The 17 Steps of the New Scientific Method

snake_oil

The old scientific method was okay, but let’s face facts: It was naïve, paid literally no attention to popularity or profitability, and tended to breed conspiracy theorists. The new scientific method resolves all these inconveniences by adding twelve steps to the original five. Please update your textbooks as follows to reflect this market-based change. (Original steps are indicated in bold.)

1. Formulate a question.

2. Ask your Facebook friends if it’s okay with them if you ask that question.

3. Revise the question in light of popular opinion.

4. Pose the question to Facebook for approval.

5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until all controversy is eliminated.

6. Formulate a hypothesis.

7. Make a prediction.

8. Seek funding from your government, university, or interested private party.

9. Revise your question, hypothesis and prediction in line with funding requirements.

10. Test your hypothesis and measure it against your prediction.

11. Analyze the test results. Does it confirm or deny your prediction?

12. Redesign and rerun your test if it does not confirm your prediction.

13. Remove all inconclusive or conflicting test results from the record.

14. Present your favorable findings to your funding source(s).

15. Get more funding.

16. Get drunk to forget your conscience.

17. Keep an eye on Facebook, the news, and your friends and family for more social cues.

How Not to Clean Up Your Email Contacts

I have 897 people in my email contact list. I even know some of them.

Some of my contacts are friends; others are business colleagues or clients. Others are people who may have been important to me at some point for some reason but I’ll be damned if I can tell you why.

Some of my contacts aren’t people at all. They’re mailing list subscription addresses I keep around to prevent their important messages from going to spam so I can personally click “delete” thirty times every morning and throughout the day. Why automate when you can pretend you have some control over your life, right?

I even have some sworn enemies in my email contacts. They started out as friends, family, or neighbors, but maybe later I super-glued your incessantly barking dog to an oak tree even though you can’t prove it, and now I just keep your address around so I can relive my spitting rage every time I try fruitlessly to clean up my contact list before giving up in a fit of PTSD.

How It Got This Bad

I used to be quite the social maven back when the Internet was a toddler and Tripod was the best website building tool anyone knew of. I’m the guy who threw a party where you got wasted and made out with another person I barely know and the two of you ended up getting married and divorced to and from. You know, that party you don’t remember anything about and neither do I. That’s why you’re one of the 897 people on my contact list. Happy belated anniversary twelve times, by the way, and sorry it didn’t work out.

I used my huge network to market art shows, rock concerts, and book releases for an artist collective I used to contribute to. And how did I meet all those people and get them to come to events? By hobnobbing it like a politician all over town and gathering email addresses.

And then there was the decade between then and now, with untold other social circles accumulated from coast to American coast.

Now I have all these old contacts and I want them gone.

Baby, Take Me Back. I Was Wrong.

But maybe I don’t. This is where it gets dicey. Maybe some of those old contacts are genuine friends; it’s hard to tell the difference in these lonely times of mass media, Internet tubes, and cheese in a spray can. I don’t want to delete a long-lost contact just because they’re long and lost. Maybe I only met that random person once or twice six years ago, but who knows? They could be super awesome! We should definitely meet up for coffee and suffer horribly through our terrified smiles as we try to remember each other’s names thirty minutes into the conversation.

How do you decide who your real friends are? Is it a function of how good they make you feel? How much money they represent to you? How many genes you share with them? If they smell good?

What’s your tribe, man? And how do you clean up your contact list? Do you go through it one entry at a time and wrack your brain to remember who they are? Maybe divide them into “Definitely Know Them”, “Definitely Might Know Them”, “Probably Not”, “I Always Did Like the Name Angela”, and start eliminating from there?

Do you stress about burning bridges that will likely never be crossed anyway? I do.

Science to the Rescue?

I worry about these things. So I consult Science. For example, Science’s “Dunbar’s Number” tells me that my brain should theoretically only be able to make sense of 150 people in my social world. The rest can be discarded. Right?

But no. It’s not that stinking easy. With the advent of the Internet, social media, and LOLCats, the average personal network size has grown to 250, 634, or 1200, depending on which Scientist you ask. What’s that say about how meaningful our relationships actually are? And shouldn’t I automatically know who is important to me? No, because apparently I am merely a shallow and disconnected specimen in the Zuckerbergian Meat Freezer formerly known as Earth.

I don’t know. Just hit delete and see what happens, I tell myself.

But what if, my huge and impressive amygdala nags. What if you delete someone destined to become your wife? What if that person you so blithely erased from your contacts really is the King of Nigeria and does want you pay you $2.5 million to run over to the Western Union for a sec? What if you’re high on ditch weed and don’t know what you’re doing?

Apparently the size of your amygdala, which is the center of fear and loathing in the brain, is correlated to the number of online contacts you have. So basically the more contacts you have, the more irrationally afraid of losing them you are, and/or vice versa. More contacts, growls the amygdala, taking over all of your higher brain functions. Must have more contacts. I figure the amygdala looks like something out of Akira at this point.

Inconclusion

I’ve just explained why my email contact list makes me feel like I have spiders and hot helium inside of my chest and skull. I haven’t even mentioned my social media profiles, phone contact lists or, ahem, the people I actually know outside of this technological jungle I chose to colonize.

What a mess. I can’t make any sense of it. Meanwhile I still have 897 email contacts. Do you feel my pain? Do you have any insights? Feel free to comment. Hell, email me about it. I hope we end up the best of friends.

– Will Conley is a writer and Web presence planner who specializes in making other people’s lives easier. Wish him luck on his own.

Sources and recommended reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

http://www.cogsci.bme.hu/~ktkuser/DOWNLOAD/PCS/ujanyagokpszichologiarol/personality.pdf

http://www.bodyspacesociety.eu/2010/12/29/numbers/

http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Technology-and-social-networks/Part-3/SNS-users.aspx

http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~ufruss/documents/Estimating.network.size.pdf

http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/mccormick_salganik_zheng10.pdf

http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/

http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v14/n2/abs/nn.2724.html

The garage my father inhabited in the 1950s in Venice Beach, CA.

How an Abducted Baby Met His Dad 19 Years Later and Made Pilgrimages

Another working excerpt from my forthcoming memoir about my mother:

I met my father when I was 20. He was 61. It was the year 2000.

My mother had abducted me from our home city in Upstate New York to the Twin Cities, Minnesota during a custody battle with my father in 1981. I was a baby.

Nineteen years later, a few months after my mother had moved back to New York to reconnect with her blood family, she mailed me a handwritten letter. The letter contained my dad’s phone number. It was Father’s Day.

What the hell. Why not. I picked up the phone. It was three in the morning. Whatever.

Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Hello,” said a 60-grit sandpaper baritone. “You’ve reached Transformations Enterprises and Pathways to Peace. We are not able to answer the phone right now, but if you’ll leave a short message after the sound of the beep, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Thank you for calling, and have a nice day.”

“Hi,” I said. “This is. My name is Will Conley.” In matter-of-fact tones I explained who I was, what my name was, who my mother was, and when and where I was born. “I apologize if this is the wrong number. But if it’s the right number, here’s my number. You can call me back if you like. Thank you for your time.”

Eight in the morning. I picked up the ringing phone.

The sandpaper baritone: “What is going on here?”

“Well,” I replied. I reiterated what I had told him on his answering machine. “My mother gave me your number. Not sure if it’s the right one.”

Pause.

“Well, Will. It looks like you found your old man.”

We struck up an email conversation in which we learned that we are very much alike despite having been apart all my life. I learned that his other son through a different wife had disappeared and hadn’t contacted my father in 15 years. I learned my dad was a former atheist but a current poet, writer, anger management specialist, and a spiritual man.

I flew a thousand miles to see him one month after our first stammering phone call. We hit it off. His wife accepted me and asked me if I would please call her Stepmom. I consented, for she is delightful.

A few days into the visit, I summoned my mother to visit us. She drove the three hours from central New York and came to dinner. She and my father, who hadn’t seen each other since before the day she took me away from him, took a walk to the lake, where lived a pair of monogamous white swans named Lily and Dale. My long-divorced mother and father returned to the house and announced to Jan and me that they had made amends.

Ten years later, when I was 30, I visited the garage my father lived in and wrote poetry in during the beatnik 1950s in Venice Beach, California. I called him on the spot and told him where I was standing. I wrote his name on the door latch in permanent marker.

This is the garage.

The garage my father inhabited in the 1950s in Venice Beach, CA.

The garage my father inhabited in the 1950s in Venice Beach, CA. Photo courtesy of Sophia Daly, a fantastic designer and project manager based in San Diego.

The story continues.

Note: This piece was updated Jan. 17, 2013.

All These Cities I’ve Lived In

Places I've Lived

Click the map image to view it in a new window or tab in Google Maps and see whether we’ve ever lived in the same place! (Chances are good.)

I’ve lived in 19 cities over the course of 33 years thus far. In the United States, these include urban, suburban, and rural places in the Midwest, the Rust Belt, New England, the Southwest, and the Deep South. Internationally, I’ve lived in Paris, France and London, United Kingdom.

For some of these cities, I lived in multiple domiciles over time.

Why so many places, you ask? I was chasing love, poetry, money, family, ghosts, memories, sunshine, trouble, the unknown, natural beauty of many shapes and hues, and other experiences worth sacrificing for.

What did I get for all this globetrotting? Why, the world. I’ve integrated with numerous cultures and subcultures. I’ve learned about the ways in which people differ and the ways in which they coincide, and that the latter is far more often the case. I filled up my eyes with visions of geological grandeur and the cosmic chandelier up there. I got God, I got a piece of the Devil, I got a lousy t-shirt.

The journalist in me got the story. Whatever it takes, right?

But what price did I pay for all this? I got broke and broken and reassembled, I got lonely and exultant. I’ve both toughened and become more vulnerable. The price I paid was often the same as the reward I reaped; in the end, the difference between those seeming opposites was always one of attitude.

I moved back to Minneapolis, stomping ground of my glory days of youth, last summer with the stated intention to “stay here as long as it takes to watch a hardwood tree grow up from sapling to large enough for children to climb on.” I prefer not to speak of time in linear terms, but in relation to the motions of nature.

I’m also experienced enough to know that just because I have plans doesn’t mean something won’t come along to change them. I’m perfectly content where I am, but the roads and skies and fabled train tracks might one day call my name again. The chorus of their voices can be very bewitching.

The Real Definition of Insanity

Insanity: Repeating the same simplistic cliché over and over because you think Albert Einstein said it.

The real definition of insanity.

Brought to you by TheWrongDictionary.com and The Wrong Dictionary on Facebook. The Wrong Dictionary is a growing fake glossary of tomfoolery,  inspired by works in a similar vein by Ambrose Bierce, Gustave Flaubert, and Voltaire. It is one of my two satirical projects-in-progress.