500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I have stuff. I’ve used eBay to sell some. In the past I would put a camera up for auction and it would sell at a profit, like a hot stock. But more recently, I put up my entire Rollei camera outfit. 
It was a classic kit and went for half what I paid for it. The other day, the guts of my outmoded multi-thousand-dollar edit system went for $80. Markets can provide an experience not unlike the amusement park ride that makes you throw up. Walter Kirn put it like this recently in the New York Times Magazine:
“According to the worldly theologians of finance and commerce, a force known as “the business cycle” that governs the rise and fall of markets was supposed to have taken us higher by now, replenishing depleted bank accounts, restoring a sheen of functionality to corroded Rust Belt cities and permitting again the buying and selling of homes. The rock in front of this tomb remains in place, though, and the day of rejoicing still appears far off.”
If you look at the value of things in terms of numbers, well, it can get you nuts. Since going nuts is expensive, I’m trying to think of markets differently. Like my 1960s era Rollei SL66 camera. It included a type of Zeiss lens that many believe was among the finest ever made. It was a sad day when I eBay’d it. But the man who came to pick it up turned that around.
He was Japanese, a pocket-protector type engineer who was passing through California on his way back home. He explained that in Japan there’s a tradition of asking retired engineers to work on projects – a way of using, and respecting, their wisdom. The guy who came to get my camera was on a mission. He was going around the States buying great lenses to give to a retired engineer in Japan. The old guy was going to study them so he could make better lenses for the digital age. Suddenly my heirloom Rollei was pointing the way to the future. Some old guy whose skills may have been ignored over here was leading the charge in Japan. I liked the sound of that, so I gave the engineer a light meter and a couple of filters to go with the Rollei. The transaction transformed the value of my camera – raising it.
Max Strom, a yoga teacher, has seen the value of yoga increase among people who drive $85,000 cars. These folks arrive at his classes, turn off their cell phones and spend $20 to look inside themselves and see what they might find. As Max wrote, the experience often “triggers the profound realization that a 90 minute, $20 yoga class fulfills many of their essential needs, more than any of their other possessions they have worked like dogs to obtain.” The value of that twenty bucks? Pretty huge. Even more when you consider, as Max argues, that “Yoga is being embraced primarily by college-educated, upper-middle-class thinkers and businesspeople in positions of power–the very strata of society that has the power to make the changes this world so desperately needs.”
I believe in money, because I use it to pay my mortgage. But when the true value of a yoga class or an old camera floats above its money value, suddenly you’re playing the spiritual stock market – always a good bet.
Written by Lee Schneider
I say there are two factors that contribute to a good blog. First, good writing; second, you have to annoy somebody. I promise to do at least one of those things today. Let’s start with homeopathy.
Recently, I wrote about a group in the UK called 10:23. Their goal was to swallow as many homeopathic pills as they could and see if they could overdose. They didn’t. But they did piss off a lot of people, especially those who are firm believers in sugar pills. I believe sugar pills can fix you, in some cases, because of the power of the placebo effect. But if you don’t believe, they might give you a tummy ache.
Something else might bring on an ache: Those who call America a Christian nation. For some years now, nice folks in Texas have been altering school textbooks to trumpet America’s roots in Christianity. The Rev. Peter Marshall, for one, believes in America’s “Bible-based foundations” and “Christian heritage,” as it says on his website. This sort of thing gets good traction with guys like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.
Fundamentalists will tell you that the Founding Fathers were Christians, and important documents like the Mayflower Compact supposedly back that up. In the words of the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the state was founded “to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.”
Um, give me a minute to find my passport. Canada’s looking good. They have health care there and the Olympics, too.
It’s true that you can’t discuss Pilgrims or Puritans without talking religion. There was also a religious foundation to the American Revolution. Historians cite the Great Awakening, a movement of the 1700s. Pushed along by evangelicals, the Great Awakening provided a foundation for rebellion.
Fair enough. But Thomas Jefferson was against the idea of establishment churches. He’s the one who came up with the phrase “wall of separation” between church and state. Roger Williams, the theologian who got Rhode Island going, believed in religious tolerance.
The New York Times Magazine quotes conservative Richard Brookhiser about the Founding Fathers’ faith: “What they said was ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God.’ They didn’t say, “We put our faith in Jesus Christ.”
Other historians concur: George Washington wrote about God but there isn’t one biblical reference in all his work. Washington was a Mason, remember, and made reference to the Grand Architect of the Universe, a pointedly non-Christian terminology. (“Oh, Grand Architect, will your plan for the new kitchen include some Italian marble?”)
These facts about the Founders don’t stop Newt Gingrich and others from talking about a Christian America. But then fundamentalists also believe earth was created 10,000 years ago and Jesus had a pet Stegosaurus. 
Roger Williams was more on the mark. He said, “God is too large to be housed under one roof.” I can work with that, because if you think all the answers are in one book, you haven’t read enough books.
It’s been said that the future will be much like the present, only longer. But knowing the future would change your life. If you knew the exact location of your death you might avoid that place and buy a few more years. (“No, I can’t go to the Teacups ride at Disneyland ever again and I can’t tell you why.”)
A time machine is one option, and there are instructions for building one to be found on the web. In fact, experts like Dr. J. Richard Gott of Princeton University say that we already know how to travel into the future. All you have to do is travel really fast. “If you accelerated to 99.995 percent the speed of light five hundred light years away and then come back at the same speed, the Earth will be a thousand years older, but you’ve only aged 10 years,” says the doctor. Easy enough.
Richard Branson is working on a spaceship for space tourists – maybe I’ll hitch a ride with him. The price of a ticket is only $200,000.
There’s a cheaper way to know the future and it involves popping a little bit of your spit in the mail. That’s right – you send in $399 along with a spit sample to a company called 23andMe. They analyze your DNA and tell you your genetic predisposition to certain diseases. You’d know whether you’re at risk for breast cancer or prostate cancer, Type 2 Diabetes, Crohn’s Disease, Parkinson’s, Restless Legs Syndrome, Macular Degeneration — 118 diseases in all. You might even find out some fun stuff from your past, like the guy you call Dad is not really your father.
Oh, the folks at 23andMe could make a mistake. Genetic testing is not infallible. You can get false positives. Genetic testing is also not a death sentence. Just because you have a predisposition to a disease doesn’t mean you’ll get it. Diet, lifestyle, environment – lots of factors to consider. Since scientists are still learning more about DNA the results of your test could be re-interpreted at a later date. 
(“Honey, great news – the doctor said I should eat more deep-fried Twinkies!”) The 23andMe folks even have a sense of humor about it all, with a blog titled The Spittoon, and a blog subtitle of “more than you’ve come to expectorate.”
I’m laughing, until I start thinking. What if everyone did this? Who gets access? Insurance companies could check out your pre-existing conditions even before they existed and find new ways to deny you coverage. Marriages would end before they started. Schools could deny scholarships because they wouldn’t want to waste money on you. (“But Van Gogh died at 37! I have plenty of time to paint a masterpiece.”)
Not knowing the future might, paradoxically, give us more power over what’s next in our lives. I think I’d rather take my chances with destiny’s roulette wheel.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
I know where ideas come from. They come from coffee. While living in Italy, I drank five espresso coffees a day and had lots of ideas. One of those ideas was this: Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation. Unless I wanted to become a professional insomniac I needed an alternative. Switching to green tea has worked but the lower caffeine content results in just 62.5 words per cup. Large vats of it must be brewed by the kitchen staff even to write this blog.
Getting enough caffeine in me to feel the neurons charging is only part of the story. The ideas have to come from somewhere – but where? The first theory involves sweat. 
Albert Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
Hard work isn’t always the answer, but changing perspectives might be, like stepping into the car or into a shower. After stepping into his bath, Archimedes figured out how water displacement could be used to calculate density. Could be the water, but closing your eyes also works. Researchers call this “gating” of visual input, and it might cause solution-related brain activity to burst into consciousness. The ah-ha moment! Dreams are a great resource, too. I’ve had some very big ideas in dreams, and after I wake up I write them down. They usually go like this: “Mungle bubble car mouse tree bliff.” If anyone can make sense of that, drop me a line.
It gets interesting when big ideas visit several people at once. Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus at the same time. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions simultaneously. Does that mean that scientific discoveries are just “in the air” — waiting to be grabbed up by a receptive mind? Can ideas be the product of a collective super-consciousness? That would mean that ideas don’t only come from inside. Instead of a theory of sweat, this is a theory of spirit.
According to Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray Love,” the Greeks believed that the “genius” was a magical, divine entity living in the walls of the artist’s studio. When the artist was working, the genius would come out to help. As Gilbert put it, this was a psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. Your ideas were not yours – they were on loan from higher sources. If your work bombed, it was not entirely your fault. You just had a faulty genius. (Can you give your genius a cup of coffee?) This changed in the Renaissance, when human creativity was put at the center of the universe. Brilliance was being a genius, not having a genius.
Whether I have a genius living in the wall of my office or not, I believe that ideas come from having a prepared mind, and yet there is that undefined something that makes me wonder if a larger consciousness comes into play. 
Television, for example, was invented by several people at once, including a Mormon farmer who was mowing hay in rows and realized that an electron beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines. Then he went in to take a shower. Where do your ideas come from?
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Taking risks. Going on a hunch. These are not words I’d associate with university or corporate science. In those often male dominated labs everybody seems to be on tenure track or fretting about funding.
Change is coming … and it’s female. According the New York Times, women constitute about half of today’s medical students, 60 percent of the biology majors and 70 percent of the psychology Ph.Ds. Though women remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering that doesn’t mean there are not female superstars in those fields.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s employee number 20, was the company’s first female engineer and its current VP of Search Products & User Experience. She seems to be doing ok, with a $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons in San Francisco. But she has taken some flak for being female, liking clothes, cupcakes and parties.
There’s lots of bias out there. It’s documented in blogs like Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): Women, Science and Writing. A scientist known as Dr. Isis writes another influential science blog and I emailed her to ask about all this. She directed me to some data about women in science: While more than 50% of chemistry bachelors degrees are awarded to women, less than 32% of Ph.D’s and 22% of assistant professorships are. Those careers hit the wall, some believe, because women are expected, pressured, conditioned or driven by biology to become mothers or pursue other non-career-advancing activities.
We know that men come from that planet over there and women come from the other one. The differences start early, with a shot of testosterone for male fetuses that helps them be competitive and assertive, and a shot of oxytocin for females that can help them read people’s emotions. Studies have shown that men are better at spatial relations – like assembling Ikea furniture. Women are better at communicating. They are more likely to trust their intuition.
Shall I argue that these differences carry into adult life and change the way males and females do science? Touchy subject.
Lawrence Summers, past president of Harvard and current head of the White House’s National Economic Council, got himself in hot water a while back for saying that innate differences between men and women may explain why lower proportions of women succeed in math and science careers. He set off a firestorm and later apologized – sort of.
Intuition is at the core of the risk-taking nature of science. Guys like to call intuition “a hunch.” Thomas Edison was famous for hunches. But those making a career of intuition – placing it center stage – are more likely to be women.
Dr. Mona Lisa Schultz has a doctorate in Behavioral Neuroscience from the Boston School of Medicine and is the author of “Awakening Intuition.” Dr. Candace Pert, formerly a section chief at the National Institutes of Health, is looking at the unconscious and its influence on illness, happiness and wellness.
DocuCinema is developing a series about integrative medicine. We’re finding that a majority of the scientists involved are female. Why? They seem more willing than male scientists to invite intuition into the lab. They are the risk takers, making them more likely to be discovery makers. I am going out on a limb with that – just a hunch.
