“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.” ― Herman Hesse, Wandering What is the function of a tree? At least, what is the function for one ice age primate that has managed to take over the globe? For almost half of our history, they have been bed, shade, safety, and food. And then that changed. I talked about how we can solve problems by seeing the function of things apart from what they're meant to do. Of course, trees don't need to have a function or be useful to humans to have perfectly worthy lives. In fact, the farther away a tree is from a human, the safer it is. THE OLD STORY: HUMANS TAMED FIRE Even now in our air-conditioned lives, we make sure to tell our children the story: humans tamed fire and dominated the earth. I think this may be one of the oldest stories in our oral tradition, sometimes called an ur-myth, because it's in every single culture. It has reached the level of … [Read more...] about Two Competing Uses for Trees and How We Got These so Wrong
Top 50 Strange & Unexpected Emojis Descriptions
I have a wee bit of vertigo, which means I have my phone read me emails and texts. This can lead to some assertions I don't think the authors are intending. Enjoy! The idea for this newsletter started when I got an author's newsletter that my (marvelous) app Speaking Email read to me as “Out Now: New romance non-binary vampire non-binary vampire” Excited, because that would be an awesome romance, but confused because it wasn’t exactly this author’s wheelhouse, I clicked over to my regular email and saw “Out Now New Romance 🧛🧛” This has happened to me before, though never to such hilarious results. Audio descriptions of emojis often don’t mean what we think they mean. Here are my favorites. (Try to imagine hearing these without the image for reference) 😂 Face with tears of joy 🐥 Standing chick 😒 Unamused face 😞Disappointed face 😔 Sad and pensive face 😟 Worried face 😕 Confused face 😣 Persevering face. (This is exactly how I look when persevering. I … [Read more...] about Top 50 Strange & Unexpected Emojis Descriptions
How Radar Started a War and Condensers Started a New Age
AVALANCHES OF OPINIONS There has been an avalanche of opinions and think pieces about the future. I have written before about the dangers of taking these accounts at face value. But we just can't help ourselves. BRAINS LOVE STORIES That seems like a positive statement. Especially coming from an author who spends all her time writing stories. But it isn't. We make meaning out of anything and everything. This concept is ubiquitous in modern psychology and difficult to trace to a specific source. There are thousands of articles that reference the concept and yet no single origin. Essentially we create a logical chain of cause and effect for everything that happens in our lives (even though the universe is mostly random chaos). Sometimes we know we're doing it and name it, like with superstitions. We know that we didn't get the job because of the tie we wore, but it's better to be safe than sorry at the next interview and wear it. Or astrology where we know that a … [Read more...] about How Radar Started a War and Condensers Started a New Age
The Greatest Social Experiment in History
WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH A BOX OF THUMBTACKS, A MATCH, AND A CANDLE?This isn't the start of a joke, but one of the best experiments ever devised.The Candle Problem shows how we can inadvertently ignore blatantly obvious solutions because we ignore function, made famous by Daniel Pink in his book Drive, from the research in the 40s of Gestalt Psychologist Karl Duncker.Participants are handed a collection of items and asked to affix a candle to a wall without it dripping on the table.Half are given a box of thumbtacks, matches, and a candle. Half are given a box, thumbtacks, matches, and a candle.Do you spot the difference? That one little difference drastically changed the likelihood of solving the problem.People who were given the thumbtacks separately from the box almost always solved the problem. Take a thumbtack and affix the box to the wall and put the candle in the box. It's on the wall and will not drip on the table.The people who were given the tacks in the box solved it far less … [Read more...] about The Greatest Social Experiment in History
Lesson from Star Wars: How to Fail Spectacularly
MY FIRST BRUSH WITH SKYWALKERS I was 7 years old and wandered into the living room to see what my parents were watching... And froze. The scene playing out onscreen was unlike anything I had ever seen in my short life. It was Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi, and the only thought in my head was that they had discovered Sesame Street for grown-ups. (Which, given Yoda's antecedents, was truer than I realized.) I was transfixed. It was dynamic, tense, and shocking for a girl whose main media diet was Disney and PBS. I was hooked. ONCE A FAN GIRL I watched all of the films, over and over again, which at that point numbered three. (And have never gotten over the fact that I watched them out of order and never got the shock of Luke's Father.) I ditched school for the first and only time with friends from marching band to see the first prequel when it came out in theaters. I avoided the … [Read more...] about Lesson from Star Wars: How to Fail Spectacularly
Placebo Effect is Responsible for World Domination??
Photo: Anders Sandberg Do you remember learning about the placebo effect? I remember a few references to it in high school biology, and a few jokes about it in various TV shows, but it just seems to be one of those concepts you learn by osmosis and never question. But it is insane! IT'S GETTING STRONGER We have powerful drugs to change our brain chemistry, how our guts work, and how our immune systems heal, and we must very carefully design studies to account for the fact that none of them measure up to the power of eating a sugar pill that you’re told might make you better. And even then, sometimes the effect that you think is the drug turns out to also be placebo. Sedatives are less effective if the pill is red or yellow and more effective if they’re green or blue. Was it the drug or the color? Not only that, but the placebo effect is getting stronger. The more time goes on, the harder it is to get an efficacious drug passed because every … [Read more...] about Placebo Effect is Responsible for World Domination??
The Perils of Advice from Fiction Characters
Photo: Theresa Mahler BEWARE THE AUTHOR PHILOSOPHERS (Though you can learn other things from authors like how to stay sane while doing a really weird job...) The primary purpose of entertainment is to entertain, but sometimes, especially in science fiction and fantasy, an author can't resist waxing philosophically. It’s a dangerous condition filled with aphorisms and sagely nodding heads. Fortunately, there’s only one science-fiction author who has worked their way into a full-blown religion: L. Ron Hubbard with his Scientology, so we all know how good of an idea THAT is. But even those authors who know they're writing fiction can't resist the perfect saying to be excerpted and printed on Etsy in a beautiful decorative frame. ADVICE I ONCE LOVED Here is some of the advice I have taken from various famous fictional accounts of life that have not stood the test of time. First, a caveat: I love these properties. They are great works … [Read more...] about The Perils of Advice from Fiction Characters
Tragedy and Triumph are group delusions
Photo Behzad No We decide this together: what is healthy or not, stressful or not? I owe a lot to Elizabeth Stanley and her book Widen the Window for her discussion of the connection between stress and trauma and how we think of them as worlds apart when they really are a spectrum. Though I've extrapolated into the healthy side of things for my work. Yes, we have to live in reality, but we shape reality with a lot of story. What doesn't kill you... The fact that some things are good for us and some kill us is not a controversial statement. I think everybody knows that some things make us happy and some things make us miserable, and some things traumatize us and blight the rest of our lives so we end up eating a pint of ice cream made of avocado because that would be healthier at 3 am when we’re convinced we’re going to be fired, our chosen political party will never win again, and humanity will be extinct in a century... No? Just me? One note: trauma is a … [Read more...] about Tragedy and Triumph are group delusions