DDR Debut Album

Perry lays into longing with the force of a whack to the heart, taking the wadded ball of hurt, lust and love that a new object of desire stirs up and hurling it at the listener with an All-Star pitcher's walloping accuracy. Each element - the raggedly right singing, the uncivilized guitars, the clomping, irresistible beat, the naked lyrics - works together to paint a warts & all portrait of what it means to want someone so bad it consumes one…until it doesn't and one moves on having survived another run through the white water emotional gauntlet.

Deep Dark Robot is a pretty far cry from the work Perry has done over the past couple decades as songwriting guru/foil to the likes of Pink, Christina Aguilera and many others. It is a personal, pure rock statement of purpose that points Perry back to her roots and lets the spotlight swing back her way again for the first time since her 4 Non Blondes days. What it reveals is a mature, powerful artist ready to take on all comers.

Deep Dark Robot

Linda Perry: Yeah but I think I'm saying it throughout the record!

JamBase: How did Deep Dark Robot come together? You haven't been in a band for a really long time.

Linda Perry: It was definitely a surprise to me. I'd written this lyric - “A deep dark robot falling in love” - and I thought, “I like that! If I were ever to start a new band I'd call it Deep Dark Robot. That's cool.” So, I stored that in the ol' memory bank, and then I wrote a song and then another one, and then I met Tony Tornay and we became really good friends and I said, “I'm forming a band. You wanna be in it? ” And he said, “Cool” [Perry's retelling emphasizing a decidedly laidback vibe]. Nine months later when I had some time, he came down to the studio and we started jamming and recorded some of the songs. Our first rehearsal was just me and him, and then the songs turned into more songs. It was Tony that pointed out, “Hey, you know you're writing an album about a girl, right?”

It was a hard situation to write about, this straight girl that I had these feelings about and it just couldn't happen because of the nature of her lifestyle. So, it's an album about this lingering emotion about not getting the girl. It's also about being seduced in a way, dangled with temptation and sort of pursued to get into it. But there was never going to be any sort of consummation of these feelings. I went through all these emotions - feeling jealous and possessive and pathetic and not good enough. At the end of it, I went, “Fuck it, this is bullshit!” The songs were written in real time; as a new emotion showed up, so did the song.

That real time aspect, the lack of forethought inherent in that situation, means less second-guessing of the music. If you'd thought about it you might have convinced yourself not to make this album, not to build a band, not to tour these songs, etc.

Deep Dark Robot

The rawness of it is the heart of rock ‘n' roll - letting it all hang out. Even thematically, you're talking about Year Zero rock stuff like getting the girl to go to the dance with you and then dealing with your feelings after you've gone to that dance. It wouldn't be as good if you'd done the Def Leppard thing and taken four years to polish every little bit.

It took four or five months to make this record but it was all in between my schedule and Tony's schedule. When we counted it up, it was about 22 days in the studio making this record. An artist would leave and I'd call Tony at 10 o'clock at night and say, “Come over, I've got this idea!”

On tour, what are you playing besides the songs on the record?

We're playing the album the way it is with the vignettes and everything. Then, we play three covers, which we're going to release as an EP: [The Rolling Stones'] “Angie,” [The Cure's] “Love Song” and [The Stooges'] “Search and Destroy.” And then we do a Deep Dark Robot song that's on iTunes as a bonus track called “Somebody Love Me Now.” I like short sets, always have, so our set is maybe 35-40 minutes. It's good, it's perfect, and we're out of there [laughs].

Emotionally, how is it playing this stuff night after night, revisiting some quite painful moments? “It Fucking Hurts” alone can't be fun to wander around in over & over.

We played Chicago and about midway through the set I started getting really depressed. It's sad. When I don't get something - I don't how everyone else is - it's a lingering emotion that sits within me. And it takes a long, long time for me to get over that. On top of that, I find this particular person incredibly beautiful and awesome, so there's no bad emotions just hurt ones. There's something romantic about the whole situation because I know she's equally tortured. I know she wants to be right here by my side but it can't be that way.

That never-to-be-resolved tension is a sad, sad truth but it's also some of the best grist for the creative mill. Isn't that a fucked-up truth?

Yeah, it totally is [laughs]. It's okay. I'll get through it. It's part of me. The thing I like about how I experience life is everything is real time for me. So, onstage in Chicago, as I experienced this emotion, my whole mood changed and I looked at the crowd and said, “I'm sorry but I'm having a mood-flip right now.” Sometimes this album is hard for me to play because I get sad. I'm just a raw and honest person, and people ended up falling more for this music and rooting for the underdog. Right now, [Deep Dark Robot] is an underdog.

8 Songs About A Girl doesn't feel like a project. There's clearly a person behind it, a person full of foibles and aches and all sorts of recognizably human traits. I think that's part of what people are connecting with in this band.

Deep Dark Robot

In this band I can do anything I want to. The content can be whatever I want it to be. Sometimes when you work with somebody else they don't want to take many chances, sing certain things, it has to fit some kind of format, and blah, blah, blah. It's a buzz killer. Now, I'm thinking, “Why would you want to sound like radio now? Radio sucks. Don't you want to raise the bar a bit?” They make up some sort of excuse about their label or something. What I got kind of popular for, now, people won't let me do. They're so scared of losing. Losing what? What could you be so frightened of losing?

Every time I get together with somebody I just try to bring out as much emotion as I possibly can. Honestly, the past couple years I haven't released a lot [of songs written for/with others] because I've ended up pulling them, going, “You know what? I'm not going to let this go out in the world. I can't back this up.” I give the money back and say, “Here you go. Sorry.” So, doing this record and being part of Deep Dark Robot has made me feel free. I have no label breathing down my neck. I have nobody telling me what to do because they know they can't [laughs]. So, if I fall, I fall. I believe in this and I will fight to the bitter end to get it where I think it needs to go.

Deep Dark Robot Tour Dates :: Deep Dark Robot News

JamBase | Fuckin' Hurt
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Artists inhabit the borders between fact and fiction – no wonder their works and lives have inspired writers from Vasari to Dan Brown

I recently read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time since I was a teenager. I understood what was going on a lot better than I did when I was 14 and had not heard of a gay subtext. But it also triggered me to think about why art inspires so many good stories.

In Wilde's scintillating novel, a painter creates a portrait of a young man he is in love with. All his unrequited, indeed unspoken, passion goes into the painting, which somehow makes it more than a passive work of art. It takes on magical, mysterious properties, and when young Dorian wishes for the portrait to age and decay while he is preserved in his pristine beauty, he gets his wish. This story belongs to a particular class of art fictions – tales about works of art. Other examples include The Unknown Masterpiece by Balzac and The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe.

If writers can tell such stories about works of art, imagine what they can do with the lives and milieux of artists. From Emile Zola's The Masterpiece, a dark portrait of the French 19th-century avant-garde, to Michel Houellebecq's La Carte et le Territoire, which satirises the contemporary art world, novelists have had their fun with artists.

This goes back to the very origins of artistic celebrity. The first great work of art criticism and art history, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, published in 1550 with an expanded second edition in 1568, is sometimes dismissed by pedants as nothing more than a collection of sensational anecdotes about artists and their works. In fact it is nothing less than a collection of great stories about art. Vasari saw art as an adventure, its creators as heroes or anti-heroes whose travails make terrific tales. Have you heard the one about Andrea del Castagno murdering Domenico Veneziano? He relates the story of these 15th-century artists who took their rivalry to the point of actual murder. It is not true: the supposed killer predeceased his victim. But Vasari's compelling murder mystery says a lot about the obsessive rivalries of the Renaissance, so it remains artistically true. Dorian Gray would have understood.

Vasari created the modern image of the artist by telling stories that hover on the borders between fact and fiction. His contemporary Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor and criminal, told his own life in a way that just as richly weaves reality with fantasy. It is no wonder that writers have continued to recognise in art and artists a tantalising subject matter that lingers between truth and lies, between the plausible and the fabulous. Cellini's life was turned into an opera by Berlioz; Vasari's life of Michelangelo was spun into Irving Stone's bestseller The Agony and the Ecstasy, which was filmed with Charlton Heston. Since then we have had the life of Vermeer in Girl with a Pearl Earring and the commercial king of them all, The Da Vinci Code.

All these fictions exist in the enigmatic borderland between art and life. If life is real and art is an illusion, does the life of an artist glide between illusion and truth? Do artists take on the unreality of their works? Or perhaps, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is a two-way relationship, and art reveals truths that the illusion of everyday life conceals. Either way, art is easily strange enough to inspire many more stories.

Own Your Beauty is a groundbreaking, year-long movement bringing women together to change the conversation about what beauty means. Our mission: to encourage and remind grown women that it is never too late to learn to love one's self and influence the lives of those around us - our mothers, friends, children, neighbors. We can shift our minds and hearts and change the path we follow in the pursuit of authentic beauty.

It was a mistake. An error in a shipping label or a database glitch, maybe, but a mistake for sure.

And yet this completely coincidental accident seemed anything but coincidental.

It was odd for me to email her. Although we’ve met once and I’ve written about her here, Karen and I aren’t close friends. Certainly not the kind of friends that email each other on the way home from therapy.

And yet, as I drove down the Interstate last Wednesday morning with the sticky residue of tears on my cheeks, I knew I had to email her. I had to get answers, and my gut was certain that she was the place to start. I got home and logged onto my email before I lost my nerve; I knew it was presumptuous to drag this casual acquaintance into my darkest place, my Original Hurt, if you will.

When you took my photo in NYC, was it hard to take a picture of me because of my lazy eyes?

I wanted to throw up as soon as I hit send. Typing the words was damn near as painful as saying them out loud, something I go to great lengths to avoid with phrases like “you know” and “eye thing” and “Vote for a Democrat! WHO WANTS PIE?!?” The oldest scab on my psyche had been picked at in my therapist’s office, and now I was picking at it here on the Internet without a safety net. But I couldn’t take them back now.

It only took her 16 minutes to respond.

The general idea was that, no, nothing had interfered with her ability to take my picture. She went on to talk a little about her philosophy as a photographer, about capturing a person’s “spark,” things like that. There were nearly 300 words in her email about taking pictures of people and genuine beauty and universal beauty and blah blah blah. Nearly 300 words total, but 27 lept off the screen and kicked me in my gut.

I will admit, when I first met you, I was surprised by your eyes —- not put off in any way, you understand, it was just unexpected.

And there it was. Confirmation of what I already knew. Here, amidst kind words from a woman who had no intention of hurting me, was the truth I was constantly trying to duck.

The first thing you notice when you see me in person is that I am a freak. There is something wrong with me. From every moment on, you will be struggling to overcome this freakishness out of respect for my personality, but always at the root of what you see -– of who I am –- is a cross-eyed girl.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. The fact that my eyes tend to turn in is a physical fact, not an opinion about my character or a preference of type. It is what it is, and what it is is always there. Unavoidable. The first thing you see if you shake my hand and look me in the face, as strangers tend to do when they are meeting for the first time and shaking hands.

For the second time in one day, I found myself drowning in a lifetime of emotions that had been carefully kept just out of reach. Wave after wave of shame and anger washed over me, each one deeper than the next. I groped for reassurance, for the lifelines I had clung to for 30 years. Thirty years of avoiding mirrors and hating pictures and hoping my eyes squinted when I smiled really big. Thirty years of forgetting for a moment what I looked liked and being ashamed when I remembered the truth. Thirty years of being both grateful and resentful of the pity that those who loved me bestowed upon me in order to love me, in order to see past my shame and find something beautiful to comment on.

But there were no more lifelines. The truth I’d been avoiding was that there was no reassurance in the world that could change me. I could delude myself temporarily, but it didn’t change what we were all trying so hard not to look at.

I was stuck with this truth. But so, too, was I stuck with a life to maintain and work to do. I packed up my bitterness into its old boxes and got on with the business of life.

Two hours later, Karen emailed me again.

I don’t know why. I certainly hadn’t told her of my pain or tears or dry heaving. But here she was, emailing me again, telling me she felt like maybe she hadn’t answered my question exactly right. And then, a few emails later, she was telling me all about her belief that flaws don’t exist.

She compared my eyes to her race in that, if you hadn’t seen us before, you might be surprised upon first meeting to discover my eyes or her race. Not good or bad, she explained, just unexpected.“But then, once you get to know me, it’s not that you forget that I’m black, but it’s just not as important, you know? Like no different than not taking constant notice of my height, or my weight, or the necklace or bracelet that I always wear. It’s just a part of the whole.”

I thought it was ridiculous that she was comparing my crossed fucking eyes to her race. Her race was part of what made her so beautiful, with her radiant skin the color of Hershey’s kisses and her perfectly spiraled mane of dark, kinky hair. She was fucking gorgeous. But then, gorgeous people, I thought, always have a hard time understanding what it’s like to wear your shame on your face.

But she went on.

She went on to talk about how we seem to need to categorize differences as either good or bad instead of just things that are. She explained that the premise of her book is this belief, this logic, that we are all in some way beautiful in spite of and because of our differences. She said a lot that amounted to me being just as beautiful as anyone else, a premise that she explained with logic rather than sentimental ideals.

And at the risk of copying and pasting even moreof her personal emails to me onto a blog without her permission, the crux of it was this:

THERE ARE NO FLAWS.

There are differences, she explained, but not flaws.

I thanked her for her time, stored her email in my archives and tucked her words into my brain to mull over. No flaws? This was not an idea that whitewashed my freakishness, but rather required that I face it head on and accept it. I couldn’t embrace the beauty of different or the philosophy of no flaws while trying to pretend not to see mine or working to distract everyone else from staring too long.

I wasn’t sure I had the strength to do that.

I hoped someday I would.

A few days passed and I tried not to think too hard about the therapy session or the email exchange or the fact that I was going to Las Vegas to meet thousands of strangers face to face.

One of my best friends blogged about what it feels like to be told you’re gorgeous. I practically choked on my resentment as she tried to explain that it was nothing, a mere coincidence of her DNA. I wondered, not for the first time in my life, how it was that I constantly found myself in really close relationships with exceptionally attractive people.

I walked in the door last night with my keys in one hand, a laptop bag in the other, and my catch-all bag slung across my chest. I instinctively stopped at the threshold to check for backpacks and tennis shoes that would be waiting to knock me on my ass. I found, instead, a flat cardboard box that I knew held a photo.

Someone had sent me another piece of art from the BlogHer auction.

Curious, Emma and I cut open the box and found a photo that I recognized from the exhibit in New York City.

What the hell?

While I recognized the piece vaguely, I had absolutely no idea why someone would have sent it to me. I didn’t know what post had inspired the piece, what artist had created it, or what in the fuck it was supposed to be about. Why was someone sending me random art?

A quick search online revealed that the piece was called “Untitled” and had been created by an artist named Renee Garner, inspired by a post called “Perky breasts won’t fix your life. Really. They won’t.”

Now I was not only confused, but mildly insulted. Was someone trying to tell me that I didn’t have perky breasts? I actually knew that, thank you very much, but I still thought it was rude to have it pointed out with an anonymous gift.

I clicked on the link and began to read the post by Christy from Transplanted.

It was a post about mother’s not needing to be told that they need plastic surgery in order to be beautiful. It was a post about scars and changes and the evolution of beauty. It was a post of a cruel message that advertisers and society sends to mothers about how they should cling to who they were and what they looked like before they had children. It is a post made up of 1008 words and 16 paragraphs, but one of them lept off the screen and kicked me in my gut:

“Three small pin lines herald 1990 and the only pageant I ever competed in -– one on the right side of my neck, one just behind my left ear and one that sits in perfect alignment with my spine. I believed that removing three benign moles (beauty marks, really  )would make me beautiful enough to compete. I lost the big prize but won the talent award, which had nothing to do with perfect skin. The small wooden plaque is one of my personal treasures. I was just 16. I made a note to myself that year about what “flawless” means.”

And there was that word again: flawless.

And there, too, in the other 15 paragraphs of the post, was this idea that beauty was the result of variety and differences and evolution and even scars. The words I’d tucked into my mind to turn over later came tumbling out, and along with them came a new set of questions.

Would I tell my daughter some day that her stretch marks made her less beautiful?

Was it possible that her race was like my crossed-eyes? That there were people in the world who would use a broad nose and dark skin and kinky hair as ammunition to hurt Karen, but only if they were really fucked in the head? And if such a horrible thing happened, would it make Karen any less beautiful than I knew her to be?

What would I tell my daughter if she had a lazy eye, or crossed eyes, or some kind of medical mystery combination of the two that was sometimes there and sometimes not? Would I pity her and her ugliness? Would I have to learn to see past her face?

What if it was acne?

Or misaligned teeth?

Or pale skin?

Or brown skin?

Or thin lips?

Or freckles?

Or red cheeks?

Or wrinkles?

Or a double chin?

Or a large birthmark above her eyebrow?

Would I weep that she had not been blessed with a perfect face?

Would I be grateful to her loved ones for taking her into their hearts, in spite of her deformities?

Would I teach her to laugh loudly and be in constant motion in order to prevent anyone getting a really good look at her, lest they be appalled by the truth?

While the answers seem easy in theory, these are actually very difficult questions to imagine because Emma, like Devin, is fortunate enough to be perfect.

I tried to look at her with a critical eye, to test a theory that maybe my love for her allowed me to overlook her flaws. But she is flawless. She is light and joy and beauty personified.

But then, so is nearly everyone that I know. I picked through my brain to recall someone I knew who was not beautiful, someone whose differences were so hideous that they couldn’t be denied as flaws. None. Not a one.

Was it possible that I was a supernatural magnet for attractive people? Why is it that most of the most beautiful people I know have shared with me some perceived flaw they see when they look in the mirror?

Could it be that differences –- even differences like crossed eyes –- really were just things that were? Could it be that these differences weren’t automatically judged as good or bad by all, but that they were taken in and weighed as part of the greater whole? Could it be that while some would toss me into The Bad pile, that others would not have to struggle to see me as beautiful? Could it be that the whichever route they chose was a reflection on them, and not me?

The questions won’t stop now.

I emailed the woman in charge of the BlogHer auctions about the photo that showed up at my door. It was supposed to be delivered to a woman in San Jose.

And yet here it sits on my dining room table, daring me to keep asking questions.

Read more about Own Your Beauty or add your name to our statement of belief now.

Britt blogs her journey through personal growth at Miss-Britt.com

According to a recent survey of 78,835 mobile phone customers in the U.K., less than 5% of women would select an Android device as their next smartphone. The problem, explains Belinda Parmar, Founder of marketing agency Lady Geek which conducted the survey with YouGov Sixth Sense, is that "Android provides a perfect example of how not to market a platform to women." Few women know or care about what Android is or how it can benefit their lives, she explains.

Parmar plans to detail the survey's findings in a presentation at Droidcon, a London-based Android conference occurring later this month.

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Boys Love Droids

According to the survey, less than 5% of women 25-39 would choose Android, while 11.9% of men in the same age range would.

Of course, a survey from a women-centric marketing agency that talks of Android's lack of feminine appeal is a bit suspect, as many company-led surveys today are. But is it wrong?

Anecdotally, I can affirm that my (non-geek) girlfriends are buying iPhones, or feature phones if money is a concern, opting for the iPod Touch as their portal to the world of apps and pocket computing. However, my geek friends, both male and female, are experimenting with both Androids and iPhones and other mobile platforms, too.

Android Isn't a "Princess's" Phone

This isn't the first we've heard of Android's male appeal, either. An AdMob study from earlier this year found that there was a 78%/22% male-to-female ratio among Android users. And a second study arriving later in the year, found that 23% of men would choose Android compared to only 18% of women.

Plus, who can forget the clearly male-targeted Droid ads which indirectly implied the iPhone was too "girly?" The ad copy read:

Droid. Should a phone be pretty? Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen? Or should it be fast? Racehorse duct-taped to a Scud missile fast. We say the latter. So we built the phone that does. Does rip through the Web like a circular saw through a ripe banana. Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone? In truth? No. It's not a princess. It's a robot. A phone that trades hair-do for can-do.

While appealing to the geek culture, whose inhabitants tend to be male (sorry, often just a fact) has been good for Android's rise, will this marketing technique impact the platform going forward? Does Android have a "dude" problem, as Parmar says? Or is she just using this survey as an attention-grabbing stunt for her own ends?

Tell us what you think in our weekly poll:

Does Android Have a "Dude" Problem?customer surveys

Here’s a riddle.

What is the secret of eloquence, the standard of virtue, the basis of moral authority, the object of philosophy, the most formidable power on earth, the noblest expression of the human spirit, and beauty itself?

Thoreau said it was better than money, love, or fame. The New Testament proclaims it the basis of personal freedom (John 8:32). Schopenhauer observed that it is first ridiculed, then violently oppressed, then accepted as self-evident.

The answer, of course, is truth. Yet you’ll notice that the supply often exceeds demand.

The other day, for instance, a friend forwarded me a political e-mail filled with dubious accusations and misstatements of fact. You would think a message that is unsigned, printed in three colors, and written in ALL LARGE CAPS might engender a bit of skepticism. Yet it resonated with him so strongly that he eagerly accepted it.

We all want to believe that we are in possession of the truth. Even when we’re uncertain, we like to feel that we’re evaluating information rationally and will surely recognize the truth when we see it.

But as Winston Churchill observed, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”

We all walk around with a picture in our heads that we believe reflects the world as it truly is. We depend on this image. It governs our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

But is it accurate?

With today’s radio, cable TV, and Internet, you can watch, read, or listen to whatever kind of news pleases you, and indulge your political, social, and scientific theories, whether sophisticated or naive, extremist or pedestrian, grounded in reality or so far out you’re floating in the asteroid belt.

It’s called selective exposure. Rather than dealing with the unpleasant sensation of having our beliefs tested, we simply steer clear of information that contradicts what we think we know. We carefully select the messages we consume.

As a result, we’re not just arguing over what we should be doing. We’re arguing over what is happening. We’re no longer just holding different opinions. We’re holding different facts.

We don’t have time to investigate everything ourselves, of course. So we rely on conventional wisdom and the opinions of others. We draw generalities from specific circumstances. We accept things we hear or read if they sound credible — and especially if they appeal to our personal prejudices. As we grow older, we even forget or misremember our own experiences.

We are creatures of culture too, brought up to accept certain narratives about how the world is.

Yet these preconceptions harden and make us resistant to opposing points of view. They prevent us from opening our eyes… or our minds. And out of politeness or political correctness, we are reluctant to ask questions or voice dissent. We fall back on what is generally accepted rather than doing the heavy lifting and thinking for ourselves.

And that should make us consider from time to time whether our version of reality — our truth — is correct.

Social scientists observe that what we believe — what we accept as true — is highly dependent on our upbringing and the society we live in. We are all caught in a web of cultural context.

Postmodernists and deconstructionists have taken this to extremes, claiming that there is no such thing as objective truth, only culturally based worldviews and opinions, none any more valid than another.

What a depressing thought, for what are we all pursuing if not objective truth? Yet Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins effectively skewers the postmodern position in River Out of Eden.

“Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet,” he says, “and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work…. Airplanes built according to tribal or mythological specifications don’t. If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists, the reason you will probably get there — the reason you don’t plummet into a ploughed field — is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right.”

It is not possible to thoroughly investigate every claim we accept. But not all modes of knowing are equal. In fact, most of our beliefs are derived in one of three ways.

The first is tradition. These are beliefs that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children and so on. The problem here, of course, is that if a particular fact or story or folk remedy was in error to begin with, it’s as untrue today as it was originally, no matter how many generations have passed it along.

The second source is authority. If a teacher, public official, or expert tells us something is true, we’re more inclined to accept it. This can be a valid shortcut. But, regardless of their credentials, experts are often mistaken. Just because information comes from someone important, it doesn’t guarantee its reliability.

The third source of belief is reason and evidence. Here we are on firmer ground. Historians use documents, letters, and photographs to piece together the past. Judges base their opinions on physical and circumstantial evidence, eyewitness testimony, and well-confirmed facts. Scientists construct hypotheses, test them by observation and experiment, share their methods, and offer the results for confirmation or rejection.

Scientists — like historians and judges — are far from perfect and their claims are always subject to revision. Yet the scientific method — with its double-blind methodology and rigorous peer-review process — is based on a fine understanding of human fallibility. It is designed to weed out erroneous conclusions.

In 1989, for example, Martin Fleischmann, then one of the world’s leading electro-chemists, and Stanley Pons announced their discovery of cold fusion, nuclear fusion near room temperature. But their results could not be replicated and their “discovery” was soon dismissed for lack of evidence.

The success of science in the modern era has given it a powerful aura. Indeed, some have tried to make it the unquestionable authority and final arbiter of truth and knowledge.

That’s a mistake.

Scientists are just as egotistical, ambitious, and biased as the rest of us. Even the peer-review process can fall prey to ideological conflicts and personal vendettas.

Science has plumbed the depths of the ocean, the hinterlands of space, and the recesses of the atom. It has increased our understanding of life immeasurably. But it has not told us why we’re here or given us the answer to life’s meaning.

Science does an excellent job of telling us what is. It cannot tell us what ought to be.
That is left for historians, theologians, and philosophers. Some important truths we have to discover for ourselves.

[Ed. Note: Alexander Green, Investment Director of The Oxford Club, has more than 20 years of experience as a research analyst, investment advisor, financial writer, and portfolio manager. He is the author of The Secret of Shelter Island: Money and What Matters, as well as the editor of “Spiritual Wealth,” an e-letter about the pursuit of the good life available only to members of The Oxford Club. You can read the latest issue, and find out more about the Club, by clicking on and viewing “A Personal Invitation by Alexander Green.”

Alex is an expert panelist with the Liberty Street League, ETR’s exclusive club based on the principles of self-determination and self-responsibility. The League is dedicated to helping members take advantage of under-the-radar, off Wall Street, wealth-building opportunities, including precious metals, Internet businesses, fine art, commodities, real estate, and much more.

As a member, the League will also help you keep your money safe from the prying eyes of the government and financial organizations that don’t have your interests at heart. For a limited time we’ve postponed instituting the lifetime membership fee for this exclusive club – but not for long. Go here to find out all about this special, only valid until 5:00 PM Eastern on October 25, here.

“Michael’s article about how to become what you want to be, in which he said to just do it… was very motivating. I always had a passion for the tabla (an Indian musical instrument). Now I will start learning it immediately.”

Malik Kapadia

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What is truth? After long stretches of time in the lab, I often wonder if we’ll ever really know. Science can be loosely defined as the search for truth, but this goal is often illusory. Every experiment we do hides a truth, but the problem is recognizing it when we see it – and more importantly, realizing when, despite all appearances, we actually don’t. Seeing, you might point out, is believing. Yet as the Hare brothers wrote in their book of essays, Guesses At Truth (1827), “Though, of all our senses, the eyes are the most easily deceived, we believe them in preference to any other evidence.” To get around this problem, some sciences rely on the generation of numbers to reveal truths, and it would be a poor scientist indeed who could persuade himself that 3 is less than 2. But in my particular discipline, cell biology, we are frequently reliant on what the eye can see. Some visual attributes can now be measured in a cold, unbiased fashion by automated image analysis: is X bigger or smaller than Y? Is A brighter or dimmer than B? But for the work I do – trying to understand the ins and outs of why and how cells take up the shapes they do – the questions are far subtler.The cell is a tiny machine. We can stain it, photograph it, separate its contents like an auto mechanic disassembling an engine into a hundred pieces onto the concrete floor of a garage. We can sometimes be awed by the sheer beauty of the visual output of a cell under the microscope, enhanced by the emerald, ruby and sapphire stains of our fluorescent probes. We can marvel at the feathery protrusions, the intertwined cables, the spidery networks of a cell caught in the act of behaving, preserved for all eternity in a frozen snapshot by our fixation techniques. And we can be bamboozled by the sheer variety: in a field of a hundred cells, all of which are supposed to identical clones, we can be treated to an infinite array of subtle variation from one cell to its neighbor. Biology’s minute-by-minute interpretations of the genetic instruction manual, and the influence of local environment, can lead to a vast array of possible outcomes. Awe and appreciation, and even temporary bamboozlement, are fine. But then we have to work out what it all means. Of course our expectations of cell appearance and behavior do not occur in a vacuum. There will be a vast body of general knowledge on this particular topic stretching back for decades and influencing our ideas. And as for the specifics, most observers like me will have been on the hunt tracking an elusive truth for months, if not years. Our modus operandi is pure objectivity, but I don’t know a scientist alive who, like me, doesn’t occasionally get caught up in the drama and excitement of an unproved theory. We shouldn’t want something to be true, but that’s exactly what happens sometimes. Because if our theory is true, suddenly all the pieces will fall into place, forming a picture of exquisite beauty. (Some might even be subconsciously motivated by the practicalities of such resolution: the bolstering of a CV, the enhancement of a future prospect, the funding of the next grant – all of which become more likely when another paper is published.)And this is where the phenomenon of observer bias steps in. It is well established that when the assessment criteria is subjective, a human being can see what he wants to see. So often I am looking at a field of one hundred cells under a microscope, wanting to know what percentage look “normal” versus perturbed in some fashion. Then I tweak the experiment and see if this proportion changes as a result. At the moment, I’m fixated on spiky cells: cells that abandon their vaguely fried-egg shape to take on a starfish-like appearance. But if you think this is a black and white thing, step into my lab and I’ll show you an infinite gradient of shapes between “fried egg” and “starfish”. You would, I am sure, have just as much of a hard time as I scoring cells that fall into the grey area – especially if in the back of your mind, you were being supremely unscientific and hoping that your particular tweak might lead to a change in the percentage in spikiness. When you get to this stage, you have a problem. Most scientists overcompensate for observer bias: they think, “I want there to be more starfish shapes, so I will downplay the evidence that there really is more this time.” Which does almost as much harm to the truth as letting your desires sway you the other way. The strategy that I, and many other scientists, use to get around this is by coding the samples so you actually don’t know which is which: in researcher parlance, you are blinded. Suddenly, you are released from the awful obligations of desire and expectation, and your blind eyes can just see, as best they can, what is actually there. Believe me, it’s an incredible relief, and I travel blind whenever I can.Some scientists might deny that what I am talking about ever troubles them. And perhaps it doesn’t: perhaps there are people out there who don’t agonize over observer bias, who just take their readings in blissful ignorance. In fact, I often suspect that in a significant fraction of the sporadic instances of scientific fraud that make the news, subconscious observer bias might be the driving force, as opposed to conscious, and malicious, intent to deceive. I think it’s important, though, to admit that we as scientists are as human as anyone else, and to take the appropriate precautions whenever we are studying material with subjective output. Our natural tendency towards observer bias might be a dirty little secret in the trade, but I believe it should be brought out into the light and discussed, and its tenacious propensities be revealed to our young trainees as soon as possible. Because more important than the narrative we weave around our work to help guide our experiments is the actual truth that underpins it – one way or the other.

What exactly was Roger Clemens thinking when he testified and told a fib to Congress in Capital Hill? As much as we want to believe that the Steroid Era has suddenly vanished, we’ll never forget all his rehearsed and inglorious lies, inexplicably and simply covering the truth and denied confessing of his wrongdoings.

With some serious explaining, now is the time Mr. Clemens may want to consider telling the truth and nothing but the truth, to avoid further dishonesty and public humiliation. Amid the most embarrassing twist, all we want is the truth, but apparently the feds and their grand jury uncovered the specifics. There’s no sympathy for the seven-time Cy Young winner who fabricated his accomplished career and, still to this day, lives a lie ever since juicing his level of performance for an advantage in a competitive sport.

What is exactly mind-blogging is that an infamous crisis is getting worse, epically for the endless dirtiness it displays, sabotaging the beauty of the game. The despicable crime labels Clemens as a fraud, a lying dumb-ass apathetic by a damaged legacy that smeared his credibility long before honesty surfaced. His steroid scandal, which ruptured an irreparable image of Clemens, who is perceived as a hopeless, unworthy right-hander, poses as a disgrace in a sport deteriorating and falling into oblivion.

It was 2½ years ago when Clemens declined in a congressional hearing as a national audience watched it nationwide on television, that he ever used performance-enhancing drugs. Huh! In the end, you were hoodwinked, cheated and fooled. How does it feel to be lied to? How does it feel to be betrayed? Trust me, I know how it feels.  

And to believe that Clemens never used an unlawful substance is foolishness, or even advocating it’s acceptable to tatter the integrity of the sport in general. It turns out that he’s the equivalent of my ex-girlfriend, a pseudo and betrayer for erroneously committing fraud on a game he truly relished and mastered before the revelations manifested clear evidence of drug usage.

At this point, the man formerly known as the Rocket is unsurprisingly the Big Fat Liar, perhaps the biggest liar sports may have ever witnessed in this decade, if ever. If Clemens committed such a sickened crime, instead of being deceptive and secretive, he’d release much tension and guilt by unleashing the truth. That’d seem very rational to avoid further nonsense and clear his name of guilt. But this happens when someone is self-indulgent, arrogant or ignorant, subsequently for getting caught and accused of his furtive sins.

Any notion that baseball was tainted years ago, Clemens was considerably one of the best pitchers at the time, of course, taking the mound as a sham and failing to be purist or expose his artistic competitiveness without injecting himself with contaminated juice. I’ve never been so befuddled, disappointed. I’ve never felt so cheated and betrayed in my life, trusting in Clemens for pitching fiercely and performing with diligence in effortless outing.

What? He relied on juice all along. What appeared real was unreal. What seemed legit was dirty. No wonder the ball was usually covered with nasty dirt nearly following every pitch. He tried to hide the truth, a mistaken idea by Clemens, sadly adding horror and anxiety on Thursday indicted on six counts for lying under oath. All he simply had to tell the world is that he was guilty and wrongly opted to be a drug dealer, rather than a spotless pitcher. Now that the he’s naïve and still acknowledged he never pumped his body with steroids or HGH, troubles are stemming from allegedly the falsifying.

Clemens has taken a rapid fall from grace, and he’s a fallen star quicker than Tiger Woods or LeBron James, losing his claim to all-time greatness among elite pitchers. Didn’t he realize it’s risky and dumb to lie under oath? Didn’t he know that is perjury? Is he really that offended with the accusations and recent charges? Then, state the facts, Roger. No false statements, but the truth. It’s time he finally succumbs to reality, but ever since the Mitchell Report revealed Clemens’ name, he hasn’t spoke in clarity or helped his own cause for spinning the story.

According to the Big Fat Liar, he “Misremembers” ever been injected with the substances. Ummm! If he had sense and pride, Clemens in all likelihood wouldn’t be facing prison time, but at worse, would have only been tainted and portrayed as a fraud. For years, ultimately, we worshipped his longevity and talent and work ethic, blinded by the possibilities of cheating, blinded by the likelihood of lying. He famously the best pitcher admired in a corrupted age of baseball, amid the rejuvenation of the game during the baseball-saving season, the summer of ’98 when the feats and incredible milestones of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were relevant.

For years, sadly, believed in Clemens until he disappointed us, lied to us and tricked us. And to make matters worst, he never had the courage or audacity to admit to immorality. Let’s face it the performance-enhancing drugs helped him infamously win two World Series championships and 354 games. Common sense tells us that he took advantage of enhancing his game with the exception of drugs, obviously when his numbers suddenly ascended later his career.

Ever seen a pitcher’s numbers improve late in his career? Not unless it was Clemens. More noticeably, his ERA skyrocketed greatly and he began pitching efficiently, having solid control of his command and velocity. And years later, he tried to prove his innocence and purity, which degenerated when baseball released the Mitchell Report. In the meantime, his legacy is smeared because of ignorance, and even his freedom is endangered because of lying.          

“Let me be clear. I have never taken steroids or HGH.”

Not even a fool believes Clemens.

In 23 major-league seasons, he was deemed as arguably the greatest power pitcher the game has ever seen, but in recent years has plunged and he likely faces 15 to 21 months in prison. This is no surprise, after all, we are living in the Steroid Era, a time when horrid crisis is badly ruining and bruising the game, such as Barry Bonds, the arrogant slugger who ostensibly lied under oath as well. If there’s one player loathed more in this country for wrongly surpassing Hank Aaron’s home run record on a night he captured the tainted milestone, it’s a moody and overbearing Bonds.

As for Clemens, the grand jury is claiming that he lied 15 times under oath. If so, then he may jeopardize his lifestyle and have to serve harsh time, based on the power of law enforcers. Sure, he has every right to claim his innocence, but the evidence revealed the explanation of a dubious situation.

In the aftermath of the release of the Mitchell Report, he’s still not confessing or apologizing for deceiving, not only the game, but congressional investigators and Congress. All along, I believed his former training Brain McNamee, who stated in the report that he injected Clemens on a cycle period with steroids and HGH between 1998 and 2001. Nevertheless, on Twitter, he’s refusing to unleash what really transpired in that time span. So apparently, he hasn’t learned or simply doesn’t care.

“I never took HGH or Steroids. And I did not lie to Congress,” Clemens wrote. “I look forward to challenging the Governments accusations, and hope people will keep an open mind until trail. I appreciate all the support I have been getting. I am happy to finally have my day in court.”

Why, so he can lie repeatedly? What support is getting? Who is endorsing the Big Fat Liar? Oh, his attorney Rusty Harden.

“The problem is nobody ever talks about what he should have done if he didn’t do it,” Harden said. “And he didn’t do it and he’s adamant about that and always has been. Today is just another continuing part of that saga…Roger is looking forward to his day in court. He is happy this has finally happened. We have known for some time this was going to happen. We’ll let everything get taken care of in court.”

Between the PEDs headlines and extramarital affairs, including an alleged affair with country signer Mindy McCready, his clean image is pathetically damaged and his credibility is lost. As of recently, he’s delusional and continues to deny all reports or any negative news that unveils. If his name was mentioned 82 times in the Mitchell Report, what makes us think he’s not guilty, what makes us think he never endangered his image or chances of being enshrined into the Hall of Fame for falsification and lagging on issues a statement when the accusations were publicized?

If he tried to publicly spin the story and former friend Andy Pettitte’s testimony, what makes us think he’s telling the truth? Come on, use common sense. In front of your eyes, he tricked the game of baseball and all populace after vowing to be a power pitcher, legitimately. When he appears in court, Clemens may wear his immaculate face again and try persuading the court system that he’s not guilty.

“The indictment of Roger Clemens comes as no surprise to me,” said Victor Conte, founder of BALCO. “In my opinion, the case against Clemens is far stronger than the case against Barry Bonds. Brain McNamee is an eyewitness who will testify against Clemens and there appears to be strong physical evidence against him as well. I believe Roger Clemens is in a lot of trouble.”

Yes, he is in much trouble.

He’s looking a prison time. I guess that means NO Cooperstown.

The Rocket has exploded, eternally.

Maybe you can be too sexy for your job? I really thought Debrahlee Lorenzana was full of lipstick when she said Citibank fired her for being too sexy, but science is backing her up.

While attractive people may enjoy a beauty privilege throughout life, women may suffer from their own looks in traditionally masculine industries like finance, construction, and engineering.

Attractive men, however, do not bear the beautiful burden. While pretty women (as judged by study participants) were judged less favorably for jobs where participants said looks shouldn't matter, attractive and unattractive men were judged the same.

Is it a small price to pay or an ugly truth?

It’s that time of the week again. Are you ready for some NEW hair at Truth? Wow the hair this week is awesome too. There’s a hairstyle for everyone, including the guys! All 4 I’m showing are in a pretty shade of light brown called walnut. First up is Sylvia. This hairstyle will compliment everyone. The best thing about Sylvia is you get two wigs in the folder, one scripted to texture change the hair into 14 preloaded streaky colors. I love this idea!

Bettina is a medium/long hairdo with bangs framing the face and long wavy tendrils in back. The hair is swept up on the sides and knotted in the back. This hair is so pretty!

Athena has a wavy side ponytail, the hair pulled completely off the face. The darker shades of this style will look good with the dark hairbase skins.

The last NEW hairstyle at Truth this week is for the guys. Jason is a shaggy short cut that will compliment both the guys and gals. You need to stop by Truth and demo all the NEW hair since demos are free. Single color packs are 250L and fatpacks are 1500L.

NEW TICK TOK Thirsty Thursday Grace Skin 99L! Don’t miss this skin, she’s a beauty!
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The post may contain some spoilers

They say that a movie seldom justifies the book it has been inspired from. Blue umbrella is that one film.

The movie is based on the short story by Ruskin Bond, the famous British writer who wrote majority of his fiction inspired by Indian culture and society of early 20th century.

The movie set in the picturesque location of Himachal Pradesh. The cinematography is just breath taking.Funnily, i have seen many movies ( especially from 90s) where whenever the camera pans to show the beauty of those hills, there is a flute, guitar, sitar playing in the background trying to enhance the beauty.

There is no background music to enhance the beauty of the hills , valleys or the continuously falling snow instead its filled with the natural sounds such as snow falling, toads croaking etc.

There are thousands of emotions running through after seeing the movie, pardon me if the post doesn’t have a flow.

The story: No, i wont tell anything about it. Not that its a suspense thriller or something, its just that you have to see to feel the literary genius of the man called Ruskin Bond and the directorial genius of man called Vishal Bhardwaj.  Only thing that i would like to divulge is this is such a complex film which generates such complex emotion. Till the credit rolled on the screen, i couldn’t make out was it a children film or a ‘Grown up’ film?

The philosophy of the movie is simple that there is a child in all of us. The child which when longs for some thing can never logic it out that why does it want that? He / she just wants it. Thats it. Its called “Baal hath” in hindi.There is dialogue in the movie which clearly indicates the underlying psychology of the lead character. Nandkishore ( Pankaj Kapoor) says

“Ham log indra dhanush ko kyun dekhtey hai ?”

“Kaagaj ki kishti kyun banaatey hai ?”

“Suraj ko pahaadi ke peechey doobta kyun dekhtey hai…kuch cheezo mein nafa nuskaan nahi dekha jaata”

Which brings me to the one of the lead roles , Nand kishore played by Pankaj Kapoor.

I declare this: If there is a God in Indian Cinema, he is Pankaj Kapoor. From Jaane bhi do Yaaro to iqbaal to Blue umbrella, that man puts so much “Bhaar” in the role that it makes us believe he is not Pankaj Kapoor. He is the guy which when plays a character makes me believe that he was like that from the begining of the time. He doesn’t ‘Play’ a character, he ‘Lives’ it. Watch out for the scene when the policemen searches his shop and he sits outside sobbing or the one where he is alone in his shop and is attacked by a bear. Splendid! Superb! Genius!

He brings out the ‘fineness’ of the character so beautifully that you just cant help but to applause for the man. Take a bow Pankaj sir! I tell you, i haven’t waited for any movie outside theater, but i would wait for your movie outside theatre, spending the night on the road just to see your first day first show, if required, i must add. Because me thinks that like the fate of Blue Umbrella, there wont be much public in your next movie also.

Sad? Yes. Truth? Yes.

Coming back to the movie, as i said, i couldn’t figure out till the end as for which audience was the movie made? There is every bit of childish desire shown by the children of the movie as by the adults, which makes this movie a masterpiece for me. Again, for example look out for the scene when nand kishore has the umbrella with him.

I believe many people here know about the story of “Kaabuliwala”, i dont know why but at many point of the story i felt that i am seeing the naive conversation kabuliwala used to have with the little girl.The kabuliwala used to give the girl dates, dryfruits etc, here nandkishore gives the girl lollypop and talks to her in the same crude child like manner as kabuliwala. If it was intentional, Kudos, unintentional, Thank you  !.

The other lead, Biniya ( Sneha Sharma), has acted quite well. I would go on to say better than darsheel. She has the best expressive eyes i have seen in underaged actors.  She perfectly fits for the role of not-so-little-kid. She charmingly captures the transition of a little kid to understanding “Samajhdaar” young girl, watch out for the scene where she asks for biscuit from Nandkishore.

The music and songs perfectly blends with the story line. The title song is so cute ! I haven’t heard that kind of songs for long now. The music has the touch of Himachal Pradesh.

I haven’t seen much of International cinema which is sent to various international cult festivals, but if something ought to be sent to any festival representing the under represented ‘Himachal Pradesh’ culture, this movie would be it.

One request to all the film maker on this platform. Please make some children cinema based on real children stories. In my 25 years of existence i could recall only three children movie Chhota chetan, makdee and blue umbrella.

My rating: 4.5 /5.

A must watch.

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“this is not problematic at all.”

“Discoveries come and go.”

“You offer one; I have read others.”

I posed four issues that frighten me about pragmatism. I wouldn’t harbor these fears if I didn’t take pragmatism seriously. And you’ve seen that I resonate with some of the ideas. That you seem to find only reassurance in what I fear adds a fifth terror to my list.

Do I fear those who claim to have found the Objective Truth? Sure: that’s what your post was about. I share Dawkins’ fear of those who claim to know the Objective Truth about God. Empirical science as currently practiced relies on falsification rather than confirmation of hypotheses, so Dawkins is being true to his methodological commitments by maintaining his agnosticism, his ultimate uncertainty about the Objective Truth. Typically it’s the politicians and talkshow hosts who turn science into dogma, not the scientists themselves.

I understand that discoveries come and go. What I fear is when this coming and going becomes indistinguishable from passing fad and fashion. I understand that popularity often trumps beauty and truth and justice. What I fear is equating popularity with beauty and truth and justice. I understand that perceptions are typically more influential than evidence, both individually and collectively. What I fear is that popular perceptions are manipulated by money and power, and even by psychologists and sociologists hired by those who wield money and power.

On the other hand, I understand that upholding standards which purport to supercede popular opinion is a typical move invoked by elitists attempting to preserve their status in class wars. And as you’ve alluded to, Jacob, power has often been wielded in the name of purported certainties promulgated by the elite: the superiority of the Aryan race, the WMDs in Iraq, etc. So there are things to fear either way.

Finally, I return to the “You offer one; I have read others” remark. This is of course insufferable, inasmuch as it’s the only thing you’ve had to say about my interpretation of Genesis 1. The implication is clear, however: from a pragmatic point of view there is no practical use for you to make of my reading. To be honest, though, I wrote the nonfiction book about Genesis 1 from pragmatic motives: I thought that I’d have an easier time getting nonfiction published than fiction, and I thought that my Gen. 1 interpretation would offer a practical solution for those conservative Christians who wanted to preserve scriptural accuracy while acknowledging the empirical and logical discrepancies embedded in the Biblical text. I hadn’t counted on the emergent evangelical crowd moving on to poetic and true myth readings of Genesis 1, wherby empirical (in)accuracy is deemed irrelevant to the meaning of the story for the Christian community. I also hadn’t counted on my coming to regard my own pragmatic reading of Genesis 1 as true and beautiful and just in its own right. And so I find myself an embittered and disillusioned old man, hanging around this Christian website when there’s no real practical reasons for me to do so any more.

I would ask you more about your dissertation, but for the sake of ego preservation I’m forced to say something like this: “Meh, dissertations come and disertations go. If it gets you a job you want, then that means it was a good dissertation. If it doesn’t, then it wasn’t.” I find it easier to put remarks like this in the mouths of fictional characters, contrasting them with other fictional characters who uphold the value of an intrinsically excellent dissertation regardless of its practical implications for the writer, for the reader, or even for the world. My fiction always remains ambivalent, so neither character would unilaterally win the day. And then of course the finished novel would remain unpublished, unread, unreal…

 
Note from PW: Hyacinth’s insubordination continues. Rather than begin her series of posts with an in-depth look at her new living room, she’s gone all existential on us and written a post about the importance of finding your own decorating style. I’d fire her if I didn’t love her so much. The living room post is coming up next; meantime, I love this one.

Take it away, Hyacinth!

______________________________________

When I read the comments section from Ree’s living room “teaser” post the other day, I realized I needed to get my decorating philosophy clear in my own mind. The comments were head-spinningly diverse, from “My eyes are getting sea-sick,” to “I admire her boldness.”

Okay, because I’m a geeky English major turned homeschooling mother, the Keats poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” came to mind:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Beauty? Truth? How does this fit in to P-Dub’s Home and Garden section? Well, I think as a whole, we’re probably all interested in finding ways to spruce up our homes, swap ideas, and generally make the space in which we live pleasant. I also think that as a whole, we probably aren’t interested in finding THE end-all, be-all house plans or THE slickest, most modern, up-to-date trends in home decorating. I think most of us would just like to keep it real and find ways to make easy changes around our house—changes that won’t break the bank, changes that are true to who and where we are in life.

So I gave it some thought.

And here’s what I came up with.

 
 
Here’s a little blank space in the curve of my stairway.

 
 
Prior to this, it had a little chair and table thing going on. It had become Yawnsville to me, so I was on the hunt for my decorating “truth” so I could turn it into the best space possible. This is what it looked like last Thursday morning.

 
 
And this is what it looked like when I went to bed Thursday night.

 
 
It’s definitely a change! And I know that while some of you are thinking “I like that!” there are naturally others who might be feeling a little woozy!

But here’s the point: my beauty is not your beauty; my truth is not your truth. So while this little space under my stairs might leave some nauseated and afraid, it follows the decorating philosophy I just developed today…as I’m typing this, in fact! Well, actually, I’ve known it for awhile, but I’ve never formalized it.

Your home should be a reflection of you, over time. Not a reflection of the decorating team at No Name Department Store in 2010. Not a reflection of a catalog spread in the Spring/Summer issue of “one of those stores”.

Here’s why this space is a reflection of me, over time:

 
Principle #1 – Your home should reflect you. This little collection of religious icons and artifacts makes me look like a Jesus freak, but guess what? I am! My faith is my life’s amniotic fluid (huh?) and a large part of what drives me every day. I have a podcast of spiritual matters – it’s simply what I’m about, man. So, when I made this vignette of Jesus doodads at the base of my stairs, it became a place that will both uplift me as I pass by it, and give visitors a glimpse of what I’m about. Until about 5 years ago, I used to give visitors a glimpse of my Danny Partridge poster, and that was totally cool, I guess. But now I think Jesus is even cooler than Danny Partridge. In fact, I’m on a personal mission to coolify religious art again (I’m also trying simultaneously to coolify the word “coolify”. See if you can work it into your memos at work today!) I mean, a great deal of art used to be of a religious nature, but now it’s only found at Grandma’s house next to her bowl of bite-sized Chick-O-Sticks. I’m on a one-woman mission to coolify it.

Okay, enough about Hyacinth. What about you? What does your home say about you? Does it say “I love magnolias!” Or “I love Madagascar!” Don’t be afraid to show people who you are…what’s interesting about you…what you stand for!

 
Principle #2 – Your home should develop over time. Under no circumstances should these decorating posts lead you to say, “Hyacinth’s house looks like dung, and when I look around, I realize that my house, though different, is also dung-like. I can’t live in this dung pile a moment longer.” Please hear me: Do not go out today and buy a boatload of decorator items from No Name Department Store. Your room will be forever frozen in February of 2010, not a reflection of a life well lived over time. Start collecting things—whether Jesus doodads or interesting shelves or beautiful pillows—that are meaningful and beautiful to you when you see them.

Let me show you what I’m talking about.

All of these things reflect a memory of a time with a friend, a moment of special significance, or a place I’ve traveled:

 
 
A flea market find! How can you go wrong with the Lord’s Supper, for heaven’s sake!

 
 
From Austin when I went with Ree and her sister Betsy. I found this in the same store where Ree snagged a cute black newsboy cap. She wore it for two years.

 
 
Ugh, my absolute favorite. I gave Ree some bookends like this. Sculptor David Belitz from Nebraska – where are you? I can’t find you on the web!

 
 
From Fredericksburg, Texas—a trip to my niece’s wedding.

 
 
Rosary beads…

 
 
My friend Marie brought this to me from Russia when she went to bring home her orphans.

 
 
Icons from Russia……I love icons.

Again, the point of my showing you this isn’t that you should go out and amass a collection of religious pieces, or that you should necessarily cluster a collection of things on the wall at the base of your stairs. What I’m trying to encourage you to do is make your house a reflection of you.

______________________________

In the coming weeks, I’m excited for you to join in my mission to coolify my family room, too. I also can’t wait to learn your decorating “truths” in the comments section…is it magnolias, Madagascar? I want to hear from you!

Peace, love, and Grecian urns,

Hyacinth

Major disclaimer: The arrangement above, which is a work of art itself, was not the work of my own hands. I credit my inability to do this sort of artful arrangement to my lack of ability in geometry. It makes me feel better to say that I’m bad at math, vs. saying that I’m incapable of a decorating task. So, I enlisted the help of my decorator friend, Cathy from Gray Dog Design in Pawhuska, OK.

If you read Confessions last week, you might remember Cathy. Well, you might remember her bottom. So by definition, you know her, right? Anyway, I’m pretty sure she was good in geometry.

In a recent post I argued that, although a lot can be said for the basic rationality of human (and non-human) conformity, there can also be trouble. The example du jour was a beauty contest. With too much choice copying among females (women choosing men whom other women choose), both females and males can suffer, on average.

Another limitation is the size of the majority that is being copied. Suppose you are trying to estimate the number of marbles in a glass jar. There are more marbles than you can count. Yet, you can make a guess using your impression of the size of the jar and the size of the individual marbles. Now suppose you are told that 100 other people have already made estimates independent of one another and that 95% of these estimates fall between 700 and 800. With the benefit of this information, your best strategy is to estimate that there are 750 marbles in the jar. If you estimated the number as 200, you would recognize yourself as an outlier, whose judgment should not be trusted. Using the aggregated information of others' estimates is like using the "poll-the-audience" lifeline on "Who wants to be a millionaire?" But what if you estimated the number of marbles to be 200 before knowing the others' estimates? Once you find out how far off you are from the rest of the group, you should not object when your estimate is removed as an outlier.

As a general rule, it becomes easier to identify outliers as the number of observations increases and as the variance or these observations decreases. Suppose there are only two others who both gave a high estimate, whereas you gave a low estimate. Should you gracefully concede on the idea that their estimates are probably more accurate than yours because they agree with each other, whereas you disagree? This is a tempting thought. Perhaps agreement reveals accuracy even when the number of agreeing persons is at its logical minimum.

I will now argue that agreement is a mere proxy of accuracy, and not a particular good one at that. It is true that if all judgments are accurate, they will all agree with one another. The inverse, however, is not true because judgments can be in agreement for reasons that have nothing to do with accuracy. One of these reasons is chance.

The alternative way to proceed is to use all three judgments (yours and the judgments of the two others) and compute the average. The average is the best estimate of the latent parameter that you are all trying to capture. According to this approach, each of the three judges is an independent measurement instrument and each individual judgment is a composite of information (truth) and error. The errors are assumed to be independent of one another, and averaging judgments strips them away.

We now have two competing recommendations on how to proceed if there are two high and one low judgment. (A) Remove the low judgment or persuade the outlying judge to change his mind and conform with the majority; (B) average the three judgments without prejudice against any individual one of them. Each method has its advocates. The main argument for A is that the low estimate is "obviously" and outlier and that agreement indicates accuracy [I already questioned this idea]. Moreover, supporters of A believe that consensus-seeking discussion among judges is always salutary. Through discussion, judges can come closer to the truth. But which truth? If the two high judges concede a little and the low judge concedes a lot, the end result might be the average that was already computed from the original judgments. If so, the group discussion was a waste. Alternatively, if only the outlying judge concedes (which is likely to happen under asymmetrical conformity pressure), the end result is what one would get by simply ignoring the outlier. Again, the group discussion was a waste of time and adrenaline. A third possibility is that the outlying judge concedes a bit more than the two agreeing judges put together. The end result is a group judgment that can be described as a weighted average (where an individual judgment is weighted in proportionate to its proximity to other judgments). This sounds good, but no one knows what the weights should be exactly. There are many points where the weighted judgment may end up that lie between the pure strategies A and B. Therefore, I will consider only A and B in the remainded of these remarks.

By using two statistical principles, we can determine whether A or B is the better strategy without appealing to intuition, plausibility, or tradition (we have always done it this way!). The first method is to ask how probable the set of three observed judgments if we assume that A or B is correct. Suppose the three judgments are 2, 2, and -2. Think of these numbers as a sample drawn from a population with a standard deviation of 1. In contrast to the standard normal distribution, however, the mean is not 0. Instead, the mean is either 2 if we assume that theory A is correct, or it is .667 (2/3) if theory B is correct. The joint probability of finding 2, 2, and -2 (or numbers more extreme) turns out to be .000008 under theory A and .00003 under theory B. The ratio of the latter over the former is 3.75, which means that (if both theories were regarded as equally likely to be true at the outset), theory B is almost four times more likely to be true than theory A. This result means that if you remove the outlying judgment (or persuade the dissident judge) to change her mind, you lose important information, whereby the resulting group judgment becomes worse.

The second method is to ask what would happen if more judgments were collected from other independent observers [note that there is no need to actually get those judgments!] We now assume that the population of numbers underlying all these judgments is a standard normal (M = 0, SD = 1). Hence, assuming the set of numbers associated with theory A after outlier removal or correction (2, 2, 2) is extremely positive. If another set of three judgments were sampled from the population, the resulting mean would most likely lie between 0 and 2, and closer to the latter inasmuch as the whole measurement process is reliable. As measurement is never completely free from error, we expect some regression to the mean. Now, assuming the set of numbers given by theory B (2, 2, -2), the mean of the second sample of three judgments would most likely lie between 0 and 2/3, and because the 2/3 is less extreme than 2, the size of the expected regression effect is smaller under theory B than under theory A.

The significance of this exercise is that it reveals that ignoring (or browbeating) outliers in a small sample does not correct the well-known regression effect in measurement, but that it makes it worse. The best estimate under theory B (2/3) is probably a bit higher than it would be after continued sampling. If anything, this estimate should be reduced. By cutting off the outlier, however, we move the group estimate from 2/3 to 2. By making it more extreme, we are making it more likely to be positively inflated.

Lest you think that this story is too abstract and that theories A and B don't make no never mind anyway, let me emphasize that they matter a great deal when small committees decide admissions, funding, promotions etc. Consider 100 candidates applying for money to do research. Each proposal is rated by three judges and each judge's scores are standardized. Only the top few can be funded. A proposal with ratings of 2, 2, and 2 is safe, but a proposal with ratings of 1, 1, and 1 is not. Now a third proposal is of the kind discussed above (2, 2, -2). According to theory B (simple averaging), this proposal does not make the cut. According to theory A (outlier removal), this proposal rises above the second one, and possibly keeps it from being funded. So group discussion can do a lot of damage. If, as in this example, relatively high scores are of greatest interest, proposals (people) with one negative outlier will be selectively favored. In a funding or promotion context, no one is interested in cases with two low scores and one high score.

The approach of simple averaging is not biased against good cases with low variance (1, 1, 1), whereas outlier-removal is. There is one final caveat. Group discussion by itself tends to make judgments more extreme. In other words, if the good low-variance case (1, 1, 1) were also discussed, some of the damage done by the outlier-removal ploy might be controlled.

BTW, the gentleman in the photo is Sir Francis Galton.