Also, listen to the radiolab episode on laughing. The link's right over there <--. I believe it says somthing like "Radiolab. Pretty much the best thing EVER."
Floridian outbreak pictured below
Dancing mania (or choreomania,[1] from the Greek: χορεία (khoreia = 'dance') + μανία (mania = 'madness’)) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 18th centuries; it involved groups of people, sometimes thousands at a time, who danced uncontrollably and bizarrely, seemingly possessed by the devil. Men, women, and children would dance through the streets of towns or cities, sometimes foaming at the mouth until they collapsed from fatigue.
One of the first major outbreaks was in Aachen, Germany, on June 24, 1374; the populace danced wildly through the streets, screaming of visions and hallucinations, and even continued to writhe and twist after they were too exhausted to stand.[citation needed] The dancing mania quickly spread throughout Europe, said to be "propagated in epidemic fashion by sight" by Dr. Justus Hecker.[2]
Having occurred to thousands of people across several centuries, dancing mania was not a local event, and was, therefore, well-documented in contemporary writings. More outbreaks were reported in the Netherlands, Cologne, Metz, and later Strasburg (Dancing Plague of 1518), apparently following pilgrimage routes.[3]
Paloma says:
Read the rest of the article on wikipedia. Also, listen to the radiolab episode on laughing. The link's right over there <--. I believe it says somthing like "Radiolab. Pretty much the best thing EVER."
Floridian outbreak pictured below
11.25.2008
11.24.2008
NOT another X-mas gift.
Dual System Toilets
Written by Peg Fong
Sunday, 23 November 2008
We don’t often think about how we could make our toilets more efficient. Maybe that’s because we don’t think about our toilets so much in general -= one flush and the problem is gone until the next time we sit and ponder. For some reason, in North America, we haven't caught on yet to what consumers in water-starved Asia and Australia have known for decades. Why should the water we flush with be as pristine as the water we drink out of the tap?
The people at Caroma have come up with an idea that makes a lot of sense. It has a system that routes the sink water used while washing hands into the toilet tank ready for the next flush. The Profile Smart Dual Flush Toilet has a built in sink behind the cistern which is useful for when space is at a premium, although it may take some adjusting to get used to straddling the seat in order to wash your hands. Apart from the filling mechanism, the toilet operates normally. The water from the sink comes directly from the utilities water supply, completely separating the two functions.
The product was even noted last month as one of the top ten items in Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Products of 2008. Caroma, which has its headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, says it has tested to make sure that soapy water in the tank will have no adverse impact on the toilet components and has calculated water usage savings of 70 per cent per household by combining the sink and toilet.
The system is already available in Australia and the company anticipates selling in North America starting in 2009.
Via Inventor Spot and Popular Mechanics
On a personal note, I once went to this rather fancy hotel in Ireland and soon discovered that their toilet systems used recycled toilet water. It was brownish-yellowish. So this sounds like a reasonable alternative to me.
Written by Peg Fong
Sunday, 23 November 2008
We don’t often think about how we could make our toilets more efficient. Maybe that’s because we don’t think about our toilets so much in general -= one flush and the problem is gone until the next time we sit and ponder. For some reason, in North America, we haven't caught on yet to what consumers in water-starved Asia and Australia have known for decades. Why should the water we flush with be as pristine as the water we drink out of the tap?
The people at Caroma have come up with an idea that makes a lot of sense. It has a system that routes the sink water used while washing hands into the toilet tank ready for the next flush. The Profile Smart Dual Flush Toilet has a built in sink behind the cistern which is useful for when space is at a premium, although it may take some adjusting to get used to straddling the seat in order to wash your hands. Apart from the filling mechanism, the toilet operates normally. The water from the sink comes directly from the utilities water supply, completely separating the two functions.
The product was even noted last month as one of the top ten items in Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Products of 2008. Caroma, which has its headquarters in Brisbane, Australia, says it has tested to make sure that soapy water in the tank will have no adverse impact on the toilet components and has calculated water usage savings of 70 per cent per household by combining the sink and toilet.
The system is already available in Australia and the company anticipates selling in North America starting in 2009.
Via Inventor Spot and Popular Mechanics
On a personal note, I once went to this rather fancy hotel in Ireland and soon discovered that their toilet systems used recycled toilet water. It was brownish-yellowish. So this sounds like a reasonable alternative to me.
Who's spider is that?
click on image for full effect please
[editor's edit: sorry the text is so small, it just turned out like that, not my fault]
11.22.2008
This ALWAYS makes me laugh!
Stephen Benigno (UWA) wrote
at 1:16am on January 8th, 2008
paloma, i didn't know your arms were so white and hairy
Kayla Keller (Texas State) wrote
at 12:17pm on January 8th, 2008
aww this night looks like fun! sad i missed it!
Donovan Escalante (Netherlands) wrote
at 11:44pm on January 16th, 2008
Kayla, I'll tell you what happened. This is right before Stephen and Mike made out and then Paloma got naked. Look at Matt in the back with his evil eyes
Stephen Benigno (UWA) wrote
at 12:03am on January 17th, 2008
kayla, i'll tell you what really happened. paloma twisted off donovan's head using her super strength, then i ripped out mike's throat. We both threw them to evil-eye matthew, who ate them whole. then paloma and i made out a little bit
11.17.2008
As promised
The article we discussed:
Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.
This quote does illustrate an important point: before jumping right into solving a problem, we should step back and invest time and effort to improve our understanding of it. Here are 10 strategies you can use to see problems from many different perspectives and master what is the most important step in problem solving: clearly defining the problem in the first place!
The Problem Is To Know What the Problem Is
The definition of the problem will be the focal point of all your problem-solving efforts. As such, it makes sense to devote as much attention and dedication to problem definition as possible. What usually happens is that as soon as we have a problem to work on we’re so eager to get to solutions that we neglect spending any time refining it.
What most of us don’t realize — and what supposedly Einstein might have been alluding to — is that the quality of the solutions we come up with will be in direct proportion to the quality of the description of the problem we’re trying to solve. Not only will your solutions be more abundant and of higher quality, but they’ll be achieved much, much more easily. Most importantly, you’ll have the confidence to be tackling a worthwhile problem.
Problem Definition Tools and Strategies
The good news is that getting different perspectives and angles in order to clearly define a problem is a skill that can be learned and developed. As such, there are many strategies you can use to perfect it. Here are the 10 most effective ones I know.
1. Rephrase the Problem
When a Toyota executive asked employees to brainstorm “ways to increase their productivity”, all he got back were blank stares. When he rephrased his request as “ways to make their jobs easier”, he could barely keep up with the amount of suggestions.
Words carry strong implicit meaning and, as such, play a major role in how we perceive a problem. In the example above, ‘be productive’ might seem like a sacrifice you’re doing for the company, while ‘make your job easier’ may be more like something you’re doing for your own benefit, but from which the company also benefits. In the end, the problem is still the same, but the feelings — and the points of view — associated with each of them are vastly different.
Play freely with the problem statement, rewording it several times. For a methodic approach, take single words and substitute variations. ‘Increase sales’? Try replacing ‘increase’ with ‘attract’, ‘develop’, ‘extend’, ‘repeat’ and see how your perception of the problem changes. A rich vocabulary plays an important role here, so you may want to use a thesaurus or develop your vocabulary.
2. Expose and Challenge Assumptions
Every problem — no matter how apparently simple it may be — comes with a long list of assumptions attached. Many of these assumptions may be inaccurate and could make your problem statement inadequate or even misguided.
The first step to get rid of bad assumptions is to make them explicit. Write a list and expose as many assumptions as you can — especially those that may seem the most obvious and ‘untouchable’.
That, in itself, brings more clarity to the problem at hand. But go further and test each assumption for validity: think in ways that they might not be valid and their consequences. What you will find may surprise you: that many of those bad assumptions are self-imposed — with just a bit of scrutiny you are able to safely drop them.
For example, suppose you’re about to enter the restaurant business. One of your assumptions might be ‘restaurants have a menu’. While such an assumption may seem true at first, try challenging it and maybe you’ll find some very interesting business models (such as one restaurant in which customers bring dish ideas for the chef to cook, for example).
3. Chunk Up
Each problem is a small piece of a greater problem. In the same way that you can explore a problem laterally — such as by playing with words or challenging assumptions — you can also explore it at different “altitudes”.
If you feel you’re overwhelmed with details or looking at a problem too narrowly, look at it from a more general perspective. In order to make your problem more general, ask questions such as: “What’s this a part of?”, “What’s this an example of?” or “What’s the intention behind this?”.
For a detailed explanation of how this principle works, check the article Boost Your Brainstorm Effectiveness with the Why Habit.
Another approach that helps a lot in getting a more general view of a problem is replacing words in the problem statement with hypernyms. Hypernyms are words that have a broader meaning than the given word. (For example, a hypernym of ‘car’ is ‘vehicle’). A great, free tool for finding hypernyms for a given word is WordNet (just search for a word and click on the ‘S:’ label before the word definitions).
4. Chunk Down
If each problem is part of a greater problem, it also means that each problem is composed of many smaller problems. It turns out that decomposing a problem in many smaller problems — each of them more specific than the original — can also provide greater insights about it.
‘Chunking the problem down’ (making it more specific) is especially useful if you find the problem overwhelming or daunting.
Some of the typical questions you can ask to make a problem more specific are: “What are parts of this?” or “What are examples of this?”.
Just as in ‘chunking up’, word substitution can also come to great use here. The class of words that are useful here are hyponyms: words that are stricter in meaning than the given one. (E.g. two hyponyms of ‘car’ are ‘minivan’ and ‘limousine’). WordNet can also help you finding hyponyms.
5. Find Multiple Perspectives
Before rushing to solve a problem, always make sure you look at it from different perspectives. Looking at it with different eyes is a great way to have instant insight on new, overlooked directions.
For example, if you own a business and are trying to ‘increase sales’, try to view this problem from the point of view of, say, a customer. For example, from the customer’s viewpoint, this may be a matter of adding features to your product that one would be willing to pay more for.
Rewrite your problem statement many times, each time using one of these different perspectives. How would your competition see this problem? Your employees? Your mom?
Also, imagine how people in various roles would frame the problem. How would a politician see it? A college professor? A nun? Try to find the differences and similarities on how the different roles would deal with your problem.
6. Use Effective Language Constructs
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula for properly crafting the perfect problem statement, but there are some language constructs that always help making it more effective:
Assume a myriad of solutions. An excellent way to start a problem statement is: “In what ways might I…”. This expression is much superior to “How can I…” as it hints that there’s a multitude of solutions, and not just one — or maybe none. As simple as this sounds, the feeling of expectancy helps your brain find solutions.
Make it positive. Negative sentences require a lot more cognitive power to process and may slow you down — or even derail your train of thought. Positive statements also help you find the real goal behind the problem and, as such, are much more motivating.
For example: instead of finding ways to ‘quit smoking’, you may find that ‘increase your energy’, ‘live longer’ and others are much more worthwhile goals.
Frame your problem in the form of a question. Our brain loves questions. If the question is powerful and engaging, our brains will do everything within their reach to answer it. We just can’t help it: Our brains will start working on the problem immediately and keep working in the background, even when we’re not aware of it.
If you’re still stuck, consider using the following formula for phrasing your problem statement:
“In what ways (action) (object) (qualifier) (end result)?”
Example: In what ways might I package (action) my book (object) more attractively (qualifier) so people will buy more of it (end result)?
7. Make It Engaging
In addition to using effective language constructs, it’s important to come up with a problem statement that truly excites you so you’re in the best frame of mind for creatively tackling the problem. If the problem looks too dull for you, invest the time adding vigor to it while still keeping it genuine. Make it enticing. Your brain will thank (and reward) you later.
One thing is to ‘increase sales’ (boring), another one is ‘wow your customers’. One thing is ‘to create a personal development blog’, another completely different is to ‘empower readers to live fully’.
8. Reverse the Problem
One trick that usually helps when you’re stuck with a problem is turning it on its head.
If you want to win, find out what would make you lose. If you are struggling finding ways to ‘increase sales’, find ways to decrease them instead. Then, all you need to do is reverse your answers. ‘Make more sales calls’ may seem an evident way of increasing sales, but sometimes we only see these ‘obvious’ answers when we look at the problem from an opposite direction.
This seemingly convoluted method may not seem intuitive at first, but turning a problem on its head can uncover rather obvious solutions to the original problem.
9. Gather Facts
Investigate causes and circumstances of the problem. Probe details about it — such as its origins and causes. Especially if you have a problem that’s too vague, investigating facts is usually more productive than trying to solve it right away.
If, for example, the problem stated by your spouse is “You never listen to me”, the solution is not obvious. However, if the statement is “You don’t make enough eye contact when I’m talking to you,” then the solution is obvious and you can skip brainstorming altogether. (You’ll still need to work on the implementation, though!)
Ask yourself questions about the problem. What is not known about it? Can you draw a diagram of the problem? What are the problem boundaries? Be curious. Ask questions and gather facts. It is said that a well-defined problem is halfway to being solved: I would add that a perfectly-defined problem is not a problem anymore.
10. Problem-Solve Your Problem Statement
I know I risk getting into an infinite loop here, but as you may have noticed, getting the right perspective of a problem is, well, a problem in itself. As such, feel free to use any creative thinking technique you know to help. There are plenty to choose from:
You may want to give yourself an Idea Quota of problem statements. Or write a List of 100 problems to solve. SCAMPER your problem definition. These are just some of dozen techniques you can try.
Of course, how much effort you invest in defining the problem in contrast to how much effort you invest in solving your actual problem is a hard balance to achieve, though one which is attainable with practice.
Personally, I don’t think that 55 minutes of defining a problem versus 5 minutes acting on it is usually a good proportion. The point is that we must be aware of how important problem defining is and correct our tendency to spend too little time on it.
In fact, when you start paying more attention to how you define your problems, you’ll probably find that it is usually much harder than solving them. But you’ll also find that the payoff is well worth the effort.
Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.
This quote does illustrate an important point: before jumping right into solving a problem, we should step back and invest time and effort to improve our understanding of it. Here are 10 strategies you can use to see problems from many different perspectives and master what is the most important step in problem solving: clearly defining the problem in the first place!
The Problem Is To Know What the Problem Is
The definition of the problem will be the focal point of all your problem-solving efforts. As such, it makes sense to devote as much attention and dedication to problem definition as possible. What usually happens is that as soon as we have a problem to work on we’re so eager to get to solutions that we neglect spending any time refining it.
What most of us don’t realize — and what supposedly Einstein might have been alluding to — is that the quality of the solutions we come up with will be in direct proportion to the quality of the description of the problem we’re trying to solve. Not only will your solutions be more abundant and of higher quality, but they’ll be achieved much, much more easily. Most importantly, you’ll have the confidence to be tackling a worthwhile problem.
Problem Definition Tools and Strategies
The good news is that getting different perspectives and angles in order to clearly define a problem is a skill that can be learned and developed. As such, there are many strategies you can use to perfect it. Here are the 10 most effective ones I know.
1. Rephrase the Problem
When a Toyota executive asked employees to brainstorm “ways to increase their productivity”, all he got back were blank stares. When he rephrased his request as “ways to make their jobs easier”, he could barely keep up with the amount of suggestions.
Words carry strong implicit meaning and, as such, play a major role in how we perceive a problem. In the example above, ‘be productive’ might seem like a sacrifice you’re doing for the company, while ‘make your job easier’ may be more like something you’re doing for your own benefit, but from which the company also benefits. In the end, the problem is still the same, but the feelings — and the points of view — associated with each of them are vastly different.
Play freely with the problem statement, rewording it several times. For a methodic approach, take single words and substitute variations. ‘Increase sales’? Try replacing ‘increase’ with ‘attract’, ‘develop’, ‘extend’, ‘repeat’ and see how your perception of the problem changes. A rich vocabulary plays an important role here, so you may want to use a thesaurus or develop your vocabulary.
2. Expose and Challenge Assumptions
Every problem — no matter how apparently simple it may be — comes with a long list of assumptions attached. Many of these assumptions may be inaccurate and could make your problem statement inadequate or even misguided.
The first step to get rid of bad assumptions is to make them explicit. Write a list and expose as many assumptions as you can — especially those that may seem the most obvious and ‘untouchable’.
That, in itself, brings more clarity to the problem at hand. But go further and test each assumption for validity: think in ways that they might not be valid and their consequences. What you will find may surprise you: that many of those bad assumptions are self-imposed — with just a bit of scrutiny you are able to safely drop them.
For example, suppose you’re about to enter the restaurant business. One of your assumptions might be ‘restaurants have a menu’. While such an assumption may seem true at first, try challenging it and maybe you’ll find some very interesting business models (such as one restaurant in which customers bring dish ideas for the chef to cook, for example).
3. Chunk Up
Each problem is a small piece of a greater problem. In the same way that you can explore a problem laterally — such as by playing with words or challenging assumptions — you can also explore it at different “altitudes”.
If you feel you’re overwhelmed with details or looking at a problem too narrowly, look at it from a more general perspective. In order to make your problem more general, ask questions such as: “What’s this a part of?”, “What’s this an example of?” or “What’s the intention behind this?”.
For a detailed explanation of how this principle works, check the article Boost Your Brainstorm Effectiveness with the Why Habit.
Another approach that helps a lot in getting a more general view of a problem is replacing words in the problem statement with hypernyms. Hypernyms are words that have a broader meaning than the given word. (For example, a hypernym of ‘car’ is ‘vehicle’). A great, free tool for finding hypernyms for a given word is WordNet (just search for a word and click on the ‘S:’ label before the word definitions).
4. Chunk Down
If each problem is part of a greater problem, it also means that each problem is composed of many smaller problems. It turns out that decomposing a problem in many smaller problems — each of them more specific than the original — can also provide greater insights about it.
‘Chunking the problem down’ (making it more specific) is especially useful if you find the problem overwhelming or daunting.
Some of the typical questions you can ask to make a problem more specific are: “What are parts of this?” or “What are examples of this?”.
Just as in ‘chunking up’, word substitution can also come to great use here. The class of words that are useful here are hyponyms: words that are stricter in meaning than the given one. (E.g. two hyponyms of ‘car’ are ‘minivan’ and ‘limousine’). WordNet can also help you finding hyponyms.
5. Find Multiple Perspectives
Before rushing to solve a problem, always make sure you look at it from different perspectives. Looking at it with different eyes is a great way to have instant insight on new, overlooked directions.
For example, if you own a business and are trying to ‘increase sales’, try to view this problem from the point of view of, say, a customer. For example, from the customer’s viewpoint, this may be a matter of adding features to your product that one would be willing to pay more for.
Rewrite your problem statement many times, each time using one of these different perspectives. How would your competition see this problem? Your employees? Your mom?
Also, imagine how people in various roles would frame the problem. How would a politician see it? A college professor? A nun? Try to find the differences and similarities on how the different roles would deal with your problem.
6. Use Effective Language Constructs
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula for properly crafting the perfect problem statement, but there are some language constructs that always help making it more effective:
Assume a myriad of solutions. An excellent way to start a problem statement is: “In what ways might I…”. This expression is much superior to “How can I…” as it hints that there’s a multitude of solutions, and not just one — or maybe none. As simple as this sounds, the feeling of expectancy helps your brain find solutions.
Make it positive. Negative sentences require a lot more cognitive power to process and may slow you down — or even derail your train of thought. Positive statements also help you find the real goal behind the problem and, as such, are much more motivating.
For example: instead of finding ways to ‘quit smoking’, you may find that ‘increase your energy’, ‘live longer’ and others are much more worthwhile goals.
Frame your problem in the form of a question. Our brain loves questions. If the question is powerful and engaging, our brains will do everything within their reach to answer it. We just can’t help it: Our brains will start working on the problem immediately and keep working in the background, even when we’re not aware of it.
If you’re still stuck, consider using the following formula for phrasing your problem statement:
“In what ways (action) (object) (qualifier) (end result)?”
Example: In what ways might I package (action) my book (object) more attractively (qualifier) so people will buy more of it (end result)?
7. Make It Engaging
In addition to using effective language constructs, it’s important to come up with a problem statement that truly excites you so you’re in the best frame of mind for creatively tackling the problem. If the problem looks too dull for you, invest the time adding vigor to it while still keeping it genuine. Make it enticing. Your brain will thank (and reward) you later.
One thing is to ‘increase sales’ (boring), another one is ‘wow your customers’. One thing is ‘to create a personal development blog’, another completely different is to ‘empower readers to live fully’.
8. Reverse the Problem
One trick that usually helps when you’re stuck with a problem is turning it on its head.
If you want to win, find out what would make you lose. If you are struggling finding ways to ‘increase sales’, find ways to decrease them instead. Then, all you need to do is reverse your answers. ‘Make more sales calls’ may seem an evident way of increasing sales, but sometimes we only see these ‘obvious’ answers when we look at the problem from an opposite direction.
This seemingly convoluted method may not seem intuitive at first, but turning a problem on its head can uncover rather obvious solutions to the original problem.
9. Gather Facts
Investigate causes and circumstances of the problem. Probe details about it — such as its origins and causes. Especially if you have a problem that’s too vague, investigating facts is usually more productive than trying to solve it right away.
If, for example, the problem stated by your spouse is “You never listen to me”, the solution is not obvious. However, if the statement is “You don’t make enough eye contact when I’m talking to you,” then the solution is obvious and you can skip brainstorming altogether. (You’ll still need to work on the implementation, though!)
Ask yourself questions about the problem. What is not known about it? Can you draw a diagram of the problem? What are the problem boundaries? Be curious. Ask questions and gather facts. It is said that a well-defined problem is halfway to being solved: I would add that a perfectly-defined problem is not a problem anymore.
10. Problem-Solve Your Problem Statement
I know I risk getting into an infinite loop here, but as you may have noticed, getting the right perspective of a problem is, well, a problem in itself. As such, feel free to use any creative thinking technique you know to help. There are plenty to choose from:
You may want to give yourself an Idea Quota of problem statements. Or write a List of 100 problems to solve. SCAMPER your problem definition. These are just some of dozen techniques you can try.
Of course, how much effort you invest in defining the problem in contrast to how much effort you invest in solving your actual problem is a hard balance to achieve, though one which is attainable with practice.
Personally, I don’t think that 55 minutes of defining a problem versus 5 minutes acting on it is usually a good proportion. The point is that we must be aware of how important problem defining is and correct our tendency to spend too little time on it.
In fact, when you start paying more attention to how you define your problems, you’ll probably find that it is usually much harder than solving them. But you’ll also find that the payoff is well worth the effort.
11.12.2008
Not quite what I pictured but still rad.
The flying car
A British engineer has invented a fan-powered flying car - and to prove the Skycar works, he’s off to Africa in it
Richard Fleury
To Timbuktu by flying car: it sounds the most unlikely journey on earth; a sci-fi voyage from the pages of Jules Verne. But this is no fantasy. The car really flies. And the journey will become reality early in the new year when two explorers set off from London in a propeller-powered dune buggy heading for the Sahara.
The seed of this improbable adventure was sown four years ago when Gilo Cardozo, a paramotor manufacturer, had a eureka moment. For those not familiar with paramotors, picture a parachutist with a giant industrial fan strapped to his back, which provides forward motion and boosts lift for the parachute - or wing - during takeoff. Cardozo’s brainwave was to attach a car to the fan.
“I started making a paramotor on wheels that you sit on and take off and it suddenly occurred to me, ‘Why not just have a car that does everything?’” recalls Cardozo, whose Wiltshire-based company Parajet built the paramotor that the adventurer Bear Grylls used to fly near Everest last year.
A workable flying car has been the inventors’ holy grail for half a century, but the reality has remained elusive. Just ask Paul Moller, the Canadian engineer whose four-seater Skycar is still at the prototype stage after 40 years and more than £100m of development.
Cardozo, a self-taught engineer with a tiny fraction of that budget, thinks he may finally have cracked it. “I’ve been dreaming about making flying cars since I was a boy,” he says, “thinking about all the ways it could be done and seeing how all the other people in the world have done it wrong.
“No one’s ever made one that really does work that you can go out and buy. But here’s the ultimate solution: it’s cheap, it’s safe, it works, all the technology’s already there. So I pushed ahead and thought, ‘We’ve got to do it’.”
Without recent advances in flexible wing technology, the idea would barely have got off the ground. New aerodynamic profiles and materials make it possible to lift a vehicle weighing 1,500lb and passengers without dangerous instability.
“This thing will launch itself without any pilot input,” says Cardozo. “You just open it up and it goes. The more power you put on, the faster you go until you come off the ground [at 35mph]. The wing will basically lock above you [once airborne] and stay there, without weaving, at speeds of up to 80mph.”
Fully road-legal - the car passed the government’s single vehicle approval test last month - and designed to run on bioethanol, Cardozo’s Skycar is powered by a modified 140bhp Yamaha R1 superbike engine with a lightweight automatic CVT (continuously variable transmission) gear-box from a snowmobile. It boasts Ferrari-beating acceleration on land, an air speed of up to 80mph and can swap between road and flight modes in minutes.
“The fan’s static when you’re driving around,” says Cardozo. “The engineering challenge was getting a really reliable system that will switch power between wheels or fan.”
With chief pilot and expedition organiser Neil Laughton, Cardozo will fly and drive the two-seater more than 3,700 miles to Timbuktu. Setting off on January 14, they will take about 40 days to reach the city in Mali, west Africa, whose name is a byword for the back end of beyond (a recent survey found a third of young Britons claimed not to believe that Timbuktu exists).
The team has spent £130,000 developing and attempting to make the Skycar desert-proof. The vehicle is in fact a modified Rage Motorsport off-road racing buggy, and will be followed by a support convoy including an eight-wheel truck, two Toyota Land Cruiser 4x4s and several motorbikes.
If the buggy’s 1000cc engine fails in the air, the machine is designed to glide back to earth for an emergency landing, like any aircraft. But it’s also equipped with an emergency, rocket-launched parachute in case the canopy collapses.
“It’s going to be quite a treacherous trip,” predicts Cardozo. “But that’s all part of a good adventure.”
The Skycar’s first challenge will be the 22-mile flight across the English Channel, before landing in France and continuing by road. Then, after a high-altitude navigation over the Pyrenees, it faces another all-or-nothing crossing over the Strait of Gibraltar.
“If the transmission system or engine go down, we risk losing our car in the water,” says Cardozo. “We’re looking into flotation devices like they use on lifeboats. You attach them to the car and throw them out to stop it sinking.”
How much of the Skycar’s voyage will be airborne and how much earthbound will depend on the prevailing conditions. But the planned route will take the team through Mauritania, Morocco and into Mali and include a crossing of the Sahara’s remote “empty quarter”, where they will need to be self-sufficient for up to two weeks.
The Sahara is a notoriously harsh environment but the heat, dust and unforgiving terrain are not the only dangers. Last year the annual Paris-Dakar desert rally was cancelled because of fears of terrorist attacks.
“There is certainly a little bit of a threat in terms of unsavoury organisations in that part of the world, the southern Sahara,” says Laughton. “It’s a sensitive area and there are reports of Al-Qaeda cells springing up. I’m not taking it lightly but if we were to take the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advice, we wouldn’t be going. We just have to be a little bit savvy and not advertise our exact route, which might put us at risk of an ambush.” Laughton, who has led expeditions to the Amazon, Arctic and Antarctic, hopes the Skycar will one day be more than just an adventurer’s toy. Its versatility and low cost could potentially make it useful for flying doctors and relief workers in remote areas.
“In the 2005 earthquakes in Pakistan there were no helicopters available and this is a really inexpensive and easy method with which to [bring in] a doctor or medic very quickly,” Laughton says.
“When the road ahead is destroyed by avalanche or rockfall and it’s impossible to get in by road you can simply take off and fly around the obstacle. And a pilot could extract somebody very easily in the passenger seat and get them to a hospital.”
Laughton - a pilot - claims the car is easier to fly than planes or helicopters. “It’s so much less complex then either of those two or pretty much anything else I’ve flown,” he says. “It’s just got a throttle and two foot pedals for steering and that’s pretty much it. It doesn’t get much easier. One minute you’re dragging on a sandy beach and the next minute you’re flying over it.”
If the Skycar comes through its maiden voyage, Cardozo’s company plans to put it into limited production with a price of somewhere between £35,000 and £40,000 for a standard model and £60,000 for a high-performance sports version.
Unlike a light aircraft, potential buyers won’t need a private pilot’s licence to fly a Skycar, just one day’s tuition and a powered parachute licence.
“It will be a serious aircraft but also a proper road machine, with acceleration to match your average sports car,” says Cardozo. “I’m not going to sell millions of them but even if we sell 20 we’ll be laughing.”
But first there is the small matter of Timbuktu.
FROM ROAD TO AIR IN THE SKYCAR
The driver unpacks the parafoil wing from the boot and manually deploys it from the rear of the car. He switches the transmission from road mode, which drives the wheels, to flight mode, which powers the rear fan
The fan’s thrust pushes the car forward, providing lift for the wing as the car reaches 35mph – takeoff speed. Once airborne, pedals in the footwell steer the Skycar by pulling cables that change the wing’s shape
The Skycar has a flying range of about 180 miles. If the wing is damaged or collapses, the pilot can fire a roof-mounted emergency parachute that allows the car to float safely back to earth
VITAL STATISTICS
ENGINE 1000cc, four cylinders
POWER 140bhp
RANGE 180 miles (flight) / 250 miles (road)
CRUISING ALTITUDE 2,000-3,000ft
MAXIMUM ALTITUDE 15,000ft
ACCELERATION 0-60mph: 4.5sec (on road)
TOP SPEED 80mph (flight) / 110mph (road)
COST £35,000
A British engineer has invented a fan-powered flying car - and to prove the Skycar works, he’s off to Africa in it
Richard Fleury
To Timbuktu by flying car: it sounds the most unlikely journey on earth; a sci-fi voyage from the pages of Jules Verne. But this is no fantasy. The car really flies. And the journey will become reality early in the new year when two explorers set off from London in a propeller-powered dune buggy heading for the Sahara.
The seed of this improbable adventure was sown four years ago when Gilo Cardozo, a paramotor manufacturer, had a eureka moment. For those not familiar with paramotors, picture a parachutist with a giant industrial fan strapped to his back, which provides forward motion and boosts lift for the parachute - or wing - during takeoff. Cardozo’s brainwave was to attach a car to the fan.
“I started making a paramotor on wheels that you sit on and take off and it suddenly occurred to me, ‘Why not just have a car that does everything?’” recalls Cardozo, whose Wiltshire-based company Parajet built the paramotor that the adventurer Bear Grylls used to fly near Everest last year.
A workable flying car has been the inventors’ holy grail for half a century, but the reality has remained elusive. Just ask Paul Moller, the Canadian engineer whose four-seater Skycar is still at the prototype stage after 40 years and more than £100m of development.
Cardozo, a self-taught engineer with a tiny fraction of that budget, thinks he may finally have cracked it. “I’ve been dreaming about making flying cars since I was a boy,” he says, “thinking about all the ways it could be done and seeing how all the other people in the world have done it wrong.
“No one’s ever made one that really does work that you can go out and buy. But here’s the ultimate solution: it’s cheap, it’s safe, it works, all the technology’s already there. So I pushed ahead and thought, ‘We’ve got to do it’.”
Without recent advances in flexible wing technology, the idea would barely have got off the ground. New aerodynamic profiles and materials make it possible to lift a vehicle weighing 1,500lb and passengers without dangerous instability.
“This thing will launch itself without any pilot input,” says Cardozo. “You just open it up and it goes. The more power you put on, the faster you go until you come off the ground [at 35mph]. The wing will basically lock above you [once airborne] and stay there, without weaving, at speeds of up to 80mph.”
Fully road-legal - the car passed the government’s single vehicle approval test last month - and designed to run on bioethanol, Cardozo’s Skycar is powered by a modified 140bhp Yamaha R1 superbike engine with a lightweight automatic CVT (continuously variable transmission) gear-box from a snowmobile. It boasts Ferrari-beating acceleration on land, an air speed of up to 80mph and can swap between road and flight modes in minutes.
“The fan’s static when you’re driving around,” says Cardozo. “The engineering challenge was getting a really reliable system that will switch power between wheels or fan.”
With chief pilot and expedition organiser Neil Laughton, Cardozo will fly and drive the two-seater more than 3,700 miles to Timbuktu. Setting off on January 14, they will take about 40 days to reach the city in Mali, west Africa, whose name is a byword for the back end of beyond (a recent survey found a third of young Britons claimed not to believe that Timbuktu exists).
The team has spent £130,000 developing and attempting to make the Skycar desert-proof. The vehicle is in fact a modified Rage Motorsport off-road racing buggy, and will be followed by a support convoy including an eight-wheel truck, two Toyota Land Cruiser 4x4s and several motorbikes.
If the buggy’s 1000cc engine fails in the air, the machine is designed to glide back to earth for an emergency landing, like any aircraft. But it’s also equipped with an emergency, rocket-launched parachute in case the canopy collapses.
“It’s going to be quite a treacherous trip,” predicts Cardozo. “But that’s all part of a good adventure.”
The Skycar’s first challenge will be the 22-mile flight across the English Channel, before landing in France and continuing by road. Then, after a high-altitude navigation over the Pyrenees, it faces another all-or-nothing crossing over the Strait of Gibraltar.
“If the transmission system or engine go down, we risk losing our car in the water,” says Cardozo. “We’re looking into flotation devices like they use on lifeboats. You attach them to the car and throw them out to stop it sinking.”
How much of the Skycar’s voyage will be airborne and how much earthbound will depend on the prevailing conditions. But the planned route will take the team through Mauritania, Morocco and into Mali and include a crossing of the Sahara’s remote “empty quarter”, where they will need to be self-sufficient for up to two weeks.
The Sahara is a notoriously harsh environment but the heat, dust and unforgiving terrain are not the only dangers. Last year the annual Paris-Dakar desert rally was cancelled because of fears of terrorist attacks.
“There is certainly a little bit of a threat in terms of unsavoury organisations in that part of the world, the southern Sahara,” says Laughton. “It’s a sensitive area and there are reports of Al-Qaeda cells springing up. I’m not taking it lightly but if we were to take the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advice, we wouldn’t be going. We just have to be a little bit savvy and not advertise our exact route, which might put us at risk of an ambush.” Laughton, who has led expeditions to the Amazon, Arctic and Antarctic, hopes the Skycar will one day be more than just an adventurer’s toy. Its versatility and low cost could potentially make it useful for flying doctors and relief workers in remote areas.
“In the 2005 earthquakes in Pakistan there were no helicopters available and this is a really inexpensive and easy method with which to [bring in] a doctor or medic very quickly,” Laughton says.
“When the road ahead is destroyed by avalanche or rockfall and it’s impossible to get in by road you can simply take off and fly around the obstacle. And a pilot could extract somebody very easily in the passenger seat and get them to a hospital.”
Laughton - a pilot - claims the car is easier to fly than planes or helicopters. “It’s so much less complex then either of those two or pretty much anything else I’ve flown,” he says. “It’s just got a throttle and two foot pedals for steering and that’s pretty much it. It doesn’t get much easier. One minute you’re dragging on a sandy beach and the next minute you’re flying over it.”
If the Skycar comes through its maiden voyage, Cardozo’s company plans to put it into limited production with a price of somewhere between £35,000 and £40,000 for a standard model and £60,000 for a high-performance sports version.
Unlike a light aircraft, potential buyers won’t need a private pilot’s licence to fly a Skycar, just one day’s tuition and a powered parachute licence.
“It will be a serious aircraft but also a proper road machine, with acceleration to match your average sports car,” says Cardozo. “I’m not going to sell millions of them but even if we sell 20 we’ll be laughing.”
But first there is the small matter of Timbuktu.
FROM ROAD TO AIR IN THE SKYCAR
The driver unpacks the parafoil wing from the boot and manually deploys it from the rear of the car. He switches the transmission from road mode, which drives the wheels, to flight mode, which powers the rear fan
The fan’s thrust pushes the car forward, providing lift for the wing as the car reaches 35mph – takeoff speed. Once airborne, pedals in the footwell steer the Skycar by pulling cables that change the wing’s shape
The Skycar has a flying range of about 180 miles. If the wing is damaged or collapses, the pilot can fire a roof-mounted emergency parachute that allows the car to float safely back to earth
VITAL STATISTICS
ENGINE 1000cc, four cylinders
POWER 140bhp
RANGE 180 miles (flight) / 250 miles (road)
CRUISING ALTITUDE 2,000-3,000ft
MAXIMUM ALTITUDE 15,000ft
ACCELERATION 0-60mph: 4.5sec (on road)
TOP SPEED 80mph (flight) / 110mph (road)
COST £35,000
Another X-mas gift: iBangle
The latest piece created by Gopinath Prasana. While millions of music listeners “shuck & jive” up and down street corners listening to the latest tunes from their sleek iPods, Shuffle, Nanos, and Touch pieces. It seems as though there is a new concept design created for the more “fashionably forward” consumer. Gopinath Prasana has decided to turn up the volume on Apple, creating a concept ipod design made to be worn on the wrist and would be featured as an aluminum bangle to the naked eye. The iBangle concept design features a built in mult-touch track pad for you to control your playlist. Along with music controls, hold switch button, and a Air in/Out button for wearing support. It’s quite obvious Prasana has put a lot of thought into this concept - seeing as though it would be made for both men and women, and while everyone has a different body type - this concept has been designed for comfort as well as wear. Wireless In-Ear Headphones would help users listen to the music while looking “fashionably sound” on the streets. Now I don’t know about you ladies….but I am definitely feeling this idea. I wonder if this iBangle would really go into motion? Knowing Apple….you never know what might happen!
Via Blogue.us / YankoDesign.com
To GM or not to GM?
Purple 'super tomato' that can fight against cancer
By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 3:03 AM on 27th October 2008
Comments (28) Add to My Stories
It looks like a cross between an orange and a black pudding, but this genetically modified purple 'super tomato' could be the latest weapon in the fight against cancer.
The fruit, which tastes and smells like a normal red tomato, has been given two genes from a snapdragon flower that produce the dark colour.
The distinctive hue is created by antioxidant pigments that protect against diseases including cancer, heart problems and diabetes.
These plum-like tomatoes have been genetically engineered to fight cancer
British scientists behind the crop believe their purple tomato is the respectable face of genetic modification and could help convince the public of the benefits of GM food.
But critics say the potential health benefits are a distraction from the harmful environmental side effects of GM farming.
The tomato - developed by the John Innes Centre in Norwich - contains high concentrations of anthocyanins, pigments found in blackberries and cranberries.
Anthocyanins are chemicals called flavonoids which mop up potentially harmful oxygen molecules in the body. Although they are produced naturally by tomato plants, they are normally found only in the leaves.
The scientists transferred the genes from the snapdragons using specially adapted bacteria.
Food for thought: The tomatoes could be on sale within three years - but not in Britain
Professor Cathie Martin, who led the John Innes research - the results of which are published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology - said one tomato contained the same anthocyanins as a spoonful of cranberries.
'Most people do not eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day,' she said.
'But they can get more benefit from those they do eat if common fruit and vegetables can be developed that are higher in nutrients.'
The scientists found that mice bred to be vulnerable to cancer lived longer when fed the GM tomatoes. They now hope to test the effects on men at risk of prostate cancer.
Dr Lara Bennett, of Cancer Research UK, said: 'It's exciting to see new techniques that could make healthy foods even better for us.'
But critics warn that genetic modification is tied in with factory farming methods that harm communities - and that any seeds from a GM tomato could produce unexpected effects on the environment.
Friends of the Earth said: 'GM crops cannot be deemed a "healthy" option.'
By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 3:03 AM on 27th October 2008
Comments (28) Add to My Stories
It looks like a cross between an orange and a black pudding, but this genetically modified purple 'super tomato' could be the latest weapon in the fight against cancer.
The fruit, which tastes and smells like a normal red tomato, has been given two genes from a snapdragon flower that produce the dark colour.
The distinctive hue is created by antioxidant pigments that protect against diseases including cancer, heart problems and diabetes.
These plum-like tomatoes have been genetically engineered to fight cancer
British scientists behind the crop believe their purple tomato is the respectable face of genetic modification and could help convince the public of the benefits of GM food.
But critics say the potential health benefits are a distraction from the harmful environmental side effects of GM farming.
The tomato - developed by the John Innes Centre in Norwich - contains high concentrations of anthocyanins, pigments found in blackberries and cranberries.
Anthocyanins are chemicals called flavonoids which mop up potentially harmful oxygen molecules in the body. Although they are produced naturally by tomato plants, they are normally found only in the leaves.
The scientists transferred the genes from the snapdragons using specially adapted bacteria.
Food for thought: The tomatoes could be on sale within three years - but not in Britain
Professor Cathie Martin, who led the John Innes research - the results of which are published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology - said one tomato contained the same anthocyanins as a spoonful of cranberries.
'Most people do not eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day,' she said.
'But they can get more benefit from those they do eat if common fruit and vegetables can be developed that are higher in nutrients.'
The scientists found that mice bred to be vulnerable to cancer lived longer when fed the GM tomatoes. They now hope to test the effects on men at risk of prostate cancer.
Dr Lara Bennett, of Cancer Research UK, said: 'It's exciting to see new techniques that could make healthy foods even better for us.'
But critics warn that genetic modification is tied in with factory farming methods that harm communities - and that any seeds from a GM tomato could produce unexpected effects on the environment.
Friends of the Earth said: 'GM crops cannot be deemed a "healthy" option.'
11.11.2008
I'll be going outside now.
China issues first definition of Internet addiction
Xinhua News Agency - November 09, 2008
BEIJING, Nov 09, 2008 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- Chinese doctors released the country's first diagnostic definition of Internet addiction over the weekend, amid efforts to address an increasing number of psychological problems that reportedly result from Internet overuse.
Tao Ran, a medical expert at Beijing's Military General Hospital, where the definition was developed, said it was also the first time for China to officially designate hospital psychiatric units to treat such cases.
Symptoms of addiction included yearning to get back online, mental or physical distress, irritation and difficulty concentrating or sleeping.
The definition, based on a study of more than 1,300 problematic computer users, classifies as addicts those who spend at least six hours online a day and have shown at least one symptom in the past three months.
"Eighty percent of addicts can be cured with treatment, which usually lasts about three months," said Tao. He did not describe the treatment, however.
According to the China Youth Association for Network Development, Internet-addicted youths are more likely suffer frustration in interpersonal relations than their peers.
Those aged 18 to 30 account for nearly half of the online population in China, which has been estimated at 210 million as of 2007 by the China Internet Network Information Center.
About 10 percent of young users suffer Internet addiction, an earlier survey revealed, and about 70 percent are male.
Copyright 2008 XINHUA NEWS AGENCY
Xinhua News Agency - November 09, 2008
BEIJING, Nov 09, 2008 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- Chinese doctors released the country's first diagnostic definition of Internet addiction over the weekend, amid efforts to address an increasing number of psychological problems that reportedly result from Internet overuse.
Tao Ran, a medical expert at Beijing's Military General Hospital, where the definition was developed, said it was also the first time for China to officially designate hospital psychiatric units to treat such cases.
Symptoms of addiction included yearning to get back online, mental or physical distress, irritation and difficulty concentrating or sleeping.
The definition, based on a study of more than 1,300 problematic computer users, classifies as addicts those who spend at least six hours online a day and have shown at least one symptom in the past three months.
"Eighty percent of addicts can be cured with treatment, which usually lasts about three months," said Tao. He did not describe the treatment, however.
According to the China Youth Association for Network Development, Internet-addicted youths are more likely suffer frustration in interpersonal relations than their peers.
Those aged 18 to 30 account for nearly half of the online population in China, which has been estimated at 210 million as of 2007 by the China Internet Network Information Center.
About 10 percent of young users suffer Internet addiction, an earlier survey revealed, and about 70 percent are male.
Copyright 2008 XINHUA NEWS AGENCY
11.10.2008
things i've been shown on youtube
this one is funnier if you know someone from new zealand
this one has been shown to me twice by seperate people, consists of more than one episode, and is extrememly annoying
this one has also been shown to me twice by seperate people, consists of more than one episode, and is one of the most disturbing and creepy things i've ever seen. i refuse to watch any more of them. enjoy
Free Rice has revamped.
You can now quiz yourself in foreign languages, chemistry, and geography. Check out the feed me link on the left. Right now.
11.04.2008
11.03.2008
Riddle me this:
Brain injury gives local mom a "foreign" accent
CindyLou Romberg, of Port Angeles, suffers from a rare condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome, which makes her sound like she has a European accent. She'll be featured in an episode of the Discovery Health Channel's "Mystery ER" show.
By Marc Ramirez
Seattle Times staff reporter
STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
CindyLou Romberg, of Port Angeles, suffers from a rare condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome, which makes her sound like she has a European accent. She'll be featured tonight in an episode of the Discovery Health Channel's "Mystery ER" show.
STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
CindyLou Romberg trims back dead branches on her favorite tree in her Port Angeles yard.
Related
Video | Foreign Accent Syndrome
Tonight on "Mystery ER"
CindyLou Romberg's story will be featured on the show, which runs at 5 and 8 p.m. on the Discovery Health Channel. The program, which concludes its second season, features real-life medical mysteries told through subject interviews and re-enactments of true events. Information
Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare disorder brought on by neurological damage that affects a person's ability to speak and creates the impression of a foreign accent.
Resources:
University of Texas at Dallas: www.utdallas.edu/research/FAS/
Discovery Health video
feature: www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6y0voUoeGE
At the hospital, all the doctors and nurses asked her the same questions: Where are you from?
Port Angeles, she said.
No — we mean, where were you born?
Well — Crescent City, California.
But you have an accent.
That's why I'm here.
After a serious accident in 1981, life had become fairly normal for CindyLou Romberg, a caregiver and motorcycle enthusiast living in Washington's Olympic Peninsula. All that changed last year, when out of nowhere, she began talking like someone who'd grown up on the European continent.
Ever since, Romberg, 51, who has never studied a foreign language or been to any other country but Canada, has spoken in markedly accented English that sounds to some like German, French or Russian. On the phone, she's had to convince family and friends of her identity; in person, she's stopped trying to convince strangers who find her accent adorable that she's not from elsewhere.
Her diagnosis: A rare condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome, one that's landed her on tonight's episode of "Mystery ER, " a medical reality program on the Discovery Health Channel.
"Mother Nature can do some strange things," says Glenn, her husband of 22 years.
Romberg's speech changes without warning. Sometimes, all she can do is gesture for that dish she wants from the cupboard. Other times, pure babble pours from her mouth, confusing her grandkids. ("Nana, we don't speak your language," her 5-year-old grandson has said.) Once, at a diner stop during a charity bike run, she rattled off something that sounded Swedish.
Though it's been frustrating and scary at times, Romberg, is doing OK. "I am very good, yah," she says.
In 1981, Romberg, then in her 20s, fell out of a moving Toyota and hit the pavement, splitting her head from front to back.
For months afterward, she suffered terrible headaches; and for years, she addressed her lingering back pain by occasionally seeing a chiropractor. She found one she liked in Puyallup. "Things were really good," she says.
One day last year, her back was bothering her, and she decided to go to a local chiropractor instead. He tried an adjustment, then tried it again. But something wasn't right. That night, her neck swelled up.
By the next day, a Friday, the swelling had subsided. Then, that night, she went downstairs to talk to her daughter, and all that came out was gibberish.
Over the weekend, she visited a series of urgent-care physicians. One thought she had a migraine. Another thought she'd had a stroke. On Monday, her primary-care doctor sent her straight to Seattle.
Doctors still weren't sure what was wrong. She got an MRI and a CT scan; they thought she had a collapsed blood vessel in her neck. Surgery told them otherwise.
Eventually, her speech returned, but "she wasn't CindyLou," Glenn says. She sounded like she'd come from Berlin.
Finally, a doctor at Harborview told her: I think you have Foreign Accent Syndrome.
The first widely recognized case of Foreign Accent Syndrome, or FAS, involved a Norwegian woman struck by a piece of shrapnel during World War II. Afterward, she emerged with what sounded like a German accent and, given the times, was shunned by her community.
Only 50 or 60 cases have been verified worldwide, depending on whom you ask. Diagnosis is by process of elimination. "There's no ironclad test," says Jack Ryalls, an expert on neurologically based speech disorders at the University of Central Florida.
Typically, neurological damage — generally in the brain's left hemisphere — is followed by the inability to use words properly or at all, then a gradual return of speech, albeit altered. Most cases develop within one or two years of the original injury, making Romberg's case unusual.
While some researchers claim curative success using speech therapy, he says, "A person has to have some degree of conscious control" for it to work, and most victims seem not to. The few who regain their normal voices just do so with time, he says.
Our voices are part of our identities, which is why some victims of FAS are so devastated. Other people just shrug their shoulders, count their blessings and move on. The only evidence of Romberg's former self is on her cellphone, where a bright, melodic voice asks callers to leave a message.
She does not recognize her new voice, seemingly an octave lower. And at first, neither did anyone else.
Faraway friends would call the house and hang up, thinking they had the wrong number. One suspected identity theft and was ready to call the police. One day she answered the phone. It was her niece, Kayla. "... Is my aunt CindyLou there?" Kayla said.
"I said, `It's me.' She said, `Ohhh-kay... . What is Uncle Glenn doing?' I could tell she did not believe me."
Others called her mother, Joann Vedin, asking what was wrong with CindyLou. ("She talks funny," they'd say.)
Some things she still can't say. H's are difficult. Occasionally, her voice is slurred and stuttered. "You do n-not kn-know when it will haah-happen," she'll say. Some words emerge differently: "Heard" becomes "heared." "Garage" is "GARE-ej."
Some names just won't come at all: She calls Phyllis, her sister, but the word that comes out is "Sheba." Equally inexplicable, the word that comes out when she addresses daughter Sadrianna is something like "Pakka."
In time, people began to find the whole thing a novelty, as if her accent were some chunk of asteroid fallen from the sky. "My mum's friends thought it was the coolest thing that ever happened," she says. Ultimately, she was enlisted to record the greeting on her mother's answering machine.
But at times, the situation leaves her a little verklempt. She'll have something to say, and suddenly the words aren't there. "My mum" — she used to say mom — "will call after I've left a message," she says, "and Glenn will answer and say, 'Sorry, she's got no English tonight.' "
Glenn Romberg says it's as if his wife's brain short-circuited, and researcher Ryalls says that explanation isn't far off. He thinks the syndrome could be a recovery stage, the brain's way of compensating for lost function. A rewiring, in a sense.
What sounds like a foreign accent isn't, really, though it may be indistinguishable from one. It's a voice impairment we aren't used to hearing, so we associate it with what it most sounds like.
Romberg doesn't blame the chiropractor. It's not, she points out, as if he'd said, "I'm going to crack your neck today and make you talk French."
Still, "she's a different CindyLou than she was before," her mother says. "She doesn't know what it's going to develop into, whatever's happening to her. It kind of scares her, and I don't blame her."
But with three siblings already passed away, Romberg considers herself lucky. "The human body is amazing and can do absolutely phenomenal things when it needs to," she says.
In the meantime, she sometimes calls herself on her cellphone, just to hear the person she knew for 40-plus years. "That's the only thing I have," she says. "I used to really like my voice. I thought it was sassy and sexy. And it is no more."
CindyLou Romberg, of Port Angeles, suffers from a rare condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome, which makes her sound like she has a European accent. She'll be featured in an episode of the Discovery Health Channel's "Mystery ER" show.
By Marc Ramirez
Seattle Times staff reporter
STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
CindyLou Romberg, of Port Angeles, suffers from a rare condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome, which makes her sound like she has a European accent. She'll be featured tonight in an episode of the Discovery Health Channel's "Mystery ER" show.
STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
CindyLou Romberg trims back dead branches on her favorite tree in her Port Angeles yard.
Related
Video | Foreign Accent Syndrome
Tonight on "Mystery ER"
CindyLou Romberg's story will be featured on the show, which runs at 5 and 8 p.m. on the Discovery Health Channel. The program, which concludes its second season, features real-life medical mysteries told through subject interviews and re-enactments of true events. Information
Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare disorder brought on by neurological damage that affects a person's ability to speak and creates the impression of a foreign accent.
Resources:
University of Texas at Dallas: www.utdallas.edu/research/FAS/
Discovery Health video
feature: www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6y0voUoeGE
At the hospital, all the doctors and nurses asked her the same questions: Where are you from?
Port Angeles, she said.
No — we mean, where were you born?
Well — Crescent City, California.
But you have an accent.
That's why I'm here.
After a serious accident in 1981, life had become fairly normal for CindyLou Romberg, a caregiver and motorcycle enthusiast living in Washington's Olympic Peninsula. All that changed last year, when out of nowhere, she began talking like someone who'd grown up on the European continent.
Ever since, Romberg, 51, who has never studied a foreign language or been to any other country but Canada, has spoken in markedly accented English that sounds to some like German, French or Russian. On the phone, she's had to convince family and friends of her identity; in person, she's stopped trying to convince strangers who find her accent adorable that she's not from elsewhere.
Her diagnosis: A rare condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome, one that's landed her on tonight's episode of "Mystery ER, " a medical reality program on the Discovery Health Channel.
"Mother Nature can do some strange things," says Glenn, her husband of 22 years.
Romberg's speech changes without warning. Sometimes, all she can do is gesture for that dish she wants from the cupboard. Other times, pure babble pours from her mouth, confusing her grandkids. ("Nana, we don't speak your language," her 5-year-old grandson has said.) Once, at a diner stop during a charity bike run, she rattled off something that sounded Swedish.
Though it's been frustrating and scary at times, Romberg, is doing OK. "I am very good, yah," she says.
In 1981, Romberg, then in her 20s, fell out of a moving Toyota and hit the pavement, splitting her head from front to back.
For months afterward, she suffered terrible headaches; and for years, she addressed her lingering back pain by occasionally seeing a chiropractor. She found one she liked in Puyallup. "Things were really good," she says.
One day last year, her back was bothering her, and she decided to go to a local chiropractor instead. He tried an adjustment, then tried it again. But something wasn't right. That night, her neck swelled up.
By the next day, a Friday, the swelling had subsided. Then, that night, she went downstairs to talk to her daughter, and all that came out was gibberish.
Over the weekend, she visited a series of urgent-care physicians. One thought she had a migraine. Another thought she'd had a stroke. On Monday, her primary-care doctor sent her straight to Seattle.
Doctors still weren't sure what was wrong. She got an MRI and a CT scan; they thought she had a collapsed blood vessel in her neck. Surgery told them otherwise.
Eventually, her speech returned, but "she wasn't CindyLou," Glenn says. She sounded like she'd come from Berlin.
Finally, a doctor at Harborview told her: I think you have Foreign Accent Syndrome.
The first widely recognized case of Foreign Accent Syndrome, or FAS, involved a Norwegian woman struck by a piece of shrapnel during World War II. Afterward, she emerged with what sounded like a German accent and, given the times, was shunned by her community.
Only 50 or 60 cases have been verified worldwide, depending on whom you ask. Diagnosis is by process of elimination. "There's no ironclad test," says Jack Ryalls, an expert on neurologically based speech disorders at the University of Central Florida.
Typically, neurological damage — generally in the brain's left hemisphere — is followed by the inability to use words properly or at all, then a gradual return of speech, albeit altered. Most cases develop within one or two years of the original injury, making Romberg's case unusual.
While some researchers claim curative success using speech therapy, he says, "A person has to have some degree of conscious control" for it to work, and most victims seem not to. The few who regain their normal voices just do so with time, he says.
Our voices are part of our identities, which is why some victims of FAS are so devastated. Other people just shrug their shoulders, count their blessings and move on. The only evidence of Romberg's former self is on her cellphone, where a bright, melodic voice asks callers to leave a message.
She does not recognize her new voice, seemingly an octave lower. And at first, neither did anyone else.
Faraway friends would call the house and hang up, thinking they had the wrong number. One suspected identity theft and was ready to call the police. One day she answered the phone. It was her niece, Kayla. "... Is my aunt CindyLou there?" Kayla said.
"I said, `It's me.' She said, `Ohhh-kay... . What is Uncle Glenn doing?' I could tell she did not believe me."
Others called her mother, Joann Vedin, asking what was wrong with CindyLou. ("She talks funny," they'd say.)
Some things she still can't say. H's are difficult. Occasionally, her voice is slurred and stuttered. "You do n-not kn-know when it will haah-happen," she'll say. Some words emerge differently: "Heard" becomes "heared." "Garage" is "GARE-ej."
Some names just won't come at all: She calls Phyllis, her sister, but the word that comes out is "Sheba." Equally inexplicable, the word that comes out when she addresses daughter Sadrianna is something like "Pakka."
In time, people began to find the whole thing a novelty, as if her accent were some chunk of asteroid fallen from the sky. "My mum's friends thought it was the coolest thing that ever happened," she says. Ultimately, she was enlisted to record the greeting on her mother's answering machine.
But at times, the situation leaves her a little verklempt. She'll have something to say, and suddenly the words aren't there. "My mum" — she used to say mom — "will call after I've left a message," she says, "and Glenn will answer and say, 'Sorry, she's got no English tonight.' "
Glenn Romberg says it's as if his wife's brain short-circuited, and researcher Ryalls says that explanation isn't far off. He thinks the syndrome could be a recovery stage, the brain's way of compensating for lost function. A rewiring, in a sense.
What sounds like a foreign accent isn't, really, though it may be indistinguishable from one. It's a voice impairment we aren't used to hearing, so we associate it with what it most sounds like.
Romberg doesn't blame the chiropractor. It's not, she points out, as if he'd said, "I'm going to crack your neck today and make you talk French."
Still, "she's a different CindyLou than she was before," her mother says. "She doesn't know what it's going to develop into, whatever's happening to her. It kind of scares her, and I don't blame her."
But with three siblings already passed away, Romberg considers herself lucky. "The human body is amazing and can do absolutely phenomenal things when it needs to," she says.
In the meantime, she sometimes calls herself on her cellphone, just to hear the person she knew for 40-plus years. "That's the only thing I have," she says. "I used to really like my voice. I thought it was sassy and sexy. And it is no more."
10.30.2008
10.27.2008
Fart it up!
The Stink in Farts Controls Blood Pressure
livescience.com – Thu Oct 23, 3:21 pm ETA smelly rotten-egg gas in farts controls blood pressure in mice, a new study finds.
The unpleasant aroma of the gas, called hydrogen sulfide (H2S), can be a little too familiar, as it is expelled by bacteria living in the human colon and eventually makes its way, well, out.
The new research found that cells lining mice's blood vessels naturally make the gas and this action can help keep the rodents' blood pressure low by relaxing the blood vessels to prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). This gas is "no doubt" produced in cells lining human blood vessels too, the researchers said.
"Now that we know hydrogen sulfide's role in regulating blood pressure, it may be possible to design drug therapies that enhance its formation as an alternative to the current methods of treatment for hypertension," said Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon H. Snyder, M.D., a co-author of the study detailed in the Oct. 24th issue of the journal Science.
Snyder and his colleagues compared normal mice to mice that were missing a gene for an enzyme known as CSE, long suspected as being responsible for making hydrogen sulfide. As they measured hydrogen sulfide levels taken from tissues of the CSE-deficient mice, the scientists found that the gas was depleted in the cardiovascular systems of the altered mice. By contrast, normal mice had higher levels of the gas, thereby showing that hydrogen sulfide is naturally made by mammalian tissues using CSE.
Next, the mice were subjected to higher blood pressures comparable to serious hypertension in humans. Scientists had them respond to a chemical called methacholine that relaxes normal blood vessels. The blood vessels of the CSE-lacking mice hardly relaxed, indicating that hydrogen sulfide is a huge contender for regulating blood pressure.
Hydrogen sulfide is the most recently discovered member of a family of gasotransmitters, small molecules inside our bodies with important physiological functions.
This study is the first to reveal that the CSE enzyme that triggers hydrogen sulfide is activated itself in the same way as other enzymes when they trigger their respective gasotransmitter, such as a nitric oxide-forming enzyme that also regulates blood pressure, Dr. Snyder said.
Because gasotransmitters are common in mammals all over the evolutionary tree, these findings on the importance of hydrogen sulfide are thought to have broad applications to human diseases, such as diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases.
The research was supported by grants from the U.S. Public Health Service and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research as well as a Research Scientist Award.
livescience.com – Thu Oct 23, 3:21 pm ETA smelly rotten-egg gas in farts controls blood pressure in mice, a new study finds.
The unpleasant aroma of the gas, called hydrogen sulfide (H2S), can be a little too familiar, as it is expelled by bacteria living in the human colon and eventually makes its way, well, out.
The new research found that cells lining mice's blood vessels naturally make the gas and this action can help keep the rodents' blood pressure low by relaxing the blood vessels to prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). This gas is "no doubt" produced in cells lining human blood vessels too, the researchers said.
"Now that we know hydrogen sulfide's role in regulating blood pressure, it may be possible to design drug therapies that enhance its formation as an alternative to the current methods of treatment for hypertension," said Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon H. Snyder, M.D., a co-author of the study detailed in the Oct. 24th issue of the journal Science.
Snyder and his colleagues compared normal mice to mice that were missing a gene for an enzyme known as CSE, long suspected as being responsible for making hydrogen sulfide. As they measured hydrogen sulfide levels taken from tissues of the CSE-deficient mice, the scientists found that the gas was depleted in the cardiovascular systems of the altered mice. By contrast, normal mice had higher levels of the gas, thereby showing that hydrogen sulfide is naturally made by mammalian tissues using CSE.
Next, the mice were subjected to higher blood pressures comparable to serious hypertension in humans. Scientists had them respond to a chemical called methacholine that relaxes normal blood vessels. The blood vessels of the CSE-lacking mice hardly relaxed, indicating that hydrogen sulfide is a huge contender for regulating blood pressure.
Hydrogen sulfide is the most recently discovered member of a family of gasotransmitters, small molecules inside our bodies with important physiological functions.
This study is the first to reveal that the CSE enzyme that triggers hydrogen sulfide is activated itself in the same way as other enzymes when they trigger their respective gasotransmitter, such as a nitric oxide-forming enzyme that also regulates blood pressure, Dr. Snyder said.
Because gasotransmitters are common in mammals all over the evolutionary tree, these findings on the importance of hydrogen sulfide are thought to have broad applications to human diseases, such as diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases.
The research was supported by grants from the U.S. Public Health Service and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research as well as a Research Scientist Award.
10.24.2008
Ozarks here we come!!
Let us not focus on what could go wrong:
But instead, let us eagerly anticipate all that could go so very very right:
But instead, let us eagerly anticipate all that could go so very very right:
10.22.2008
10.20.2008
10.16.2008
In case you were wondering what to get me for Christmas...
1GB Clamshell Cell Phone Watch with Bluetooth
With its clamshell design and the rotary dial phone inspired keypad, this cell phone watch sure stands out from the previous models we have seen here at GeekAlerts.
With a compact clamshell style body and an outer display showing the current time and phone status, this cellphone works like a mega-modern digital watch. Next, you flip up the top to see a nice color OLED display and fully illuminated numeric keypad. When you are done admiring its design, you can start using the watch to start making phone calls or playing digital media files.
Using a compact cellphone has never been so easy. Simply use the included single piece bluetooth earphone, wired audio earphones with built-in MIC, or talk and listen directly from the phone itself.
The phone has speed dial, phonebook, and secure caller options to keep you in contact with only those people you want to talk to. In addition, you can use the phones software tools to set alarms, keep organized, do quick calculations, play MP3/MP4 files, and other functions to allow you the best use of your valuable time.
Features:
Main function: Watch or Necklace cellphone and multimedia player
Additional functions: Digital video and audio recorder, organizer, multi function calculator, alarm clock
Unlocked phone; can be used with any carrier and SIM card
Pre-loaded software tools include; Stopwatch, Calendar, Alarm, World Clock, Calculator, Currency Converter, Melody Composer, Video Games
Full bluetooth support; contains profiles for NINE bluetooth mobile phone services
Powerful built-in MIC and speaker; hear your phone ringtones and sound effects clearly
GSM Compatibility: Dual Band 900MHz, 1800MHz
GPRS Support: YES
Screen: 1.3 inch OLED, 128×160 with 260K colors
Memory: 1GB internal TF/microSD card
SIM Card Slot: YES - 1
Bluetooth Profiles: Handsfree, Headset, A2DP, AVRCP, SPP, DUN, OPP, FTP, BPP, HID - All Supported
Mobile Internet: WAP, Email - (if supported by your network provider)
Messages: SMS, MMS, EMS, Voice Mail Server, Broadcast Message (from provider)
1.3 Megapixel Still Camera, Resolution: 640×480, 320×240, 160×120, 128×128
Video Camera, Resolution: 128×128 - MPEG4 or H.263
Video Formats: MPEG, 3GP - Picture Formats: JPEG, BMP, GIF - Music and Sound Formats: MP3, MIDI, WAV, AMR, AWB
Battery Life: Talk Time: Up to 1.5 hrs, Music Play: Up to 4 hrs, Stand By: Up to 150 hrs
System: Windows 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP / Vista, MAC OS 9.2.2 or above
Languages: English, Spanish, Danish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Arabic, Chinese
Dimension: Face - 60mm x 19mm; Strap Max Length - 240mm
The 1GB Clamshell Cell Phone Watch with Bluetooth is available from the Chinavision website for 104.97 Euros (about $142 USD).
With its clamshell design and the rotary dial phone inspired keypad, this cell phone watch sure stands out from the previous models we have seen here at GeekAlerts.
With a compact clamshell style body and an outer display showing the current time and phone status, this cellphone works like a mega-modern digital watch. Next, you flip up the top to see a nice color OLED display and fully illuminated numeric keypad. When you are done admiring its design, you can start using the watch to start making phone calls or playing digital media files.
Using a compact cellphone has never been so easy. Simply use the included single piece bluetooth earphone, wired audio earphones with built-in MIC, or talk and listen directly from the phone itself.
The phone has speed dial, phonebook, and secure caller options to keep you in contact with only those people you want to talk to. In addition, you can use the phones software tools to set alarms, keep organized, do quick calculations, play MP3/MP4 files, and other functions to allow you the best use of your valuable time.
Features:
Main function: Watch or Necklace cellphone and multimedia player
Additional functions: Digital video and audio recorder, organizer, multi function calculator, alarm clock
Unlocked phone; can be used with any carrier and SIM card
Pre-loaded software tools include; Stopwatch, Calendar, Alarm, World Clock, Calculator, Currency Converter, Melody Composer, Video Games
Full bluetooth support; contains profiles for NINE bluetooth mobile phone services
Powerful built-in MIC and speaker; hear your phone ringtones and sound effects clearly
GSM Compatibility: Dual Band 900MHz, 1800MHz
GPRS Support: YES
Screen: 1.3 inch OLED, 128×160 with 260K colors
Memory: 1GB internal TF/microSD card
SIM Card Slot: YES - 1
Bluetooth Profiles: Handsfree, Headset, A2DP, AVRCP, SPP, DUN, OPP, FTP, BPP, HID - All Supported
Mobile Internet: WAP, Email - (if supported by your network provider)
Messages: SMS, MMS, EMS, Voice Mail Server, Broadcast Message (from provider)
1.3 Megapixel Still Camera, Resolution: 640×480, 320×240, 160×120, 128×128
Video Camera, Resolution: 128×128 - MPEG4 or H.263
Video Formats: MPEG, 3GP - Picture Formats: JPEG, BMP, GIF - Music and Sound Formats: MP3, MIDI, WAV, AMR, AWB
Battery Life: Talk Time: Up to 1.5 hrs, Music Play: Up to 4 hrs, Stand By: Up to 150 hrs
System: Windows 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP / Vista, MAC OS 9.2.2 or above
Languages: English, Spanish, Danish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Arabic, Chinese
Dimension: Face - 60mm x 19mm; Strap Max Length - 240mm
The 1GB Clamshell Cell Phone Watch with Bluetooth is available from the Chinavision website for 104.97 Euros (about $142 USD).
10.13.2008
10.09.2008
10.08.2008
10.06.2008
10.03.2008
Since I'm sure you've all been wondering.
What's the origin of "fuckin' A"?
February 27, 2003
Dear Straight Dope:
What is the origin of the saying, "fuckin' A"? I know I first heard it from friends who are big fans of the movie Office Space, as am I. But the saying has seemed to take a new meaning. Is "fuckin' A" just something that the writer of Office Space made up?
— Josh Slavin.
The writer of Office Space could have made up the phrase, but he would have had to have been born in the 1920s or earlier, so I doubt it.
I can remember hearing the phrase for the first time when I entered college in 1962. It was the favorite expression of a jock who lived on my floor. When someone told him that a certain football team was the greatest, for example, he'd reply, "fuckin' A!" Even though I hadn't encountered the term in my sheltered high school career, I knew exactly what he meant from the context--"you're absolutely right."
The phrase is first recorded in print in 1947, in Norman Mailer's World War II novel The Naked and the Dead. Mailer has a character say, "'You're fuggin ay,' Gallegher snorted." The actress Tallulah Bankhead claimed she met Mailer at a party and said, "So, you're the guy who doesn't know how to spell fuck." (The story is sometimes told with Dorothy Parker as the speaker.) Mailer told an interviewer he never met Tallulah Bankhead, and in any case he knew how to spell four-letter words--the euphemism was used in order not to offend the sensibilities of readers in 1947. "Fuggin ay" suggests how hard it is to come by cites of one of the (formerly?) most offensive words in the English language--the next print citation of the phrase is from 1955, ". . . freaking-A loud sneeze," where it meant "goddamned."
The phrase has been an adverb, an adjective, an infix (an affix stuck into the middle of a root, e.g., "abso-fuckin'-A-lutely"), and an interjection in its lifetime. It has been used to mean "yes, indeed," "absolutely (correct)," "splendid," "very well," and "fucking" or "goddamned."
Having established that the term existed in WWII (and no doubt before), we now want to divine what the "A" means. @#%*!! I was hoping no one would ask that. Because that's the harder part to figure out.
In SDMB threads such as the following:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=91613
. . . we get suggestions as varied as "affirmative" and "asshole," neither of which is likely. Coincidentally, there has been a discussion on just this question over the past month or so on the American Dialect Society mailing list. There we get the following suggestions: "amen," "aye," "all right," "A-1," etc. And they're still arguing! Hey, if these eggheads don't know the answer, then who does, right?
Me, for one. "Fuckin' A" is short for "you bet your fucking ass." You want cites? P*ss on your cites. Sometimes at the Straight Dope we just know.
Resources:
Sheidlower, Jesse, The F Word (second edition, 1999)
— SamClem
February 27, 2003
Dear Straight Dope:
What is the origin of the saying, "fuckin' A"? I know I first heard it from friends who are big fans of the movie Office Space, as am I. But the saying has seemed to take a new meaning. Is "fuckin' A" just something that the writer of Office Space made up?
— Josh Slavin.
The writer of Office Space could have made up the phrase, but he would have had to have been born in the 1920s or earlier, so I doubt it.
I can remember hearing the phrase for the first time when I entered college in 1962. It was the favorite expression of a jock who lived on my floor. When someone told him that a certain football team was the greatest, for example, he'd reply, "fuckin' A!" Even though I hadn't encountered the term in my sheltered high school career, I knew exactly what he meant from the context--"you're absolutely right."
The phrase is first recorded in print in 1947, in Norman Mailer's World War II novel The Naked and the Dead. Mailer has a character say, "'You're fuggin ay,' Gallegher snorted." The actress Tallulah Bankhead claimed she met Mailer at a party and said, "So, you're the guy who doesn't know how to spell fuck." (The story is sometimes told with Dorothy Parker as the speaker.) Mailer told an interviewer he never met Tallulah Bankhead, and in any case he knew how to spell four-letter words--the euphemism was used in order not to offend the sensibilities of readers in 1947. "Fuggin ay" suggests how hard it is to come by cites of one of the (formerly?) most offensive words in the English language--the next print citation of the phrase is from 1955, ". . . freaking-A loud sneeze," where it meant "goddamned."
The phrase has been an adverb, an adjective, an infix (an affix stuck into the middle of a root, e.g., "abso-fuckin'-A-lutely"), and an interjection in its lifetime. It has been used to mean "yes, indeed," "absolutely (correct)," "splendid," "very well," and "fucking" or "goddamned."
Having established that the term existed in WWII (and no doubt before), we now want to divine what the "A" means. @#%*!! I was hoping no one would ask that. Because that's the harder part to figure out.
In SDMB threads such as the following:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=91613
. . . we get suggestions as varied as "affirmative" and "asshole," neither of which is likely. Coincidentally, there has been a discussion on just this question over the past month or so on the American Dialect Society mailing list. There we get the following suggestions: "amen," "aye," "all right," "A-1," etc. And they're still arguing! Hey, if these eggheads don't know the answer, then who does, right?
Me, for one. "Fuckin' A" is short for "you bet your fucking ass." You want cites? P*ss on your cites. Sometimes at the Straight Dope we just know.
Resources:
Sheidlower, Jesse, The F Word (second edition, 1999)
— SamClem
10.01.2008
Alright, this is real feckin' interesting.
And real feckin' long. But do it anyways.
I've been hanging on to this for several months now 'cause I was pretty sure no one would read the whole thing but even if you don't it should give you something to chew on.
What You Can't Say
January 2004
Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it-- that the earth moves. [1]
It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.
Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.
It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.
The Conformist Test
Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.
The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.
Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn't do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.
If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.
Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud.
Trouble
What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for. [2]
Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.
Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb works well. A lot of the statements people got in trouble for seem harmless now. So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today. Do we have no Galileos? Not likely.
To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but might it also be true?
Heresy
This won't get us all the answers, though. What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How can we find these too?
Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label-- "sexist", for example-- and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?
Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think.
In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. [3] They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.
Time and Space
If we could look into the future it would be obvious which of our taboos they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do something almost as good: we can look into the past. Another way to figure out what we're getting wrong is to look at what used to be acceptable and is now unthinkable.
Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion. The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines.
We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems. People in past times were much like us. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe.
So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. [4] Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true?
You don't have to look into the past to find big differences. In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and what isn't. So you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against ours as well. (The best way to do that is to visit them.)
You might find contradictory taboos. In one culture it might seem shocking to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. But I think usually the shock is on one side. In one culture x is ok, and in another it's considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that's shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one. [5]
I suspect the only taboos that are more than taboos are the ones that are universal, or nearly so. Murder for example. But any idea that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a good candidate for something we're mistaken about.
For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. So odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.
Prigs
Of course, if they have time machines in the future they'll probably have a separate reference manual just for Cambridge. This has always been a fussy place, a town of i dotters and t crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same conversation. And that suggests another way to find taboos. Look for prigs, and see what's inside their heads.
Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give them of the world is not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds, but sanitized as well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to think. [6]
You can see this on a small scale in the matter of dirty words. A lot of my friends are starting to have children now, and they're all trying not to use words like "fuck" and "shit" within baby's hearing, lest baby start using these words too. But these words are part of the language, and adults use them all the time. So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of the language by not using them. Why do they do this? Because they don't think it's fitting that kids should use the whole language. We like children to seem innocent. [7]
Most adults, likewise, deliberately give kids a misleading view of the world. One of the most obvious examples is Santa Claus. We think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. I myself think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. But one wonders, do we tell them this stuff for their sake, or for ours?
I'm not arguing for or against this idea here. It is probably inevitable that parents should want to dress up their kids' minds in cute little baby outfits. I'll probably do it myself. The important thing for our purposes is that, as a result, a well brought-up teenage kid's brain is a more or less complete collection of all our taboos-- and in mint condition, because they're untainted by experience. Whatever we think that will later turn out to be ridiculous, it's almost certainly inside that head.
How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don't matter-- just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can't say.
Mechanism
I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say: to look at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own time.
Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary fashions are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone imitates the whim of some influential person. The fashion for broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth century Europe began because Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot. The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to.
The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas.
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle.
I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.
Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It's easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.
We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.
I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not. And just as there is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is nothing so wrong as the principles of the most recently defeated opponent. Representational art is only now recovering from the approval of both Hitler and Stalin. [8]
Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sources than fashions in clothing, the mechanism of their adoption seems much the same. The early adopters will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd. As the fashion becomes established they'll be joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear. [9] This second group adopt the fashion not because they want to stand out but because they are afraid of standing out.
So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?
This technique won't find us all the things we can't say. I can think of some that aren't the result of any recent struggle. Many of our taboos are rooted deep in the past. But this approach, combined with the preceding four, will turn up a good number of unthinkable ideas.
Why
Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberately go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?
I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under rocks as a kid: plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious about anything that's forbidden. Let me see and decide for myself.
Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being mistaken. If, like other eras, we believe things that will later seem ridiculous, I want to know what they are so that I, at least, can avoid believing them.
Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.
Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural selection, for example. It's so simple. Why didn't anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.
In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able to question assumptions. The m.o. of scientists, or at least of the good ones, is precisely that: look for places where conventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart the cracks and see what's underneath. That's where new theories come from.
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks. [10]
Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. Or it could be because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, and this makes scientists bolder. (Or it could be that, because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a good politician.)
Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress.
It's not only in the sciences that heresy pays off. In any competitive field, you can win big by seeing things that others daren't. And in every field there are probably heresies few dare utter. Within the US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share. Yet the cause is so obvious that any observant outsider could explain it in a second: they make bad cars. And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands-- something you'd buy a car despite, not because of. Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspect no one dares say this. [11] Otherwise these companies would have tried to fix the problem.
Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.
Pensieri Stretti
When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.
Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.
The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.
When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be "i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto." Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking. This was wise advice. Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. But I think the difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of degree. Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction.
I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics [12], or that pro-Israel groups are "compiling dossiers" on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses [13], or about people being sued for violating the DMCA [14], part of me wants to say, "All right, you bastards, bring it on." The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky. [15]
The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.
Viso Sciolto?
I don't think we need the viso sciolto so much as the pensieri stretti. Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you don't agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but not to be too specific about what you disagree with. Zealots will try to draw you out, but you don't have to answer them. If they try to force you to treat a question on their terms by asking "are you with us or against us?" you can always just answer "neither".
Better still, answer "I haven't decided." That's what Larry Summers did when a group tried to put him in this position. Explaining himself later, he said "I don't do litmus tests." [16] A lot of the questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. There is no prize for getting the answer quickly.
If the anti-yellowists seem to be getting out of hand and you want to fight back, there are ways to do it without getting yourself accused of being a yellowist. Like skirmishers in an ancient army, you want to avoid directly engaging the main body of the enemy's troops. Better to harass them with arrows from a distance.
One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion. The spread of the term "political correctness" meant the beginning of the end of political correctness, because it enabled one to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of any of the specific heresies it sought to suppress.
Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, "The Crucible," about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller's metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the committee are often described as a "witch-hunt."
Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in kind to jokes. They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink. Victorian prudishness, for example, seems to have been defeated mainly by treating it as a joke. Likewise its reincarnation as political correctness. "I am glad that I managed to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote, "but looking back I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the situation deserved." [17]
ABQ
A Dutch friend says I should use Holland as an example of a tolerant society. It's true they have a long tradition of comparative open-mindedness. For centuries the low countries were the place to go to say things you couldn't say anywhere else, and this helped to make the region a center of scholarship and industry (which have been closely tied for longer than most people realize). Descartes, though claimed by the French, did much of his thinking in Holland.
And yet, I wonder. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. There's so much you can't do there; is there really nothing you can't say?
Certainly the fact that they value open-mindedness is no guarantee. Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid "wrong" as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like "negative" or "destructive".)
When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember, it's the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn't work otherwise. Fashion doesn't seem like fashion to someone in the grip of it. It just seems like the right thing to do. It's only by looking from a distance that we see oscillations in people's idea of the right thing to do, and can identify them as fashions.
Time gives us such distance for free. Indeed, the arrival of new fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they seem so ridiculous by contrast. From one end of a pendulum's swing, the other end seems especially far away.
To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what it's doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. Web filters for children and employees often ban sites containing pornography, violence, and hate speech. What counts as pornography and violence? And what, exactly, is "hate speech?" This sounds like a phrase out of 1984.
Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.
Especially if you hear yourself using them. It's not just the mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance. That's not a radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between children and adults. When a child gets angry because he's tired, he doesn't know what's happening. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say "never mind, I'm just tired." I don't see why one couldn't, by a similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions.
You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly. But it's harder, because now you're working against social customs instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society's bad moods.
How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why?
Notes
Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond and Bob van der Zwaan for reading drafts of this essay, and to Lisa Randall, Jackie McDonough, Ryan Stanley and Joel Rainey for conversations about heresy. Needless to say they bear no blame for opinions expressed in it, and especially for opinions not expressed in it.
I've been hanging on to this for several months now 'cause I was pretty sure no one would read the whole thing but even if you don't it should give you something to chew on.
What You Can't Say
January 2004
Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it-- that the earth moves. [1]
It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.
Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.
It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.
The Conformist Test
Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.
The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.
Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn't do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.
If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.
Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud.
Trouble
What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for. [2]
Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.
Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb works well. A lot of the statements people got in trouble for seem harmless now. So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today. Do we have no Galileos? Not likely.
To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but might it also be true?
Heresy
This won't get us all the answers, though. What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How can we find these too?
Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label-- "sexist", for example-- and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?
Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think.
In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. [3] They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.
Time and Space
If we could look into the future it would be obvious which of our taboos they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do something almost as good: we can look into the past. Another way to figure out what we're getting wrong is to look at what used to be acceptable and is now unthinkable.
Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion. The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines.
We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems. People in past times were much like us. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe.
So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. [4] Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true?
You don't have to look into the past to find big differences. In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and what isn't. So you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against ours as well. (The best way to do that is to visit them.)
You might find contradictory taboos. In one culture it might seem shocking to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. But I think usually the shock is on one side. In one culture x is ok, and in another it's considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that's shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one. [5]
I suspect the only taboos that are more than taboos are the ones that are universal, or nearly so. Murder for example. But any idea that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a good candidate for something we're mistaken about.
For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. So odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.
Prigs
Of course, if they have time machines in the future they'll probably have a separate reference manual just for Cambridge. This has always been a fussy place, a town of i dotters and t crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same conversation. And that suggests another way to find taboos. Look for prigs, and see what's inside their heads.
Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give them of the world is not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds, but sanitized as well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to think. [6]
You can see this on a small scale in the matter of dirty words. A lot of my friends are starting to have children now, and they're all trying not to use words like "fuck" and "shit" within baby's hearing, lest baby start using these words too. But these words are part of the language, and adults use them all the time. So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of the language by not using them. Why do they do this? Because they don't think it's fitting that kids should use the whole language. We like children to seem innocent. [7]
Most adults, likewise, deliberately give kids a misleading view of the world. One of the most obvious examples is Santa Claus. We think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. I myself think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. But one wonders, do we tell them this stuff for their sake, or for ours?
I'm not arguing for or against this idea here. It is probably inevitable that parents should want to dress up their kids' minds in cute little baby outfits. I'll probably do it myself. The important thing for our purposes is that, as a result, a well brought-up teenage kid's brain is a more or less complete collection of all our taboos-- and in mint condition, because they're untainted by experience. Whatever we think that will later turn out to be ridiculous, it's almost certainly inside that head.
How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don't matter-- just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can't say.
Mechanism
I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say: to look at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own time.
Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary fashions are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone imitates the whim of some influential person. The fashion for broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth century Europe began because Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot. The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to.
The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas.
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle.
I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.
Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It's easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.
We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.
I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not. And just as there is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is nothing so wrong as the principles of the most recently defeated opponent. Representational art is only now recovering from the approval of both Hitler and Stalin. [8]
Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sources than fashions in clothing, the mechanism of their adoption seems much the same. The early adopters will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd. As the fashion becomes established they'll be joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear. [9] This second group adopt the fashion not because they want to stand out but because they are afraid of standing out.
So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?
This technique won't find us all the things we can't say. I can think of some that aren't the result of any recent struggle. Many of our taboos are rooted deep in the past. But this approach, combined with the preceding four, will turn up a good number of unthinkable ideas.
Why
Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberately go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?
I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under rocks as a kid: plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious about anything that's forbidden. Let me see and decide for myself.
Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being mistaken. If, like other eras, we believe things that will later seem ridiculous, I want to know what they are so that I, at least, can avoid believing them.
Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.
Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural selection, for example. It's so simple. Why didn't anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.
In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able to question assumptions. The m.o. of scientists, or at least of the good ones, is precisely that: look for places where conventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart the cracks and see what's underneath. That's where new theories come from.
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks. [10]
Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. Or it could be because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, and this makes scientists bolder. (Or it could be that, because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a good politician.)
Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress.
It's not only in the sciences that heresy pays off. In any competitive field, you can win big by seeing things that others daren't. And in every field there are probably heresies few dare utter. Within the US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share. Yet the cause is so obvious that any observant outsider could explain it in a second: they make bad cars. And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands-- something you'd buy a car despite, not because of. Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspect no one dares say this. [11] Otherwise these companies would have tried to fix the problem.
Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.
Pensieri Stretti
When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.
Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.
The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.
When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be "i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto." Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking. This was wise advice. Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. But I think the difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of degree. Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction.
I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics [12], or that pro-Israel groups are "compiling dossiers" on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses [13], or about people being sued for violating the DMCA [14], part of me wants to say, "All right, you bastards, bring it on." The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky. [15]
The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.
Viso Sciolto?
I don't think we need the viso sciolto so much as the pensieri stretti. Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you don't agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but not to be too specific about what you disagree with. Zealots will try to draw you out, but you don't have to answer them. If they try to force you to treat a question on their terms by asking "are you with us or against us?" you can always just answer "neither".
Better still, answer "I haven't decided." That's what Larry Summers did when a group tried to put him in this position. Explaining himself later, he said "I don't do litmus tests." [16] A lot of the questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. There is no prize for getting the answer quickly.
If the anti-yellowists seem to be getting out of hand and you want to fight back, there are ways to do it without getting yourself accused of being a yellowist. Like skirmishers in an ancient army, you want to avoid directly engaging the main body of the enemy's troops. Better to harass them with arrows from a distance.
One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion. The spread of the term "political correctness" meant the beginning of the end of political correctness, because it enabled one to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of any of the specific heresies it sought to suppress.
Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, "The Crucible," about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller's metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the committee are often described as a "witch-hunt."
Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in kind to jokes. They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink. Victorian prudishness, for example, seems to have been defeated mainly by treating it as a joke. Likewise its reincarnation as political correctness. "I am glad that I managed to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote, "but looking back I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the situation deserved." [17]
ABQ
A Dutch friend says I should use Holland as an example of a tolerant society. It's true they have a long tradition of comparative open-mindedness. For centuries the low countries were the place to go to say things you couldn't say anywhere else, and this helped to make the region a center of scholarship and industry (which have been closely tied for longer than most people realize). Descartes, though claimed by the French, did much of his thinking in Holland.
And yet, I wonder. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. There's so much you can't do there; is there really nothing you can't say?
Certainly the fact that they value open-mindedness is no guarantee. Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid "wrong" as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like "negative" or "destructive".)
When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember, it's the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn't work otherwise. Fashion doesn't seem like fashion to someone in the grip of it. It just seems like the right thing to do. It's only by looking from a distance that we see oscillations in people's idea of the right thing to do, and can identify them as fashions.
Time gives us such distance for free. Indeed, the arrival of new fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they seem so ridiculous by contrast. From one end of a pendulum's swing, the other end seems especially far away.
To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what it's doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. Web filters for children and employees often ban sites containing pornography, violence, and hate speech. What counts as pornography and violence? And what, exactly, is "hate speech?" This sounds like a phrase out of 1984.
Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.
Especially if you hear yourself using them. It's not just the mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance. That's not a radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between children and adults. When a child gets angry because he's tired, he doesn't know what's happening. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say "never mind, I'm just tired." I don't see why one couldn't, by a similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions.
You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly. But it's harder, because now you're working against social customs instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society's bad moods.
How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why?
Notes
Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond and Bob van der Zwaan for reading drafts of this essay, and to Lisa Randall, Jackie McDonough, Ryan Stanley and Joel Rainey for conversations about heresy. Needless to say they bear no blame for opinions expressed in it, and especially for opinions not expressed in it.
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