Fun with Liquid Nitrogen

A big part of what I try to do here is to show how art and science can complement one another. It makes sense to me: artistic talent seems to be X-linked through my family. My sister is a studio artist by training. My mother was an art teacher for a long time until art teacher jobs ran dry in the late 80s. Her mother – my grandmother – was a skilled painter. In possession of that crazy little Y-chromosome, something went haywire and my artistic abilities are limited to drawing crappy cartoons. I was, however, influenced by my grandfathers: an engineer and a physician. And so I am a scientist.

(Though I do not drink nearly as much as Bob Pollard.)

Still, an appreciation for art is a big part of my personality, I think. It translates to being dismayed when the otherwise-level-headed Roger Ebert says some rather regretful things as well as trying to get out of the house and away from my keyboard every now and then to see a decent independent film at the cinema down the road from us in Cambridge. Yesterday we saw the excellent Exit Through the Gift Shop, ostensibly billed as a documentary about street art as produced by the famous yet extraordinarily reclusive British street artist Banksy and including footage of and interviews with a laundry list of globally-recognized street artists, most notable among which in terms of name-recognition as well as contribution to the film was Shepard Fairey, creator of the now-ubiquitous Obama HOPE poster and Andre the Giant Has a Posse/OBEY Giant.

Image credit: Flickr user dullhunk

The film – now screening in most major cities in North America and opening in some more cities later this week – takes a bit of an unexpected turn, though. It starts off being the story of street art as told by French-American amateur videographer Thierry Guetta. The first two-thirds of the movie is carried by Guetta as he tells the story of how he got to know every major street artist in the world – culminating with filming the notoriously hard-to-get Banksy – over a period between 1999 and 2006, recording thousands of hours of footage. Then, as the street art movement started to gain a lot more traction in the public eye as it got coverage in the mainstream media of legitimate art shows, Fairey and Banksy urged Guetta to finally put together his footage into a documentary to re-claim the “street cred” of street art. They felt that the street art movement was starting to lose its moorings as a counter-culture movement and was instead becoming mainstream culture itself, an anathema to their original mission.

After months of work, Guetta showed Banksy the final product of his film, which was, quite honestly, unwatchable. Distressed but not wanting to alienate his by-then good friend, Banksy urged Guetta to leave him with the tapes and “go do some art” on his own in order to distract him while Banksy effectively re-edited the film from square one. He didn’t have a clue, he said, he’d be releasing a monster. Guetta adopted a street art personality called “Mr. Brainwash” and, in a matter of months, had leveraged his life savings into founding a studio of his own churning out pop art at a dizzying pace, all of which was, well… “showing great influence” would be a good way of putting it.

All of this – as now largely explained by Banksy as Guetta (that is, Mr. Brainwash) has now had the camera turned on him – was in anticipation of Mr. Brainwash’s first gallery show – paid for by himself – in his home town of Los Angeles in 2008. After exceptional trepidation, spending every penny to his name and nearly having his entire work force – by the end a small army of artists and laborers – walk out on him, Mr. Brainwash’s debut show opened in grand style, pulling down low 7 figures in sales. Guetta had done that thing you’re not supposed to do – or even supposed to be able to do – he bought his fame. Not only that, he bought it by producing what, to the objective viewer, looked like an alamgam of every notable pop and street artist (including Fairey and Banksy) over the past half-century thrown into a blender and shot across the entire gallery with a fire hose: a little bit of Andy Warhol here, some Roy Lichtenstein there. His style was so incredibly scattershot and manic as to be no style at all; it seemed like what one might imagine a bar in Tokyo themed on western street art might look like. And yet he was able to find instantaneous fame and critical acclaim, even producing the cover art for Madonna’s greatest hits album in 2009. As earnest as Mr. Brainwash was in his desire to create art that overwhelmed his ability to find his own voice in that art, he created an intensely powerful statement about art itself: how what is critically or monetarily valuable and therefore deemed to be culturally valuable can be so subjective as to be completely meaningless. It was a hard lesson in regard to the merits of “paying one’s dues” as opposed to finding instant fame by playing to what’s popular taken to the absolute extreme.

Or… was it? Following its release, rumors have surrounded the film to the effect that the career of Mr. Brainwash wasn’t manufactured by Guetta taking Banksy’s advice to the extreme all on his own, but rather the entire thing was a Kaufmanesque publicity stunt manufactured by Banksy from the inside as a way of illustrating the patent absurdity of publicity stunts. It would turn the film into a sort of documentarian Being There where the joke was not just on the art afficionados who bought up Mr. Brainwash’s products at a premium, not just on the street art community that encouraged him to find his voice and wasn’t happy when they heard it, not just on Banksy and Fairey for unintentionally sponsoring his rise to fame, but on the audience viewing the film, too; the joke is on everyone.

And that’s just the thing, isn’t it? That’s how it ties in here. It seems to me that Banksy’s work is all about the absurdity of valuing art and how any attempt to do so will ultimately culminate in a giant joke on everyone. And I can dig that. Science, you see, exists at the opposite end of things: everything at its core is objective and has the same meaning everywhere in the Universe, forever. Data is open to interpretation but facts are not. Art, though, is on the opposite end of things: you like it or you don’t, and who’s to say who’s right and who’s wrong? Sure, there’s things like the Golden Ratio that seem to dictate how aesthetically pleasing something is to us, but that’s more of a guideline, not a rule. What tickles the human brain into releasing the neurotransmitters that encourage an emotional response will be as unique for every individual as that individual is unique his- or herself.

Which is why it’s necessary that art and science work together. Raw facts are immutable and objective, true, but how we interpret and visualize those raw facts are how we, as humans, are able to express our understanding of the Universe and share that understanding with others. Just as Exit Through the Gift Shop illustrates how art for art’s sake is meaningless, science for the sake of science has no language with which it can be converted into culturally transmissible knowledge without art. And so one will always need the other. And so, dear readers, I encourage you to not only use the power of awesome thinking to allow science into your life, but also to use the power of awesome doing through artistic expression to allow for yourself to be seen, heard and understood. Because, really, as far as I can tell, that’s what this whole “life” thing is all about.

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Earlier this week I mentioned that I was gone for the weekend in New York. I was there to see a play directed by our friend Jesse: a production of Alan M. Berks’ Almost Exactly Like Us. I’ve seen a good number of Jesse’s productions… erm… directions now, and this one was probably one of my favorites. Since this isn’t a theatre blog and I’m not a theatre person I won’t discuss specifically what he did (you should just go and see it if you live in New York; it runs through this Saturday and tickets are only $12. I mean, c’mon. You can’t get a decent mixed drink in Manhattan for $12). I will say, though, that I think it was an excellent script for him to take on and I very much enjoyed the concept.

It tells the story of four characters: a young college mathematics professor, his wife, her brother, and a young female student. The story of all four plays out in war-torn Chechnya, an environment incredibly foreign to the American characters. As the professor and the young student meet it’s revealed she’s sort of escaped there under the guise of teaching English. The professor eventually gives up that he’s there with his brother-in-law (a somewhat lost Evangelical Christian) and that his wife is dead. He claims he’s there to teach economic mathematics to wealthy businessmen. The locals, you see, don’t use base 10 for their counting system and this, he posits, is what makes them seem so completely foreign to everyone else.

The second act opens with the same characters but not this same story. Instead they’re back in the United States, at a fundamentalist Christian college. The professor starts with a sort of serene Hindu-cattle look on his face that seems de rigeur for Christian fundamentalists but as the act progresses it slowly melts back into the strained, wild look of a predator who has gone too long without a kill that he had in the first act. It’s abundantly clear that this is his true nature and not the Godliness he desired to project. So, too, are the other characters in a different world and yet similar to who they were in the first act. The young student is still striving to escape her own surroundings, to where she doesn’t yet know. The brother-in-law is no longer a misguided Evangelical but instead a 7th-year undergrad in the fine tradition of Jeremy Piven in PCU: an armchair rebel who wants desperately to believe in something, but whose comfort in his own prescribed and predictable social deviance prevents him from moving forward. If only something could remove that comfort he just might believe in something, or at least try to. Finally, the wife appears alive this time but with a deadened expression that reveals she no longer derives any joy from her life and has absolutely zero sense of belonging with her own surroundings. As she literally departs off-stage it’s evident she doesn’t really belong there at all.

Finally, in the third act, the characters appear in a post-apocalyptic landscape that has stripped them of any social normalcy but they are, still, who they are. Or, if there’s nothing under the veil of social normalcy they desire to project as in the case of the professor, they are not.

Three different worlds but the same four people. Alternate reality. A universe where something, somewhere, changed, and based on the different possible outcomes of that one thing, a butterfly effect transforms the results of each possible different outcome into a universe drastically different. It’s a theme in a number of pop culture productions including one of my favorite Futurama episodes (The Farnsworth Parabox) as well as one of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes (Yesterday’s Enterprise). It asks two fundamental questions: 1) do multiple universes – a sort of multiverse – exist and, 2) if there is a branching point forming multiple universes, are we still the same people in those universes? In other words, is what makes us us immutable or malleable?

The answer to the first is a definite maybe. The term “multiverse” seems to have been first coined by psychology pioneer William James and by this point a lot of theoretical physicists have had a say about it. The existence of multiple universes is predicted by string theory (which I will not get into here) and even our old friend Richard Feynman based some of his work on it. In recent years, Swedish-American cosmologist Max Tegmark has put forth a formalized theory as to the existence of multiple universes and how they might come to exist. So, yes, for the sake of argument, it’s perfectly prudent to assume multiple universes exist.

That second question about what makes us us seems like a more philosophical one but I move that it can also be approached from a lens of theoretical Physics. Why? Well, because the existence of multiple universes branching forth from different outcomes of a single event is basically a pre-requisite of retrograde time travel.

I didn’t think I’d get another chance to use this image.

If it is possible to travel back in time – and I’ll spare you the various Physics rhetoric surrounding time travel here since it’s incredibly thick – then the act of doing so necessarily creates a separate universe than the one in which one started. Say I travel back in time to warn my 10 year-old self not to ditch my Nintendo when I got a Sega Genesis because I’d want it back later. The original universe I come from – called the Prime Universe – doesn’t have me in it from two decades in the future offering such a warning. Therefore, the one where I do travel back in time and warn my younger self is different and has split off into a second universe where, when we reach 2010, things will have a different outcome. The question is, will Jon₂ be effectively the same guy as Jon₁? Will, like the characters in Almost Exactly Like Us, I have the same sort of attitude about life with just a bit of a different outcome? What if, instead, I tell myself at that age to buy a bunch of Slint and Sonic Youth albums? Will I grow up to be an insufferable hipster instead of a scientist? Or will I be the same person on the inside with a slightly more ironic exterior?

Of course, people do change, and so does our concept of what’s “right” and “wrong” with the world. So, ultimately, maybe our own sense of who we are is only as immutable as the Universe itself. So, just how changeable is the Universe?

If the Universe can really be manipulated in such a way as to allow for time travel, then, well, shouldn’t we have seen time travelers already? This is an ofshoot of the Fermi paradox that questions why we haven’t seen any evidence of other, intelligent extra-terrestrial life (sightings of little green men by inebriated rednecks aside) if they really do exist. As for the question of the lack of time travelers, there are three possible answers. One is, of course, that time travel really isn’t possible. Bo-ring. The second is that it is possible but we manage to obliterate ourselves in the future before any other intelligent life forms are able to locate us. Possible – if not likely – but still not exciting. The third, though, plays off of Clarke’s Third Law that any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic. Maybe time travel is possible but we’re just not advanced enough to detect it – or those who use it – yet. This is certainly, by far, the most interesting possible outcome.

The thing is, though, that we can’t possibly have the answer to that quandary now. So we’ll just have to see what the future holds the good old fashioned way. When we get there, we’ll have to stop and ask, are we fundamentally different? Or will we be almost exactly like us?

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[Ed: Guess who's back? Back again? Jesse's back. Tell a friend. No, really, tell a friend. Then maybe I'll stop using dated references (hint: I will not stop using dated references). I'm at my folks' house in the far-off land of New Jersey today so Jesse was kind enough to come through with this for me today. Enjoy!]

Hello, again!

So, remember how Jon was talking about art and science in one of his posts on this here blog a few days ago? Yeah, it was in that post of his titled, appropriately enough, “Art and Science.” Well, hey, that’s why I’m back!

In that post, Jon talked about how art can illustrate. Now, I might not be able to literally illustrate, like Becky can with her Fossil Fridays! series. (Or, more accurately, I could, but you probably don’t want me to.) However, hopefully I can still illustrate figuratively. And what would I like to illustrate? How art can illustrate stuff.

That’s heavy, man.

For starters, art can take inspiration from science. To use an example from the theatre (bet you didn’t see that one coming, what with me writing this, now, did you?), there’s Michael Frayn’s (phenomenal) play Copenhagen. Not only does this play explain, in pretty easily understandable English, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (seriously – if you don’t understand the Uncertainly Principle but you want to then you could do far worse than reading or seeing this play), it uses it as a metaphor for human actions and interactions. In the play, we see three characters – the theoretical physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr as well as Bohr’s wife, Margrethe – in some kind of afterlife attempting to figure out how a conversation between them went down a bunch of years ago. The main obstacle they face? They were all so caught up emotionally during that conversation that none of them were decent observers of what they said and, even more importantly, why any of them they said it.

Or, to give a shameless plug here, you could come see the next play I’m working on, Almost Exactly Like Us, and see a story inspired by the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics!

But neither of those plays are purely illustrative – both of them are more interested in using a scientific idea as a metaphor for something else. To talk about how art can be illustrate science, I’m going to take you on a detour through the relationship between art and philosophy.

They’re deeply intertwined, art and philosophy are. To paraphrase Adorno, every philosophy could use a work of art to show what the philosophy explains, and every work of art could use a philosophy to explain what the work of art shows. Basically, they’re both sides of the whole show and tell thing. For instance, if you want some works of art to show you examples of what it might look like to live in a world run on the principles of Camus’s philosophy of Absurdism, you could, say, look to the plays and prose &c. of Samuel Beckett.

No, not that Sam Beckett.

Or, for that matter, you could just look at some of those novels written by that French guy. What was his name? Oh, yeah – Camus.

Now, here’s where this ties back in to science. In some ways science is, in fact, philosophy – or at least the results of science are. I’m going to be extraordinarily reductive here and suggest that there are two things that we mean when we talk about “philosophy” – first, a description of the way (we think) the world works; and second, based on the first, what we should therefore do. (Note that Camus himself hit both of these points in his philosophical works – the first in works such as The Myth of Sisyphus and the second in works such as The Rebel.) So… science is clearly one route for figuring out the first of those two things – how the world works – and sometimes those results can spur us towards the second. For example, science pretty clearly shows us that we live in a world in which global warming is real and is some pretty serious business. Based on that understanding of how our world works, we might decide that, hey, we have to do something to counteract this whole global warming thing or else it’s going to have to choke a $%^@#. And by $%^@#, I mean us.

It would look just like this. Just substitute global warming for Wayne Brady.

So, are you picking up what I’m putting down? Have I illustrated this well enough for you?

('’)

A quick note here before I finally sit down to fill out my tax forms (whee…).

One of the more nebulous focuses of FwLN2 – specifically the Sunday feature – is the fusion of art and science. Two great tastes that taste great together. The mixing of science and religion is a gambit and science and politics should only have a one-way relationship: that is, science can inform politics but not the other way around. Art and science, by all means, should be best-o-friends, though. Artistic expression of science is a great way to illustrate just how awesome it is.

There’s a good word: “illustrate.” Illustration and I have a bit of a history. My grandmother painted. My mother was an art teacher for a long time. My sister is a studio artist by training. Meanwhile, the best I accomplished in terms of artistic endeavor was a couple abortive attempts at webcomics in the early 2000s and a series of editorial cartoons for my college newspaper. None were particularly good in terms of artistic skill, to say the least; it was mostly by the fact that I could write and compose a decent joke that I got by. Clearly, something on the Y-chromosome robs members of my family of being able to draw purdy pikshars. Which is why I respect the ability of people who can do just that, especially if they can do it in an engaging manner. And I really appreciate it when they can do it to describe just how awesome science can be.

So I present you with a challenge: draw more pictures. I’m looking for guest authors who are interested in using illustration as a means of conveying information. I want this to be part of the specific focus of conveying the importance of the fusion of art and science in this Sunday feature. As you well know, on Fridays my wife highlights paintings she’s made of representative fauna over the course of geologic time and, really, I look forward to each one every week (and not just because it gives me a day off). So if you want to draw or paint things you like that involves any aspect of science, I want to see it and I’ll put it up here if it’s acceptable.

So get to it! Feel free to comment here or email me at jon@funwithln2.com if you’re interested. I hope to be able to turn this into a regular thing in the coming weeks and months and you, dear reader, can help me accomplish that.

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[Ed: Jesse Edward Rosbrow has been a good friend of mine for the past 8 years, 1 month and 5 days. Yep, we know the exact date we met and we've been great friends ever since, even though we've never lived in the same town or even the same state as one another. He was also the best man at my wedding, which, for the record, was 1 year, 5 months and 15 days ago. Most importantly, though, Jesse's the Artistic Director of Theatre of the Expendable, a not-for-profit theatre company in New York City that puts on productions at costs designed to be accessible to all people. You should totally come to one of his shows sometime. In the mean time, he's written this for you.]

“No, that’s not a large enough sample size.”

That’s what I found myself saying a few weeks ago. This was the second business meeting my friend and I had had. Both times we spent some time catching up before we got down to, well, business. And both times, I was the person who eventually pivoted our conversation businesswards. When I did that the second time, she said, “I guess it’s always going to be you who does that, huh?”

Obviously, twice wasn’t anywhere near a large enough sample size to be able to predict such behavior in the future. Which, well, is why I said so…!

As you’ve probably gleaned from the oh-so-informative bracketed & italicized description which I’m sure Jon placed at the top of this blog post, no, I don’t work in the sciences. Not even one of the soft ones. To kill the suspense for those of you who didn’t read Jon’s text above (or on the off-chance that he decides that, upon reading this, he decides to screw with us all and either give me no introduction or an incomplete one [Ed: nice try, Jesse]), I work in the theatre. Mainly, I direct. I also produce, administrate, and occasionally act, write, hammer in some nails, and do just about anything else that needs doing (and that somebody actually trusts me to do). So, why did I find myself talking about sample sizes at a business meeting, and, for that matter, what am I doing writing a post on this here science blog?

Well, there are the obviously math-oriented parts of my job(s). For example, take blocking–or, for those of you who didn’t do plays in high school, telling people when and where they should walk and stand and run and dance &c. There’s definitely some time-lapse geometry going on there. Or, on the arithmetical side, there’s dealing with budgets. Sure, a spreadsheet program can help me add up the numbers, but I still need to be able to read them and to think of how to play with them and make them do new things. But I’ll be honest with you–although these kinds of things might be the most obvious reasons why I might be writing here, they’re nowhere near the most important or interesting one.

This blog’s guiding principle is to tell you why critical thinking is awesome. In fact, Jon’s even started a campaign to redub it awesome thinking. And, oh, that’s why I’m here.

You see, I use critical(/awesome!) thinking every day. I don’t think I could do any of my jobs without it. You might say that my ability to think critically is critical to me. (Snare drum, snare drum, ride cymbal.)

Let’s look at budgeting again. Sure, I need math skills to figure budgets out, but I also need to apply a blend of my reflections on my past experiences and my creative guesses as to how things could work in ways that I’ve never experienced. How much money should we budget towards the lighting for our next show? Well… how much have we given lighting designers to work with on past shows? How complicated were the lights for each of these shows, and how much of a difference did that level of complication make on the amount that our lighting designers ended up spending in each case? For which shows have our lighting designers gone under budget, and for which ones have our lighting designers gone over budget? Once I’ve analyzed the past, I can look critically at the script for the next show I’ll work on and make guesses about the future.

Notice I use the word guess here. My company’s produced nine fully teched productions, and I’ve produced and directed ones for other companies, as well. Maybe at some point in my career I will have worked on hundreds of shows, and at that point I’ll have a decent enough sample size of past experiences (and the old spreadsheets from those shows to help me jog my memory) to be doing better than just making educated guesses. For the foreseeable future, though, I’m going to have to continue using my noggin to help me make the most educated (and critical, and awesome) guesses that I can.

It’s just the same when I schedule a rehearsal process. On the micro level, I have to guess how long it’ll take to rehearse a scene. I need to take into account such factors as how long the scene is on paper, how tough the material in it will be for the actors, and (and this one is one I can only do once I’ve gotten a feel for what it’s like to work with the actors I’m working with) how much rehearsal time the actors involved are going to need. Some actors need to take a lot of time to talk all their options out or to deconstruct what worked once we’ve hit upon something good; others get in there and do their thing and don’t need much else. On the macro level, I need to figure out what the whole process should look like. How much time do we need to spend at the beginning sitting around a table discussing the play before we start working on our feet? Do we need to do lots of run-throughs of this show to understand how the whole thing flows together or do we need to work more on the constituent parts? Are there any (thoroughly weird) theatre games we might want to play to help us understand the dynamics of some of the scenes or of the play as a whole, or would those be a waste of time and should we just stick to working on the text? For every show I direct, I have to take my not-minor-but-certainly-not-scientifically-rigorous experience and use it as a lens through which I try to imagine what the ideal rehearsal process for this show might look like.

I could spend much more time dealing with these or other examples of how useful this scientific approach is in my life (and, who knows–perhaps I’ll be back and do so some other time!). But here’s what I want you take away from this: science isn’t so much a subject matter as it is a way of life. I’m not sure if all of you use your awesome critical thinking skills every day, but I am pretty sure that all of you should.

So, dear readers, now it’s your turn. Tell me some stories. When have you used a scientific approach to better do your job or live your life? Extra credit goes to examples that aren’t obviously about science!

('’)

I have a question for you: how does your brain work? Or, more generally, how does your CNS – the way by which you interact with your environment – work? It’s a deceptively hard question but I’m only looking for the most basic answer. In a word.

The word you chose was probably “nerves” or “neurons” or maybe “synapses.” They all basically mean the same thing, though: there are these little cells that look like a cross between a tree and something out of a Miyazaki film that carry electrical impulses down their long, spindly branches and fire off bursts of chemicals in order to talk to one another. What you imagine when you think of neurons probably looks something like this:

Little clumps of gossamer spiders all tangled up with one another, right? That’s what neurons are.

But how do we know that? I mean, ancient hunter-gatherer man didn’t just wake up one day and say, “gee, I think everything I experience both introspectively and in interacting with my environment is actually a subjective experience as seen through the window of billions upon billions of electro-chemical interactions all occurring in discreet paterns inside my skull and all down my back. Yep, that must be it. Now time to hunt a tasty mammoth!”

In fact, most pre-modern societies didn’t give all that much credence to the brain at all. In embalming the dead, ancient Egyptians scooped it out through the nose in rude clumps while they took special care to preserve other, thoracic organs. Some pre-modern cultures thought that the heart was the seat of one’s personality, soul, or whatever you want to call it. Some thought it was the liver (that, at least, makes sense to me since it’s so dang big). Others even thought it might be the spleen. Shakespeare loved him some spleen. But the poor, lonely brain seemed to do little other than provide ballast for the head and keep one’s eyes from rolling around inside one’s skull. And it’s easy to understand why if you know the history of our knowledge of human anatomy.

Throughout much of early Western history (straight up to the Renaissance and later than that in some areas) it was forbidden to perform dissection of human cadavers. Instead, budding anatomists had to rely on vivisection, or the (extraordinarily gruesome) dissection of living animals. Often unsedated living animals. And it’s here that the brain can seem to be less important than it really is. First off, if you’re dissecting something you start by opening the chest cavity, not the brain case. To an anatomist to do so would be like putting on your pants before your underwear. Then you’ve got a whole array of organs that, upon removal, cause instant death. Heck, even poking the heart with enough force will cause the animal to expire. Clearly, they thought, by removing that organ they had also removed the vital spark that kept the animal alive. Therefore, that same vital force that gave the animal its life must reside in that organ. Contrarily, you can poke and prod the brain to a great extent before it ceases to function. In fact, one Dr. Charles Sherrington would discover around the turn of the 20th century that one can carefully remove the entire cerebrum of a cat and the animal will recover and look, to an untrained eye, relatively normal. Add all this to the fact that brain tissue that has not been fixed has the consistency of flan and it’s easy to see how the brain was long cast away as a second-rate organ.

However, eventually, as more and more anatomists poked more and more organs of more and more animals (and later humans) in various stages of life or death, the brain started to get the credit it was due. As microscope technology improved into the mid-19th century, cell theory – the idea that all living organisms are made up of specialized cells – came to be universally accepted. But the brain was especially tricky to nail down even then. CNS tissue is, as I stated above, quite soft and delicate, not to mention fairly colorless under a light microscope. Furthermore, its cells are so enmeshed that to properly see what the heck is going on one needs to cut thin sections no more than about 50 microns thick. That’s roughly as thick as a strand of human hair. Try imagine cutting paper-thin slices of Jell-O with a razor blade and you can begin to understand the difficulties facing neuroanatomists around 100 years ago.

This is why the work of the Spanish physician and histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal is so remarkable. That picture of the neurons above? He drew that by hand from what he saw in his microscope. The big ones with the impressive arbor are called Purkinje cells and are exceptionally important to cerebellar function in that they help to mediate motor coordination and proprioception. Cajal used a method innovated by Camillo Golgi in which he stained – or permanently dyed – tissue with a solution of silver nitrate – a chemical then-used in photography – to darken and visualize individual cells of the brain and spinal cord. What he saw was not well-contained boxes like in other tissues but rather cell bodies from which immensely complex branches grew off long distances in a near-fractal pattern:

Cajal’s impeccable, delicately-detailed images showed that the brain was a jungle of thick connections – potentially hundreds, even thousands per cell body – interwoven into an immense network. They offered the strongest proof yet for a theory from his impressively-named contemporary, Heinrich Wilhelm Gottfried von Waldeyer-Hartz, known as the neuron doctrine which, in a nutshell, states that the neuron is the basic unit of transmission of information inside the brain and that each neuron communicates via gaps called “synapses.” This, in turn, laid the groundwork for the idea that neurons send signals via electrical impulses along their membranes – called cable theory – that now matches our present understanding of the basic means by which neurons communicate with one another and the brain and spinal cord process information.

All this was made possible by Cajal’s patient, diligent observations and his careful and masterful artwork in describing the shapes and layers of connectivity of neurons. Cajal’s work is as much art as it is science and without having both of those elements it would not have been nearly as easy for us all – over one hundred years later – to have such a good understanding of what the basic components of the brain look like in regard to how they work and, in turn, how we work.

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[Ed: Today's guest author for the inaugural Sunday Specials! is a good friend of mine, Lou Fancy, who has written about how he applies a scientific method to the artwork that is computer programming. Please enjoy.]

About a year ago I was sitting in a law class hearing about the difference between copyright law and patent law. The professor explained to us that copyright is for art and patents are for inventions and then told us that program source code was an exception because it was covered under copyright even though it wasn’t art. I did speak up that day but I wasn’t able to formulate the right argument on the spot and don’t think he would have understood anyway.

Programming is art, it’s a sculpture that moves, a painting that helps you figure out where to buy an iPhone. Anyone that says otherwise isn’t a programmer or at least isn’t a programmer that I’d want to work with. Given the same problem, 500 programmers would come up with 500 different solutions. Each solution would be different and wonderful in it’s own way the same way that if you asked 500 painters to paint the emotion joy you’d end up with 500 different paintings. If you know a painter well you can tell their work from their brushstrokes the same way that if you know a programmer well you can tell them apart by the way they declare a variable or use their favorite algorithm.

I work at a hospital, mostly dealing with Medication Safety. We’ve got roughly 100 reports that print out automatically each day. Some reports are small and tell us things like “How much of Drug X did we give out last week” and some are huge and tell us things like “This patient is on drug X and drug Y at the same time, if someone doesn’t take them off they’ll die”. Yes, I type words into a computer all day and save lives.

Not only do I build reports but I build workflow systems as well. Getting a medication to a patient is a complicated process, especially when you’ve got thousands of medications (some of which are handled differently than others) and give out thousands of doses a day. With that many medications and that many doses it could be easy for something to get lost in the shuffle and hurt somebody. It’s my job to make sure that doesn’t happen.

There are steps to what I do:

Analyze

This is the point where I stand in the middle of a process with my hands on my hips and say “what the hell is going on here”. I usually begin the process knowing nothing, sitting in a room full of people that know the process like the back of their hand. It’s my job to ask probing questions and listen selectively to gain an understanding in a few hours that it took them years to build.

From there it’s imagination time. I’ve got point A, what we’ve got and I’ve got point B, where we need to go and anything in the middle is up to me. Do we drive a car? Do we take a bus? Do we invent a Back To The Future style floating skateboard? I diagram things, I document things, I pace, I draw, I listen topost rock and eventually a picture of what will be come to life will draw itself in my mind.

Design

When I finally figure out the general idea of what I want to do I’m usually so excited that I run to tell someone on my team right away. After I get the initial idea out I’ll talk with the original people that taught me about the problem and we’ll toss ideas back and forth. I go back to my office and think often. I tear down what I thought I knew and I build new understanding of the process. I either go back to the Analyze step or come out of this process with fully thought, drawn out and diagrammed idea of what I want to create from nothing.

Build

This is where the magic happens. I have an idea, some conversations and some drawings but at the beginning of this step I am literally staring at a blank text box. I will begin with a single keystroke and many, many keystrokes later I will bring my idea into being from nothing by the power of text alone.

Implement

I’ve thought of an idea and I’ve built it but this is the point where I strap my monster to the table, turn on the weird buzzing electricity things and yell “GIVE MY CREATION LIFE”. My idea, my baby bird, gets pushed out of the nest and into the real world. Though there are always bumps and corrections eventually my little bird flies on it’s own and I’m off to the next big thing. She runs day after day tirelessly. Sometimes I will visit and add some new or fix something that went awry but by and large she’s on her own now.

Sometimes I like to sit back and imagine my many little creations all running around and doing their thing. Machines that I’ve build with nothing more than some keystrokes and imagination are making the patients at this hospital safer and more comfortable. People are being automatically told when bad things happens. The almost endless combinations of medications, lab values and activity for all patients are being endlessly compared to one another for dangerous situations and my little creations even tell me when something is wrong. These things are happening right now, this very second.

At the end of the day I return home and cook dinner. Those around me are oblivious to the god-like power of creation that resides in my fingers.

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