 Good evening, good evening, good evening, and welcome to Nerd90's Pay Number 33. My name is Ray Karnasky, I'm one of the co-bosses of Nerd90's Pay. How many of you? This is your first time at Nerd90. Welcome you all. You picked a great month to be your first, because if it had been last month, you might look like this. It turns out that when you have events in the night clubs which like to dance, sometimes they choose to put rear speakers, that one and that one, that point directly back at me. So we have a circuit that looks like that. Great for that. Not so great for that. It's not the kind of vibe we go for anyway, but it's still not great for this either. But fortunately we have a lot of kick-ass volunteers, so McLean and Lee and Jason and all the people here at Club 21 helped us fix this ship. So hopefully you could all enjoy the show. You could also enjoy the food, Mr. Reba and Nanny Cakes. Delicious looking food. And you'll actually be able to hear you standing over there, because it's a good way. Nice. Oh! And the DJ is still clutching with my knobs, so I'm just going to stand up here. The sound is almost perfect. The Oklahoma Library is also back there. You should really go back there if you don't already know the library card. The library card is turned out to be really sweet. Not only can you get books, I just found out this last week that you could get audio books delivered to your cell phone, and now I get nothing at all done at work. Our first speaker of the night is going to talk to us about illusions, about how we can trick our mind into thinking things that probably shouldn't, seeing things that aren't there. It turns out there are audio illusions too, and since we have a sound system that is 90% perfect, so when the DJ stands off my knobs, I can show some of those off. Some of you may have seen this version before, if I can get sound out of my autopsy. Ah! Ah! Ah! So that's the McCurk effect. Same sound, depending on which of the two characters you're looking at, you might hear different things. It also works really well for Lady Gaga's poker face. But I wanted to show another illusion, and this one's actually going to require you to close your eyes. I know that some of you may have neighbors sitting next to you that are sexier than others, keeping this to yourself. I'll just load this up. The reason you're going to close your eyes in a bit, what I tell you to, is that we are taking this survey. So I'm going to play for you two tones, and you're going to decide whether the second tone is higher or lower than the first tone. If you think it's higher, raise your hand. If you think it's lower, keep your hand down. And if you really can't tell, shake your head, you know what's up. So if you want to close your eyes, you're going to play the jumps down. Here's tone number one. All right, again, raise your hand if you think tone two is higher. Okay, not too many hands. That's good, that's good. You're actually ready. I'm going to change things up ever so slightly. Okay, tone one. Okay, close your eyes, tone one. More hands up. You can see the trick. So this corresponds to frequencies. The trick is that either it's higher or lower. I'm playing you a collection of things. And the nearest pitch is half an octave up and half an octave down. So it's really going to depend on what you hear. But if we just change the bass frequency, people suddenly think that they hear something else. And apparently this depends upon the nationality that you're in. So if you're a tone-all language speaker, or if you're from England, you're more likely to detect no difference between those two different bass frequencies. Whereas if you're a California, you have no hearing. But my favorite audio illusion is this one. So I'm going to just start going up and pitch a few times. I get basically to this all right. What's great is that you just heard a few passes of the same chord progression. So again, you can see on this part. Watch it pass through this center point. But now we're just going to have illusions of another kind. We have Paul Sess. Can you play that audio? That just what I'm going to be talking about tonight is just first, like the audio illusions, but a little more immediately acceptable, that we kind of have come to peace with the fact that our minds will lead to certain kinds of conclusions. You don't need to be on the plier to feel like this might be cultivating. And the thing that I'm going to be talking about is a range of things that, oh, you can't really see that, but that's great. Everything is less important than it seems. So I would say that would be the generalization across everything I'm talking about, which is like whatever's in your mind right now is always smaller or less important than it appears at the moment. And Danny Connery calls that the illusion that what you see is all there is. Enough about that. Let me actually show you my first special effect. It's impossible for me to explain the underlying neurophysiology, but I'm always thinking like why can't that orange wall stick up for itself? What is it doing that it keeps shrinking? And it was to say, you know that every illusion I'm showing you is an illusion so you know that that ball is actually the same size brown, but knowing is not the same as perceiving. So let me switch from this first cognitive, or rather from this first perceptual illusion to a cognitive illusion. Do you remember, this is back before the 2013 law, but they used to say get 10 cents if you bring it back. And the question is how motivated are you to earn a dime? Probably not very intensively. And most people like no thanks, don't need a dime, just give me a dime. But in 2013 they changed it. And instead of foregoing a dime, you have to actually cough up a dime. Now to an economist that is the same. The opportunity cost and the actual realized loss are logically equivalent. But how many people feel that they are psychologically different? Well, you could raise your hand or you could just say yes, I dropped something that cost me $7 because I was carrying it in a bungalow because I wouldn't pay a dime. Now, all of this has to do with the fact that the reference point that we adopt can change something that under one framing is a game to another that's a loss. And throughout one of the most robust phenomena is that losses hurt more. In fact, a very famous curve that we'll be talking about. First, everybody learns this curve in E-com 101. It's just the law of diminishing returns. What it was added by the people who found it in my field is the fact that the curve relative to the reference point actually is sensitive to whether it's a gain or a loss. And here what you notice is that losses are approximately twice as steep. So think about taking a bet where you could gain a dollar. If you were perfectly rationally to be like flip a coin, win a dollar, lose a dollar, I didn't care. But actually in order to take a bet where you win a dollar, you're typically not willing to accept that bet unless all you have to lose is about 50 cents. So keep that in mind that we're sensitive to losses. Not new illusion, new question. What is killing our farmers? Out of the counties in the United States, the highest kidney rates of kidney cancer rates are in these sparsely populated, primarily rural, they're preponderantly Christian and evangelical, they're low from the metropolitan coasts. So anybody have an idea? Jesus, yes. I was thinking this line, since you mentioned Jesus, I remember Christopher Hitchens said that Mother Teresa was with somebody and she said, Jesus is kissing your face right now to somebody who's lying on a cot. He goes, tell Jesus to stop. So I think it's pretty easy to start thinking well, they probably smoke more, they may be more fatalistic. But I have another question for you. What's saving our farmers? Because out of the counties where you look at kidney cancer rates, the ones with the lowest, oh I should say lowest, the lowest rates are in exactly similar counties. Now why? Because people aren't sensitive to the fact that when you have a cancer rate of 1 in 20,000, if you have a town with a population of 1 and that guy gets cancer, their rate is 20,000 times anyone else's. And you just can't find many people who will think about the fact that randomness is a better explanation. We'll keep talking about this. There's a statistician at Berkeley who said, whichever side of a lawsuit has to explain statistics is bound to lose. So it's just a fact that we don't have access to this. Now what's an analogous perceptual illusion? This is called the Machin illusion, hopefully. So these are little pieces of light. And yet when you watch the light moving, you can't not feel that blue and red are interacting. Similarly, if you have the blue ball hit the red light and then the red light not move and then move a second later, there's no visceral perception of causality. So Pixar and Disney and everybody knows this and the connection I'm trying to make is that when we see patterns, even random patterns, we're really geared to come up with causal stories. So here's a question. I asked my life this question last night. So anybody have theories? Yeah, okay, there's something there. Maybe it's ego defense. Maybe armed candy is good enough when you're already smart for the family. Another question is if you make it to the cover of Sports Illustrated while you're in college, how you dodge the curse, the Sports Illustrated cover curse. What can you do to deflect that while continuing to bask in all of your good fortune? The third question, the $2 billion question, is why did the Gates Foundation invest $2 billion to make class sizes smaller? And the reason is because they weren't trying to reduce kidney cancer rates. Somebody reanalyzed the statistics and noted that for that phenomenon, it was again regression to the mean. Now, okay, I'm doing what the statistician at Berkeley said. I'm going to make a case that I'm going to be able to explain to you how statistics might work to explain all three of these. And the general phenomenon and actually the source of the linear regression equation is that things that are extreme in one point will tend to regress to the mean. So if you have an extremely smart wife, let's say she's in the top .01%, then the odds of her being able to hold to that standard are exceptionally hard. Similarly, no matter how lucky you are in college, you have to stay that lucky. And if luck is a random variable, then it's normally distributed. And if you lose some of your luck, then you won't be as good as you were when you made it onto the cover. With the Gates Foundation, the issue was that they picked out the highest performing classes. They noticed that an overrepresentation of them were small classes. And they didn't bother to look at the underperforming classes and ask whether those also were overrepresented. But like the county I showed you with one person in it, it is the case that by having small samples, we expect causal stories to suffice to explain what's going on. And yet we really aren't built to make inferences based on sampling. Next, perceptual illusion, Ted Adelson designed this. And I used to use this in presentations and it was just too disruptive because people would be like, no, F in way. So A and B are tagged there because they're the same color. Now, if there's anyone who could intuit that without knowing that I'm giving a talk on illusions, you win. This sort of demonstrates it because you block it out and then the luminance shading is kind of blocked. But my son thought I'm still jerking him around. So let me show you an example. You just need to see her take this square and put it on the other square. And then would you put it back on me? So there you go. Now, what am I going to use that for? In this talk, I'm going to talk more, not about the perception, but about how comparing things side by side rather than separately can lead to very different judgments. So here's something that we're actually sold on eBay. One was a music dictionary had 10,000 entries and the condition was like new. Another was a 24 piece China set like new. They also sold a different dictionary twice as many entries with a torn cover. They sold this plus four extra pieces, but one of them was chipped. And this sold for more than that. This sold for more than that. But that's in separate evaluation. If I stand up here and I go, well, which did you rather have in a joint evaluation, sort of like when those block bars run down, you're willing to say, okay, that has to be something where I'm going to get the four and throw away one. Another language for this is called the presentation paradox. When I talk about it because I work in software, I just call it the Microsoft brochureware phenomenon, which is like, you know, if you ask people how much they pay to stay at a five star hotel, they're going to offer more than if you mention five star hotel that has a three star restaurant. Because we're forming a kind of composite, a prototype, an average cross. And as soon as you mention something that's chipped, imperfect, torn, then the whole is relatively dropped. Okay, this one's okay. Does the ending affect the whole story? And here you have two people at Stanford. And these are the two people at Stanford. This is a guy, Berkeley. No. Needless to say, you know that next to the guy in the hat, those are exactly the same number of pixels. But we're using a lot of external cues. And I like this illusion. So let's look at two painful procedures. There you go. There you go. This is a guy who had less than 10 minutes. And this is another person who had more than 20 minutes. And so the question is patient A, patient B. Who's suffered more? And you know, that's not even a math question. That's just obviously because I actually made this out of... B is actually using A. You can even see this little screenshot hand here. That means I really did just cut it and extend it. That A clearly suffered more. Okay? Oh, I mean B. B. Sorry. When I said A, I meant B, right? But which person, when you ask them, is willing to do it again? And the answer there, and again this is a perceptual illusion, is B. B and YB. Because we use what Dan Econome calls the heuristic of a peak end. First, there's duration neglect. So we don't actually have an integral that's running that goes, oh my God, it's taking 10 minutes for pizza, 11 minutes for pizza, 12 minutes for pizza. We just kind of go, I'm waiting. And then the easiest thing to do is to take the moment that's worst and then take the endpoint moment, store those two bits, and then you make a recollection. So you have an experiencing self that's clearly suffering more. But the remembering self is like, ah, I would rather do that. And in fact, this phenomenon made clinicians add extra time to colonoscopies. Because if you rip the band-aid off, then they go, oh my God, that was so bad and the last moment was terrible. And then they go, all right, I tell you what, let's just make it last longer. And they're like, that one was good. And so there's lots of opportunities, hopefully, for us to do that in software. So now I'm going to talk about generalization. We're not really doing integrals, computations, mathematical operations most of the time. Heuristics are, by definition, quick rules of thumb. The long, small numbers generate a pattern without being sensitive to sampling. Same with the presentation paradox and the peak end rule. One way of thinking about this is that we have two systems. FAST is intuitive, immediate, unreflective. It perceives patterns and it's just free. Then there's the slow thinking, which is reflective. Now, I ask the question sort of like this. I don't know how many people, my son's reflecting data. It was a slightly different wording of the same question, which is a baseball and a bat cost $1.10 together. And the bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? It was a slightly different wording. It was a $350 camera outside, but 72% of the people knew and answered effortlessly that the lens, because it was $300 less, had to cost $50. So 72% of the people who answered that question today let their super fast intuition answer that question and then we're fine. Did anybody say that? So one way of thinking about this, imagine a game show where the fastest response always wins. So you have Chris Farley just hitting the buzzer and going $50, or $0.10 for the ball. And then slow is Stephen Hawking. And so if he does answer, it's going to be great. It's going to be sophisticated. But Chris Farley answers 99% of them before Stephen Hawking can bring his cursor up. And as I said, in this game, fast is pretty much good enough. You know, there's not typically an error checking. And with the ball and the bat example, there was no error checking. So now I'm going to just give some props to two people, the thinkers fast and slow. Danny Kahneman wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. Amos Persky was a teacher of mine. And really it's worth mentioning that Danny Kahneman is just a very perceptive, elusive, extremely insightful, humane, perceptual psychologist who makes connections everywhere. And that Amos, his collaborator, was, well, I remember at his memorial service, somebody said, one time I met an economist and he said, I measure most psychologist IQs in millitiversities. So he was about a thousand times smarter than most people, but he was very logical, very precise. If I have time, and I think this will be my last thing, say, oh, I'm at 18 minutes, which is Ted time, right? So I could talk about more, I could do more, but I'm going to leave you with this, which is, if you recall, I spoke about the fact that, you know, our sensitivity to loss is greater. Here you see that this here, as a gain, is not nearly as high as it would be. And then if we connect that back to, you know, this perceptual illusion, this is our reference point, that's the other thing that's important to include, that future gains are not really that attractive to us. They're upside. Whereas take that, move it backwards, say you're going to be set back by a dime, you're going to give up, you're going to forgo, you know, you're going to lose, it actually moves a lot larger. So here is a lot of the theory that Conor and Terespe did called prospect theory. And there's one last thing I wanted to do, which is to zoom into this small region right here, right around the zero, zero, because, you know, maybe our sensitivity to chance depends on perspective. Would you say it's possible? So there is a place where if you stand out, you can actually see the patterns. I'm not going to talk in depth about this, but these are probability weights for the difference between a low risk, a medium risk, a high risk and a certainty. And, you know, one thing is like a 1% risk looms large. So here you can see that a 1% risk is treated as if it's 5.5 on a normal high scale. And so you overweight really low risks. You're relatively insensitive to shifts in the middle. The clearest example is you say, okay, well, I gave you a gun and you have to play Russian roulette and there's four bullets in it. How much will you pay to remove one of those bullets? And most people are like, you know, like, who cares? You know, there's still going to be three bullets in it. And, you know, there are times where people are very relatively insensitive to the move between say two thirds and one third risk. There's increasing sensitivity as you get higher and finally there's a sure thing. Now imagine that you've bought all the bullets and there's only one left in that Russian roulette chamber. How much are you willing to pay for that? Fastly, fastly more because you want certainty. Insurance, lotteries, lots of things are built on this. And so is my talk. So there's follow-up references. The Great Oakland Library people have confirmed that all of these are in their collection and that was my talk. Okay, so 18 to 25 people. I am going to repeat it. I am going to repeat it. What did you say? Did you say repeat it? Could somebody repeat what the person asked me to repeat? So the question was some people on the way in were accosted by a couple of eight-year-old twins and asked to complete a study on an iPhone and those questions were kind of like the fruit flies of the behavioral econ field. So one is about whether you're willing to do something that will save an Asian disease where 600 people are exactly known to die if you don't do anything. Under one framing you're told if you do this you will save 200 and in another framing you say if you do that exact same thing 400 people will die. And surprise, surprise the choice and it was held up in the data for the people who answered in the little phone thing. When you foreground the number of people who die even if it's the same mathematical number people's behavior changes to risk averse or risk impulsive based on that. She asked me to stay on this side of the stage because you don't know what she said. Any other questions? I'm doing in a stock market. Well, you know, fooled by randomness is not just a slogan. I actually worked, I worked at an online brokerage for a while and I really thought when I started I got my PhD in 2000 I thought I could empower people to overcome these cognitive delusions. The online brokerages often said empower the little guy. It turned out that there were almost like it was like a facade where there's like a million people. You know what it's like? It's like an American election because there's 300 million people who are supposed to vote and then there's like in the basement there's like a roulette table with like these fat Texans who weigh like 800 pounds and every dollar theirs is worth 500,000 votes upstairs. So if you're asking how I'm doing I don't pay attention because it amplifies risk sensitivity but I do know that there are a small group of people who are willing to lose everything over and over and over again and as soon as they die God makes new ones. Is that it? Okay, well thanks so much. Thanks, bro. Merritt, it is not actually a lake. Who knows this? It's actually an estuary. Did you know? Oh, look at it for you. I didn't know until we had a speaker talk about it. So as you're going to learn a lot more about the short lake it was once this lagoon area this was in 1800 the estuary terminology means that you have freshwater rivers that lead to a body of brackish water that's sort of like partially enclosed but feeds out to the ocean so there's water moving in and out so you have ocean water mixing with fresh water to create this brackish area which is neat. So here's some interesting stuff that I didn't know. So pretend you didn't know and you're fascinated. Another estuary is the San Francisco Bay. Yeah, okay, I didn't know that. It's the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. You can see it also has gone through a lot of major changes as like the land there's been a lot of land reclamation and stuff over the years. So what's the largest estuary in the US? That is correct, it's Chesapeake Bay. Very good. Geography nerds, I know you're out there. So some other things that are actually estuaries include Puget Sound, Boston Harbor, Cook Inlet, Long Island Sound, River Plate, Gulf of St. Lawrence which some say is the largest estuary in the world but I couldn't get a confirmation on that. All I got was some scientists saying that wasn't me. And the Firth of Fourth which I included just because I love saying Firth of Fourth. So this got me questioning. These are all estuaries. So what's a bay? How is that different from a sound? Is that different from a firth or a fjord or all these other terms that are being used? So I looked it up and this is lifted directly from Wikipedia. A bay is a body of water connected to an ocean. It's like a big inlet. It could also be called a gulf, a sea, a sound or a bite. A cove is a smaller thing but sometimes coves are also called bays and a fjord is a bay that was carved out by glaciers. So that cleared up nothing. They're basically interchangeable terms a lot of the time. I think bay is sort of a catch-all although when I tried to delve and I looked up sound it told me a sound is larger than a bay which is contradictory to the information on this Wikipedia page. So fuck Wikipedia. So that wasn't particularly enlightening. It's just that I know nothing about bodies of water. But our next speaker is going to be very enlightening. We're going to learn so much about this lake that's actually an estuary right in our own backyard quite literally. So without any further ado, here is Stephanie. She just got to be telling me. So here's the Rotary Nature Center a little place that comes in from Tahoe with fresh water from San Joaquin. Meet up under here, low tide, low bit salty due to the ocean. Ocean water comes out, comes into the Lake Bridge comes into the Virgin Marina the fresh water opens up into the estuary opens up into Lake Merritt. We have 62 storm drains and eight creeks that brings you to a body of water. Thank you very much. Not been to Lake Merritt but I can see by this overwhelming response in here I guess everybody has been to Lake Merritt, right? I have two of my staff and one of them, Constance has been here before to talk about Lake Merritt for 40 years. I was selected by Paul Cabell who was the first municipal naturalist hired in the nation by Parks and Recreation Department in 1948 until he retired in 1975. I followed the footsteps of that man even though there had been other naturalists before me. The purpose of this presentation is one, I'm going to give you a little bit of historical information a little bit of a seedy underbelly of wildlife the trials and tribulations of urban naturalists like myself and others throughout the nation that try to balance recreational needs with wildlife and hopefully at the end of this presentation you will learn what the difference between parks that are for people and refuges that are sanctuaries or safe place for wildlife so the title is bringing people and nature together and probably if I turn this right we'll see if it works yep, turned it off ok ok, come on back I turned off the lights in here ok, it looked like the one you gave me is that the right one? you should have ok Lake Merritt in the year 1820 which was part of the largest land grant given to one man known as Sergeant Louise Maria Peralta in the year 1820 for the great service that he did 44,000 acres that go from Albany to San Leandro up to the hills he was supposed to stay on it and create a settlement instead he divided up among his four sons Ignatio, Vincente but Antonio and Domingo but it was Antonio that this lake sits in by the time he divided up among its sons the pioneers came a man named Horace Carpenter who was a New York lawyer and Edson Adams who was named after and Moon through sculled adultery they were able to rest away the property rights from the Peralta so when Oakland became incorporated in 1852 by 1856 the Peralta had lost all control over the land known as the Peralta Land Grant there was a city beautification process and at that time 1913 this is a pagoda that's at the northeast end of the lake where a thousand one people like to go partying and everything like that this actually served as when the water was really deep for boats to come up this close into the shore and pick up cattle skins and wax and bees and all that kind of stuff but the most important thing about Lake Merrick was when a man named Samuel Merrick came into the Bay Area when it was just slews and townships and stuff and on his ship he came during the time when San Francisco had a number of earthquakes prior to the 1906 and he dismantled his ship and sewed the lumber and the nails and everything to help and he decided that Oakland was the most beautiful place he had ever seen and one of those places happened to be Lake Merrick but guess what since the time that the city was a city the only sewage dump in Oakland was Lake Merrick and that's because it had a very high saline a water to dispose of the bacteria and everything and so Merrick decided that out of his pocket he would build a dam and with that dam he would it's not man made it's man altered you gotta remember that it's not a man made late it's man altered with a man altered he created this this today is Lake Merrick and it's facing out to where the estuary is and actually in this middle part here this is all landfill that was all open waterway where the Kaiser building sits and going behind that that was open channel through the creation of the wildlife refuge making it the first in the nation because of Samuel Merrick in the year 1870 wanted to protect the wildlife he got tired of cows being shot all over the place and the people complaining about it and the smell which sometimes even in the future we were complaining about it being accessible but he went to governor Haight and through that governor he decided that preserving 145 years ago the legacy of what is now known as Lake Merrick it is the oldest wildlife refuge in the nation now what's that mean nobody ever had that thought to make it a wildlife refuge it precedes Yellowstone by two years Yellowstone didn't get its designation until two years after Oakland got arts 1903 was the first Pelican Islands the first federal refuge system and under that they have over 506 but we have Lake Merrick it started here a safe place my topic is bringing people and nature closer together but it's actually bringing urban sprawl and nature together this is all that is left of the wildlife refuge where the water naturally would have met the shores counting 16 rods out from that you can see how much of the city has encroached in onto this piece of property that everybody and their brother I know everybody and their brother has been down at the lake I don't know me from telling you stop going down backwards down on the street put your dog on the leash pick up your trash and all that kind of thing that was me when you wanted to call the police on and all that I'm still here but this is all the wildlife area that is left of the wildlife refuge from 1870 so what are the trials and tribulations of the naturalists well it's not what Paul Cabell used to do now this is why it says I didn't know you're supposed to squash something down in that little white square but that's okay so if he was full view you think he's cute don't you he's a cold blooded little murderer let me tell you that don't let these eyes and those cheeks fool you he's a little murderer there he is evidence in hand eating a sparrow and you thought he only wanted nuts no, squirrels have to they eat other things than just nuts and so they do make up most animals do they can't find other food then they revert to protein like this these I don't know if you've seen in the water but they were washing up on shore because I said we had floating bodies these are the sea hairs at Lake Merritt how many of you have seen the sea hairs okay if you haven't seen them they have these purple blobs that have been showing up on the shores and more so this year because the waters are so warm out there we also have to deduce as an actress who killed who out there and so you can see that this is a body of a gull that has a hole in it yeah those are things that my staff and I sit around and try to figure out we try to figure out if it's man-made and we think that it might have been the rays the ones that eat the muscles because they have that perfectly little round portion there and we got floating fish these are carp and when the water changes when it becomes less brackish and more saline then the brackish fish or the fresh water fish have a hard time surviving and look how big and fatty he is he was eating a lot of stuff and then what's it like to be walking down one of our pathways and out of the clear blue sky a headless bird falls on your head and you miss these are our hawk and this is a big red tail and then down there he just murdered the bagel right there so those are things that happen in a wildlife refuge but here's what I have to deal with the wildlife refuge just recently changed to allowing dogs within the interior of the wildlife refuge we don't want that we'd rather it be on the outside because by walking on the outside maybe a paw pat then the animals are crowded toward the water and not being caught in between them and you might recognize these dogs I don't know if any of you have been in Oakland a long time but you might recognize the owner of one okay you have the right to go get them because I said either you get them or I get them if I get them I keep them and then people I can't tell you you can walk your dog leech but entitlement they insist on having their dogs running in the park we have eight beautiful walking miller dog runs in which you can take your dogs up in a leash and not only do they come by the tunes but sometimes and runs right in the middle of the breeding season and do I get thoughtful people in the park well do people do pick up after their dogs I do appreciate that but next time don't leave it next to the garbage can kind of put it pick it up you picked it up put it in the garbage can and then there's the disnification of the wildlife refuge now that people have discovered the lake again they're bringing everybody and their brother and their sister and their aunts and their cousins and their furniture to the lake they're still on the cell phones they're partying they got loud music the neighbors are complaining to me because there's music going on at 10 o'clock at night and some of you might recognize yourselves in these pictures okay and so not only do we have our furniture and stuff we have the barbecuing and what people don't realize is what does smoke do to animals they think that it's a forest fire and when they think of a forest fire then they start moving out but with the amount of people that are using the park and it's beautiful there's the amount of trash that's left behind take your trash with you leave no trees behind kind of thing but it doesn't work like that and then we have the flea markets and that is definitely furniture okay we have entrepreneurs and then we have more and they come by the bus loads and they set up right in the middle of even where the wildlife has what little grass they have to pour it John they set up huge tents and they bring fake flowers when you already got flowers all around the park that's okay that was part of this and with the community people comes the graffiti comes the homelessness comes the encampments that my staff and the City of Oakland staff have to stay on top of to make it presentable for people to come down there and to feel safe this person here I must have poured out close to 710 cans of beer and all the years that I've been there he just doesn't get so there I moved the homeless person into that spot to give him out of his niche so you got to do what you have to do and we do deal with mental issues recreational needs of the public it does look good to see all these straps and everything but guess what these trees are put into the park in 1910 by the city fathers to have trees from around the world for pioneers or people who were immigrants coming into the city to have a taste of what their home like we have trees from Cyprus from New Zealand from Australia, from China trees from around and they're old and you can see the roots are already around at the bottom being exposed so they can't really handle this the historical trees we have the guy who was type roping and I told him you can't type rope during springtime because all the baby birds in the trees were so graciously took it down and this gets me we have three point something miles around a beautiful lake part of city beautiful again they took out the natural wetlands they made parkland they made pathways all for the help of the people to walk it and yet you come up with segways when you really need to be strolling through here there's a lot of users on the park I've got bicyclers, people with strollers people with segways people who are ambulatory from Aesong a lot of people share those paths very little but what about the animals when you push the animals out and I apologize again for this being a little blurry but there's a little bit of a heron there and the egret there then they become a problem outside of the wildlife refuge where they were confined so to speak it starts to disturb the wildlife and so then when they work their way out into areas that the public doesn't expect them to be then you have these kind of situations where in this case we know it's the post office because the next slide is going to show the post office they hired to cut half the tree down they just didn't do it during the right time of the year and that's because they got tired of their trucks being whitewashed the car was on the street being whitewashed and so their trees city trees now look like this down there but this is all the result of the animals trying to adapt to the changes that are happening around them at all times with the drought back today I had birds just walking back and forth across Grand Avenue and Harrison but I got to say this there are a lot of considerate people now why don't the birds fly some of them still don't have their wings or their feathers so to speak but I rarely pick up any dead birds people are really, really kind to the animals that are going across those blow guards but here's the thing they're drinking whatever water they can find and that's right there in the streets or they're swimming right behind a car and people ended up setting up this kids at play which really meant that they put a sign up here asking people because the birds have been getting killed and people are speeding and back they go faster than 15 miles an hour come on now and so people got upset put this up and then of course they said when the city found to get some money to pay for a better sign but you know who reads signs at least not the birds so I'm always told when I go out there and I ask people please put your dog in a leash don't chase them you know don't bring your segues across and I always tell me the famous things you got too many damn geese to begin with you need to barbecue them you need to get rid of them during the avian flu they wanted me to literally round up the birds at Lake Merritt during that avian flu scare and have them cold but I always say looking at the size of this and how big that lake is how is this going to be too many compared to too many what, children adults okay come on we're talking about a wildlife refuge not a park so let's talk about that when Lake Merritt became a wildlife refuge and I'm just going to read this briefly Governor Hay set the purpose of Lake Merritt by saying this to educate and inspire through understanding the values of conserving the natural resources of the state that was for our lake that was for our wildlife refuge that was for the first wildlife refuge in the nation so now let's take a look at what people don't see what they're not paying attention to when they come to Lake Merritt that they're missing out on my geese again but not only are my geese there it's a foggy day and look in the back behind that mission revival Pagola and you see all those dots those are the migratory birds our lake is seasonal you just happen to interact with the geese during the summertime when they migrate trying to find ample food, space and water why they molt and lose their flight feelings they can't fly during the summer and so when people chase them or you know so why didn't it move, why didn't it fly if they can't fly down for 46 weeks to their new feathers grow and then nobody complains about the number of birds I have out there I've got stops and voting eyes and cabinets back there's probably four times as many of the water but it's because they're on the water that they're not at inconvenience little things like butterflies we have a beautiful botanical garden we have bumblebees how many really stop to look at some of the smaller things or walk and look for maybe an elk or something under one of our little toasts you come down to reflect at the lake so do my birds this is a black crown night heron a lot of people call these blue herons they've held people in parking lots at bay and have called me to come rescue them because they couldn't get into their car this is a fish eating bird nobody looks up in the air we have peregrines red tails coopers we have a variety of birds of prey that also migrate through and also like to rent free sit on some of the business state and Bellevue actually the aerodynamics of the term now you see all that colorful thing those are people but do you ever stop to look at the marble at the shape and the dynamics of these birds some of these animals give inspiration to people and yes the sky rats he was all those pigeons but let me tell you about this pigeon his cousin disappeared within 100 years and that was a passenger pigeon because of what man did going to their 30 mile nesting using the toddy gun eating them the whole nine yards right out within 100 plus years the passenger pigeon the common pigeon a rock dove was a little bit smarter he was like he learned his lesson by watching what happened to his cousin but why you need to respect these birds these are the type of birds that were used by the military during the war to send messages back and forth until the Germans decided to train birds of prey to take them out so they earned their right to eat out of your hand the great blue heron the common egret I mean you just walk right past them they will sit and take a photo you photograph them and where else can you jog alongside pelicans we have one pelican hank I used to have two 40 years ago when I started we had Hector and Helen and then when Helen died after 29 years being at the lake I got Hank during the worst snow, water storm that we ever had that lasted for several months I didn't know if he was going to acclimate the animal intelligence has passed on Hank was by himself for up to five years and then one day another pelican showed up we never had white pelicans except the two that we had whales had brown pelicans little white pelican kept coming back and forth back and forth and after three years she brought two other pelicans now you can go to the lake and you can see anywhere between 14 to 26 white pelicans at Lake Merritt on the western hemisphere out of eight species of pelicans the California brown and the American white to be seen at Lake Merritt you can see them close up here that's them afar out on the islands you can get up close and personal this is Hank here getting his now when all the pelicans leave white pelicans are cooperative feeders they need to have other pelicans around to help them eat so winter time the staff is feeding them fish and comes up to get it but imagine these things go back to prehistoric times to look into the eyes of these animals and to know their lineage like you and I here from the first dawn of mankind showing up for each of you to be sitting in this room past plague, pestilence, your lineage same thing for this pelican and what about the brown pelican there's beauty in this landing now they're individuals they like basketball players they either play with the group or they play by themselves to get to the fish this is my yin and yang photo now some of the photos are done by Leigh one of my photographers this one is done by Kamina one of my staff people and those are our cormorants they're out there just preening away because they have to be able to get their feathers dry and ready so that they can go back to diving like little submarines Yigret Canada geese they don't care where they nest but they have to be because of the dogs and the people and the kids and everything but this one just nest right in the middle of the parking lot because it does what it has to do but the joy that some of these little God'slings, ducklings give to people is enough to make people stop and really look and to marvel at nature this is a fishing frenzy with Yigrets these were the birds that were in the tree the post office had cut down this is a snowy Yigret at the bottom and one of the young black crown night herons this is the squawker these are the ones that keep the people at bay in the parking lots these are the ones that get calls on and they're actually this one's related to that first one on the boat the black crown night heron this is the offspring but look at that beauty to really look at a bird this is the green heron and the reflection in the water these are things that you're missing so let's talk these are our turns they go back and forth from Alameda and they come fishing at the east lake area to get some of their fish this is right outside the ruddery nature center how many mouths do you have at home to feed like this and then of course we do have raccoons the mother takes them out and they want to be able to rest somewhere and this is in our trees I was watching coming into the park and I saw people standing around looking up in the tree and it was one of these and when you really look close then you're able to see this little guy from a distance you know what that is? that's right Mr. Lorax himself it's one of those rare occasions he was down at the boat house in a loading dock got his picture snapped thought he could disappear but we got him we got that face but when you look close then you look at animals that are in distress you get to see things like a hook on the end of a camarade but look at that emerald green eye to know that the animal has to suffer because we don't clean up pick up after ourselves so I have this tree that all during the summer I'm going to say do you know that there's a dead bird hanging from the tree and I go yeah are you going to get it? he'll fall off well okay I said it's a teaching moment they go what? it's a teaching moment it shows you the side of the wildlife refuge that it may not be pleasant it's the things that happen out in the real world that get caught up on trash on things that are left behind and they do die now it's a food source for the insects and other things that come along and we even had one of the children from St. Paul's Episcopal was really excited about documenting the decay of it so it always works into another career somewhere this is a view that you enjoy the lights in 1925 came on the neighbors of the Cleveland Cascades were trying to bring back to light Gilkey's 20 tiered Cascades with rainbow color lights back they got it halfway there but when everybody goes home this is what my admins see on the Cuomo night they stop to think what they talk about what they might say we only think here let me explain what that permit is when we say if you have less than 25 people those 25 people are your friends your family when you're doing an event where you're inviting the public you need a permit when you're going to have more than 25 you need a permit for that and when you have jumpers you need a permit because of the insurance of bringing your jumpers on to any city of open property to say that it's okay they now just recently designated some barbecue pits which I was against but I have no control with that but it comes down to this like the wolves in Yellowstone once they put the wolves back Yellowstone and all its wildlife the bison went back to being a herd and the bears went back into their caves I need my park rangers back it was a park rangers that actually were the friendly officers with the squirrel cuffs they always said that would go and explain this to people but you can go out at Oakland Net I think it's OaklandNet.org and it has the permit process there for it and the other thing is when you come understand we want you to come but we want you to understand that the wildlife reach which is a shared resource with other species other lives and that what you leave behind can either kill or damage the wildlife that is there but this is over 145 years that we have this legacy I want to see that it goes another 145 years okay way in the back with the light that the thing is she said she feeds stale bread and that is a good for the birds I had one of my staff people who forgot he went on one night that everybody in their brother knows me so if you're going to put something on the website I'm going to hear about it and the one thing he was really peeped about was that I wouldn't get up there and say stop feeding the bread so let me tell you about that we don't want you to bring the bread store to the lake to feed feeding bread does not kill or damage because the abundance of bread we have mold on it that lake will never be a natural wildlife refuge because of the human impact of all the garbage and food you guys leave behind and the animals are adapted to wow that's some kind of Caesar salad you know it has to do with quantity but here's the other thing when I watched over the years parents with their children sit down and feed bread out of their hand to an animal especially birds they're creating an empathy they're communicating with something that is normally wild they're giving that child or I watched seniors on that bench feeding pigeons, feeding birds you have to put your priorities right I'm not going to go out there and fight with somebody I'm going to tell them you may not know this but we have seeds inside that is better and that if you come down here again come and get with seeds but do not feed them anything with mold on it don't feed them 50 loaves of bread that kind of thing do you agree with me I've seen the wonder and the excitement in children or people's eyes when something wild trusts them enough to come up any bread getting the officers to realize that park rangers are not a threat to them there are park rangers in Central Park San Francisco Boston we had our rangers back in 1919 we can actually take some of the rookies part of their academy training and they could be pseudo rangers and learning the recreation centers in the parks and everything as part of their training and learning a different way of communicating before they go on to be officers but then they're able to respond quickly to open spaces like walking Miller, Kansas State and they're not going to get lost and say I didn't know where that was thank you so let's thank Stephanie right down here so if you have any questions for the next 10 minutes she'll be happy to answer those again we're going to take a 10 minute break before we have our last talk on an E coming in foam so grab a drink say hi to the library and come back in 10 comprehending art and literature my first reaction is something along the lines of this I have known that for it when you're in college you should see me after the show because I love these kinds of talks because it's an opportunity for me to learn more and I'm happy to have more of them that being said the way that I approach poetry is I go out and look for academic papers on it sometimes I don't find academic papers on poetry sometimes I find academic papers that become poetry so this is a great paper it's an astronomy paper that basically shows that there's carbon and oxide out in some distant star cluster that's related to planet formation and that's really exciting and they do a great job of explaining all of this in about six pages which is good they have graphs one of the first things you do when you're reading the paper is you just look at all the pictures and try to understand it that way so you're definitely looking for a concise language but another good thing to learn about the papers is to go to these scientific meetings the text is kind of small and blurry but essentially they're like hey we're having an astronomy meeting in Australia and you should totally come like I saw what that paper did and they were selected to go last and so they're like you'll notice that there's only a single author credit there and figure one was this you're already off to a good start because again you start with the figures you don't even have to do that because he wrote his entire paper in not six pages but eight pages a verse so he says I wrote my abstract sentence in with words that don't defend imagine my horror to find that I am scheduled at the end let me say to be the last speaker there are very few things worse as a sort of parenthetical this is because usually conferences are great places like Sydney Australia the last day of the conference you might as well go surfing or learn a snorkel instead of going to people's talks parenthetical over and so this talk together eventually will be entirely in verse the subject I address today is that of star formation and what we found out recently about the situation this is fantastic not only it was the entire paper in verse but it actually had more citations more football so I'm not going to read you all six pages I don't have the wherewithal this is Oakland there are far better people to do this book than me but I will read the last bit but now we have not one but two CO sources it is true Iran and this G33 0.6 minus not 0.2 in fact the sources now are three because again last May the very next flight that we did found CO in Seabird anyway well thank you all for listening because some of you have slept I wonder now will it take me a day this manuscript accept in other words like is the editor of this conference basically actually going to accept this manuscript and this was the footnote so here to talk about much less scientific poetry this January baking my heart is really pounding what would that be like to give a whole presentation silence yeah right I mean I don't have the slides for it but that would be unexpected you know we're expecting a certain thing out of presentations like this like talk slide talk slide so Cummings has these 22 characters and you can see they spell this is a little tricky I had an English teacher as a junior who read this poem out loud one a leaf falls one, one, innis it's not wrong but there's also the word loneliness L loneliness and inside the parentheses a leaf falls and all of it broken up into small bits I wanted to give you some context for the poem and my involvement with it so 200,000 BCE approximately humans developed this is after Lake Merritt most of the species there just to put that in context 50,000 BCE on April 7th language was invented 6,000 BCE this is very approximate but they say 8 to 12,000 years ago written language was developed and then things moved very quickly between movable type in 10 40 the printing press in 1440 typewriters in 1840 and I forgot to include computers but that was also significant 1958 is when Cummings published this poem I first met it around 1980 the English teacher I told you about read it to me in 85 I wrote my first academic paper on it in 1988 and then I never left the poem it's always been with me I'll explain why another little while in 2009 I started to perform these solo pieces about poems that I really love and at the same year I woke up with something in this poem that I had never noticed before which I'll tell you about later so this became kind of one of the pieces and I've done versions of this talk a few times so I'm happy to bring it here and answer this question what is it so I'd like to unpack the poem for you and show you some of the things I see in it I springboard from that into discussions of you know philosophy and what it means to be human and what poetry is and what art by extension is and what expression is and creativity it's a lot in there so we'll start at the very beginning with the first character and the question is what is it what is it it's an L yes and number one it is both there's a contractual obligation at nerd night that somebody has to mention a Schrodinger's cat so I'm happy that I get to be the one to do that okay lay person's terms Schrodinger's cat is this system where you have this closed box and inside is unstable isotope and a lethal mechanism of some kind and a cat if the isotope either decays or it doesn't if the isotope decays it triggers the mechanism and kills the cat if it doesn't decay and it might not for a while then the cat lives and the point is until you observe what's happening in the box the cat is said to be in a super state where it is both a living cat and a dead cat I can't explain it any further than that but I like that that really applies to this character because when you need it to be an L in loneliness it becomes the L in loneliness and when you look at it as the numeral one it is the numeral one and as soon as you stop requiring it to be either of those it returns to the super state of being both an L and a number one very literally this was not Cummings typewriter but around the same time you'll notice a key missing if you're used to contemporary keyboards right you would type one key on this typewriter or others of its kind you would type L space L I M E and that would read one line so it was literally the same character does anyone know how you would do an exclamation point a period and backspace apostrophe so shift 8 so it took 4 characters or 4 keystrokes like so many exclamation points in a row like that grammatical aberration you wouldn't see it because it would just take too much time so bring back the old smith corona how many times does this poem in just a few characters iterate and re-iterate this idea of one this number one why one because loneliness but look at how many times it comes up first of all there is the Roman numeral at the top of the page this is very standard for poets to put Roman numerals on their poems that's what Pound did this is the first poem in the series Cummings has the numeral Roman numeral one but obviously that is also a super state character it is both the Roman numeral one and the first person singular pronoun I which is really significant when you talk about poetry because people are always saying who is speaking the poem and this is the I of the poem and the whole series at the top of the first poem when we talk about the number one we're talking about several things we're talking about singularity being alone we're talking about wholeness being one whole and we're also talking about firstness so this Roman numeral one is the first it's first person singular and then we get into the poem L is also the number one so signifying the number one is by being alone from the rest of its work it is the only letter separated from the rest of its work then we have the first the singular pronoun A which is also the first letter of the alphabet together the L and the A is La which is a singular pronoun in Spanish and in French Le is a singular pronoun in French you have the two L's or ones in the middle of the poem which is an interesting demonstration that even though they're together they're still separated by the typographical space so even together they're separate just as all these iterations of the idea of one they make a crowd but they're all still just one Cummings of course breaks out the word one from the word loneliness but it's not the word one it's the syllable on or really it is both it's on its own and it's also the word one and then I just noticed this recently there's the one again which is an L but I just noticed that it's the only line in the poem that is one character long so it's like that one guy in the party where everyone's like grouped off I've been in that position so I kind of relate to that I think I was not looking at it on purpose but now I know this but it's the only single line in the whole poem and then of course I-ness at the end is the Roman numeral one again so all these iterations of one this bracket signifies that the whole thing looks like a number one kind of I mean with the seras at the bottom and then of course there's the way it appears on the page which is just astonishing like this white expanse of page and this tiny thing there's no bigger than my pinky holding the page open so we talk about loneliness because one the idea of one is singular it's also whole the one whole and it's also the first-ness and when we talk about loneliness the poem is only saying loneliness it's not telling us how to feel about loneliness or what kind of loneliness so here are a few ideas about loneliness first one is the loneliest number that you'll ever do two can be as bad as one it's the loneliest number since the number one which is a bullshit lyric right because two is not a lonely number nobody goes look at those two people they look so lonely but the reason I quote it is because of the bad it's as bad as one like it's this is a very common way to think about loneliness that it's a sad and bad state to be in but there's this poem by William Carlos Williams this is especially good for men if you're a man and haven't seen this this is a especially I think men should read Donce Bruce by William Carlos Williams and it has this wonderful line I am lonely I was born to be lonely I am best so I think women can relate to that too I know my wife does when I leave with my daughter just like when she takes my daughter out of town I'm like I miss you and have fun and then there's that I'm alone again which is a really soaring feeling sometimes like a lobo solo and then of course this quote by Ginny Romady be first and be lonely right the idea that Ginny Romady is the CEO president and I think chairperson of IBM and often cited as one of the most powerful people you know in the country or in the world but this idea of being the icono being the leader of the icono class somebody who's doing something different from anybody else like doing an entire presentation in silence be first and be lonely it's a risk so I've talked about the loneliness and I've talked about the singleness but I want to talk about a leaf falls for a moment look a leaf falls so these are small enough ideas that you're supposed to hold them both in your head at the same time the leaf and the loneliness and then all these different possibilities emerge so the first thing is have you ever seen a leaf fall and specifically watched a leaf fall has anybody seen that I'm a little surprised okay you're like yes come on like it's obvious unless you're really watching you can be in a place where leaves are falling around you but to actually notice a leaf falling you kind of have to be watching a tree for a while unless they're just like pouring out of the tree but it always surprises me how fast they go but I would love this image of the leaf falling as loneliness because a leaf is part of the tree it emerges from the chemistry of the tree and it's part of the tree and living with all the other leaves and then when it falls it's on the ground with all the other leaves and it's only in that one solo pirouette that it falls is alone it's the one time a leaf is alone right so an ideal image about being lonely it's sad because it's dying it's also adventurous because it's finally crossing that river Jordan by itself and it's also leading the way for the leaves that will fall them as far as it knows I guess also noticing a leaf fall you kind of have to be alone I really do think that if you're with other people or you're doing something else at Lake Merrick and leaves are falling then you don't really notice a single leaf falling when you notice a single leaf falling and begin to reflect on how that is this image of loneliness this image, this moment where the leaf leaves its company to rejoin a different company and that very brief I guess it really depends on the species of tree but it goes really fast the first time I saw it happen I'm like wow I mean it just went right down so to meditate on it you have to be alone as well and I pointed out that the poem looks like one but it also has the shape this has been pointed out by other critics of this poem it has the shape that your eye would follow as it watches a leaf fall which at first I read I didn't believe it because I had the romantic notion of a leaf kind of swirling and twisting and then I saw it just kind of fall and people say it flips over here between AF and FA and then drifts sideways and then there's a little swoop at the end of Inus so it's almost a cartoon if you didn't know that Cummings was a painter as well so there's something very painterly happening in here and also something very mathematical I want to take you a little bit through the math of this poem it's been pointed out by other critics of this poem that the LL in the very middle is something like an upended equal sign and as such it represents some equalities that are happening first of all the image of the leaf falling is equal to the idea of loneliness there's something you hold like the Libra Scales one on each side that they're equal also the state of the leaf in the tree with its fellows is equal somehow to the state of the leaf on the ground with its fellows it's in this cycle and also the idea that the happy loneliness is the same as the sad loneliness that's a very Zen idea of emotions how they come and go and the weight and the color that we attribute to our moods is something that the mind is doing separate from what the mood is doing I think that's a complicated way of saying that the loneliness is our equal the happy loneliness and the sad loneliness are somehow the same and also I just want to take this moment to point out the symmetry of the poem, the line, the space three lines, a space a line, a space, three lines, a space it's really intentional it's really carefully and consciously crafted and there's this amazing thing that happens too when we talk about the math we'll count the characters count with me let's start with one, ready? one, two, three, four yeah, when I first saw that it blew me away there's an old question about what did the poet intend did he put that there, did he know and of course it's a question that can't be answered that finally doesn't really matter the fact that it's there is so astonishing to me and so perfect and then, you know, it's anticlimactic to say it but the rest of the poem also equals 11 more characters so that equal sign operates again 11, right there, 11 this is a poem of associative meaning in that you have to keep going outside to figure out what it's about you can't stay in the poem, that's unusual most poems you read by Emily Dickinson or you know Alison Luterman who's a great local influence poet, they tell a story, they share a thought you go into the poem and read the poem and you get the idea about what you're supposed to think about and dwell on this poem doesn't give you anything but loneliness and elite falls and what you do with that is up to you, you have to go outside the poem to associate that's very rare for a poem to do that it's like somebody saying suit you know like what suit do you think of you're given nothing but the very barest of details so you're constantly drawn back in to see what the poem does but no other poem asks you to count the number of characters or look at the first letters in the lines and see the word fall rises in the first line or the first column of letters or rising fall it's doing so many things I think I'm going to speed over this I kind of want to put it in because of Michel Foucault that's for the literary nerds you're welcome but the idea is that it's never it's never showing it's never speaking it's either saying loneliness elite falls or else it's visually representing things but it can never do both at the same time like Schrodinger's cat it's either an L or it's a one they're both at the same time but this is how I love this quote from E. E. Cummings to destroy is always the first step in any creation and tying in with Derrida's quote that no more word the efficacy is coming from the syllables which scatters the word actually he's talking about Malarmé in this quote but the idea is the same that he's broken up the words into these tiny pieces and that's where the efficacy comes so remember that language started about 10,000 years ago so the words that we use have this ancient, ancient idea of where they come from and letters started about 10,000 years ago so by breaking the words into the letters now we have to look not just at what the words mean what leaf is, what loneliness is we now have to figure out what is L what is one, what do these letters have as far as their history to tell us from this poem it's an associative well to fall down for 25 years which is what I have done I woke up in 2009 and realized well you know Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do well you get La and you get Fa and Lei is actually La Flat it's La down a half step so I'm going to attempt to play okay we're okay so it sounds like this I did that for 3 notes but here it goes I'm going to do that again I picked a nice mysterious sounding patch I'll sing it next time La Lei Fa so it has the sound in it it woke me up out of a dead sleep at 2 in the morning I mean back that there's sound in this poem really astonishes me because I've always considered it or thought of it as being a silent poem how do you read it like leaves like how do you pronounce that it defies the voice and that's extremely significant because poetry so sometime between 50,000 BCE and 6000 BCE sometime between the invention of language and written language is when poetry develops poetry predates written language it was passed down in the voice it lives in the voice and to this day poetry is all about being spoken and this is one poem be first and be lonely one poem that dares to defy the voice you can't read it out loud it's extremely iconoclastic is it even a poem can I go back in and play a video or is it going to make too much home I'm going to give it a shot so there's this great video I'm just going to play a little bit of it the history of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow you might remember Michael Winslow from police academy he's not really a comedian his shtick is that he does sound affection to his mouth that's his thing and he did this video called the recitation of the history of the typewriter so here's just a little bit of that he had victim model 5 I just restarted while I restarted I wanted to say why I shared that is that you're all going to see my password now I'm not a comedian but he's not he's kind of doing a recitation but there's no words in it except for the title cards so what is this it's a video I guess that's as much as you can say about defining what this piece of cultural art is it's a video creative people have to remember that labels like poem, painting, performance these are labels but what we actually create is free to completely go beyond any of these expectations like somebody coming on stage and doing something entirely silent or somebody doing a recitation with no words or a poem that doesn't fit into the voice it is really more of a painting than a poem I don't speak French people speak French here could all people who speak French say this and want to count to three out loud so I can hear thank you so it's not a pipe we know it's a painting but the idea is oh see I remember this now what's the title of this painting does anyone remember it's like the trickery of imagery or something there's a name that talks about how this is fooling you into thinking it's a pipe the idea being that the literal sense in the literal sense paintings poems, writing, language these are incapable of letting you into it the thing itself because everything is just a copy it's all just symbolic language and I love the idea of the alien coming down and you say to the alien okay this corresponds to something in the world see if you can figure out what it is it's all just symbols we understand them and we use them to be able to communicate the idea but your leaf is not the same as my leaf and yet I took a photo of the book where you see an actual leaf because a sheet of paper is called a leaf and that's the point of this poem is that it is provoking crises in language by showing the unstable and undecidable relationships between all these different meanings and the relationships between forms and these different grammatical categories and the crisis is a result of the logic of language it's not a distortion of it this is actually what language does the purpose and why it works is that it's undecidable and that's how I can say something that means something different to me than it does to you but we can still understand one another that's all in there maybe I don't know does one equal one I think of even our most fundamental language which is the language of math you know but that doesn't really equal that because that one's on this side and that one's on that side so even something as fundamental as math depends on an imaginative leaf all the time into what is the idea, not the thing itself I wish I had a stronger ending but the question is really open for me it really is always open for me with this poem so instead at the end of the plug this is my forthcoming book the cover of it one way to ask and I had a publisher it was a digital book but they don't have the app ready yet they were doing the proprietary app so now I'm kind of looking for a publisher so if you know somebody the manuscript is ready I don't think you can see my email down there but either find me or I'll just say it out loud at this point it's eflux e-f-f-l-u-x at sonic.net and I'd love to ping you when it comes out it's my original poems with art by 67 different artists including our Chrome he told me not to chrome-sploit him but I said I couldn't really chrome-sploit him with poetry but I have works by Roz Chast who does zippy the paint head going with poetry I'm very pleased with it so I'd love to ping you just one time when it comes out if you're interested and are there any questions thank you just to repeat the question it was a compliment to me in my intelligence, thank you so much the point was really good it will be hard people that spend their careers interpreting Beowulf it's in old English we've lost that language what the gentleman made was that now the typewriters are a thing of the past and fonts are a different creature than they used to be you know the Cummings poetry that he's really one of the only poets that depends on typography to make his poem I think there's people who still do concrete poetry like put words into pictures but I haven't seen anybody do it like him it's like harpal marks it's like there was one of a kind so, yeah, it could be lost I hope not, thank you yeah, yell it out yeah, good question is the recording of him reading this I have a lot of recordings of him reading but never this poem so maybe he really did not meant it to be read, he always does anyone lived in a pretty high town that's the one I was here and Millie and Maggie and Molly and May went to the something something, I have to get back to you on that I've never heard a recording of this poem damn him you know way in the back with the light, yeah my second favorite good question, I think it's in Just Spring with a little lame blue man whistles far and we maybe, yeah, I think that's the one there's a lot I also love buffalo bills defunct do you know that one? it's shaped like a bullet and he's writing about, you know something about Buffalo Bill's death and as a novice poet, I used to try to mimic that I forget who I wrote about, but you know someone's always dead there was something beating it about that poem what's yours? what's your second favorite coming poem? in a station at the metro, that's a pound I think good poem any other questions? oh yeah did he play with puzzles? he didn't know him personally I wish I did you know, I know he was really inspired by his painting and his paintings almost look typographic the ones I remember seeing have little black and white lines black lines on white fields in shapes so he was moving toward hybrid of those things I don't know about puzzles I would not put a past in thank you so much I really appreciate it so thanks, that was great while I switch laptops can you guys just keep on clapping for our three speakers I do want to highlight some upcoming events I will mostly focus first of all, Tourette's Without Regrets is like this but with way more booms and you should go because they're a new bigger space I also wanted to point out the Bay Area Science Festival events are starting to be announced just tonight they released tickets to Bofest the bad and hot hypotheses festival last year it sold out to the Castro it was great and this year it's probably going to be just as great so get on that now I'm glad you stuck around because we're trying something new if you remember that code you'll get one dollar off your ticket if you order online in advance our next show is going to be awesome we're going to have some of those sex interactments with Warren Esposito marbling of paper and cloth by Alex Preston and female ejaculation with Dr. Danny Belchak we're looking forward to seeing you next month last Monday of September have a great month