Month: January 2011

Dana's Dojo: The Authorly Art of Watching TV

Dana Hunter

Today in the Dojo: Making your cable television watching qualify as work.

All television is educational television.  The question is:  what is it teaching?  
-Nicholas Johnson

Has anyone here ever seen an article in a writer’s magazine about using TV as a research tool?  If so, send me the reference, because I haven’t seen it.  I’ve seen them talk about libraries, books, professionals, the Internet, and a billion other things, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone mention television as a valid research resource.  Which is silly, because it’s one of the best tools out there – if you know how to milk it.

It’s all in your approach.  If you’re just sitting down in front of the boob tube drooling on your Cheese Doodles, you’re not going to be able to claim the cable bill as a business expense.  However, cable offers far more than sitcoms, unrealistic reality shows, and third-rate crime dramas. 

So here’s how to turn your viewing from passive time-wasting to active research/writing time.

WHAT TV’S GOT THAT NO ONE ELSE HAS GOT

Lights.  Camera.  Action.  Oh, yeah.

Let’s face it: books are words.  No matter how well they’re written, no matter how illustrated, they’re still just static words and images.  And that isn’t good for the writer who’s trying to get a full sensory experience from their research. 

The Internet is useful, and with video proliferating getting even more so, but still needs supplementing.  We will not even discuss the stupidity of search engines at this point. 

As for the other research options, seeking out a professional for everything you need can be difficult and daunting, and active research in the field can be costly.  Not to mention dangerous, depending on what you’re researching.

If you’re already subscribing to cable, you might as well make those bucks work for you.  It brings professionals into our homes to tell us useful things without a consulting fee.  It takes you around the world for cheap.  And you can find a program on nearly anything you’d care to know about.

But there’s more to it than that, something else books can’t provide: Television grabs us directly by two of our five senses: sight and hearing.  It’s the closest most of us may come to the direct experience of walking through the fortress at Golconda and hearing the sound of clapping hands refracting off of faceted ceilings.  It can take us places we could never afford to go with a richness of visual and auditory detail that no book and precious few websites can match.  In turn, we can translate that experience back into prose, and make the world our characters move through the richer for it.

Television viewing can give you broad, shallow exposure to a variety of new things and ideas that you can use as inpiration.  It can also give you an idea of where you should concentrate your in-depth research energies.  It can do a lot, if you let it.

INSPIRATION

Writer’s block?  Too tired to do anything of any use to anyone?  Have to do the ironing, coupon cutting, scrapbooking, toenail clipping, or other household tasks that mean you can’t write because your hands are otherwise occupied?  Turn on the TV and open your mind.

What I’m advocating is not watching reruns of That 70s Show, but programs you ordinarily wouldn’t watch in a billion zillion years.  This is where my habit of having the TV on in the background, tuned to something like the Travel Channel or National Geographic or what have you, has served me well.  I’ll pop on one of those channels while I’m cooking, cleaning house, ironing clothes, or typing emails, and I’ve gotten some amazing insights from a few hours’ worth of unusual programming.

You never know what your brain might be able to make from a medley of documentaries on muscle cars, ghosts and taboos.  When you’re stuck in a rut, having someone take you around to some of the more unusual places in the world can get you back on the road.  Learning about new places, new people, and nifty new things can provide just the breakthrough you need to solve a sticky problem that’s stalled your story.  At the very least, you’ll have learned enough about random stuff to keep any cocktail party conversation going.

INFORMATION

What do you need to know?  Television will teach you about anything ancient and modern, natural and man-made, civilized and otherwise.  Just check your local listings for the right program.

Say you’re writing a courtroom drama, but you can’t take time off work to follow a court case.  No problem.  Watch a trial on teevee.  You’ll see how the defense and prosecution present cases, get to watch the judge’s eye twitching, see and hear how the spectators react… If you’ve done your homework and know the rules of evidence and other such courtroom specifics, then you’ll be able to follow along as those things are put into action, and then be able to translate that action into prose.  A quick follow-up visit to a local courthouse will provide you with the smells and tactile impressions that TV can’t provide.

Need to know what Greece looks like?  What it’s like to travel around in Asia?  Take the boob tube.  And the nice thing about travelling with the television rather than the guidebooks is that a lot of programs will show you around the less touristy places.  It’s also instructive to see things moving and interacting rather than getting all your impressions from static pictures.

Speaking of travel, don’t limit yourself to the Travel Channel.  If you need to go to Greece, watch a science program on it.  Small town America?  Find out if City Confidential on A & E has done a show on it.  Sure it’s a crime drama, but they spend the first part of the show giving you an in-depth tour of the town, including some of its history and what it’s really like to live there.  These programs aren’t going to limit you to the hot tourist spots.  They’ll show you the not-so-pretty places, too.

TV can show you how things are made, what a job is like, how to make haute cuisine, and so many other things.  There’s a channel for everything – and this is all on basic cable.  Watching shows on whatever you’re researching will most certainly help bring that research to life. 

One of the most valuable things you’ll take away is an infinite variety of people.  Quality television programs can really give you insight into how people different from your inner circle live, think and act.  Listen to the accents, the ideas, the beliefs, and you’ll suddenly have a library of useful stuff for creating characters who aren’t just infinite versions of you.

PUTTING IT ALL TO WORK

So we’ve determined that the boob tube isn’t such a boob after all.  But it’s not going to do you any good if you’re just drooling in your chair.

A writer needs to do things no regular viewer does.  Normal viewers do not sit there and take notes, nor keep a library of programs to refer back to.  You must.  Otherwise, you will have nothing to show the tax man when you’re saying, “See – this is work!”

Here’s how I’ve made it work:

1.  Watch with a writer’s attitude.  This means looking for the subtle stuff – gestures, nuances in tone, turns of phrase, modes of dress, and all other things that make people unique for characters.  For all else, notice the fine details.  The texture of stone, the play of light and shadow, the refraction of sound, everything.  View television with an artist’s mind.  You should be thinking how you’d get this across in prose, at least part of the time.

2.  Take notes.  I’m not kidding.  Some of you can probably get away with mental notes, but if you’ve got a memory like mine, that’s like writing on a nice flat bit of sand in a wind tunnel.  I keep a notebook by my chair for those times when the computer isn’t in my lap; otherwise, I use the notepad function on my laptop.  I don’t take many notes, but enough to prompt this poor sieve of a memory of mine to retain the bits that really strike me as essential.

3.  Record.  I have a nice tidy library of programs recorded on the DVR.  Those come in handy when I need a refresher course in ninja warfare, the history of comics, competing theories of the Apocalypse, and a billion other things.  If you come across a program that’s particularly useful to you, bung it onto a DVD.  The beauty of cable is that they repeat things about a zillion times, so you’re bound to catch it on rerun at some point.  If you’re one of those lucky buggers with a DVR, you’ve got it made.  Just tell the machine what you want.&nb
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And make sure you label things clearly….

4.  Follow up.  You can’t rely on a one-hour documentary to tell you everything you need to know about everything.  Television is another tool, not the be-all and end-all of your researches.  It works best in conjunction with the traditional sources: books, articles, Internet, experts, shoe leather, and whatever else is vital to the research process that I’ve managed to leave out.  Besides, teevee’s notorious for getting things wrong.  Don’t trust and absolutely verify.  Think of television as either a starting point or a support tool, and you’ll be fine.

5.  Websites.  Most of the channels have their own websites, and they run special features on their programs.  Those features often include a plethora of information that didn’t make it in to the programs.  They’ll provide you with a ton of research sources, all vetted by the professionals and there for the taking.  Take advantage.  After all, you (might have) sat through the bloody commercials that paid for the things – they owe you!

There you are.  All the info you need to make your hours of television viewing look like good, hard work.  And on top of that, you got the house clean, your toenails clipped, and created a scrapbook your inlaws will weep over – all while getting another piece of your job as a writer done.

Not bad for a few hours’ viewing.

Dana's Dojo: The Authorly Art of Watching TV
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Why We Need Science Bloggers

Dana Hunter

Two exhibits shall suffice, methinks.

Exhibit A: The Strange Case of the Oldest Homo Sapiens That Weren’t

The world went haywire last week with breathless reports that ZOMG ALL UR HOOMIN EVOLUSHUNS HAZ CHANGED!!1!11!!  Back in the bad old days when all I had access to was the MSM, I might have gotten sucked in by the hype.  After years of reading science blogs, though, I just sat back and waited.

And, sure enough, on December 28th, there was Brian Switek on Twitter, on the case:

Scientists claim 400,000 year old Homo sapiens teeth found in Israel cave, older than African H. sapiens http://bit.ly/gblFEl BUT… [1/2]
… paper abstract http://bit.ly/fgZQKz draws closer comparison to Neanderthals and indeterminate types like the Skhul/Qafzeh hominins [2/2]

Then:

Haven’t read full paper – no access – but I have to wonder if the popular presentation is hyped beyond paper’s conclusions #notthe1sttime

Scicurious took care of the “no access” problem.   And, within hours, Brian had taken a gargantuan pin to a very over-inflated balloon:

A handful of fossil teeth found in Israel’s Qesem Cave, described in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and attributed to 400,000 year old members of our own species in multiple news reports, are said to rewrite the story of human evolution. This discovery doubles the antiquity of Homo sapiens, the articles say, and identify a new point of origin for our species. “Find in Israeli cave may change evolution story” proclaims The Australian, while the Daily Mail asks and answers “Did first humans come out of Middle East and not Africa? Israeli discovery forces scientists to re-examine evolution of modern man.” (The Jerusalem Post, by comparison, went with the tamer “Homo sapiens lived in Eretz Yisrael 400,000 years ago.”) As is often the case, though, the hype surrounding this find far outstrips its actual significance.


Then, for good measure, Carl Zimmer piled on.  I’m sure plenty of others leaped into the fray, but those were the first two I read, and suffice to prove my point.  We bloody well need science bloggers.  Why?  Because science journalists, the supposed professionals, are so fucking busy misreading, misleading, and giving science repeated black eyes by taking carefully-hedged papers filled with cautions and bet-hedging and warnings against jumping to conclusions and hyping them out of all proportion.  Carl called it “journalistic vaporware,” which rings true.  It’s disgusting is what it is.

And it used to be a person had three choices: accept, discount, or pay out the nose to access the original scientific papers and then try to wrangle sense from things not written in layman’s language.


Now we have science bloggers, who know science, love science, speak its lingo, and have the access and the tools to investigate and report back to the rest of us.  Because of them, I’ve learned not to believe the hype, and to refrain from hyperventilating until one of them weighs in.

Which brings me to Exhibit B:  The “Placebo Effect” Effect



Twitter absolutely blew up with links to various and sundry about some paper claiming the placebo effect worked even when people knew they were taking a placebo.  I can’t report on how some of the sources Bora linked were reporting it, because I was busy getting me arse kicked by other links (I’ve been busy, damn it).  But I saw other babble floating around that seemed to take it at face value.  Meh.  It was either a solid study or it wasn’t, I wasn’t too fussed about it, and knew that if it either had merit or sucked leper donkey dick, it would eventually land on one of the medical sites that are part of my regular reading schedule.


I love it when I’m right:

Placebo effects without deception? Well, not exactly…

Dr. Gorski eviscerates both study and breathless hype.  Yes, the study showed some interesting things.  No, it didn’t prove that placebo works sans deception.  Rather a fatal flaw:

No, the reason I say this is because, all their claims otherwise notwithstanding, this study doesn’t really tell us anything new about placebo effects. The reason is that, even though they did tell their subjects that the sugar pills they were being given were inert, the investigators also used suggestion to convince their subjects that these pills could nonetheless induce powerful “mind-body” effects. In other words, the investigators did the very thing they claimed they weren’t doing; they deceived their subjects to induce placebo effects by exaggerating the strength of the evidence for placebo effects and using rather woo-ish terminology (“self-healing,” for instance). Here’s how the investigators describe what they told their patients:

Patients who gave informed consent and fulfilled the inclusion and exclusion criteria were randomized into two groups: 1) placebo pill twice daily or 2) no-treatment. Before randomization and during the screening, the placebo pills were truthfully described as inert or inactive pills, like sugar pills, without any medication in it. Additionally, patients were told that “placebo pills, something like sugar pills, have been shown in rigorous clinical testing to produce significant mind-body self-healing processes.” The patient-provider relationship and contact time was similar in both groups. Study visits occurred at baseline (Day 1), midpoint (Day 11) and completion (Day 21). Assessment questionnaires were completed by patients with the assistance of a blinded assessor at study visits.

This is a description of the script that practitioners were to use when discussing these pills with subjects recruited to the study:

Patients were randomly assigned either to open-label placebo treatment or to the no-treatment control. Prior to randomization, patients from both groups met either a physician (AJL) or nurse-practitioner (EF) and were asked whether they had heard of the “placebo effect.” Assignment was determined by practitioner availability. The provider clearly explained that the placebo pill was an inactive (i.e., “inert”) substance like a sugar pill that contained no medication and then explained in an approximately fifteen minute a priori script the following “four discussion points:” 1) the placebo effect is powerful, 2) the body can automatically respond to taking placebo pills like Pavlov’s dogs who salivated when they heard a bell, 3) a positive attitude helps but is not necessary, and 4) taking the pills faithfully is critical. Patients were told that half would be assigned to an open-label placebo group and the other half to a no-treatment control group. Our rationale had a positive framing with the aim of optimizing placebo response.

How is this any different from what is known about placebo responses? I, for one, couldn’t find anything different. It’s right there in the Methods section: The authors might well have told subjects that they were receiving a sugar pill, but they also told them that this sugar pill would do wonderful things through the power of “mind-body” effects, as though it was entirely scientifically clear-cut that it would.

That, my darlings, is deception.  That’s telling folks the sugar pill is magic.  And we all know that when you hand people a pill and tell them it’s magic, a subset will believe, and heal themselves.  The only real difference was that in this study, the bottles of sugar pills actually said “PLACEBO” on them.

POP goes another overinflated response to a study that didn’t merit the hype.  Thing is, without science bloggers, us regular joes wouldn’t know any better.  And without science bloggers, us regular joes would be pissed next week or next month or next year when future studies are breathlessly hyped as saying these studies were completely fucking wrong.  Science bloggers bring us back down to earth.  They help us understand what the science was really saying, analyze the studies for flaws that might cast doubt on sensational conclusions, and show us how good science (and good science reporting!) is actually done.


That, my darlings, is why we so desperately need science bloggers.  And to all of you science bloggers in the audience: thank you, thank you, a million times, thank you.

Why We Need Science Bloggers

Not So Much An Explosion…

Dana Hunter2 Comments

…as a long, slow-burning fuse.

Dr. Joe Meert and colleagues may have discovered evidence of Ediacaran fauna stretching back a lot longer than previously thought.  And it’s all because their driver had a mild stroke in the field, leaving them stranded a bit and with nothing to do but nose around the rocks of Maly Karatau looking for fossils.  They found some.
Our work in the lab is what provided the first surprise. The general consensus is that the Ediacara fauna reached their zenith around 565 Ma following the last of the severe glacial epochs. In fact, many argue that the so-called Snowball Earth episodes provided the stress necessary for the evolution of complex life during the Ediacaran-Cambrian interval. But the age of the rocks came back as 766 Ma. This is more than 100 million years older than the previously reported occurrences of Nimbia and was a bit of a shock. Furthermore, our study of stable isotopes on the glacial deposits indicated that they are most likely of Marinoan age (~650 Ma). Since the fossils were found stratigraphically well below these glacial rocks, our age estimate made even more sense. 
[snip]
Meert, J.G., Gibsher, A.S., Levashova, N.M., Grice, W.C. and Kamenov, G.D., Glaciation and ~770 Ma Ediacara (?) Fossils from the Lesser Karatau Microcontinent, Kazakhstan, Gondwana Research (large pdf). doi10.1016/j.gr2010.11.008. 

More at the Panda’s Thumb, including more about the geology of the area.  Or, for the full stratigraphic goodness, you could go read the whole paper, which includes some mouth-watering photos of ancient tillites and one very attractive rock that looks like a glacier scratched it up just last Ice Age.

Now, if this paper gains any traction, you’ll probably see headlines shrieking that the Ediacaran fauna have positively without doubt been pushed back another 100 million years ZOMG.  That could be the case.  But the authors of the paper are careful not to jump all the way overboard.  This could prove multicellular animals were tooling around the oceans long before we suspected.  Or… not so much.  They may be determined not to have been multicellular at all, in fact.  Lots of research still needs to be done, and you can tell from the photos that these soft-bodied little critters are subtle and hard to suss.

But that’s ultimately not so important as the fact that life on Earth spent a long, long time evolving its way toward complexity.  It got there gradually, not all at once in some huge, instantaneous explosion.  It’s not like critters went to bed single-celled and got up on the first morning of the Cambrian as multicellular armored beasties.  That is just not how it went.  If you still want to think in terms of an “explosion,” you’ll have to envision a blowup that lasted up to hundreds of millions of years – longer, in fact, than it took us to evolve from shrew-like mammals shivering in the shadows of dinosaurs to nekkid apes shivering in a stiff winter breeze.

As far as we can tell, life spent a long time futzing around with single cells, lounging together as microbial mats, before venturing out in a desultory sort of way to become wee little multicellular things that eventually discovered the joys of predator-prey relationships and the importance of armor.  Evolution can happen quickly, and sometimes does -once a threshold is reached, it’s not implausible that innovation can take off in all kinds of directions.  But it’s not precisely an explosion.  And it’s certainly not the kind of nearly-overnight sensation the IDiots and cretinists lust for.  It may look fast, but that’s only if you don’t understand geologic time.  This paper, should it prove that the authors’ conclusions are right and the Ediacaran fauna spent an additional hundred million or so years lurking around in soft-bodied multicellular glory, is merely an additional slap in the face to those who cling with grim determination to a figure of speech.  We already knew the “explosion” took at the very least tens of millions of years to go boom – far more than enough time for plain ol’ unsupernatural evolution to do its thing.  No gods need apply.

Still, it’s exciting to think that life on Earth consisted of more than just microbial mats as early as three-quarters of a billion years ago. 

Incidentally, Dr. Meert has his own blog, Science, AntiScience and Geology, where you can read one of the greatest Blogger profiles ever written:
I have a Ph.D. from By Bayou University where I am employed as a Professor of Hydrocephalic Earth Studies and Structure. My research is aimed at demonstrating the utter lunacy of young earth creationism. Oh, I am not 549 years old, I don’t endorse astrology and I found it interesting that 1457 was the year of the rat, but I have no idea why this blogger puts such information into a bio.
I think I just fell a little bit in love just then…
Not So Much An Explosion…

Kevin Smith on Living the Dream

Dana Hunter

If you don’t know who Kevin Smith is, you’ve been living in a box buried in a caved-in cave.  He’s the wildly-successful filmmaker behind Mallrats, Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma, among others.  He’s done a run on Daredevil, and I have to say he’s just as excellent at writing comics as he is making movies.  He may not be your thing, but you can’t avoid the fact he’s living the dream.

I’ve been in love with him since Clerks.  He’d captured life as a cashier perfectly.  So yeah, maybe I’m a little partial.  So sue me.

He’s started doing #Smonologues on Twitter.  You can find the very first one here, and it’s awesome, but the one I want to highlight is here.  It is a kick in the arse.  It is a reminder of the truly important shit.  And even if you’re not a “creative” person, even if what you want to do in your life has nothing to do with writing or filmmaking or art of any kind, you still need to get your arse kicked, because sometimes buttocks need prodding before you’re motivated to go live your dreams.

So here you go:

But before all of that, you gotta start with the idea – and not just the idea for the story/movie/novel/installation/song/podcast/whatever. You gotta start with the idea that you can do this – something that’s not normally done by everybody else. Since it’s not second nature to take leaps of faith, you have to SMotivate yourself. Even invent language, if you have to. Embrace a reasonable amount of unreasonability.
But nobody else can believe in you if you don’t believe in what you’re doing. I’ve willed almost all the stuff I’ve done into existence, and if I can do that, anybody can do that. So start your chatter: talk about what you’re going to do. Don’t pursue a role, LIVE that role. Like my sister told me, back when I confessed I wanted to be a filmmaker…
“Then BE a filmmaker,” she said. 
“That’s what I’m saying: I wanna be.”
And that’s when she gave me the million dollar advice…
“No – BE a filmmaker. You say you wanna be; just BE a filmmaker. Think every thought AS a filmmaker. Don’t pine for it or pursue it; BE it. You ARE a filmmaker; you just haven’t made a film yet.” 
And it sounded artsy-fartsy as fuck, but it was CRAZY useful advice. A slacker hit the sheets that night, but the CLERKS-guy got out of bed the following morning. 
So plant the seeds early & take as much time as it requires to will your goals into existence. Keep a few going, you’ll never get bored. Expect moments of discouragement, but don’t wallow in them. Remember that if an ass-hat like Kevin Smith can succeed at something like film or life, then what the fuck is stopping YOU from doing the same? I was not ‘to the manor born’. This shit was not manifest, nor was it ever offered.
And just remember that, when you read about some deal or project, sometimes that’s just some bluffy motherfucker trying to change his or her game by willing some shit into existence. 
Only guy I ever heard of who got an amazing life literally handed to him was Hal Jordan. Don’t wait for a dying alien to give you a magic ring: just do it yourself, Slappy. We can’t all be Superman, but we sure as shit can train hard, and with loads of practice, we can elevate our simple, non-Kryptonian selves to be the Batman. And who the fuck doesn’t wanna be Batman? Batman has an impeccable moral compass. He’s clever & mysterious. And when fucktards get sassy, he punches them in the face. Plus, that car.
Ideas cost nothing yet have the potential to yield inexplicably long careers & happy lives. So go ahead: dream a l’il dream. #SMonologueOff

Be it.  Live it.

This is your year.  No excuses.

BE.

Kevin Smith on Living the Dream