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#i just used up all my brain cells to translate the transcription of what he said...... its all on twitter btw but MY BRAIN.....
95z · 4 years
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the dumpling incident
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pianjeong · 4 years
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biology zuko
this got SO long so i made my own post instead of tacking it onto the zuko vs bio post anyway thank u sonny @itszukkatime for enabling me i’m a bio major so here come headcanons
zuko doesn’t expect to be good at bio the first time he takes it bc as established he has never once understood math and he took chemistry first and that was literally the undiscovered 10th circle of hell
so he’s braced for failure from day 1 but then the prof starts talking and he’s like ??? where’s the math ? and there ISN’T math that goes past like. arithmetic and he can just use a calculator for that
instead it’s all diagrams and flow charts and understanding the connections between things and his notes are literally the prettiest things like colour coded for each process or whatever. he can freehand a cell organelle diagram. it’s incredible
the first quiz he gets an a on makes him cry bc he’s never made an a on a stem related quiz ever
you know those big rolls of butcher paper that are in every school ever for some reason? yeah he steals a bunch of paper off of those and basically wallpapers his room with flow charts bc he’s a visual learner and even the chemistry is easier if he can actually see the molecular structures
more on the visual learning point: he’s one of Those People who can visualize three dimensional structures like it’s nothing so stuff like understanding how enzymes work and why replication/transcription/translation happens the way it does makes a lot of sense to him bc he can literally see how the proteins and nucleotides interlock
it doesn’t really make sense to anyone else bc they just memorized things (like why A/T and G/C bond in DNA or whatever) or only understand why they happen on a theoretical level and zuko is just sitting there drawing the protein structure of polymerase like “what like it’s hard??”
mnemonics for EVERYTHING. words brain go brrr like he will whisper some stupid phrase under his breath during exams (the only one i can think of is ‘leo says ger’ for redox which is...only tangentially relevant for like. cellular respiration SORRY i didn’t memorize those kskks) and only he understands it but u know? only he needs to understand it
the only thing he struggles with is genetics and evolution (not the concept but the actual mathematical evaluation of how it happens) bc he does NOT understand probability and there are too many fractions. statistics is hard. he sticks with molecular bio from then on
LABWORK....(god i miss the lab) my boy cannot drive a car but he’s the king of pipettes...thinking abt how firebending is really about control esp. of the breath and about how many times i’ve messed up bc i breathed at the wrong time and my hand shook
he does struggle with microscopes especially once they introduce the dual eyepiece ones bc u kno...only one functioning eye and the other one gets tired more easily bc of it
(sokka invents a modified microscope that accommodates for his specific issue)
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Witches, Chapter 20: in which I allow Phoenix to channel my frustration at how long this case took to end, make up more backstory for a character who’s dead when we meet them in an extra DLC case, and the orca case still will continue for one more chapter after this.
[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]
[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]
----
Blackquill is out for blood today.
Not that he wasn’t yesterday, or in April - not that this isn’t just his default state. But Phoenix simply tries to tell the judge that the defense is ready and gets attacked by the damn hawk. “Ready,” Blackquill drawls, and now Phoenix is no longer ready, and that’s how the trial starts, with some loose feathery fluff fallen on his scattered notes laid out on the bench, and talons perilously close to his eyes. 
If this is a test of Phoenix, Edgeworth seeing what he’ll put up with, the answer is “a lot”, and he’d really be glad if Edgeworth would go ahead and ban the bird.
Dr Crab is the first witness up on the stand, and though he wasn’t the intended witness for today, Blackquill gives no hint of that. But while it might not be what the prosecution wants, a chance to cross-examine Crab, on the record, all eyes of the court watching, to dig the truth out of him, is exactly what Phoenix wants. 
(Rimes is still an open question, why he’s holding back on testifying. He made clear yesterday that he wants to help Sasha, wishes they would’ve protected her better, and doesn’t trust Orla. Does he know something that he knows would further implicate Sasha and that’s what he’s refusing to say? Does he still actually believe somehow that Orla did it but he doesn’t want to be the man to damn the orca with his testimony, knowing how distraught Sasha would be? Does he know who actually did it? Did he actually do it but is he a murderer who has a conscience and still doesn’t want his friend to take the fall?)
No time to speculate on Rimes. His current suspect is the man on the witness stand, and maybe Dr Crab didn’t kill Jack Shipley, but he did try to kill Orla, didn’t he?
What do they know? Phoenix can prove that the murder happened with Orla right nearby - the Luminol reactions on her skin in places where she herself wasn’t bleeding. And he can say that could have happened at the time Dr Crab was scheduled to meet the victim at the orca pool. It could’ve been drained then too. They only have Crab’s own word that he didn’t go. And then they only have his own word that the sleeping pills that he purchased were stolen out of his laboratory. Uh huh, certainly, that’s real convenient. 
But they don’t have proof, solidly, and the burden of proof lies with the defense. Phoenix’s case that it was Dr Crab who tried to kill Orla (they’re still working their way, slowly, back to Jack Shipley’s murder) is broken by the mere possibility that someone else could have taken and used the sleeping pills. He’s not the prosecution, even if he feels like it right now. This isn’t enough for the defense. All it’s enough for is to piss Dr Crab off that he, an honorable veterinarian, is being accused of trying to kill an animal in his care. 
“Wright-dono,” Blackquill says after Dr Crab’s fury at the slander has abated, “surely you are not suggesting that the orca was drugged for fear that it as a witness would speak to the truth of the murder?” He speaks with a cold condescension that tells Phoenix he knows, yes, this is exactly what Phoenix is suggesting, but he is still going to kindly repeat this back to him to allow him to hear it from another’s mouth and thus reconsider the absolute stupidity of this statement.
Phoenix is not going to reconsider the absolute stupidity of this statement. He’s bluffed on stupider. “Orcas are very intelligent creatures,” he says. “A veterinarian would of course know this, and it’s not that much of a stretch to think that he should be concerned about what Orla might be able to indicate. Besides,” he adds, knowing that when this case is over Edgeworth is going to take the transcript and highlight this section and smack him in the face with it, “I have it on good authority that the victim, Jack Shipley, was known to be able to converse with the orca. Who’s to say—” 
Blackquill slams his hand down several times on the bench, laughing as he does, loud and ugly mirth over the clang of his cuffs also hitting the wood and the rattle of the chain. “I should have expected this of you, Wright-dono. Your students were the ones who tried to make the phantasm of a yokai out to be a very real murderer. More the fool am I to have hoped that you would be any better than stooping to claiming magic is real.” 
He hoped. Is he serious right now - he knows for a fact that Tenma Taro is very real, and he was the one who told Edgeworth that. He learned that without being physically present there, must have heard what his hawk heard, and he says magic isn’t real. He probably thinks it’s funny, wouldn’t he, to say shit he knows isn’t true knowing that it will make Phoenix sound like more of a lunatic. Knowing that Phoenix can’t actually know what he believes about anything he says, because his presence blinds Phoenix’s Sight. 
(The more he thinks about that, the more disturbed he gets. That shouldn’t happen. The Sight sees through fae glamours that a changeling might not know she has in place; the Sight gives him glimpses of a changeling who knows but is trying to deny what he is. Klavier’s disappearing act hits both sets of eyes; Pearl doesn’t seem any more out of place with one or the other. It takes his magatama for that. But Blackquill was confusing even Pearl - hiding, she said. Hiding what he is, isn’t that what she said - or did she say who? What kind of magic, or force of will, or whatever, can possibly—)
“And tell me, presuming even that the victim could commune with the orca, what then is your plan? Do you know of some ritual to bring those very truly dead back to life so that our dead man may translate the orca for us - and should you know such, please, do enlighten me as to why we shouldn’t just ask the dead man to tell us who killed him.” He’s still smirking. Phoenix hates him.
“That was just an example,” Phoenix says. “I believe the defendant has also some ability to know what the orca is communicating.”
He glances at Sasha, who looks extremely alarmed. Maybe that he’s fallen to making this point in court, or maybe she was just teasing him when she said she was translating Orla. Well. Too late to take it back now. 
“Yes, of course.” Blackquill lowers his chin, glowering at Phoenix. “We will ask the orca about the murder the defendant committed, and the defendant shall translate her testimony for us. Tell me, do you see an issue with that?”
“Er…” Yeah. Yeah, that’s an issue.
Dr Crab drums his fingers on the witness stand. “If you’re finished with this line of consideration, may I add something? Think, Mr Lawyer, that had I wanted to poison Orla - who was it that treated and saved her when you came running to say something was wrong?” He waits for a moment’s emphasis, during which time Phoenix considers that he didn’t say they were out of their minds debating talking to an orca, and then adds, “Me.”
“Well,” Phoenix says. Shit, that’s true. He could’ve just let her die, couldn’t he? “Except shouldn’t you have known what was going on with her, without Pearl having to come get you? The TORPEDO is constantly monitoring, right? It should’ve been telling you something was going on!”
“Son of a—” Dr Crab inhales and blows out his breath through gritted teeth. “Son of a gun. You really had to remember that all and bring it up, huh? You’re not as birdbrained as you look.”
“Objection.” Blackquill doesn’t have to yell to be heard; he drops the courtroom into silence no matter how quietly he speaks. Is it magic or just another trick of his terrifying presence? “The defense’s brain does not merit this disparaging comparison to birds - they are far smarter than he.”
“Hmph.” Dr Crab shakes his head. “Bird-lover, I should’ve guessed.” Taka isn’t on Blackquill’s shoulder right now, but maybe Dr Crab saw it when Blackquill spoke with him yesterday. Is Taka a jailbird too? “You and I aren’t destined for friendship then.”
Someone should give Blackquill one of those penguin calendars when this trial is over. It might brighten up his prison cell a bit. 
“My apologies, Dr Crab.” Phoenix feels like he’s interrupting something but it might be better that way, before Blackquill picks a full-on fight with a veterinarian about how smart birds on average are or aren’t. (Varies across species, surely? Crows are smart; Kay harps on that all the time, but Phoenix still wouldn’t get anything out of calling a crow to testify unless Kay was there translating. Parrots, though—) “But I did warn you yesterday that if it would help Sasha’s case, I would divulge whatever it took.”
“Back up one moment,” Blackquill cuts in. “What is this ‘TORPEDO’?”
And Phoenix’s next accusatory tangent lies dead in the water by the end of it, with Dr Crab pissed that Phoenix has announced his illegal activity in court - fair enough - and Blackquill puzzling out that yes, Dr Crab would be telling the truth when he said he didn’t get any warning data on Orla. The sensor is attached in her tank and sends sound waves through the water, but if there’s no water in the tank - or in, say, half of the tank, the half that was drained where the police found an odd-looking sensor during their investigation - then no data gets communicated. Therefore, Dr Crab doesn’t know that Orla is in trouble, and can’t come running to save her. 
Bizarre, really, to see Blackquill of all people be the one to figure out why the aquarium’s high-tech equipment was and wasn’t working the way it does. Is Phoenix projecting a little about his own technological inadequacies? Maybe. Is it also just generally shocking to see a man who talks and acts like he was dropped here straight from feudal Japan so quickly grasp what’s going on with this monitoring system that he only had explained to him three minutes ago? Yes. And is it frustrating when, by knowing that the sensor in Orla’s pool only turned off twice, during the overnight cleaning and during the police investigation, they know that the pool was never drained another time, leaving no other time that the victim could’ve been killed in the orca pool room, meaning that Sasha is the only one who could’ve killed the victim? Absolutely. 
His theory broken down by tiny inconsistencies that add up into something bigger; this is what it’s like to be the prosecution. Except by this point Phoenix is pretty sure Dr Crab didn’t actually try to kill Orla. He’s pretty sure of that even when he objects that someone did try and kill Orla, no way around it, no matter if it wasn’t Dr Crab. Two people fed Orla during the trial yesterday, when the drug would’ve gotten into her system. Sasha was one - unfortunately, because nothing can be easy - and the other was Marlon Rimes.
Not quite the place he thought this would end up, to be honest.
-
The judge calls a short recess for Rimes to be summoned, and Blackquill cuts that down to a minute and a half because Rimes is apparently already here in the courthouse. It leaves Athena enough time to say she can’t belive this, either, and Dr Crab to drop Azura’s charm, the one Rifle ate, on the defense’s bench and tell them that he certainly doesn’t want to accuse either Sasha or Marlon, but the truth is what it is and it’s up to them to figure it out, and best of luck to them. “Now I think I should’ve learned Japanese,” Athena says, holding the charm up close to her face and then wrinkling her nose and quickly pushing it away, some fishy smell remaining to bother her. From that distance she squints at the characters inked on the front. “Like I kept going back and forth on whether I wanted to, but it wasn’t as practical as the languages for countries I was studying in, and then with the Bar too—”
“Athena, you really don’t need to justify not knowing how to read Japanese.” It’s like she thinks she’s supposed to be able to do everything all at once, and she falls silent, looking at him and then back down at the charm.
“I think these are like - not supposed to be opened? Or it’s bad luck to open it or maybe I’m thinking of something else.”
“Better hold off on that, then.” Phoenix holds out his hand and she drops it in his palm and then Fulbright ushers Rimes up to the stand and that’s the end of Blackquill’s speedrun recess.
Rimes, despite being at the courthouse, apparently doesn’t know what was happening in the trial, implying that Blackquill just dropped him in a lobby and left him there and - other than the hawk attack right at the start, Phoenix hasn’t actually seen Taka around. He pictures Rimes sitting paralyzed with fear under the watchful and murderous eyes of the prosecution’s attack bird. That’s probably how it was. 
“Mr Rimes,” the judge says, probably pleased that for once he’s not the most clueless person in the courtroom. “You are under suspicion of the attempted murder of the orca.”
Phoenix decides that if it’d bad luck to fiddle with this charm, he’s already cursed enough as-is, and he might as well go ahead and do it. There’s something inside the little packet, another thin slip of paper, and he slides it out to find a small photograph, showing Rimes with his arm around the dark-haired young woman from DePlume’s book. Azura Summers, bright-eyed and alive, with an anchor-shaped orca whistle around her neck and behind her and Rimes, the orca.
Now that’s a hell of an interesting revelation, isn’t it. Phoenix sets the charm down on the bench and turns his attention to Rimes, on-stand, hollow-eyed and gone quiet at the accusation. “Fine,” he says. “If that’s already out - I’ll tell the truth.”
And he again begins to insist that Orla was the one to kill the victim.
“We proved yesterday that she didn’t!” Athena slams her fist down on the bench, then winces. “Mr Rimes, why are you lying!”
“I ain’t lying,” Rimes protests. “And that’s better for you! Sasha goes free if the orca did it, right?” 
Athena’s mouth hangs open in silent fury. Blackquill stares Phoenix down coldly, and his hawk a mirror of him but with yellow eyes instead of black. “Getting a witness to lie to get your client off the hook? That’s a low, underhanded trick, Wright-dono, even for you.”
A pit opens wide in Phoenix’s stomach. His old reputation, the one Kristoph wove for him, ever precedes him. “Prosecutor Blackquill,” he says, as evenly as he can, hoping as he does that Athena is too distracted with her own anger to notice the emotional tangle that he is caught up in. “I fought for Orla’s acquittal yesterday, and I stand by that today. Ms Buckler believes in Orla’s innocence - I would be letting her down if I saved her at the cost of someone she loves.”
Blackquill’s expression darkens further. He is a thundercloud, a shadow, a wraith, a nightmare made flesh, and for someone who doesn’t have a perfect win record and never was a picture of prosecutorial perfection, he certainly acts like one of those prosecutors who would do anything to get their win, to the cost of the person in the defendant’s seat. Out for the blood of everyone in the courtroom.
Time to prove that Phoenix is as good as his word. “Now, Mr Rimes, let’s talk about your testimony. Your claim is that the orca killed the victim by flinging him up into the air and hitting the water, which is roughly a thirty-foot fall based on the distance between the ceiling and the water. The autopsy report makes clear that the cause of death was something more around sixty feet - sixty-five feet being the depth of the orca pool. If there was still water in the pool as you said, that simply wouldn’t be possible.”
“Ah—” Rimes jerks back away from the stand. 
“That’s rather decisive, isn’t it?” the judge muses. “We’re returning to the orca not having done it, then.”
“We are,” Blackquill agrees, his eyes closed. “As I expected. I could not believe this tripe for a moment. I am grateful, Wright-dono, that you shut up this witness on my behalf. Now, the attempted murder of the orca is not the issue we are deliberating, so once again, we prove that Sasha Buckler is the only person who could have killed the victim.”
“Wait,” Rimes says. “Shit. That’s not—”
Every turn they take, Sasha is still the only one who could be the killer. The location and the card key usage record lock in that conclusion. If there’s any way for someone who isn’t Sasha to be the killer - if he turns it around, what scenario leaves the possibility for someone else to be the killer? The location would have to be somewhere that wasn’t the pool room, somewhere that anyone could access, and somewhere with a long way to fall, same as the drained pool. And somewhere that the orca was, to leave blood on her.
The show stage pool.
“Objection!” Phoenix yells it not quite sure what he’s objecting to, having missed the last thirty seconds or so of the conversation, but Blackquill stands expectant, waiting, and the judge was raising his gavel, and that’s the time when there’s no time to think, just object. “I have an objection!”
“Do you,” Blackquill asks, “or are you merely saying those words in a desperate bid for more time?” He tilts his head slightly to the side, considering Phoenix, and adds, “You appear rather sick. Best for your health if you just lie down and accept this, I’d wager.”
I’d wager. One of them in this courtroom is actually a professional gambler, and it’s not the man saying that. What the hell does he think he knows? “Consider,” Phoenix says. “What if the scene of the crime was somewhere else?”
Definitely not his strongest opening, but he’s already put it out there, so he’s got to run with it. “The prosecution’s argument is that, because only the victim and defendant entered the orca pool room when there was no water in the tank, that only the defendant could have killed him, correct?” Blackquill nods curtly. “But if the murder actually took place somewhere else, then it’s very possible that someone else who is not Sasha Buckler could have committed it.”
“Do you know where you’re taking this argument?” Athena asks quietly.
“Actually, sort of, yes.” In a sense, as long as where he’s taking this argument doesn’t immediately need evidence.
“Mr Wright, I hope you aren’t - as I recall you often doing - just bluffing, are you?” All the things that the judge could remember about Phoenix’s defenses after eight years absent from court, and this is what stuck.
“If the show stage pool was drained, it would be equally possible to fall to one’s death there,” Phoenix says. There, proof that he isn’t totally bluffing: an actual suggestion of where this hypothetical other crime scene could be. 
Blackquill rubs his chin, frowning, for several seconds, staring out into somewhere in the middle of the courtroom floor. “Wright-dono,” he says, eyes unblinking and not even moving in Phoenix’s direction, “you are a disgrace to your profession.”
“There’s a hoist for moving the orca and props between the two pools.” If he doesn’t acknowledge Blackquill’s barbs, will he eventually stop throwing them? Probably not; that never made middle school bullies stop, either. (Larry dumping a cup of dirty paint water on someone’s head was a better solution. Still probably won’t work on Blackquill.) “It wouldn’t be difficult to move a body via the same method.”
“You have no idea what you are spewing, do you?” Something snaps behind Blackquill’s eyes and he jerks his head up. “Your desperate conjecture creates an entirely new crime scene and even then you cannot follow it through to realize that your new scenario is another malformed coffin for your defense. Tell me, how is it you have deluded yourself into believing that you belong on this battlefield, in this courtroom? Have you truly begun to believe your own mad bluffs?”
The Twisted Samurai knows where to strike to draw blood, if Phoenix had anything more than ice and stone left in his veins. Of course he knows he doesn’t belong back here, but he’ll be damned if he lets Edgeworth down. That’s more important. And now that he’s here, he won’t let Sasha down. 
Blackquill raises his fists and slams them in tandem down on the bench. The whole courtroom seems to rattle with the force of the impact, and the chain between his shackles doesn’t hold up. It breaks apart, again, giving Blackquill the full use of his arms, fully preparing him to strike. (There’s something beyond disturbing about the thought that he could do this at any time and simply chooses not to. He could make a break for it from the courtroom if he really wanted. Edgeworth’s met with him one-on-one before. Blackquill could’ve killed him if he wanted to, surely. Phoenix spent seven years trying to keep Edgeworth away and safe from one murdering, magic-using lawyer, and here he was arranging this, whatever the hell this is, with a different one.)
“Well, if you think you’re so smart, then what do you think is so wrong about Mr Wright’s theory?” Athena demands. She’s a good person to have in his corner, all that energy bursting forth, making her not fearless - she shrank away from Blackquill like the rest of them - but furious enough to work past it. Even if she did ask Phoenix if he actually knew what he was arguing. Can’t exactly blame her for it.
The hoist only operates from the orca pool room, meaning that it still had to be Sasha who moved the body, as the only person who did, or could, enter. No way around it. But Sasha could have, theoretically, moved it unknowingly, when she asked for Rimes’ help hiding a prop, the skull rock. If the body was hidden in there—
“Huh,” Rimes says, turning his eyes down toward the stand. “You’re way smarter than I expected, Mr Wright.” Why does everyone keep saying that? “I thought I could hide my involvement, but, yeah, I helped Sasha move and hide the captain’s body after he died at the show pool.”
“Mr Rimes, please stop committing perjury.” Phoenix puts his head in his hands. Presuming that this isn’t more perjury, which he will presume that this is more perjury because Rimes is still saying that the orca killed the victim. 
“For once, I agree with the defense,” Blackquill says. “What did I bother putting you on the stand for, if you have nothing but nonsense for testimony!”
“It’s the truth!” Rimes protests. “I didn’t kill the captain, and Sasha didn’t either! She’s only guilty of trying to protect that damn orca! It flipped him way up in the air and he died when he hit the water.” His eyes have glazed over, obviously remembering something, but what, Phoenix can’t say if he is, as he is, assuming this is still lies. If Rimes murdered Shipley, then wouldn’t he want Sasha to take the fall? It would be easier than watching his story unravel trying to insist the orca did it. “And all the spectators screaming when his body came up, I can’t get it outta my head. Sasha and I were already gonna move the skull rock so we put his body in it to hide it; we were gonna figure out what to do in the morning. But then Ms DePlume found out, and I freaked.”
Spectators? What in hell is he talking about? It was the middle of the night. “Hm.” Athena draws a circle in the air with her gloved fingers, whipping up one of her emotional analysis screens. “I think I can take this one, Mr Wright. There’s a ton of noise I’m hearing. It’s coming up as - ah.” Having finished loading, Widget makes some horrible blaring noises and the projected display flashes between blue and red. “Completely out of control anger and sadness.”
“Can you do something with that?” Phoenix asks. She nods. “If there’s anything you can hone in on about that ‘spectators’ line—”
“That’s definitely an odd spot.” Athena scratches her chin. “And odd, inconsistent spots like that usually have something to do with it. Poke him on that and see what he says.”
He says that he made a mistake. An odd one to make, without a doubt; they’ve been talking about how this case happened during overnight cleaning for two days now, and here’s Rimes, talking like it happened in the middle of a show. “Pointing that out made some of the sadness subside,” Athena says, further pondering the screen and swiping back and forth between statements of the testimony. “I wonder if he could be mixing up one memory with another - some other incident left a deep imprint on his psyche and was similar enough that he’s recalling it now.”
The charm that belonged to Azura Summers’ boyfriend still lies on the bench, the corner of the photograph sticking out. “Mr Rimes, you didn’t happen to be in the audience at last year’s show, when the other trainer died, did you?”
“I—” Surely he must have realized that this would become a topic of contention, that someone could figure out his connection to this prior case, but Rimes appears wholly unprepared for the topic. One of his hands flits down toward his pocket. “Yes, I was in the audience, but so what?” His voice trembles as he asks. “I was just - just some other spectator.”
“No you weren’t.” Phoenix picks the charm back up and removes the picture fully from it, passing it to Athena. “Ms Azura Summers, the orca trainer who died last year, was your girlfriend.”
“H-hey! Where’d you get that charm—” There’s the reaction Phoenix wanted. Rimes doesn’t have a poker face. 
“I thought you said we weren’t going to mess with that yet,” Athena says. 
“I didn’t want you to,” Phoenix says. “I can’t get much more cursed.”
“Well, you could’ve mentioned to me that you’d—” Athena squeals and jumps backwards as Taka alights on the bench, sticking its head through the Mood Matrix. Pulling the picture close to her chest, Athena stares down the bird; it glares back, snapping its sharp little beak open and closed several times. “Wait, do you - do you want—” She slowly extends her hand, fingers curled to keep them from appearing as tempting snacks, picture offered to the hawk pinched between her thumb and fist. Taka stretches its neck out and plucks the photograph away from her, sweeping its wings wide and taking off with a gust that buffets their faces and leaves behind a few loose bits of feathery fluff.
“I’m surprised it didn’t just rip it out of your hands,” Phoenix says. 
“Must’ve been afraid he’d ruin it,” Athena says. Across the courtroom, Taka lands in front of Blackquill, holding the picture for him to examine, and then flies off to the judge. 
Rimes’ anger is easy from there: he thinks the orca killed his girlfriend. Of course he hates it. Of course he wanted to prove it to be - frame it as? - a killer. And with those loudest, most furious emotions quieted, Athena can hear that he wasn’t surprised when DePlume saw the orca finding the body in the rock. The last contradiction between Rimes’ words and feelings cleared, it’s all there: motive to hate the orca and frame her for murder, method to move the body, and a witness who they proved yesterday had been manipulated by the real killer to specifically witness the “killer” whale. And if Rimes, like he points out, doesn’t have a motive for killing Jack Shipley - well, that’s it, isn’t it? Rimes tried to kill Orla by draining the show pool, but that left room for Shipley to fall to his death. 
It’s quiet, for a moment, with Phoenix finished laying out his proposal. “Mr Rimes?” the judge prompts. “Do you have anything to say to this?”
“I wish I didn’t have to fight anyone but that orca,” Rimes says, “but I guess you’re not leaving me much choice. I’m not strong enough otherwise.” His hand returns to his pocket, but this time when he brings it back up a magatama rests in his palm, glowing faintly blue. Fingers closing around it, he brings it up to his chest. 
“Mr Rimes, wait—” Whatever he thinks he’s doing - even if he did murder Jack Shipley while trying to kill Orla - Phoenix is of the opinion that very few people deserve what the fae would put them through. Rimes isn’t one. But it’s too late, and he stands there in front of the court with light shining out between his fingers, spilling across his skin and up from under it. He flexes and his arms bulge, and his whole body with it distorts and swells so that he looks, really, nothing like the Rimes of a moment ago. His jaw and face widen; his shirt splits apart under the strain of this bodybuilder-caricature physique. If there is a murmur from the gallery whenever something interesting happens, this is a roar, and the judge, shocked like the rest of them, not even banging his gavel for order.
Blackquill recoils, but by managing to speak he’s one step ahead of the rest of them on the court floor who are struck by silence. “What the devil kind of deal did you make?” he snarls. Rimes doesn’t answer him; Blackquill’s eyes flash silver again and Taka shrieks and Phoenix is the next unfortunate prey beneath their gazes. “This entire yarn you have spun, defense, is predicated on this witness being able to manipulate the orca into acting as he wished. Answer me this, witness, before your body folds under the weight of your bad decision: can you control the orca’s actions?”
Phoenix almost misses Rimes’ answer - something about not being able to, and that Phoenix is spewing bilge, which, no, Phoenix is pretty sure he’s on the right track this time - thinking more about the way Blackquill called Rimes on the magatama. How did he get it - what did he do for it - is Blackquill concerned of what will come of that, the way Phoenix is, or is this disdain and no sympathy for a fool in over his head? It doesn’t matter, in the moment, but Phoenix is grasping for any insight at all into Blackquill’s thoughts and his own situation. There’s a lot to learn about someone else’s background based on their opinions of the fae and the like. 
The trouble is, he’s pretty sure that if he ever tried to talk to Blackquill, personally, the man would laugh him out of the detention center, and this is going to be the most insight he gets.
“Ms Buckler was the only one who knew how to issue commands to the orca, wasn’t she?” the judge asks.
“Ah,” Phoenix says. Shit. He’s got to figure out how someone else could’ve, and fast.
“How does it feel to be shown up as a lawyer by the judge?” Blackquill asks. (Pretty bad, honestly.) “Strike at me with a blade of evidence, or accept your defeat with grace, should you even know how!”
He lashes out at Phoenix with a slash of his finger, his movement no longer limited by the handcuffs. The air in the courtroom moves, pushes across a cold front, and with it, cutting through the dark that falls over Phoenix’s Sight with a silvery, icy curved blade of wind. He’s sure it isn’t solid, but it strikes him in the face, up by his temple, and still hurts. The sting that lingers is of a paper’s slice through skin, but the initial impact, the first cut, is a damn bit stronger than that. He lifts a hand and drags it through his hair there, isn’t surprised to find that some dark strands come away stuck to his skin.
There’s supposed to be reason for those handcuffs, a mundane reason and a magical reason, and yet Blackquill breaks the chain limiting him and uses magic that should be stopped by iron. Is that something to be said for the power of psychology? Magic powered by belief in it, and Blackquill perhaps tricking himself into believing that none of this can stop him. Witch, magician, fae, or something else, iron should limit him at least somewhat - unless this is him limited, and that’s an entirely new frightening thought.
Yeah, yeah, isn’t it nice that Phoenix doesn’t have any reason at all to ever be involved with Blackquill ever again after this trial is over, huh.
(Damn you, Edgeworth.)
“I’m afraid that this line of reasoning has reached a dead end,” the judge says. Rimes couldn’t frame Orla without manipulating her - how could Rimes have manipulated her? If Phoenix doesn’t have proof he at least needs some way to stall for time, some more testimony - from Sasha? If he asks Sasha to testify about Orla’s training sessions, if it was possible for someone to see or record them, if anything is written down— “Unfortunately, there seems no way for your theory to work, Mr Wright. Now—”
“Objection!”
Athena’s shout reverberates through his ears, and with that so close and so unexpected, Phoenix knows his face doesn’t put up the facade of the defense team both being on the same page. She doesn’t immediately followup with evidence or more reasoning, and he asks, “Do - do you have something to say?”
“No,” she says, staring across at Blackquill at the other bench. “But you do. You’re not done arguing - I can hear it in your heart that you’re not.” She smiles at him. When did he last say something, for her to hear? Does it not take words any longer, after the time she’s known him? Or is she just saying what she hears in her own heart, her hope for him, that the great Phoenix Wright who she admired enough to become a defense attorney won’t quit like this. “So I was speaking up for you - sometimes you need someone else to help, right?”
Someone else to speak up for him - someone else to remind him who he is. He hasn’t gotten his badge back to not fight to the end with insane and absurd suppositions. Sasha came to him for help and he won’t let her down. “Thanks, Athena,” he says, and louder calls, “Your Honor! I’m not yet finished presenting my argument!”
“Some day or another you both need to learn to give up.” Blackquill leans forward, his elbows resting on the bench. “I might prefer that to be today, now. What more can you possibly want to do? You’ve already presented a mountain of evidence and scrutinized every last piece of testimony from all of the witnesses!”
Everyone involved - DePlume, Rimes, Sasha, Crab. He could ask Sasha to testify again, buy some time to think - wait, everyone involved? Not quite. There’s a reason Sasha came to him for help, and this is batshit, this is a joke, but it saved him in a situation far more dire than this.
“No,” Phoenix says. “Not every witness. We haven’t heard from the central figure in both today and yesterday’s trials, have we?”
“Don’t tell me.” Blackquill pushes himself up straighter, the better to condescendingly glare down at the defense. Phoenix can’t help but crack a momentary grin at him. Oh, I’ll be telling you in a second.
“Wait - who have we not heard from?” the judge asks. “Prosecutor Blackquill, Mr Wright, what valuable input have you been neglecting?”
Blackquill closes his eyes. Phoenix takes a deep breath and steels himself. Nothing else for it. “The defense would like to call Orla the orca as a witness for cross-examination!”
-
“—and I hope Phoenix knows that I can’t actually understand Orla on more than a basic first-week-of-foreign-language-class level! Like ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘it’s fine’, ‘thanks’ - I could tell you who the killer was if she could tell me but I don’t know enough vocabulary to—”
“Sasha, calm down.” Phoenix slides his phone back into his pocket. “I wasn’t expecting you to. Since you and the victim were the ones who fed Orla, she shouldn’t have interacted with Rimes much, right? But if we can get some sort of reaction from her when she sees him, that could be telling.”
“Wait, would she even recognize him the way he looks now?” Athena asks. “Bold move, Boss, at any rate.”
He can’t tell if that’s sarcasm or genuine admiration. “Well, since you spoke up for me before I’d figured out a plan, I had to work out our next step on the fly.”
“You do that off your own objections, too, though,” Athena says. 
“And I just—” He stops. He also can’t tell if that one is sarcasm or admiration and he’s going to let it all go. “Just spoke with Pearls and she’s getting the telecast set up on her end. Says Orla seems to be feeling fine.”
“Thank goodness,” Sasha says. “And thank you so much - I r-eely appreciate you not giving up on Orla.”
“Of course we wouldn’t!” Athena says brightly. “We don’t give up! Wait, do you say ‘really’ like that like to mean, like, reeling in a fishing pole?”
“What? No, it’s like eels - electric, moray, you know.”
“Ooh,” Athena says.
Sasha frowns. “I had no idea how much Marlon hated Orla. Feels like an electric eel’s gotten to me now. I can’t believe that all this time he was planning on…”
Orla didn’t kill Jack Shipley. Every new thing Phoenix proves keeps coming around to that. But Rimes - Rimes said he was sure the orca killed Jack Shipley, right? Was that what he said? What were his exact words? How had he phrased it? Phoenix doesn’t remember, but Psyche-Locks hadn’t appeared, and they probably should have, because Rimes is hiding all this and more. Consistency, consistency, Phoenix thought he had this figured out. Was it screwed up because Pearl was nearby but not with him? Where was she when he talked with DePlume? Or was he not paying attention because he had no idea that Rimes might be important? Because unlike DePlume, he didn’t act blatantly suspicious, and Phoenix didn’t give him a glance with the Sight, either. Maybe he was just too trapped in his own head to notice, too busy thinking about Maya, about humans and orcas and humans and fae, to have any room left for locks to force their way in front of his eyes. 
That seems likely. He really needs to stop considering the mirror. It only misleads.
What was it that Blackquill said to Apollo, that first day in court? To stop relying on the tricks that someone else gave him? Phoenix needs to remember that, again, himself. If nothing else, it’s a reminder. He was a lawyer before he could see Psyche-Locks. He was a lawyer and figured it out when they were misleading him. 
Locks or no, they’re reaching the end of this, and Phoenix is going to make Rimes break.
“Of course he hates the orca that killed his girlfriend.” Great, as if he didn’t need more pressure, here is DePlume, strutting into the lobby like she owns the place. “And killed her right in front of him, too!”
“I - didn’t know you were here, Ms DePlume,” Athena says, as clearly unhappy that she is here as Phoenix is. 
“Of course I am! I’ve made a vow, you see.” She looks serious. Phoenix hopes it’s not any kind of magically-binding vow. “That I will learn the truth, and report on it in my next book - whatever this truth happens to be, and even if it goes against what I last wrote about this orca.”
That is - not the response Phoenix thought she’d have, not when she was so furious yesterday to have been proven wrong. “That’s really good of you, actually,” he says, immediately regretting the “actually” that his stupid brain let go through the filter and get attached to the end of his sentence.
DePlume sniffs haughtily. “Don’t patronize me, blue boy. Patronize my books if you will anything - I may be a bestselling author, but it is still difficult to maintain a living off of that alone.” And harder, no doubt, when people like Phoenix’s daughter are pirating her books. Should he feel bad?
“No, I mean, genuinely, it’s hard for anyone to realize that they’re wrong, and to face that truth head-on, too. Having been there enough myself.” And seen that many more of his friends and clients facing the same. Sasha slid to the side out of DePlume’s war path but still thinking about Rimes, that resentment he harbored and fed until a man is dead and the aquarium staff tearing themselves and each other apart.
“I’d sure like to know that truth myself,” Dr Crab says. When did he enter? Easy to miss him when DePlume takes center stage. “Now and then, too. I was in that audience, same as Rimes, and Azura died right in front of me.”
The photo of her body presents itself in Phoenix’s mind’s eye. How they said the orca killed her but the only teeth marks were on her walkie-talkie. “What happened then, exactly, if you’re willing to tell me?”
Dr Crab shakes his head but he’s already answering as he does. “It was the middle of a show. I was usually right there for them, in case something happened - to the orca, we were prepared for. But Azura fell off its back and started thrashing around in the water, not like she was trying to swim and couldn’t, but just writhing in pain. The orca was in the middle of singing but started headbutting her, several times, before she took her in her mouth and dragged her over to the side of the pool. They’d already started ushering the crowd out, but it was so loud, people screaming - Jack and I ran over to her, and we could see her holding her chest, in obvious pain, but by the time we got there…”
She was dead, and the orca the only apparent thing involved. But a pain in her chest, a sudden death, no visible marks on her body that honestly how could they think the orca did it unless there was some very delayed bruising - and yesterday what did Apollo find out? “I don’t think the orca had anything to do with her death, either,” Phoenix says. “I think probably, when Orla was headbutting her, she was trying to check on her. In the course of our investigating, we discovered that Ms Summers suffered from a heart condition - she was taking the same medication that you do, Sasha.”
“A heart condition?” Sasha yelps. “But that - she never told me!”
“Just like I’m currently finding out that you have one,” Crab says dryly. Sasha makes a small noise of affirmation. But he looks shaken, too, and seems to be chewing over some thought for several more seconds until his head snaps to attention with a revelation. “Son of a bitch! What her family said - and that you have a condition too, Sasha, of course!” 
“Uh…” Sasha turns helplessly around to face every other person in the room. Coming up with nothing, she finally asks, “Is this about that spectacular fight with her family that you had, and what does something they said have to do with me?”
“Spectacular?” Athena repeats warily.
“The hallway around Dr Crab’s lab was practically shaking,” Sasha says. “It was when they came to - to pick up Azura’s body. I couldn’t tell what anyone was saying but boy were you all mad. It’s not like, the fun kind of way you usually think when people say ‘spectacular’, but it was loud and dramatic and bombastic.”
“They were furious with me,” Dr Crab says. “They believed that were I really a friend of Azura’s, I would’ve told her to go back home and away from this aquarium and this city. Because they mentioned the orca, naturally, but then told me it often happens that shapeshifters like her who grow up isolated from human society end up developing any number of health conditions when they try to integrate with an environment that’s so human - all of our bustle and pollution and technology and metals.” He shakes his head. “Son of a bitch, I didn’t know why they were telling me it then, but they must have known. And here you are, Sasha, another selkie with a heart condition—”
“Azura was a selkie? But - but she never told me that either!” Distressed, Sasha fiddles with the whistle around her neck and doesn’t look back at Dr Crab. 
“You’re a selkie, Sasha?” Athena asks. “You didn’t tell us that! Wait what’s a selkie. Is that the one that sings you to death?”
“Siren,” Phoenix says. “Selkie is seals.”
“Well… I guess not. But - is this why we got along so well? I can’t believe this!” Sasha pushes her bangs back and leaves them spiked partway up. “Are you sure?”
“I kept her skin on hand for her in my lab for her so yes, I’m rather sure.”
“What? Her skin?” Athena echoes, eyes wide, aghast. “Ew!”
“Her sealskin, and it looked more like a fur coat than anything,” Dr Crab says irritably. “Her family wanted it back, which was the argument I had with them. They wanted to take her home, and it’s not like she and I ever discussed what she wanted to happen if…” He shakes his head again. “Hard to think about when you’re this young. But she’d left home and made this her home for a reason and she told me that and I told them that, and I thought part of her should stay here. They left with her body, and Jack and I took her sealskin and gave it back to the ocean here. And hoped that was something she would’ve wanted.”
Sasha wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “I bet it was,” she says. “And in my family, maybe she had different traditions, she said she was from Japan right?” - Dr Crab nods - “but my family has a funeral rite of separately interring our sealskins to the sea, so that there’s room in the empty skin for a new life to incarnate. So I think - I think Azura would’ve been happy with that.” She sniffles loudly. “And I knew Orla didn’t do it! And you were talking about putting her down!”
Dr Crab’s eyes dart toward DePlume, who has been strangely quiet - likely rattled to have been so wrong. “That was a lie,” he says, finally, reluctantly, but with Orla’s innocence established, with the aquarium already in trouble for the TORPEDO monitoring system - go ahead. Might as well spill more. “Jack and I were against such a thing from the start, no matter what she might’ve done.” Like Pearl said. That it wasn’t fair. Not for Orla. “That’s what the sleeping pills were for - if it came to it, we would drug her, pretend she was dead, and set her free.”
Is an orca smart enough to be malicious? Smart enough to realize how fragile humans are? Failing a concrete answer to that - and the fact that the victim talked with her doesn’t give an answer, because Kay talks to crows and they’re smart but enough to be punished for crimes? - Phoenix thinks that yes, that would be the right thing to do. 
An orca’s an orca. Not the fae, who tend toward conceptually understanding what humans think is moral but still erring on the side of “it’s only a crime if you’re caught”. Another reason that they established the rule of using the local human judicial body rule on their murders, because human investigators are more eyes to help catch your enemies for actions that are against the law, and there’s another fae tendency to not look ahead to consequences, like that one day all those investigating human eyes will be catching you for your crimes, too.
(And he’s not going to tell Kay that his professional legal opinion is that crows should not be sentenced for crimes. She’d be the one to figure out how to push it too far. Would Blackquill be willing to prosecute a murder of thieving crows, or does his love of birds extend past Taka and penguins?)
“I have one last thing that I can’t tell you,” Dr Crab says. “I made a promise to Jack, and I’m bound to it. But here’s a clue for the aquarium’s last secret - focus on the orca’s song.”
“Orla’s… song?” Phoenix repeats. Crab nods. “She only knows how to sing one song, right?” Crab nods again, and Sasha this time, does as well. “All right. That’s - okay.” Great. Nothing like building a case off of cryptic clues. 
DePlume should have been hearing this entire conversation, from selkies to faking an orca’s death, but she doesn’t act like she has. When she finally speaks, it’s like she’s frozen back at the very start. “I never even considered that the poor girl’s death could have been - an illness, a physical ailment.” She tugs her scarf away from the back of her neck and fans her skin. “I just want to know the truth,” she repeats. “Whether I may even say ‘just’ with all of this that you speak so openly of” - she still doesn’t give a hint whether she knows and believes them and is shocked that they would dare utter these things loudly, or whether she thinks they’re lunatics - “but I will tell you something that will help you. It is not in service to the truth for me to refrain from speaking of this.”
“Oh?” Even rattled as she is, she still has that certainty and confidence that made her such a formidable and more than that, frustrating, witness. What else does she know that they didn’t pry out of her, or that she didn’t happily admit in what seems to be an insatiable need to gossip?
“I told you that I was investigating the aquarium that day on behalf of a client, yes?” Phoenix has no idea if she did but nods anyway. “I was called out, specifically, that morning, to investigate the orca pool, by that animal keeper, Marlon Rimes.”
-
“I’ve tried to explain to Orla what’s going on and what she needs to do, but I don’t think she understands any of these lawyering words.”
The monitor that showed Orla yesterday, today once again sits on the floor near the witness stand, and its screen projected much larger, up into the air, for the court to easily see. Pearl stands with her hands clasped behind her back, half in view, watching Orla, who splashed up water at the edge of the pool and chirps contentedly. 
Even if she can understand pieces of what they say, what frame of reference would an orca have to understand what a court or testimony is? “Thanks for trying,” Phoenix says. 
“Ah, young lady there with the very cute orca, we’ve met before, have we not?” the judge asks. Despite being afraid of Orla yesterday, today he thinks she’s cute. Point to the defense. 
“You have,” Phoenix says. “That’s Pearl. She came with me to court a number of times.” And watched her mother get arrested for conspiracy and accomplice to murder on the second-ever day. Ah, memories. 
“It’s very good to see you’re doing well, Mr Your Honor!” Pearl says brightly. 
Taka screeches and makes a beeline for the judge’s head, settling gently, as it does, down on his scalp, but clearly conveying the message that there’s no time for small talk. “Ahem. Mr Wright. What is your plan for cross-examining this witness here?”
“I’m gonna ask her for testimony,” Phoenix says. “And I would also like to call Mr Rimes back up to the stand, to see if we can get any reaction from Orla. Pearl, do you have a way to see the courtroom proceedings on your end?”
“Uh - yes, one moment!” Whether that means she’s doing something with the video phone, or is popping open some one-way mirror of a faery ring, Phoenix doesn’t ask, and she doesn’t say, and a moment later her voice is fainter. “Orla, look here! At Mr Animal Keeper here!”
Orla whistles with much the same intonation as she was before, with no apparent acknowledgement of Rimes. Great, okay. More or less what Phoenix expected. What’s his plan? He doesn’t have a plan. If he can’t get something out of this, then Sasha will be found guilty. He needs to figure out how Rimes gave commands to Orla. He needs time to think about that, but the only way he can buy time is with this cross-examination. He’s letting his mouth run the show, stall for time, while his brain goes to work on an entirely different problem. 
His last bit of self-awareness tells him he sounds like an idiot, accepting an orca’s chirps as testimony while he tells her that her chirping isn’t really enough information and he’s going to need something more out of her, but better an idiot lawyer than a convicted client. “Excuse me, Orla, could you do the lifesaver trick for us, please? Or sing for us?”
She spurts a few drops of water up from her blowhole, like she’s snorting at him. “I guess if she’s only got a limited vocabulary, like Sasha does, then that doesn’t mean anything to her,” Athena says. “She’d associate the actions with the whistle, not the words.” And if she does know the words, then that means she doesn’t want to take orders from anyone but her trainer - either way, nothing Rimes could do. “But oh, isn’t she adorable!” 
Blackquill rolls his eyes. Phoenix is glad that Athena has just kept talking, trying to suss out what Orla is feeling. Whether she knows it or not, she’s stalling for him. 
Could Rimes have in some way overheard the whistle patterns and learned them? No, the training whistles aren’t within audible range; he couldn’t have. Could Azura have taught him some of Orla’s commands? Since she was a trainer, and knew them, and sent videos of training sessions to him—
The videos. 
Pearl and Athena both squeak and go silent as Blackquill slams his fists on the bench. “I have had enough of this farce of yours! You had better have an answer now, Wright-dono, else I will have Taka feast upon your treacherous tongue!”
He needs that tongue. “Then allow me to explain to this court exactly how it was that Orla was manipulated. Pearls—” He probably shouldn’t call her that in court. Not real professional of him. “Ms Fey.” Blackquill laughs, low and disbelieving, and to him it probably sounds like Phoenix is saying Ms Fae, which - Mia really phoned it in when she came up with a surname. She saved all her creativity for her defenses, Lana said at one point. “You have Mr Rimes’ video phone with you, yes?”
“Yep!”
Invasion of privacy here they come. They’ve got reasonable suspicion, right? “Would you look for any videos of any orca training sessions with Ms Summers and Orla? They’d be from more than a year ago. Especially if there’s any videos of the lifesaver trick.”
Azura would’ve had to use the whistle commands for Orla to do her trick. They can’t hear the whistle, but if the video could’ve picked it up and replayed it—
“Um.” Pearl’s voice is fainter. “I will try.”
He wishes she’d have a little more confidence about it. Maybe if she did it would have taken less than the very painfully long five minutes that they wait, Blackquill glaring all the while. Phoenix would swear that he doesn’t blink. “I found one,” Pearl says finally, and the world releases the breath it was holding, like they were caught in the moment before Psyche-Locks appear. “Do you want me to play it?”
“Throw the practice dummy in the pool first,” Phoenix says. 
Pearl runs around the pool, grabs the doll, and hurls it with the speed and trajectory of a fastball. It doesn’t arc into the pool and just noisily crashes into a wall somewhere off-camera, and she raises a hand to her face in surprise. 
Phoenix presses both his forefingers to the bridge of his nose. “Drop,” he amends. “Drop it in the pool.”
“She could probably bench press more than me,” Athena says, sounding awed. 
“She could probably bench press you,” Phoenix says. 
“Well yeah, given the average weight of a person it’s theoretically not hard to bench someone. The difficulty would come from, does the person you’re benching have enough core strength to hold themselves steady when you’re lifting them so they don’t flail and fall and kick you in the face on the way down.” Phoenix hopes that she’s only worked this out theoretically and not actually been kicked in the head trying to use a person as a barbell. 
A splash on-camera means Pearl finally got the dummy into the water. She leans over the side to watch it sink, and Orla looks at her, and after a few seconds Pearl acquises to something silently passed between them and grabs some fish from a bucket to feed her. “Okay, it’s sunk down to the bottom,” she says. “Now I play the video?”
“Yep.”
The first several moments, Phoenix fears nothing is going to happen. Then Orla dives, out of sight, and Pearl narrates the rest. “She’s going toward the dummy - she’s got it - here she comes - good girl, Orla! I don’t think she left any new bites in it!” She waves it above her head, for them to see. “What a smart girl! Here, I’ll get some more food for you!”
“Will you try one more for me?” Phoenix asks. He doesn’t like these questions, asking them phrased this way, but Pearl said she would help and this is part of it; this isn’t a separate deal. She pops her head back into view. “A video of her singing.”
“Of course!” And moments later Orla is squawking out her one song, a bit toneless and lacking rhythm, and still better than what Phoenix manages to do with a piano. 
“Isn’t she amazing?” Athena sighs in admiration. “You go, Orla!”
“Hmph.” Blackquill is not nearly so impressed, but there’s still something bordering on begrudging acknowledgement in the grunt. Maybe he’d just rather be seeing the penguin perform. “What a shock, Wright-dono, that you pulled this off. You’ve successfully proven the possibility that Marlon Rimes could have manipulated the orca - but that is, after all, only a possibility that you have not proven, and so it is just as likely that Sasha Buckler simply commanded the orca, using her own whistle, to perform the singing and lifesaver tricks. None of this rigamarole with the videos.”
The two tricks at the same time? Didn���t they talk about Orla not being able to do that? The sound of another orca song, but a different one, as much as there can be a difference in an orca chirping in something that’s close to a pattern, jars him away from the thought. Pearl just sent over Rimes’ videos, and Athena has one pulled up and playing. It shows Azura, the dark-haired selkie, kneeling next to the pool, bobbing her head to the vague melody that Orla began in response to her whistle.
No, the orca can’t do two tricks at the same time, and Dr Crab said to give thought to the song. Phoenix still doesn’t know what the latter is about, but the former, he can toss back at Blackquill. “Not just as likely,” he says.
Blackquill’s eyebrows disappear beneath his shaggy hair. “Do tell,” he says. “If you strike at me, best be prepared to follow through.”
“I’m getting to it.” This isn’t a sword fight with a samurai, no matter how Blackquill’s metaphors make it sound. In court, with evidence, Phoenix can go toe-to-toe with him. Meanwhile, his only combat experience is choreographed Shakespearian stage fights and those don’t count, he’s starting to think. 
He explains the issue, Blackquill heckling him every moment he stops to breathe for the fact that his theory is that Sasha can’t be the killer because the killer made Orla do something that’s impossible for her to do. “Better straighten out this theory of yours before I straighten you out.”
Phoenix opens his mouth. Several responses vie for space on the tip of his tongue, and in the time that “well, you are certainly allowed to try” and “yeah, that’s absolutely never going to happen” are fighting, his brain-to-mouth filter swoops in and stops him from saying anything. He closes his mouth. His silence probably makes Blackquill think he’s gotten the better of him this time, but, frankly, fuck him. (But not - okay, Phoenix is derailing this train of thought right out of the station. No puns, no pondering whether Blackquill would be attractive if he didn’t look like a dead-eyed corpse. He’s not Phoenix’s type anyway.)
“The orca’s song was probably faked,” he says finally. “Orla didn’t perform both at the same time - like I said, it’s not something she can do. The song was played over the speakers in the lobby by the tank, from this recording from a year ago. Ms DePlume said that the song she heard that day at the aquarium is the same from the Swashbuckler Spectacular show a year ago - but the song Orla sang for us just now, when Ms Fey played the video, is not that song. Marlon Rimes, who had these videos on his phone, would have been able to do this - play the lifesaver video to get Orla to bite the body, and broadcast the song to get Ms DePlume’s attention and show her that same scene she saw a year ago.”
“I ain’t exactly a tech guy,” Rimes says. “You saying I got my phone hooked up to those speakers? How?”
Ah. Well. How indeed? This would be a damned silly place for him to be stopped having come this far, though. “Not necessarily? You could’ve used your walkie-talkie. You’ve got one, same as Sasha and Jack Shipley, and those can also broadcast through the aquarium loudspeakers, right?”
Rimes fakes a laugh. That can’t mean anything good. “Sure can! Thing is - day a’fore DePlume was there and saw that murderin’ orca—” His tone of voice keeps dropping to something gravelly and more like a stereotypical pirate accent. It honestly wouldn’t surprise him if that was part of the magic woven into the magatama, just for the amusement of whatever fae made a deal with a pirate-themed aquarium employee. “Screwed up an’ broke my walkie-talkie while cleaning.”
“Are you fucking bullshitting me right now.”
He’s back in the basement of the Borscht Bowl Club, staring down seven long years of faceless challengers, and when he didn’t laugh off the ones that thought they could trick or intimidate him into losing the only reputation he had left, he dropped the thin pleasantries, dropped into the persona he mirrored from the rest of them, short-tempered and foul-mouthed card sharks, and gave a dead-eyed stare and asked what the hell they thought they were playing at. Usually his sudden change in demeanor startled them enough to give him time to regain his footing. 
But today the ground is still shifting and sliding beneath him. 
“You probably broke it on purpose, afterward, to be your stupid little flimsy alibi!” Athena is no less furious that he is, enough that she doesn’t point out the hypocrisy of the times he’s given her a gentle reminder that yelling at the prosecution and/or witnesses like that is not professional in the slightest. 
“I’d not done any such thing,” Rimes protests. “Dropped it after I was done helping Sasha with the cleaning.”
Athena makes quotation gestures in the air. “You ‘dropped’ it, huh? You got proof for that? That you dropped it and didn’t ‘drop’ it?” She’s really going in on this phrasing. 
“Proof?” Blackquill interrupts. “The burden of proof is on you, not this witness!”
It is, isn’t it? Fuck the burden of proof. Fuck everything about this. Rimes could’ve stolen someone else’s walkie-talkie and used it to broadcast the video. He could’ve used his own and broken it after the fact. It’s logical, every single bit, it’s common sense, and that doesn’t matter. They’re down to nitpicking a goddamn walkie-talkie because Rimes has no other way to defend himself: he had the means, the motive, the opportunity. He could be lying about anything and Phoenix wouldn’t know. Phoenix doesn’t know if Blackquill screws up his Psyche-Locks too but he probably does. “Mr Rimes,” Phoenix says, and he hears himself speaking louder than necessary to drown out the long, frustrated yell thrumming through the back of his skull. “I hope you realize a jury wouldn’t buy one second of this shit you’re spewing.”
“A jury,” Blackquill repeats, tonelessly, expressionlessly, and Phoenix almost has the naivety, for one flash of an instant, to think that this isn’t going to go somewhere that makes him want nothing more than to push the prosecution off the edge of an empty orca pool. “Perhaps this is the sort of situation you should have considered before you made a catastrophe of your own Jurist System, deciding you would rather it serve the cause of personal revenge than serious reform.” 
He could argue. It would be easy to argue. He could say that reform takes time, and the public doesn’t trust the legal system as it currently stands, and that makes them expectedly cautious about said legal system’s plans for fixing itself from the inside; and that Edgeworth’s careful, wants more test cases, wants to know how a prosecutor not so stringently fighting for truth as Gavin could sway a jury far off-course, wants to see how juries that Phoenix hasn’t dropped an amnesiac dead woman into act, wants to make sure they do this right instead of just trying to do something immediate, so that another twenty years down the line they don’t have to fix it again.
And it would be the most difficult thing in the world to argue, because he knew, the day of Drew Misham’s death - Phoenix knew if he did that, this is what would be said about him, now until the end of everything. He knew and he went for it and how can he argue when he knew, when he barely survived a vote the committee took on whether he should stay on it at all, when they didn’t have to vote on whether he should be stripped of his chair because that was an easy decision to of course make; and how can he argue when he said it himself, to Apollo, when the kid asked if there was any progress being made, that this is how he knows he’s perceived. “Like I was using the whole project for personal revenge.” How can he argue against this perception when he doesn’t regret a damn thing. 
And if he argued it wouldn’t matter at all, because Blackquill stacked the deck. He knows where to cut but doesn’t have any personal investment to care if there’s a lashing back. Phoenix could say anything and it won’t change Blackquill’s stance because Blackquill might not even believe what Blackquill is saying. He might not care what Phoenix did. He just knows where to get under his opponent’s skin, and this is one of Phoenix’s open wounds.
Somewhere up in the gallery there’s Edgeworth, Apollo, and are they sitting together with Trucy - do they not say anything because of her, or because Apollo’s still intimidated by Edgeworth, but do they exchange a glance, one that acknowledges and hates what Phoenix turned himself into? Does Edgeworth regret this now, watching the face-off between the two attorneys with blackened names who he’s trying to clear?
Phoenix says nothing, and Blackquill’s smirk widens,
And Athena is still furiously arguing with Rimes about who it is exactly who’s spewing bilge, the lawyers or the witness - Phoenix’s vote is on the witness for seeming to be trying to on-the-spot compose a diss track against Phoenix, stick to your day job, Rimes - like they’ve not even noticed the drama happening next to them. It means nothing to Athena, who barely knows about the Jurist System and Phoenix’s role in it, who certainly doesn’t know about where Phoenix stands at the intersection of the Mishams, Zak Gramarye, and Kristoph Gavin, because Athena doesn’t know any of them either. She just knows right here at this moment, Marlon Rimes is lying through his teeth, and she’s going to chew him out for it.
Is she accusing him of not even having broken his walkie-talkie in the first place? Bold strategy, probably not going to work out for her, but if she keeps talking Phoenix can stabilize himself and maybe figure out what’s actually happening while she’s stalling for time. He has to prove either when Rimes’ walkie-talkie broke or that he used someone else’s. If—
“Sure, I can prove t’ya that I broke my walkie-talkie - I’ve still got it with me - just not when—”
“Yes!” Phoenix slams his palm down on the bench. Athena jumps. “Please show that to the court!”
Taka swoops down and snatches the sword-shaped walkie-talkie from Rimes’ hand, whisking it off to the judge, the prosecution, and then, finally, landing and depositing it in front of the defense. Athena reaches tentatively for the walkie-talkie that the hawk remains perched on, gingerly trying to avoid its talons, and Taka opens its beak and lets out a horrible screech, right in Athena’s face, before flying off. “Damned bird,” Phoenix mutters, picking up the walkie-talkie and turning it over in his hands. Athena remains frozen for a moment longer, recoiled back from where Taka was. Then she leans over Phoenix’s arm to examine this latest piece of evidence with him.
The casing at the bottom, the part that constitutes the sword’s hilt, is cracked, some pieces of the plastic shattered off entirely. The backing to the battery casing is missing. Several large tooth marks arc across the gray blade part, also badly scuffed. “That’s a big bite,” Athena says. “Do you think it was Orla?”
Either her or Maya, and one of those looks way more likely for this case than the other. “Mr Rimes, this walkie-talkie does very much seem to be broken,” Phoenix says. “But I don’t believe it’s yours.”
The victim’s walkie-talkie has been missing since his death, missing in the photo of his body, and could easily have been broken in the fall. And his had the marks of Orla’s teeth in it, because it was Azura’s before he used it, Which means that Rimes’ actual walkie-talkie still could’ve been used, and this is the victim’s missing one, and the only person who had reason to steal the victim’s walkie-talkie would’ve been the killer trying his hardest to cover his trail. 
Right?
Phoenix says this. Rimes claims that he’s had some run-ins with Orla that ended with her biting him and his walkie-talkie both. 
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Phoenix demands.
The judge slams his gavel down. “Mr Wright! I’ve tried to be lenient on account of how long it has been since you last stood in court, but if you continue to use this sort of language I will have no choice but to penalize you!”
“Sorry. I - sorry, Your Honor.” Phoenix inhales slowly and lets all of his breath out even slower. His client is counting on him to keep a level head. Athena is counting on him to keep a level head. “Mr Rimes, it really seems remarkable to me that you, who so hated Orla and wanted to be rid of her, would never make mention of the fact that she allegedly attacked you - that seems like a worrying behavior that should have been brought to someone’s attention if it actually happened, no?”
“Enough,” Blackquill says lazily. “The witness’ litany of terrible and incomprehensible choices are not on trial here - Sasha Buckler is. Either present to me some evidence of this walkie-talkie theft you insist upon, or allow His Baldness to finally render the verdict that seals the fate of your orca trainer.”
He laughs far too hard at that for it to be anything but a ghastly pun off of Sasha’s identity. 
“Sasha’s innocent!” Rimes protests. Still, to the last, insisting on that. “Forget the orca! Let her walk the plank - just save Sasha!”
“I can’t do that, Mr Rimes.” Well - he could. That’s the thing, he could. But he’s sacrificed enough of his principles over the past years, and now that he’s here in court as a lawyer again: no more. No more of that. Sasha trusted him to get Orla found Not Guilty, and Sasha stands by that and is trusting him to stand by that while he defends her. He can’t break that trust. Fuck what anyone else thinks the truth of this case is, Phoenix is going to find the real one, and he’s going to save them both. 
“Hey, Mr Wright,” Athena says. “I - okay first I think we need to come up with our own office rap/freestyle or song or pirate theme or something so that we can—”
“Nope,” Phoenix says. “What’s the next thing?”
“I noticed something weird about the bite marks, I’m not sure that it means anything, but…” She shrugs.
“Athena, we’re at the point where we have nothing else and I will make it mean something if it doesn’t actually yet mean something. What’ve you got?”
“Ah,” she says. “Right. We’re running out of half-baked bluffs.” Ouch. She’s really punching him in the pride today. “The bite marks are different, from this walkie-talkie here to the training dummy.” She brings up a photo of the dummy to display above the walkie-talkie. "There's a tooth missing in the bite from a year ago in the walkie-talkie, but not in the dummy, and Orla's not missing any teeth, is she?"
"And you wouldn't give an orca a prosthetic tooth. Do you have anything from Ms DePlume’s book scanned in, like that picture of Azura’s body? If we look at the walkie-talkie there too—”
“On it.”
So the tooth marks are different: if there was a tooth missing from the bite marks now, on the dummy, and a full set on the walkie-talkie a year ago, that would make sense. It would mean Orla had broken a tooth over the past year. But it’s the other way around, two variations on a bite mark - and two variations on the song, too, he remembers suddenly. Dr Crab told him to think about the song. Orla only knows one, Sasha said, but the whistle command from that video a year ago now has her singing a different song than the one in the video a year ago. Two contradictions, both of them a year ago and now. Wouldn’t Sasha have said if they taught Orla a knew song and overwrote the old one? Wouldn’t that be harder than teaching her a new song with a slightly different whistle command? Wouldn’t she get confused?
Phoenix is the confused one. But this has to mean something - Dr Crab wouldn’t have pointed out the songs if it didn’t. If he takes “Orla only knows how to sing the current Swashbuckler Spectacular song, the one Athena knows” as fact, and “a year ago, the orca sang a different song, the one DePlume knows” also as fact—
—then there couldn’t be two different orcas, could there? One missing a tooth, and one not? That’s goddamn absurd, a hell of a leap he’s taking now, but it fits the facts he has to take as fact—
—and Sasha said, what feels like forever ago, but was really two days ago when they met Orla, that her name is actually Ora but she only responds to Orla. 
Because even if the aquarium was trying to pretend two orcas were one, if they were ever there in an overlapping time span, they wouldn’t both be trained to respond to the same name. It would get too confusing to refer to them by the same name.
Ora and Orla, two different orcas. 
“Shit,” he says.
“Mr Wright,” the judge warns. 
“Sorry! Sorry. Can I get a pass for just realizing something astonishing?” Something that’s going to upend half of this case, answers the remaining contradictions, and raises a thousand more questions outside of the case like “but why?” and also “but why?” 
“Was this astonishing realization of yours that I am correct and you intend to finally give up insisting on the defendant’s innocence?” Blackquill asks with a smirk.
“You’re a dick.”
Blackquill, unfazed, laughs, but Phoenix still feels a little bit better for having said it. He’s wanted to say that to most prosecutors he’s known in court at least once, and finally, he’s gone for it. “Just hit me with that penalty, Your Honor. Now, what I’ve realized is that, this entire case, we’ve been making an assumption - and why wouldn’t we, no one who works for the aquarium has said otherwise.” Because maybe they actually, physically, can’t. “But these inconsistencies we keep running into make me think - Orla we know now, and the orca at the aquarium a year ago, are not the same orca. There’s not one, but two Ora Shipleys.”
Diving right into this revelation might mean the judge forgets to issue a penalty, because Rimes is shocked, and Blackquill disbelieving, and even Athena who noticed the bite marks surprised that this is the conclusion they’ve reached - and the judge calling for order and asking how there can be two different orcas in the same breath, contributing to the disorder he’s trying to end in the same breath. Different songs, different bite marks - and when Athena pulls up videos, the Swashbuckler Spectacular aired on tv the other morning, and one of Azura’s, they can see different teeth. In the video from a year ago, the orca, as expected, has a broken tooth on the front left side. Orla has a full mouth of perfect teeth. 
“Ergo” - wait, did he really just say that, he hasn’t spoken to Edgeworth in like, a week, why’s he talking like this - “the tooth marks on this walkie-talkie cannot be from Orla, this walkie-talkie cannot be yours, and it was stolen from the victim, Jack Shipley. And the only person who would have had the opportunity to steal the walkie-talkie before the body was discovered is the culprit - is you, Marlon Rimes.”
“No!” Rimes clutches at the witness stand like it’s the only thing holding him upright, like his legs are going to give out if he doesn’t have that. “You’ve got it all wrong! It’s the orca’s fault! It’s—” He staggers. He can’t even stay upright now, doubled over the stand and clinging to it. “It’s - it’s the orca’s fault! She’s a killer!”
Phoenix remembers, again, the lack of Psyche-Locks. Rimes believes this, so strongly, that he dragged this out to its bitter end, sure that the orca killed Azura. Sure that she’s a killer, and Jack Shipley only died because he was trying to save her - might Rimes believe that’s her fault, too? Sure she deserved death, and Rimes was only trying to do what she deserved, and he wouldn’t have had to if she weren’t a killer then Jack Shipley wouldn’t have - and he’s dead and it’s her fault, right? 
(And Phoenix might be years past I did not kill Juan Corrida, can spot locks for secrets that lie beneath technical truths, but it shouldn’t surprise him that he still trips on the half-truths. It’s a fae blessing and that’s true to the fae. They’re squidgy, the locks, much like secrets and truths are. It’s like a metaphor except it’s being an actual physical issue to him. Metaphysical issue? He still hasn’t asked Pearl if she knows what the black locks mean. He’s spent enough time hung up on Kristoph.)
“She’s a - a—” Rimes slumps off the stand, sinking to the floor, leaning against its wooden bars. “Why I am still too weak to help anyone?”
That isn’t a confession yet but it’s something close, and Rimes finally done fighting, all the desperate protestations bled out of him. The judge clears his throat. “Ms Buckler,” he says. “Is Mr Wright’s claim true? Are there two orcas?”
“I, uh…” Sasha stands up from her chair, takes one step, and stops, and takes a step back toward the chair, twisting the cord of her whistle around her finger. “Well, I didn’t tell you that, Phoenix - you figured it out, so I guess I can say, yeah, there used to be two orcas at the aquarium. Ora and Orla.”
Well, shit.
“They were sisters. They were rescued by the captain when they were beached on shore” - Phoenix remembers this story, but only about Orla - “a few years back. Ora was fine, but Orla was in really bad shape and it took a long time of Dr Crab looking after her to get her back to health. And Ora didn’t want to leave her, and after they’d been here for so long, they loved the captain, they didn’t want to leave, and we kept them on at the aquarium. Ora was the one who performed in the pirate shows, since while Orla was recovering, she started learning tricks, but after - after Azura’s death a year ago, Ora was put down. The Center for Dangerous Animal Control demanded it.” She looks back down at her hands. “The captain and the doctor begged them to leave Orla alone, and then we put Orla in the pirate show, acting as Ora. But she couldn’t figure out how to sing the same song her sister did, so we had to write an entirely new one based around how she ‘sang’.”
“And why did you say nothing of there being two orcas?” Blackquill asks.
“Wouldn’t that have been an easy way to get Norma DePlume to stop coming around?” Phoenix asks. “Just tell her that there’s two orcas, and this new one is using the stage name of the old and is obviously not a killer.”
Sasha sighs. “I don’t - I don’t quite know. The captain wanted us to keep quiet about it ‘till he thought the time was right - there were only a few of us who knew about Orla, since she was never on view for the public, just a couple of us worked with her, me and Azura and the captain and Dr Crab. The captain made us, me and the doctor, swear we wouldn’t say anything. So I couldn’t say anything.” She shrugs. The magic in the swearing is obviously implied, the same way Dr Crab said he was bound and could only hint. “I think - he had to put Ora down because the CDAC wouldn’t ever get off our backs, but he knew she didn’t kill Azura and telling everyone that we had a new orca was just - admitting it? Admitting the old one killed Azura? That’s how it would’ve felt to me anyway. But the captain, he had such a presence that, some people just, even if you don’t know why they’re doing something, they’ve got such confidence and you trust them and you do what they ask because you know they’ve got reason somehow even if it’s weird? Jack was like that.”
Athena is nodding beside Phoenix and he hopes she’s not thinking of him. She probably is. 
“So Mr Rimes had no idea that there were two orcas?”
Rimes has managed to stand again, and was staring at Sasha with haunted eyes, but with attention turned back to him he slumps, his posture so collapsed that he’s again about the height he was before his transformation. “No.” His voice cracks. “How would I?”
“Was the entire reason you came to work at the Shipshape Aquarium to try and kill Orla?” Phoenix asks. 
Rimes nods. “Azura told me all the time about the other girl who worked with the orca, how much they loved that orca, and how much Azura loved this friend who was like a sister.” Sasha hastily swipes her hand across her eyes. “I couldn’t do a thing to help Azura so I thought if maybe I could make sure to protect her friend - maybe then I could live with myself. And I came here and saw Sasha trusts that orca as much as Azura did and I was so afraid—” He takes a loud, shuddering breath. “When I started bein’ sure about my plan, that next time I’d help I’d drain the pool, I was afraid I might have t’fight the orca, or pull its jaws off of someone or myself, or something and I made a deal, for strength, I thought so that this time I…”
Blackquill shakes his head. His eyes flash; maybe it’s the light and angle of his head, or maybe again they really do turn silver. “You blighted fool. And Jack Shipley discovered you as you enacted this plan, and that is why—” He tilts his head slightly to the side. “You killed him?” Frowning, he lowers his head. “Ah, of course. The note with the autopsy report. The strange bruising around the victim’s wrist that was Marlon Rimes’ handprint. Now I see - it was left during a fight with the victim.”
Rimes’ handprint, but just one, on one of the victim’s arms. Wouldn’t it make more sense to fight with two hands, that there would be some other mark? What was Rimes doing with the other hand, trying to turn the water back off, trying to grab some weapon - somehow leaving that weird single handprint on the pool ladder, that Pearl found while going wild with fingerprint powder?
“It wasn’t the orca who killed him,” Rimes says softly, like it’s a sudden final revelation even to him. “It was me. I killed him. Just give Sasha her ‘Not Guilty’ and me the death penalty. I don’t care anymore.”
Is there still a piece missing here?
“Finally accepting your defeat, I see,” Blackquill says. “Very well. You, to hell, and Your Baldness, your verdict.”
“It would seem that this very much…” The judge pauses for a moment, considering a way to describe it. “Unprecedented sequence of trials has come to a close. If there are no final objections, this court finds the defendant—”
“Wait,” Phoenix says. The courtroom goes dead, and he’s not even sure he breathes for a moment. “Not - I don’t have any objections to the verdict on Ms Buckler!” he adds hastily, assuaging the expressions of horror that appear on Sasha and Athena’s faces, and even narrow-eyes confusion on Blackquill’s. “But - but before Mr Rimes goes, I think - I think we still don’t quite have the full story yet.” And he knows how this works. If a crime is proven in the course of trying someone else, it’s that evidence that takes the new culprit to trial, that and nothing more. It’s enough to exonerate the first defendant, so it’s enough to convict the second. No further investigation needed. Rimes is confessing now; there’s all this evidence established against him. It will be open and shut, no other scenario considered, unless Phoenix does something here, now, with what he has, examines the last possible angle. 
(Or unless he takes up Rimes’ defense, which he isn’t averse to, but he might as well establish this now.)
“This new evidence the prosecution has brought still hasn’t been fully examined, and I don’t think we’ve revealed the full truth of the matter yet.”
Blackquill’s glare doesn’t lessen in the slightest. “Your client is about to be declared ‘Not Guilty’ - you have defended her and the orca both! What more can you possibly think to be doing?”
He swore that he would save both Sasha and Orla. Now, he supposes, he’s trying to save everyone. Everyone but the dead. “There’s evidence that, in the course of our investigation, we also didn’t know how it fit with anything else. Athena, can you project for the court a picture of those fingerprints Pearl found?” 
He waits a moment, gives the judge and prosecution time to examine the prints and Athena’s mock-up of how it would look to hold the ladder in that way. “This was Rimes’ handprint, grasping the ladder from above. And we also have his handprint tightly grasped around the victim’s wrist. I submit to the court the possibility that these two prints were left at the same time - that these events happened in the same time. And if Rimes, above the empty pool, were leaning out from the ladder, and holding the victim’s wrist in such a way—”
Blackquill gets it first, recoils; even his mask of condescension slips. “But that would mean that he—!”
Phoenix nods. “Yes. Marlon Rimes was trying to save the victim. This wasn’t a murder - this was an accident.”
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tonyglowheart · 5 years
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so since I can’t stop obsessing over 无羁 (Wuji) I decided to pop open Microsoft Word and through the power of a random youtube commenter who transcribed it, a working knowledge of heritage Mandarin, and many translation sites, I can now absolutely lose my mind even more over the significance of the lyrics and who sings them.
more under the cut, a lot of it is unorganized emotion-fueled yelling
tumblr is kind of rough for long-form stuff, but I guess I’m just going to braindump:
Note: btw do I finally wised up to the fact that the uhh actual lyrics appear in some Tencent videos (and actually a lot of the verses show up with lyrics in the end themes) and also realized that the transcription I got - which was from a Youtube comment - was... wrong in places. And I ALSO realized “Yunshen” was probably referring to Cloud Recesses lol. And so yeah, I’ve edited it to update it.
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first off: LAN ZHAN SINGING ABOUT HOW THE RIGHTS AND WRONGS ARE IN THE PAST, HOW CAN WE PRETEND IT’S A DREAM UPON WAKING? Like this is so sad and filled with like...honestly, righteous bitterness towards the world? but also so practical? This is of particular note because Wei Ying’s corresponding line in the second part/repeat. Just you wait
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Wei Ying having the line about how can the [praises, blames, gains & losses] of the mortal world be measured is :( bc like. yeah... it’s so in character it makes me sad as heck. Because like. he’s done So Much for the world, and the world continues to denigrate and belittle and revile him, and it hurts him but ultimately he takes it with like.. a sad resignation. D8 babey,,,
*poetic stuff, poetic stuff, blah blah* (although I will add that the added layer of poetic imagery is the “feng liang” means something like cuttingly cold. “feng” refers to the sharp/cutting edge of a knife/sword, and then “liang” is cold. So it’s the imagery of someone getting cut or stabbed by a cold sword and their hot blood rustling down it (the first part is onomatopoeia)
okay the ZITHER LINE. I guess “wen” could be anything, BUT we know there’s a guqin spell Inquiry, so I’m! going to interpret it as more along that lines! I think the Tencent translation actually has it as “also” but it could be “again” I think? Implying that even when they’re far away from each other and Wei Ying is playing his flute all alone and melancholy, there’s an answering zither sound inquiring on him? (i’m going to take it as his well-being :’) )
Edit: so it turns out the “wen” was incorrectly transcribed in the first version of the lyrics I saw; it’s actually the same “wen” as the flute line, so more of it can also be heard, like the Tencent translation. ...but I Want to Believe....
edit: ALSO HOLD ON A MINUTE. I DIDN’T NOTICE, BUT I SAW A SCREENSHOT THAT SAID SOMETHING ABOUT HIM PLAYING INQUIRY LOOKING FOR WEI YING ONLY TO BE MET BY HOLLOW SILENCE? IS THAT FROM THE NOVEL? IS THAT MISTRANSLATED? OR DID I JUST NOT NOTICE. Guess I’ll have to find out
the last line/duet line: I can...kind of see where the “unrequited love” comes from? This is one of those lines where I wonder if it’s classical Chinese and therefore has layers of meaning that don’t convey through translation engines. I might need to actually search it and see but I’m scared to :’) my last brain cell is on Wuji I can’t deal with a wall of Chinese text right now :”)
so just going by the pinyin and what the translation engines tell me individual parts mean, the first part is something about a petition left open, which I can see as meaning unrequited (or more gently, “the story is not over” lol), but not sure what business Google has coming out of left field with a flat-out UNREQUITED LOVE for 8V bls my heart can only take so much
the last part of that line, NO clue at all, must be some kind of poetic thing... so I just gotta go with their translation and no other layers of understanding
Edit: ChenQing, interestingly, is the name of Wei Wuxian’s flute, and is also in the Chinese title of the series. so I think that first line is open to interpretation, it’s one of the lines I’d love to discuss with someone who knows Chinese and hear what they think.
the second part is mostly poetic imagery. it’s saying like low-laying silvergrass in the moonlight looks like frost (silvergrass being a common grass in parts of Asia. It’s that one with the fluffy fronds). When I googled the Chinese, it returned this specific species: Miscanthus sacchariflorus 
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wOw the part about preparing a pot (metaphoric) of all of life & death’s ups and downs to memorialize/offer a sacrifice for a young man? hits me right in the heart and the feels and im going to sob over Wei Ying again
the other line that absolutely makes me lose my mind - and like the one above, it’s one that Wei Ying has a direct counterpart in part two - is Lan Zhan’s line here. Tackling the second part before I lose my mind over the first part, I sort of have an impression that second part is kind of a “go with the flow” (of life?) sort of deal, since to my understanding, it means something like... [traverse through time/through time/over history?][wind and waves]
okay but the part that makes me lose my mind is the “xiaoxiaosasa” part, which is a counterpart to the line sung by Wei later, “tantandangdang.” xiaoxiaosasa means like... in a natural/unrestrained/carefree manner. And at first I was like..Lan Zhan?? xiaosa?? but actually I kind of see it as like.... not a serious suggestion, but an impossible wish? Like this other post I think I where someone talked about them watching Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen wandering off, free of duties and clans, to hunt monsters etc. and I think that’s something that might be an impossible wish in Lan Zhan’s heart of hearts that he wouldn’t ever materialize because his sense of duty is so important to him. But maybe in a world where the two of them - or Lan Wangji especially - isn’t/aren’t bound by clans and sects and sundry, maybe they’re able to take a more carefree approach to life.
and then sharing the melodious song together at the ends of the earth is another one that has all of my ;A; ‘s
aaand here we are on the repeat, where Lan Zhan sings a line first, and Wei Ying has some sweet sweet counterpart lines that extra hit me straight in the heart:
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okay so first off, first line. Unless that’s some Classical Chinese idiom, or honestly just flat-out idiom, I’m not sure where “I became lost after facing a dead end” comes from. Anyway.
HERE IT IS. HERE IT IS. okay so remember. the first verse, Wei Ying’s line is about a lonely and melancholy flute, and then Lan Zhan’s line is kind of tinged with a sort of world-weary bitterness but also resignation. But here!! Wei Ying’s line! is like sO magnanimous and accepting. Whatever the turmoils and rights and wrongs of the past, he’s already let it go. Granted I’m seeing this from a “the world wronged him” perspective so I’m like “D8 my generous-hearted boy... oH No my feelings...” Lan Zhan may move on but I think he can’t quite forgive the world for how it treated Wei Ying, but Wei Ying, like he said in the show, is ready to forgive and forget, it’s all in the past, and also I get the vibe of “yeah I’m used to it.” anyway gOD the contrast, and also I’m sad
[the rest of the intervening lines are the same, until]
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okay the line is mostly the same, but one translation also gave me “fickle” instead of unpredictable or impermanent, and I feel that mood. It’s saying like “laughing over how fickle worldly matters can be”
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aaand then here it is. Wei Ying’s counterpart to Lan Zhan’s carefree/unrestrained. why not go through life with a magnanimous heart. Which! is so in character for Wei Ying and honestly exactly what I think he does, like it HURTS him when ppl make shit So Personal about him which might have mitigating factors, or like... aren’t even his fault. But to some extent, he’s willing to bear it, for the sake of the world. Some of I think is out of misplaced sense of guilt trained into him (like when Madame Yu blamed him for bringing calamity to the Jiang Clan and he just accepts that :’) ) but I do think he’s also got a martyr’s heart.
Anyway, all of this taken together, and with the beautiful melody and the two singers switching lines and also dueting together, a b s o l u t e ly makes me go, as the kids say, feral
thanks for coming to my TED Talk
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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 18: Translating the untranslatable.
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 18: Translating the untranslatable. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 18 shownotes page.
[Music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics! I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: And I'm Lauren Gawne, and today we're talking about how to translate untranslatable words. But first, it's our Patreon anniversary!
Gretchen: Yay!
Lauren: And we are super excited to revisit the topic that we visited for our first episode, which is swearing. Yayyy, rude episode on Patreon!
Gretchen: So our first Patreon episode was all about the sounds of swearing and swearing in different languages, and this time we're talking about the grammar of swearing, and we already have reports that it made somebody laugh out loud in public, so maybe don't listen to it around young children or in public, because you might have to explain to them why you're laughing so hard. You can go check that out at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
Lauren: We also, conveniently for our anniversary, unlocked a new Patreon goal, which we are really excited about. This one is a goal to commission some Lingthusiasm-themed art.
Gretchen: Yes! So we're very excited to have some exciting art and for you guys to get to see concept sketches and where things go from here! Stay tuned for more exciting Lingthusiasm art news.
[Music]
Gretchen: Untranslatable words! Lauren, have you come across any untranslatable words lately?
Lauren: It's because I came across, like, three in the space of a day that I was like, "We really have to talk about this topic." Because it's a bit of a linguist meme, or talking about language meme, is this idea that there are some words that just aren't translatable, or meanings for which we don't have a single word and maybe we should. So the first is a Language Log post from Mark Liberman. He was talking about how there was a big, windy, wintry, weathery event in Philadelphia that meant that there were a lot of discarded umbrellas left around, and he talked about how there's no word for a dead umbrella.
Gretchen: Isn't the word for a dead umbrella just "dead umbrella" or "broken umbrella"?
Lauren: Well...
Gretchen: I don't know why this has to be so hard!
Lauren: We can chat about it, but he felt like it was something that needed a word and a blog post. And the other one –
Gretchen: Is it an UNbrella?
Lauren: An unbrella.
Gretchen: We need to write in to Mark.
Lauren: Yep. We solved it!
Gretchen: You have your umbrellas and then you have your unbrellas.
Lauren: And the second blog post about untranslatable words, or no word in a language, was from my favourite gynaecologist, Dr. Jennifer Gunter, who has a really fabulous blog, and she she was talking about – I'll just read the quote. "I believe there is no word in any language to describe that unique experience that's simultaneously running out of both pads (or tampons) and toilet paper when you're sitting on the toilet and in immediate need of both."
Gretchen: This is a terrible situation, but I think she's described it! I don't know, like, am I the untranslatable word sceptic here? But I think she's, you know, just put several words together and it did a pretty good job of describing this relatable experience.
Lauren: But there's no single word that encapsulates – I mean, there are plenty of single words and most of them are more appropriate for a Patreon episode than this episode – but none that specifically encapsulates that meaning.
Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, so this is a thing that I've been thinking about in terms of what I've called "the schadenfreude effect," which is, you know when you learn the schadenfreude and you're like, "Wow! The Germans! They really do have a word for everything, like taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune! It's not just me who's uniquely terrible by doing this sometimes! Other people do this too! Whoa, mind blown!" And the thing that I think makes us resonate with these lists of untranslatable words or ideas that certain concepts are untranslatable or there should be a word for something is that words are way of packaging our experiences, and if we have a word for something, then we know that someone else has thought of packaging that particular experience before. And so saying, "Oh, is there a word for this?" is also kind of trying to reach for "haven't other people also had this common experience" or "isn't this something else that other people have also felt."
Lauren: I really like that you've coined the term "schadenfreude effect" to really encapsulate the meaning of feeling pleased that you found a word that neatly translates a concept that you thought didn't have an elegant word for it.
Gretchen: Yeah, it's kind of when you encounter a word that describes something you're already familiar with. And I came up with it actually because there's this paper that I really like about people learning words and how best to teach people new concepts and new vocabulary. And so they did this study, and I think was a biology class or an economics class, I don't remember, an intro class at a university somewhere, and some of the students got a reading, kind of your standard textbook reading that is, like, you know, "Mitosis is blah blah blah..." and "Supply and demand is blah blah blah" – I don't remember whether this was biology or economics, so...
Lauren: The biology/economics textbook.
Gretchen: In the highly in-demand Intro Bio/Econ course! So anyway, they got your kind of standard reading that had a bunch of terms with their definitions, and then the other people got a different reading which was a version where you had all the concepts explained to you, saying, "There is a concept in biology where cells divide blah blah blah" or in economics where people buy things at different rates. And then for those students, they got to class and they got a brief list of vocabulary words that said, "These concepts that you were exposed to in the reading, here are the words for them." And then they did a post-test on how well the students did in learning these concepts, and they found that the students that had been exposed to the concept before the jargon did better than the students that were exposed to the jargon and the concept at the same time or even the jargon first.
Lauren: So it's not just a matter of smashing words into your brain.
Gretchen: Yeah, and it's – you know, when you come across a word like "schadenfreude" and you're like, "Wow, this is so satisfying to learn this," the reason it's satisfying to learn the word "schadenfreude" is because you're already familiar with the feeling.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: And it's less satisfying to learn a word like, I don't know, "mitosis" or something because you're not familiar with this concept before you learn the word, so you're having to learn the word and the concept at the same time.
Lauren: I guess it's why – and this is gonna date this podcast horrifically – why "hygge" has resonated so much with people in the last 18 months. It's just been like a hygge bonanza of like –
Gretchen: Mm-hmm!
Lauren: – Danish/Scandinavian, cosy, thoughtful, living books.
Gretchen: Yeah, and it's all about this, like, okay here's this concept that we'd like to be able to reach for, or this idea that we'd like to be able to articulate better, like, doesn't everyone want more cosiness in their lives? And it comes with a lot of cultural stuff, but it's around the idea of people wanting more cosiness, or more of whatever it is that thing that the Danes have. I think this is the same reason why words like "tsundoku" often show up on untranslatable words lists as well. So this is the Japanese word for the pile of books that you haven't gotten around to reading yet.
Lauren: What's wrong with "my pile of unread books"?
Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people who talk about their "TBR pile," which is their "to be read" pile, or their reading list?
Lauren: Mmm.
Gretchen: And as far as I can tell,  they're used pretty similarly to "tsundoku"! But we're familiar with the idea of "of course you have this pile of books you haven't gotten around to reading yet."
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And, oh, isn't it convenient that there's this convenient package for this thing that you either are intimately familiar with, or that you would like to be more familiar with, as in the case with "hygge."
Lauren: It's interesting how sometimes these words will enter into English. So, like, schadenfreude I think is – I mean, you can tell from my very Australianising of it, like it's a comfortable piece of my vocabulary, I can use it actively in a sentence, and I feel really comfortable with it. But, like, I think "hygge" is kind of crossing into that at the moment? I don't – I think it's too faddy, personally.
Gretchen: Yeah, I think it may still be too much of a fad at the moment, but it may be crossing over. I heard someone saying "tsundoku" in a sentence in English, but she was someone who'd lived in Japan for a while, so I don't think she was using it Anglicised? So I don't know which ones of these are crossing over.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: But one of the things that I always think about what I think about these lists of "oh, here's a bunch of words that are untranslatable," is first of all, well, here is this convenient column B where someone just provided a bunch of nice translations for them. So how untranslatable are they, really? And also that if you look at a language just through the lens of its lexicon, you can end up with some really weird conclusions.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And my favourite example of this is French doesn't have a word for "please." Therefore, obviously, the French, they must be very impolite...maybe. But what they do have is a four-word phrase, "s'il vous plait," which comes in another form, which is "s'il te plait," which both mean effectively "please." And in fact they come in formal and informal versions, this phrase that means effectively "please." And so, sure, if we look at the lexicon of French, the individual, atomisable words with spaces in between them, like, "Oh dang, there's no equivalent for please! Like, how do you even be polite in this language?" But if you look at it even just one step further in subtlety, of course there are lots of ways to be polite in this language! And so, seeing a language just through the lens of its lexicon – on the one hand, it gets us some of these interesting packages, but on the other hand it misses out on a whole lot of what a language actually is if all we're doing is looking at the lists of words and their translations.
Lauren: It reminds me of the "there's no way to say 'yes' and 'no' in Mandarin" meme?
Gretchen: Mm-hmm.
Lauren: That there isn't just a convenient word like "yes" we see that you can use to answer an affirmative, and no equivalent of "no" that you can just use to say no to a question that someone asks. And it's because you say – if, you know, someone says, "Do you want this?" you use the equivalent of "want" or "don't want."
Gretchen: Oh, Gaelic does this too.
Lauren: Yeah! So just because you can't find "yes" or "no" in a simple word list doesn't mean you're unable to say it.
Gretchen: Like, "Whoa, you can't do negation or affirmative in these languages!" Clearly the speakers are capable of agreeing and disagreeing with things.
Lauren: "Yes and no are untranslatable!" And it's just like, oh, they have some way of expressing affirmative and negative. Life is going on.
Gretchen: Yeah! But something that interests me is the subtler domains where things are actually harder to translate as well. And one of the big areas for me for that is poetry, because what makes a poem, essentially, is that you have a relationship with form and meaning that is aesthetically pleasing.
Lauren: And contextually dependent.
Gretchen: And different languages do have different relationships between form and meaning. So to take a very simple example, a pair of words that rhyme in English don't necessarily rhyme in another language you might be trying to translate a poem to. So if you have something like "roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and I love you" the kind of classic, four-line, parodisable poem in English –
Lauren: All versions of that poem are said in deep, deep earnest, Gretchen. It's the most moving piece of poetry.
Gretchen: So moving. Why wasn't this our Valentine's Day episode? 
Um, so you have something like this, but "blue" and "you" rhyme in English, and they don't rhyme in many other languages. There's no particular reason why they have to rhyme, it's just they happen to in English and so they make good subjects for poems, and that's why we don't say "violets are purple" because "purple" doesn't rhyme with "you." And so when you try to translate that in another language, either you've got to be unfaithful to the meaning and use a different pair of words that do rhyme, or you've got to be unfaithful to the rhyme and then not reproduce the aesthetic experience of getting the poem. And so because there's this inherent asymmetry, because different languages have different words – shockingly! – it's really hard to translate things that rely on both the form and the meaning simultaneously.
Lauren: I remember learning to read Old English poetry, and I just couldn't get my head around it – it involves alliteration, they weren't really big into rhyming.
Gretchen: Mm!
Lauren: And I was just like, "I don't have a feeling for this being good." You know, my Old English teacher would just be like, "Yeah, this is such a great poem, you can feel the rhythm!" and I'm just like, "Oh, but there's no rhyming..."
Gretchen: Everything's gotta rhyme.
Lauren: Yeah, I don't know how to evaluate this.
Gretchen: I remember I tried to read Hamlet in French once because, you know, whatever.
Lauren: How did that go?
Gretchen: Well, what was really interesting for me is, you know, the thing about Hamlet, and Shakespeare in general, is that Shakespeare is all in iambic pentameter, right?
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Gretchen: And so you have your, like, duh-DUH beat, your iamb, with weak-strong –
Lauren: Yeah, even my "mm-hmm" was in iambic pentameter, I was really impressed. Mm-hmm.
Gretchen: Mm-hmm! There you go. And you have five of those per line, but in French you can't do that, because French doesn't have word-level stress the way English does.
Lauren: Right, yeah.
Gretchen: And I'm sure we'll probably do, at some point, a full stress episode, but in French you just only ever stress the thing that's at the end of the whole sentence or phrase. That's it, that's all you do, you have to do it that way.
Lauren: Okay. Yup.
Gretchen: And so you can't divide a poem into beats like that, because French doesn't do beats that way. And so what French poetry has instead that's, like, stylistically similar to iambic pentameter is something called the alexandrine, which is twelve syllables per line. So iambic pentameter gives you ten syllables per line, the alexandrine gives you twelve, which is pretty similar, and so this translation of Hamlet was all written in alexandrines with the twelve syllables per line.
Lauren: So they get an extra two syllables per line.
Gretchen: Yeah!
Lauren: The whole thing goes for like an extra 20% of time.
Gretchen: But it often takes more syllables to say the same thing in French anyway.
Lauren: Oh, okay.
Gretchen: Because French is kind of spacious like that.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: So I think it kind of balanced out. But yeah, you just got this very different –
Lauren: And was it in modern French or ye olde French?
Gretchen: I... don't remember. I think it was in pretty modern French, though, it didn't feel super ye olde.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: But I also don't necessarily know what ye olde French would sound like, you know?
Lauren: Fair enough! Because sometimes, like, translating across time – you know, we talk about translating between cultures and what I think is, dare I say, a bit of fetishisation of, like, Scandinavian and Japanese social life that we overextend, one way of kind of borrowing their words that translate interestingly. And we forget that translating from older texts, like translating from Shakespeare, or going back further to something like Beowulf, there's actually a lot that's not easily translated between those.
Gretchen: Yeah, and when you're translating something like – you know, Shakespeare's stuff was written in current English to the original audience he was writing to, he wasn't writing in fake ye olde English, and so do you try to be faithful to that for the modern reader, or do you try to reproduce the experience of the modern reader in experiencing that as something old? Something I've been really fascinated about recently has been the Emily Wilson translation of The Odyssey.
Lauren: Mmm!
Gretchen: Oh, it's so cool. I follow her on Twitter now, it's really great. So, she is heralded as the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English, which is kind of shocking that we've gotten this far and it took that long.
Lauren: I'd have to say most of the versions that I have ever come across have been quite dusty, dry, like they feel like they were written at the time of Homer, even though they're in English.
Gretchen: Well, not quite Homer, but like this kind of 1800s feel.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And that's the thing, like even the ones that were written in, like, I don't know, the 1950s, often have this fake ye olde thing because, like, oh, well, Homer is a classic and so you need to make him sound olde.
Lauren: So what's Emily Wilson done?
Gretchen: And so Wilson doesn't do that. She's not doing ye olde, and her first line that she translates the poem as is, "Tell me about a complicated man," which is referring to Odysseus.
Lauren: Oh, that could be a text that I sent someone.
Gretchen: That's an Avril Lavigne song! Like, "Odysseus, why did you have to go make things so complicated? Right now I'm just unweaving this loom and man I really hate it!" You know, like, that's a very real translation! But she also – and this is something that the other translators also don't do – she also translates the whole epic poem in verse, and she does all of her lines in iambic pentameter.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: And the other translators tend to render it in prose, or in, like, shortened lines, but without paying attention to that beat in the same sort of way.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And so I'm also really holding out for the audiobook version of this translation of The Odyssey, because I want to hear it read. It was originally an oral piece of a literature, and I really want to hear someone render it to me in that sort of way.
Lauren: Mm, that would be fun.
Gretchen: Yeah! I'm excited. It's one of my post-book projects, I'm gonna dive into that pretty deeply, I think.
Lauren: Awesome.
Gretchen: Yeah! So untranslatability, when it comes to things like how do you render – and I think the Greek word that she's trying to render with "complicated" is "polytropos"? I'm probably getting that wrong. But it means, like, "many-turning"?
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Gretchen: "Poly" meaning "many" and "tropos" is "turning," like a heliotrope is a flower that turns towards the sun.
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: But "many-turned" is not really an idiom in English. And so different translators try to render that idiom in different sorts of ways that both try to make it legible for the reader and also try to make it sound somewhat idiomatic and give you a sense of the feeling of the source text, in a short amount of space.
Lauren: I mean, idioms are super difficult because they're often multiple words, or if it's just one word, alluding to the whole idiom. Like, idioms already come as complicated sets of words that have a specific meaning that you can't just go, like, "word + word." You know, "looking a gift horse in the mouth," you can't say "look + horse + gift + mouth = ..."
Gretchen: That's a nice Greek idiom, Lauren!
Lauren: Yeah, I'm just keeping on-theme. You have to know about how gifts work and how horses work – and actually I don't actually know how horses' mouths work, I just know that you want to make sure they're healthy and that's apparently the mouth!
Gretchen: Yeah, I remember I was reading a book that I'd – when I was practising French I was reading stuff in French I'd already read in English.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And the English passage of this book had said something like "doing this thing was carrying coal to Newcastle," which, I've never been to Newcastle, but I know that this is an idiom for, you know, Newcastle is a big producer of coal and so why would you bring coal to Newcastle, Newcastle already has the coals.
Lauren: Yeah. Was it "taking croissants to Paris"?
Gretchen: I wish it was! They just said something like "it was just a drop of water in the ocean".
Lauren: Taking mustard to Dijon.
Gretchen: I don't think those are idioms in French the same way that "coals to Newcastle" is an idiom in English, right? So that would be kind of bringing you out by saying, "Oh, what what is this weird idiom that they have?" So instead they had just "is a drop of water in the ocean," which is kind of idiomatic, but is also something you could interpret at a very literal level and it doesn't particularly require context for the idiom.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Because also the book wasn't supposed to be set in France, so it'd be weird to have a very French-y idiom.
Lauren: Uh-huh. So, we can have this kind of translatability complication over time in English, but we could also have it over space because English is a language that is spoken in many places, and many places have their own words that have their own specific meaning.
Gretchen: Yeah, I really do like adding to those "untranslatable" lists, like, here's this very specific meaning that this Japanese pile of books brings to you. English has a specific verb for "to deceive someone into watching a video of Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up.'"
Lauren: Hey, wait! We do!
Gretchen: What does it say about the English speakers that we have the verb "to rickroll."
Lauren: Oh my gosh. It's such a profound reflection on what it means to be an English speaker on the internet that we have created the word rickroll.
Gretchen: I know, right?
Lauren: I never thought about it like that before, it's really fun to flip this trope around!
Gretchen: Yeah! You know, like, the English speakers – like, it's gonna be on a French word list somewhere and be like, "Look at those English speakers, look what they've done!"
Lauren: Oh, that one's gonna date really badly as well.
Gretchen: Nah, rickroll's a classic. And there's different words in Canadian English and Australian English that sometimes have different connotations.
Lauren: And since we bump into this occasionally, I thought we would do a mini quiz round!
Gretchen: Okay! Are you gonna quiz me?
Lauren: I'm gonna quiz you. I have some words here that have very specific meanings in Australian English.
Gretchen: Mm-hmm.
Lauren: And I want you to have a go at what you think they mean.
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: The first word is "bogan."
Gretchen: I'm familiar with "bogan," but I don't know if I could actually define it? Is it kind of like a hick, but in Australia? Or like a chav, but in Australia?
Lauren: I like that you're going for definition by triangulation.
Gretchen: Yeeeah... like, it's kind of more like working-class, salt-of-the-earth, but also the people that politicians kind of try to make up to?
Lauren: Yeah, that's actually – you did pretty good there. That's good.
Gretchen: Yay!
Lauren: But you can identify them from the particular sports that they're interested in, like the footy, like the cricket, something something outdoors, something something wearing flannel.
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: It's kind of a set of meaning that goes together to define –
Gretchen: I mean, in Canada they like the hockey, so I think I may somewhat understand this demographic.
Lauren: Yeah. The next word is "mateship."
Gretchen: So, because I know that you say – people say "mate" in Australian English to be like, "G'day, mate," or like, "What are you doing mate, that was a bad idea." So mateship is like the quality of having mates or like the relationship that you have with your mates? Or... this kind of thing?
Lauren: Uh, yeah! I mean, that is great, you've just kind of said the meaning of both of those words at the same time. Good start!
Gretchen: Is there something else I should be adding?
Lauren: It's something to do with the ineffable quality of reciprocal support. It's tied in a lot with the idea of community – not gonna lie, it has a kind of Anglo vibe. It's –
Gretchen: Oh my god, it's Australian hygge.
Lauren: It's Australian political dog-whistling to like –
Gretchen: Ohhh.
Lauren: – you know, the way things should be, i.e. back when Australia was quite Anglo. (It never really was, but that's another point.) Or this kind of idea of Australians as like battlers forged through hardship and adversity and are now somehow all kind of closely knit for that. Is my kind of definition of mateship.
Gretchen: Okay. Yeah, I definitely don't have the political context there.
Lauren: It doesn't stir your soul? That's what it's meant to evoke.
Gretchen: It just... ships my mates, mate!
Lauren: The final one is "early mark."
Gretchen: I have no idea.
Lauren: Have a guess, just make up...
Gretchen: A... like, something that... like, when you're like "on your marks, get set, go" so it's like the early... first thing you do?
Lauren: Mmm... no.
Gretchen: I told you I didn't know!
Lauren: This one is not even – like, so this is not a word that I have in my active vocabulary.
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: And it shows that like even in a country like Australia, which has a really quite homogeneous use of language across Australia, given how big it is, this is from New South Wales and Queensland?
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: And an "early mark" means you get to leave school or work early.
Gretchen: Ahhh!
Lauren: I have no idea why. New South Wales never really explained it to me.
Gretchen: I have a word for that, but I don't remember what it is.
Lauren: Is it "leaving work early"?
Gretchen: Yeah, okay. No, no, there's like an idiom to it, and I'm sure my high school self is reaching through time and being like "how did you forget this??"
Lauren: It was very important to you.
Gretchen: Yeah, it was really important to me for 13 years, and now I can't remember. I can remember the concept, but not the term.
Lauren: Well, there you have – it's an untranslatable word for you, Gretchen! It's a concept you're very familiar with and you've never had –
Gretchen: No, it's a schadenfreude thing!
Lauren: It's the schadenfreude effect from English to English.
Gretchen: Okay, can I give you a Canadian one?
Lauren: Sure.
Gretchen: So, are you familiar with the Canadianism "toque"?
Lauren: I am, but I feel like I'm not gonna know where to draw the boundary on it.
Gretchen: Okay, well, try.
Lauren: So, I know it's a hat.
Gretchen: Mm-hmm.
Lauren: Umm... yay for having Canadian rellos.
Gretchen: "Relatives" for the non-Australians.
Lauren: Thanks for translating for me! 
Gretchen: Welcome!
Lauren: Um, it's a hat, but it's like a hat you wear in the cold.
Gretchen: Mm-hmm.
Lauren: Like, I'm gonna translate it into my English and say it's a beanie, which is like a knitted, or like thick, woollen hat that doesn't have a brim or anything, it's just like an egg-warmer for your head.
Gretchen: Yeah, Americans do call it "beanie," so I wasn't sure if you'd have beanie as a term, because it's like kind of warm to wear beanies in Australia. So yeah, people call it a beanie, I have a beanie as something very different.
Lauren: What's a beanie, then, for you?
Gretchen: A beanie is one of those, like, round caps that has like a spinny thing on top? That they wore in like the '20s or something?
Lauren: Ahhhh. No. Gee, that's so confusing. How do we even talk to each other? Sometimes it's a complete mystery to me.
Gretchen: I know.
Lauren: It's going to be very difficult if I ever come and visit you in the cold. "Don't come here with a beanie, you need to bring a toque."
Gretchen: I may own a few toques, but I do not own any hats with little spinny things on top, and I do not aspire to.
Lauren: Ah, well. So, even when we speak the same language, we still kind of reach these moments of translation where we have to hopefully figure out that we're not talking about the same beanie.
Gretchen: Yeah. I know, personally, I think that my favourite really difficult word in English to translate is "the."
Lauren: That's not gonna look nice on any lists, Gretchen.
Gretchen: But it's so difficult! Because, you know, some languages don't have articles like "the" and "a" and "an" at all! Russian doesn't have them, Chinese doesn't have them I don't think, and there's a whole bunch of languages that don't have this at all, and so trying to translate into those languages is really hard, and for speakers of those languages, trying to learn English and being like, "Should I be using the 'the'? But how do you know?" And then there's a bunch of languages that have, like, several of them!
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And then even languages which have what is ostensibly still a definite article don't use them in the same sorts of ways.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: So in English, if I want to say "I go for a walk on Mondays," I don't put the "the" on Monday. But in French, if I want to say "I go for a walk on Mondays," then I have to say "le lundi," not just "lundi."
Lauren: Go for a walk on the Mondays.
Gretchen: Go for a walk the Monday. Singular.
Lauren: Okay. The Monday.
Gretchen: Yeah, so it's like, even in languages that ostensibly have things that map to this category, figuring out how to use them slightly differently depending on the language is a rich and difficult area of of investigation.
Lauren: So, we've established that it's not untranslatability, it's unable to translate into a single convenient word. And it's not untranslatability because it happens across Englishes, too...
Gretchen: Mm-hmm.
Lauren: So what is happening here?
Gretchen: I think it's about – there's two kinds of meaning that come with a word.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Gretchen: There's the kind of one-sentence, easy-to-describe, dictionary sort of meaning.
Lauren: Yeah. Which is what we often think of as meaning.
Gretchen: Yeah. And then there's all of the kind of surrounding context: the social context, and when you learned a word, and what it means to you, and these kinds of things. You know, I was coming across in one of these lists a word about, I think it was a Swedish type of coffee break.
Lauren: Fika!
Gretchen: Fika!
Lauren: It's a good one.
Gretchen: And they were saying, "Well in the Swedish coffee break you're not allowed to talk about work, and you must only talk about things that are not related to work."
Lauren: Uh-huh.
Gretchen: And I don't necessarily think that it is an intrinsic property of "fika" as "fika" specifically. I think this is a Swedish property of coffee breaks.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: Like, I know what a coffee break is.
Lauren: So it's conflating the coffee break and the – oh, I always think, 'cause with fika it's about having coffee and food, I think of it as, like, "let's do coffee"? You know, the act of doing coffee.
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: That's what I think of fika as.
Gretchen: Let's get coffee, or let's do coffee.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Not just like you're sitting by yourself at your desk having sad desk coffee.
Lauren: That is definitely not fika. I know that, and I'm not Swedish.
Gretchen: But you know, the cultural things are like what you do at a coffee break, or, you know, if you talk about different – I don't know, to go back to the school example, different recess traditions, or different school break traditions, like do you go out and play in the playground, or do you stay inside because it's very cold in Canada in the wintertime sometimes and they wouldn't let us outside, even with our toques.
Lauren: So, now that we have the concepts of these two forms of meaning, do you want the jargon?
Gretchen: Yes, I'd like the jargon.
Lauren: Okay. So the specific, to-the-point meaning – dictionary meaning, more or less – is "denotation." Which I always remember because denotation and dictionary start with the same letter.
Gretchen: Mm!
Lauren: And then connotation is all the context to the meaning. (Do you see what I did there?)
Gretchen: Ah, good.
Lauren: So I'm gonna explain denotation and connotation using sandwiches.
Gretchen: Okay.
Lauren: And of course we pulled sandwiches apart – not literally, just semantically – in a Patreon episode. But I want to come back to sandwiches and talk about a historical anecdote in my family that kind of explains where denotation and connotation are in tension. So as I've mentioned, my grandmother is an English second language speaker.
Gretchen: Mm-hmm.
Lauren: I've mentioned it on the show before. She's a Polish and German native speaker, came to Australia, had to learn not only English, but also raise a family of very Anglo-educated children. So, my grandfather's English, they went to school in English, and they wanted to kind of fit in with the other kids. And so the denotation of a sandwich is very simple: it's two pieces of bread with filling between it.
Gretchen: Yep.
Lauren: And my grandmother would send my mum and her siblings to school with sandwiches, but where my grandmother fell down was on the connotation of a sandwich, because my grandmother took the "two pieces of bread with some kind of tasty filling" quite liberally.
Gretchen: Uh-oh!
Lauren: There are stories of her sending my mum to school with butter and peanuts? Because she couldn't get the hang that peanut butter was a specific thing? Or sending them to school with – and I've never tried this, personally – but like chocolate biscuits in bread.
Gretchen: That's very interesting!
Lauren: And so this is completely violating the idea of what a sandwich – what its connotation is. But she's still meeting the denotation of it.
Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, I think in our sandwich episode she's passing the sandwich test with flying colours!
Lauren: She's doing better than a burrito!
Gretchen: Yeah!
Lauren: Or a pierogi.
Gretchen: Yeah, or a pizza or whatever. Like, she's got the the two pieces of bread, which is pretty key, and you could make a chocolate chip cookie sandwich...
Lauren: And so when we have these ideas of untranslatable words, we're trying to pull all the connotation along with the denotation. I mean, sometimes it's just denotation?
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: And the denotation that it has cuts the world in a particular way our language doesn't, and that would be nice to have. But often we're trying to drag a lot of the connotation along as well, and I think that's why "hygge" feels like such a complicated thing to bring into English, because we could just say it means cosiness, and we've kind of hit the denotation pretty well.
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: But we want to bring alllll of the Scandinavian knitwear, candles, prettiness in along with it.
Gretchen: Yeah. And it's kind of aspirational, like, this is how it could be. There's a quote from Dinosaur Comics that I really like that expresses this. So they're talking about meanings of words and what's the opposite of various things, and T-Rex is getting more and more frustrated and says, "Language is hard!" And the other character says, "No, life is hard. Language is just how we talk about it."
Lauren: Oh, that's so true. And it does – these connotations make it really hard, they make it hard especially for machine translation, because machines can't weigh up all the different connotations of different words in a way that a translator can. And that's part of the skill of translation, is knowing what words to use that have the same connotations.
Gretchen: Mm-hmm.
Lauren: You know, if you're translating a scene about someone at a market, then the word "cheap" as opposed to "inexpensive" – something that's cheap has this connotation of inferior quality compared to using the word inexpensive.
Gretchen: Yeah! Or "a good deal," you know, they could be the same thing, like a "bargain."
Lauren: Oh, yeah! Suddenly that's not only like – it's like good cheap.
Gretchen: "Wow, that's good cheap!" And, you know, "bad cheap," or "inexpensive," there's all these different levels there and –
Lauren: But words are connotation magnets. I mean, it's why we need euphemisms all the time, because as soon as we start using a word in a particular context, it just amasses all these connotations and they become either pejorative and negative and that's how slurs kind of get cycled through, which is not great, or they kind of make all these other cultural inferences.
Gretchen: Yeah, and I think that one of the things that talking about words as "untranslatable," even though it can be satisfying to say, "Oh wow, here's these new concepts!" or "Here's the thing that I hadn't thought about in this way before," in some respect, every word is untranslatable and yet we managed to learn them all anyway.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: How do we learn any new word if no word has an exact equivalent somewhere? Well, you know, we live a life and we figure it out! And in many cases, the word side of translation is very easy. It's the grammar side and the aesthetic side that's a lot harder.
Lauren: And all those connotations. I know when I learnt Nepali, I had to keep track of three different formality levels, which, like, I know how to be polite to different people to different extents in English, but suddenly I had to do it in another language and in the grammar, and I remember just knowing who to use which level of formality with was a whole set of translation that I took a long time to really feel comfortable with, so I would definitely agree that the kind of grammatical encoding of things adds a translation complication that can be quite hard to master.
Gretchen: Yeah, and yet you don't see different forms of "you" in "difficult to translate" lists, even though maybe they should be there.
Lauren: We're gonna start our own very exciting list.
Gretchen: Let's make a "difficult to translate for linguists" list! I'd be down for this!
[Music]
Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as SuperLinguo.
Gretchen: And I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistic questions, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. Current bonus topics include the semantics of sandwiches, language games, how to teach yourself linguistics, and a double feature: two episodes about swearing! And you can help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. Can't afford to pledge? That's okay too, we also really appreciate it if you can rate us on iTunes or Apple podcasts and recommending Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.
Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire, our editorial producer is Emily, and our production assistant is Celine. Our music is by The Triangles.
Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
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nipponnomad · 7 years
Text
Translation: ONE-Sensei Young Sunday Interview :D
youtube
I did my best to summarize this hour-long interview with ONE-sensei, uploaded to YouTube by Young Sunday in March and uploaded to Tumblr by the lovely and talented @one-blog last week. Please note, while my Japanese is decently high-level, I typically translate written Japanese rather than spoken Japanese (which, by its very nature, is harder to translate), so there might be mistakes here or there. That said, I believe I captured the general gist of things. If you're fluent in Japanese and want to do a more comprehensive translation in the future, please feel free!
EDIT: Here are some more detailed translations of selected parts of the interview, based on Japanese transcripts that @isasm found. :)
ONE-SENSEI: YOUNG SUNDAY INTERVIEW
Things to note:
-I mostly focused on what ONE said, as the hosts talked a lot and tended to get off on tangents.
-ONE comes across quite shy in this interview, especially in comparison to the super-chatty hosts. There are times when the hosts start to ask him a question and he doesn't seem to know what to say. There are also a few times where it looks like ONE is honest-to-god dissociating. That said, it's a good interview that includes some pretty insightful commentary.
-ONE is forced to sit in the creakiest wooden chair known to man.
-Maybe this is common knowledge, but is ONE married? You can see what looks like a wedding ring in a lot of shots.
-Instead of “ONE-sensei,” the hosts refer to ONE as “ONE-kun” throughout. I'm not sure why. It's kind of cute though.
The Interview: ONE's Life Story
The hosts begin with small talk, chatting about a new album they've listened to, and introducing ONE-sensei and his work in general terms. ONE doesn't actually show up until about nine and a half minutes in. The hosts ask if he's seen their show before and he says he has, that he watched it after he was invited to appear on it. The hosts seem quite pleased and amused about that.
ONE is asked what sorts of activities he did in middle school and high school. He responds that he did tennis in middle school, but he wasn't at a super high level. Because ONE comes across pretty shy and self-effacing, the hosts joke that they can now understand where Mob Psycho came from. They then announce that they're going to do an abbreviated life history for ONE, who says he's nervous.
ONE says he was born on October 29th, 1986, and is a Scorpio. His birthday is next week or the week after next (from when this interview was filmed). The hosts remark on how he's relatively young.
ONE says he was born in Niigata but raised in Saitama Prefecture, where he's lived for 22 or 23 years. His hometown is near Kounosu (wherever that is). He specifies that his town shares a DMV with Kounosu, which is such a charmingly mundane detail. :P
The hosts ask what kind of kid he was. He says he was a normal kid, but “low tension” (i.e. low energy, quiet, laid back). The hosts say that that explains why his characters tend to be low tension as well. ONE agrees that might be the case. He says there are times when he gets more energetic, and the hosts tease him, implying that now is certainly not one of those times. ONE says he did get really energetic when the One Punch Man anime was announced.
How ONE Started Drawing Manga
The hosts ask how he felt when the One Punch Man anime was announced, and ONE says it was really awesome. The hosts remark that One Punch Man reminds them of American comics and is like a “Japanese Marvel.” ONE agrees that he has a similar image of One Punch Man and has always found its advent a little mysterious—like he doesn't quite know where it came from. ONE states that it's now been about three or four years since One Punch Man debuted in Ura Sunday and Shonen Jump.
ONE says that he started drawing manga in elementary school and can't remember exactly how he got started. He says he remembers reading Crayon Shin-chan on the shinkansen and stuff and trying to draw it (he specifies that he was very slow at drawing at the time). He says that Crayon Shin-Chan was an early influence on him, which the hosts find unusual.
The hosts ask about his upbringing and whether or not his parents were strict. It seems his family was a bit strict and he didn't show them his manga growing up—because he was embarrassed, but also because he expected he would be scolded for drawing manga instead of studying. So basically, he hid his manga hobby until he got to college. The hosts compare him to Kamuro from Mob Psycho, presumably because of the strict family.
The hosts ask if ONE ever submitted one of his comics for publication. ONE says he did submit to Shonen Jump when he was a first-year college student, but that it didn't go well because “it wasn't an interesting story.” He says the guy who reviewed his manga at Shonen Jump went through it really fast with a totally blank face and that ONE was sent packing pretty quickly.
Because the submission didn't go well, ONE started putting his comics on his personal blog. At the time, it was really hard to read the comic on your phone because you could basically only see one panel at a time and you had to go through all fifteen pages that way. Eventually, he started drawing manga on his computer and uploading it from there. He got really into the “pasokon manga” culture and bought himself a drawing tablet and downloaded Comic Studio.
He began uploading his work to a pasokon manga site where all the users were beginners or semi-professional. As far as I can tell, the site was called NEETsha, short for “NEET Shakai” or “NEET Society.” (Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that one.) This was when he started drawing One Punch Man.
About One Punch Man
The hosts ask where the name One Punch Man (“Wanpanman”) came from. One host points out that it obviously sounds like Anpanman. Obviously it also sounds like One Piece (“Wanpiisu”), which is a sales juggernaut in Japan. ONE points out that actually “Wanpanman” outsells “Wanpiisu” overseas.
They ask what kind of character ONE was aiming for when he created Saitama. ONE says he always loved shonen manga and read a lot of it, and he thought about the final episode/battle, when the character was at their greatest strength. Basically, he thought it would be funny to start with a character who was already at the peak of their power and go from there, watching each successive villain get taken out in one hit.
Within the world of One Punch Man, the hosts note, Saitama is basically a regular person, he's laid back and flexible and his main concern is everyday stuff like going to special sales. They also note that Mob is similar, being a quiet type of guy who keeps a low profile until his percentage starts going up.
The hosts ask if One Punch Man immediately became popular after ONE posted it to NEETsha. ONE says it was pretty soon afterward, and that he enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts and comments and encouragement.
At this point, the hosts realize the interview is half over and they've totally forgotten about the personal history thing.
About Mob Psycho 100
As the hosts see it, there are three major themes in ONE's work: 1) What is power? 2) What should be done with power? 3) What is our true power, and how are we supposed to live with that power? We don't typically see the characters longing for more power; instead, we're dropped into the middle of the story and watch what they do after they've already become powerful. This is evident in Mob Psycho 100.
The hosts ask if the Mob Psycho manga has changed from when ONE put it online to when it was released in print. ONE says it hasn't really changed but it was worse reading it online because it was so small and hard to read on a cell phone screen. The hosts also ask if ONE has had assistants helping him to edit and fix things up, but ONE says they weren't there in the beginning.
The hosts look at some of the pages from Mob Psycho and comment on the art. When they compliment ONE's use of lines for emphasis in one picture, ONE says, in a self-deprecating sort of way, that he just did it using a tool in Comic Studio. The hosts also remark on the way Reigen holds a phone in one panel (you probably know which one) and laugh a lot. However, following this seeming criticism, one of the hosts keeps calling the art in Mob Psycho “punk” or “hip hop.” I had a hard time figuring out what he meant by that, but I think he's calling it a sort of indie, outsider art. He goes on to say that it's not like how everyone else draws and isn't imitating the prevailing manga style.
The same host states that there are two kinds of mangaka: 1) the “cover band” type that imitates others without really thinking for themselves, and 2) the type that doesn't imitate others and thinks for themselves. For example, many “cover band” mangaka imitate the battle scenes in Dragonball, whereas the ones in Mob Psycho look—if anything—more like battles in Akira. The hosts ask ONE if he was inspired by Akira. ONE says he likes Akira but doesn't really answer one way or another.
The hosts have been talking a lot, so they interrupt themselves to ask if ONE wants to correct them on anything. ONE has just one thing he wants to say: when he was drawing the picture of Reigen holding the cell phone, surprisingly enough, he drew it while looking at his own hand. This comment gets big laughs.
Themes in ONE's Work
The hosts discuss the issue of “leveling up,” comparing it to “geemu nou” (“game brain,” a type of dementia allegedly caused by playing too many video games). In English academic discourse, we would probably call this “gameification.” Basically, people who play a lot of games—as well as the protagonists in a lot of shonen manga—become obsessed with “reaching the next level” and don't focus on anything else. The hosts ask ONE if there's some sort of lesson in his work about the dangers of this type of single-mindedness.
ONE says that he's noticed this tendency in shonen manga. By contrast, he discusses the series he was influenced by as a child, Crayon Shin-chan—specifically, the movie version of Crayon Shin-chan. As a series about a normal family, Crayon Shin-chan was generally fairly peaceful and funny. However, in the movie, things got kind of serious. ONE believes that, when things get serious in a gag series, they hit extra hard.
He compares this to One Punch Man. Even though it's a gag manga, the world itself is pretty serious, with people being killed by monsters all the time and so on. Existence itself is like a gag in the world of One Punch Man, which ONE finds interesting.
Finally, the hosts show pages from the fight between the esper kids and Claw's 7th Division. They discuss the part where Mob very calmly and directly tells Gas Mask Ojiichan: “Having psychic powers won't make you popular.” Gas Mask Ojiichan then gets upset and yells: “EVEN SO, I SHOULD BE TREATED SPECIAL!” So basically, Claw is full of children who never managed to mature into adults and don't want to become “commoners.”
ONE then talks about “commoners,” average people who get up in the morning, get on the train to go to work, and do their best day after day. ONE thinks that this in itself—being a member of society—is difficult in its own way, and that's what Saitama and Mob are trying to do.
I feel like that's a really lovely way to end the interview. Sadly, they never finish the personal history and we never find out what ONE's favorite food, color, movie, manga, and type of woman are. :(
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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years
Text
WHY I'M SMARTER THAN LANGUAGE
We tend to write the software controlling those flying cars? But I always end up spending most of the members don't like it.1 Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare.2 Lexical closures provide a way to get startup ideas is hard. Wasting programmer time is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time.3 Someone wrote recently that the drawback of Y Combinator wants to raise $250-500k. Language design is being taken over by hackers.4 A lot can change for a startup, it will sound plausible to a lot of money. Did they want French Vanilla or Lemon?
Organic growth seems to yield better technology and richer founders than the big bang method.5 I can call on any struct.6 The project either gets bogged down, or the startup will get bought, in which case problem solved, or the result is a free for all. Which means that even if we're generous to ourselves and assume that YC can on average triple a startup's expected value, we'd be taking the right amount of risk if only 30% of the startups were fundable would be a good idea, but you have to process video images depends on the rate at which you have to be facing off in a kind of business plan for a new type of number you've made up, you can envision companies as holes. I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10,2001. What investors still don't get is how clueless and tentative great founders can seem at the very beginning.7 You have to approach it somewhat obliquely.
Usually this initial group of hackers using the language for others even to hear about it usually, because to prove yourself right you have to do is turn off the filters that usually prevent you from seeing them. This helps counteract the rule that in buying a house you should consider location first of all. I went to work for the love of it: amateurs. Which makes it easier to remember that it's an admirable thing to write great programs, even when this work doesn't translate easily into the conventional intellectual currency of research papers.8 In theory this is possible for species too, but it's a bad sign they even try. In some applications, presumably it could generate code efficient enough to run acceptably well on our hardware. The problem is the same reason Facebook has so far remained independent: acquirers underestimated them. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to be one of the only programming languages a surprising amount of effort has gone into preventing programmers from doing things that they think aren't good for you.9 I don't think we suck, but instead ask do we suck?10 And try to imagine what a transcript of the other guy's talk would be like teaching writing as grammar, without mentioning that its purpose is to refine the idea.11 But I'd rather use a site with primitive features and smart, nice users than a more advanced one whose users were idiots or trolls.12
Expressing ideas helps to form them. A company that an angel is willing to put $50,000 into at a valuation of a million can't take $6 million from VCs at that valuation. Afterward I put my talk online like I usually do.13 This is understandable with angels; they invest on a smaller scale. As a young founder under 23 say, are there things you and your friends would like to build great things for the companies they started would hire more employees as they grew. Having strings in a language where all the variables were the letter x with integer subscripts. Plus they're investing other people's money, and they even let kids in.14
It's due to the shape of the problem. If you want to notice startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your inbox?15 But I know the real reason we're so conservative is that we shouldn't be afraid to call the new Lisp Lisp.16 And it may be, this is the exact moment when technological progress stops. Currently the way VCs seem to operate is to invest in startups Y Combinator has funded. Then I do the same thing over and over seems kind of gross to me. To start with, investors are letting founders cash out partially.
And so interfaces tend not to change at all, and you'd get that fraction of big hits. That may be the greatest effect, in the sense that it lets hackers have their way with it. Essays should do the opposite. You might think that if they found a good deal of syntax in Common Lisp occurs in format strings; format is a language where you can spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to hear it. Is it necessary to take risks proportionate to the returns in this business. We wrote what was, 700 years ago, writing software pretty much meant writing software in general, because we'd be a long way toward fixing the problem: you'd soon learn what was expensive. The real question is, how far up the ladder of abstraction will parallelism go? It's pretty clear now that the healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to eat because they were so much more robust to have all the brains on the server. This is more pronounced among the very best hackers will like? But of course if you really get it, you can cry and say I can't and they won't even dare to take on ambitious projects. You're getting things done.17 But that's no different with any other tool.
And then there was the language and there was my program, written in the coming years will be Web-based software you can use any language you want, so if I can convince smart readers I must be pretty sharp. But business administration is not what you're doing in a startup founded by three former banking executives in their 40s who planned to outsource their product development—which to my mind is actually a lot riskier than investing in a pair of really smart 18 year olds—he couldn't be faulted, if it means anything at all, and you'd get that fraction of big hits.18 In one place I worked, we had a big board of dials showing what was happening to our web servers.19 But if you're living in the future. I decided the critical ingredients were rich people and nerds—investors and founders. I'm just saying you should think about who you really admire and hang out with them, instead of taking a class on, say, transportation or communications. Inventors of wonderful new things are often surprised to discover this, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. When I go to a talk, you could fund everyone who seemed likely to succeed, it's hard not to think where it came from. How often does it happen that a rule works for thousands of years, then switches polarity?
Anything funny or gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be rational and prefer the latter. When you know nothing, you have to be more than a language, or you have to get up on monday and go to work.20 At a good college, from which—because they're writing for a popular magazine—they then proceed to recoil in terror. How do you tell whether something is the germ of a giant company, or just a niche product? The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not likely to have happened to any bigger than a cell. There is also the same: Darwinian. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results.21 Translated into more straightforward language, this means: We're not investing in you, but we weren't interested in ecommerce per se. And it's not just the cost of reading it, and that is exactly the kind VCs won't touch. If there's something you're really interested in, you'll find valuable ones just sitting there waiting to be discovered right under our noses.
Notes
The optimal way to make that leap. 'Math for engineers' sucks, and this tends to happen fast, like storytellers, must have had a tiny.
Turn the other seed firms. For example, probably did more drugs in his early twenties compressed into the work that seems formidable from the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is allowing economic inequality to turn down some good ideas buried in Bubble thinking. Geshke and Warnock only founded Adobe because Xerox ignored them. Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings.
It seemed better to embrace the fact by someone else start those startups. The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably part of wisdom. I hadn't had much success in doing a bad sign if you are unimportant. Or rather, where many of the political pressure against Airbnb than hotel companies.
They thought I was there when it converts. Perhaps the most important information about competitors is what approaches like Brightmail's will degenerate into once spammers are pushed into using mad-lib techniques to generate series A rounds from top VC funds whether it was putting local grocery stores out of school. They thought I was a very noticeable change in the long term than one level of links. Instead of bubbling up from the revenue-collecting half of it.
A round, that they kill you, it becomes an advantage to be higher, as on a saturday, he saw that I see a lot of people like them—people who are both.
Viaweb, he'd get his ear pierced. If you have more options. That's the lower bound to its precision. Now we don't have to solve this problem by having a gentlemen's agreement with the solutions.
Investors are one of them is that if a company tuned to exploit it.
But it turns out to do with the New Deal but with World War II the tax codes were so bad that they violate current startup fashions. As well as problems that have economic inequality.
No one seems to have gotten away with the high-minded Edwardian child-heroes of Edith Nesbit's The Wouldbegoods. I were doing Bayesian filtering in a bar. Professors and politicians live within socialist eddies of the next round, though more polite, was one firm that wanted to have to deliver these sentences as if a bunch of other people. No Logo, Naomi Klein says that I know when this happened because it depends on a valuation cap is merely a complicated but pointless collection of stuff to be a founder; and with that of whatever they copied.
Apple's products but their policies. I think in general we've done ok at fundraising is because other companies made all the East Coast VCs. 35 companies that tried that.
If you walk into a few additional sources on their companies. At Princeton, 36% of the conversion of buildings not previously public, like good scientists, motivated less by financial rewards than by selling them overpriced components. You need to fix once it's big, plus they are like, and that injustice is what we need to get users to recruit manually—is probably 99% cooperation.
Teenagers don't tell the craziest lies about me. It seemed better to read a draft of this.
In fact, this thought experiment works for nationality and religion too. To a 3 year old son, you'll be well on your board, there is some kind of gestures you use in representing physical things.
Some of the world in verse.
I have so far has trained them to ignore what your GPA was.
In 1995, when Subject foo degenerates to just foo, what if they did not become romantically involved till afterward. Some are merely ugly ducklings in the sample might be enough. The actual sentence in the same thing twice.
What made Google Google is that Digg is Slashdot with voting instead of reacting. Some VCs seem to be when I switch in mid-sentence, but starting a business, having sold all my shares earlier this year. Even as late as 1984. And yet I think it's mainly not having to have this second self keep a journal, and I don't think they'll be able to formalize a small amount, or Microsoft could not process it.
03%.
These points don't apply to the hour Google was founded, wouldn't offer to invest in these funds have no real substance.
Only founders of failing startups would even be working on is a dotted line on a road there are lots of type II startups spread: all you know Apple originally had three founders? They want so much better to read stories. But I'm convinced there were, like wages and productivity, but trained on corpora of stupid and non-broken form, that it might be?
Some of the word procrastination to describe what's happening till they measure their returns. The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the 2002-03 season was 4. Part of the world barely affects me.
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perspectivepodcast · 4 years
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[Transcript] Side A: Seasons
There was a tree in my backyard, a pine tree. I don’t know what it is about pine trees that attracts me so much. For me, they smell like summer; they remind me of places where the air is sweeter; perhaps I was a fox in another life and used to hide under them to protect myself from the blizzards or the heat.
There was a pine tree in my backyard once, just next to the pomegranate tree that just now is offering its fruits to the birds.
They say Persephone was picking flowers one day, on a field in the green and yellow island of Sicily, the land of the sun, of fertility. Suddenly, Hades, King of the Underworld, appeared on his chariot of death and raped and kidnapped Persephone, and took her with him to the Underworld as his bride. Her mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest, unleashed her despair and fury over the world by making everything on the earth wilt and die. Fearing for the survival of the earthlings, Zeus, King of the Gods, decided to convince Hades to give Persephone back to her mother, and he forced Hades to agree on one condition: he could have Persephone for himself only as many months a year as many grains of pomegranate she would eat in the Underworld. Hades, however, did not tell Persephone about this bargain. Meanwhile, in the Underworld, the heartbroken, captive Persephone had refused to eat for many days, and began to feel starving and feeble. Hades offered her twelve grains of pomegranate; she accepted six of them. Thus framed, Persephone doomed herself to live in the Underworld as Queen for six of the twelve months of the year, and she would be free to go back to the earth, to her mother, for the remaining six months. Every year, this is why the seasons come and go: during the six months Persephone is in the Underworld, Demeter forbids everything from growing, while, as soon as Persephone is back on the earth, Demeter makes the world bloom again. They say that poppies first blossomed on the earth the first summer Persephone could see the sun again, as a passionate reminder that Hades stood forever waiting for her return in the Underworld.
If you still believe in this story, then Persephone must soon be bound to go back to the Underworld, judging from the color of the leaves. And from the pomegranates on the tree.
But perhaps, this story stays true even if you don’t believe in it.
One of my favorite poems is about this story. It was written by Louise Glück, and it is entitled ‘A Myth of Devotion’:
When Hades decided he loved this girl he built for her a duplicate of earth, everything the same, down to the meadow, but with a bed added.
Everything the same, including sunlight, because it would be hard on a young girl to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness.
Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night, first as the shadows of fluttering leaves. Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars. Let Persephone get used to it slowly. In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting.
A replica of earth except there was love here. Doesn't everyone want love?
He waited many years, building a world, watching Persephone in the meadow. Persephone, a smeller, a taster. If you have one appetite, he thought, you have them all.
Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night the beloved body, compass, polestar, to hear the quiet breathing that says I am alive, that means also you are alive, because you hear me, you are here with me. And when one turns, the other turns—
That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness, looking at the world he had constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind that there���d be no more smelling here, certainly no more eating.
Guilt? Terror? The fear of love? These things he couldn’t imagine; no lover ever imagines them.
He dreams, he wonders what to call this place. First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden. In the end, he decides to name it Persephone’s Girlhood.
A soft light rising above the level meadow, behind the bed. He takes her in his arms. He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you
but he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end you’re dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.
 Life is the combinational, delicate dancing struggle of light, earth, and water. A single green vine shoot is able to grow through cement. Some animals have evolved to hibernate; some animals have evolved to migrate. Some trees lose their leaves; some trees keep them. The seasons change, pass, follow one another, in a flow that doesn’t really take everything they find on their way with them, because everything that is in the way of the seasons also kind of is the seasons actually. Life all flows with them, inexorable. The light doesn’t just refract or diffract, it is diffused and absorbed. The land will rest in winter; the fruits will fill with sunlight in the summer; the birds will build new nests in spring; the waters will quench the thirst of forests in the fall. As we circle around the star of our devotion, the leaves will burgeon and grow and swell with chlorophyll and be burned by the blinding light and find relief in returning to the ground. Nothing remains intact. Everything remains itself. Everything is real and what is real cannot die. Everything just keeps being everything, in all its countless forms and mutations.
There is something about evergreens that fills me with wonder and admiration. Although I should specify it’s a sense of wonder and admiration I feel for plants in general, not just evergreens nor just for trees. I am in awe by and admire their ability to be, despite everything. I admire the state of biological evolution they have reached that makes them so incredibly resilient to external forces of change. I admire how intelligent they are as life forms, how wisely they have used their time on this planet to learn how to adapt to it with mutual benefits.
We animals are all built to make movement possible. We have organs that are specialized in one thing, and one thing only, because of course if the whole of our organism were responsible for the whole of our biological functions it would take us too long to process everything we need to process, or at least, too long to be able to move and go and fetch food or run away from another animal that has come to fetch us as food. Imagine if we had to wait for every cell in our body to process sugar before being able to move. We have specialized cells for that. And a brain to control it all. So that in the meantime our muscles, hopefully helped by a generous dose of endorphins and hormones triggered mostly by fear, can target us to a safer place while our stomachs can concentrate on digesting the food we just ate.
Trees don’t have this kind of hierarchy: if you cut down a branch, or a root, or if you carve the trunk, it’s not as if you made a hole in one of our lungs, or cut through our stomachs. A tree is always itself: unless you really annihilate it, and you really need to make a sadistic effort to do that, it’ll find a way to grow back no matter how much you mutilate it. In this sense it is different from animals because while animals are individuals, that is, in Latin, in-dividuus, or non-divisible, trees are very much divisible and they’ll still be what they are. But most of all, they’ll still be.
There was a pine tree in my backyard, and once I made up a story about it being actually a prince who was turned into a tree by a witch to prevent him from marrying the princess. The witch had taken the princess away with her a long time before, but the Pine Prince continued to stand watch and wait for his princess to come back. I must have written it somewhere, the story I mean. Who knows where it is now.
I met him in my backyard everyday as I walked to the garage to take my bike and go to school. The Pine Prince would endure the fog, the heat, the cold, the snow, the rain. I remember the bark was crusted, and tears of honey-colored resin lay between the cracks. He was a little threadbare, perhaps because he didn’t have much space to grow…
They cut him down on the 7th of March 2011. I wrote two poems, that day and the day after, that I’ll try to translate here:
 They had told me that everything dies (my eyes burnt for the cold dismembered dismembered in pieces before my eyes). But I didn’t think they’d dare rape the smell of the sea and of freedom ancient inside the coarse skin or the tender white secret (how many tears of resin have we wept together?). Not in spring, I didn’t think they’d dare, not in spring (one bud that closes its eyes puts a whole forest on mourning)… Something dies inside. It dies like the shadow of the sagging smoke of fireworks dies. It dies and where there used to be the mutilated shape here after my gaze, now only the sky is left only an emptiness of sky.
 *
 In memory of a dream
Any invention, even an entire world of poetry, is worth you staying here with me.
 I don’t know what it was about that tree that made me love it so much. Perhaps he was the symbol of trees for me. Perhaps he embodied something I was still unable to phrase with precision, something Rainer Maria Rilke was able to put to words in a book I still didn’t know at the time but that has been a home for me ever since I read it a couple of years later, the Letters to a Young Poet. In Stephen Mitchell’s translation, Rilke writes: ‘if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!’
 It is autumn now, and I wish I were as firm as a tree in my ability to be. I wish I knew how to be the way trees know. I wish I were as vertical, as resolute as them. I wish I were as horizontal, as molecular as them. I wish I knew how to be despite and through the seasons. I wish I weren’t indivisible. I wish I weren’t so brittle.
They say sorrow passes, and we remain. But I wish we didn’t always have to worry so much about our intactness, I wish I didn’t always have to be so afraid to be disintegrated.
I wish I could be more like the Pine Prince, or even better, I wish I could be a forest of Pine Princes. And seasons would be seasons again. And time would be time again. And I would be seasons too. And I would be time too.
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In this video, Dr. Pillai talks about rediscovering the Brzee mantral; the Mantra to Change your Financial Destiny and Create Prosperity Consciousness.
Transcript ============================= The rediscovering Brzee, the sound of wealth. To summarize in one word what is the rediscovery of Brzee, I will say Brzee is the ‘word’. Brzee is the ‘word’. What does the ‘word’ mean? The ‘word’ is the ‘word of God’, the Bible.
For the Hindus, the ‘word’ can be translated as Veda. Veda is ‘the word’ and what does the ‘word’ or Veda do? It will create. The word creates or more precisely the sound. I am substituting sound for the ‘word’.  The sound creates. It is Nada in Sanskrit. Nada is the ultimate sound, the most subtle sound. Even the sound of a subatomic particle, even minuter than a subatomic particle and that is within us.
Being human itself is a precious achievement, is a very, very hard achieved body. This body, this brain that we have has the ability to create everything because, even as the Bible says, ‘I have created man in my own form’. So if God looked like anything or anyone, he looked like us.
The ‘word’ is important. ‘Brzee’ is the word. So that is the rediscovery. Initially when this was given to me I did not have the full understanding of it. It took two decades and more to understand it more. So I have always been oscillating between science and religion.
So coming back to Brzee, Brzee as a wealth sound means it is the ‘word’.
We have many, many scientific and precise way of understanding the ‘word’. The ‘word’ here is Brzee. Brzee is the ‘word’ and I became very creative in teaching it. Some done some good but now let us not do the good that Vishwamitra, the emperor Yogi intended and he and I co developed it and I am co-developing it still and he is helping me from the other plane.
The Brzee is just not the sound or the word, it is a Being and where is that Being? That Being lives in turmeric. If you want to understand the power of turmeric, what you have to do? You have to go and see the research that has so far being completed or are on turmeric, ‘Kurkuma’, immense results. It can do almost everything. It can do almost everything. It is a miracle root, even to the Yogis.
I can talk about turmeric and the traditional understanding of turmeric by the Yogis, but I am going to briefly mention one thing. This is turmeric I have been carrying. I just wanted to get it away because it has been on my computer bed for a long time. But she said, ‘No. Don’t throw me, throw me out’, because there is an angel that is in. You can see the angel’s face, the two eyes. That was not the angel I first found out, which told me ‘Don’t throw me out’.
‘Okay, then I won’t. You look like a baby. I don’t want to kill you.’ ‘Okay then I will teach you more’. ‘Okay. That’s good’. ‘Okay. Then everybody can understand more, understand the word, and understand Brzee’ ‘Okay. That’s nice.’
That’s not what I found. What I found was there was an adult or a bird like being like I am going to show that to you. This is the being I found out first and this is the being who said ‘don’t throw me out’. The one that I showed you earlier was another being.
So we have to understand how we can use this being, the Brzee being and I have been up until now more comfortable. For instance, when I was doing the research on the stem cells of turmeric, which we have a patent pending on that’s with the Indian Government on my new discovery on the effect of the Brzee sound on the turmeric.
Now, what is more important than the stem cells of the turmeric is the being of turmeric. You seen the being and I have been here to bring science and religion together. So let me do that, instead of just going more in favour of science. So as I said I am going to give three points more to religion. So that it always remains beyond what science can discover.
Now, wait for what I am going to do on May 19th  when I will discover more about how it can change our financial destiny, how it can change our financial brain-all these interesting things along with more info on the Goddess of Brzee, the being of Brzee.
God Bless! ================================
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babbleuk · 5 years
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Voices in AI – Episode 95: A Conversation with Eric Topol
[voices_in_ai_byline]
About this Episode
Episode 95 of Voices in AI features Byron speaking with author Eric Topol regarding how Artificial Intelligence could revolutionize medicine and the health care industry.
Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com
Transcript Excerpt
Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by GigaOm, and I’m Byron Reese. Today my guest is Eric Topol. He is the author of the book Deep Medicine, and he talks about how the power of artificial intelligence can make medicine better for all humans by freeing physicians from the tasks that interfere with human connection. He holds a degree with highest distinction in the study of biomedicine from the University of Virginia, and he holds an MD, with honor, in the study of medicine from the University of Rochester. Welcome to the show, Eric.
Eric Topol: Thanks very much, Byron.
Tell me a little bit about your background and how did you, obviously with the medicine background, first get into AI and see its potential for transforming the medical industry?
Well, it’s been about a dozen years ago when I started this Research Translational Institute, which was predicated on understanding human beings at a deep level. That was also involving, of course, digital, wearable sensors. Very quickly we saw that there was no shortage of data being generated for each person, whether it’s through different sensors or a genome or electronic health records or images, and it became clear that we needed a rescue for dealing with all this data. Clearly, AI is emerging to fulfill that very objective.
What do you mean, you set out to ‘understand humans’? Is that psychology and sociology and physiology? Is it all of that? That’s a pretty tall order. You have to look at history and anthropology…
Yeah, not quite as diverse as you’re mapping but rather the medical essence of a person. That would be the biological layers like DNA, proteins, the microbiome, the physiologic through sensors layer, the anatomy through scans, and then the environment you can quantify now through sensors, as well as the traditional medical information. We’re not talking about anthropology or psychology as much as we’re talking about what makes a person tick.
If you go to 2000, 2003 when the genome was announced, the first human genome draft, their thought was the DNA is going to have all the operating instructions. I’ve never thought that to be the case and in fact, we need much more information about a person. The whole concept of individualized medicine [means] being able to match up that knowledge of a person with prevention or better management of conditions, or everything we do for screening and medications and making diagnoses, everything we do in medicine, by having a deeper understanding of each person.
Where are we on that journey? If you go back [from] Hippocrates to now—because I’m always struck by how much we don’t know—you can start with the brain and how a thought is encoded and what gives rise to the mind. We used to think the neurons were the story, and then it’s the glial cells and then it’s something else. I read recently we don’t even know how the body maintains its body temperature. How does it always keep us at 98.6? Where are we in terms of our understanding of what you’re trying to[do] – are we still in the era of stone knives and bearskins?
[Laughter] No, we’re not. We’re making tremendous headway. I think it was a remarkable study done on Scott and Mark Kelly, the astronauts, where they compared Scott – these are identical twins – who was out in space at the International Space Station, and every one of these things we just discussed, every layer, was essentially defined: the deepest phenotyping, what we call it, of human beings in history and then the analysis of what was the hit of being in space for a year on Scott, and it was quite a bit of effect on genes, chromosomes, and on his cognition, a significant impairment. We can do this now. We haven’t done it at scale.
We probably now have done genome sequences of a million or so people, but it’s just starting to come together. To answer your question, Byron, we can do each of these. We can do an in-depth probe of a person’s gut microbiome. We can understand things that we never could before. Integrating it all for each human being is another task that is going to require AI because no human being can assimilate all this data.
Yeah I always wonder, will these systems give us more understanding of how things work? Hear me out here because I think about the antidepressant Wellbutrin, which while it was being studied, some people remarked, “You know, I don’t seem to crave smoking as much.” They’re like, really? They do studies and they say “Wow, this is really good for smoking cessation. Let’s call it Zyban and sell it.”
It’s more like we get things out of the data that we don’t necessarily understand, but is it necessarily important that we understand them? We just need to know that it works. We don’t know necessarily how an aspirin stops pain but it’s enough to know that it does, and it doesn’t seem to have terrible side effects. Do you think these sorts of systems are giving us true understanding at a systems level of what a human being is, or are they giving us just a high degree of predictive ability?
Well, there isn’t one simple answer. It depends on the particular focus. In some areas, we’re making significant progress across the board; in others, we’re still at a pretty rudimentary state.
The one thing people are always curious about, of course, is longevity. While the number of people that make it to 100 – the percent of people that make it to 100 goes up every year, the number of people who make it to 125 is stuck at zero forever, seemingly so far. Do you think the kinds of technology you’re studying are going to let us – and I’m not even talking about “curing death” but just break past 125 or 150 for a few people?
It’s possible. I mean, I’m somewhat skeptical about the ability for the science of aging to have a measurable impact on extending lifespan. I don’t know if there are a lot of people who are optimistic that we’ll be able to change that ceiling that you refer to (of 120) and increase the number of people who are centenarians and beyond. That’s really being pursued, but it’s speculative. We are understanding the aging process, that science, far better than ever before and there’s lots of ideas that are being pursued. So far, I don’t see anything that is really making any substantive difference.
Yeah because it always seems like if you ask the people that live a really long time, “Why did you live a long time?” they always have something like, I ate a stick of butter every night, or something that’s completely counter-intuitive.
Yeah we’ve seen that. We’ve had people swear that it was the Twinkies that did it. We have a big elderly program of people who are 85 average, 90 but 85 and above who’ve never been sick, and we’ve had people in that cohort that smoked two packs of cigarettes a day still at age 99. There are some genetic underpinnings that allow people, without any drugs, environmental effects, and things that we don’t understand yet, that give a Teflon coating for some people, not just for lifespan but I think most people would agree it’s actually ‘health span,’ the number of years you can extend where a person is perfectly healthy without any significant chronic conditions. That’s the real goal, not just to be able to say you lived to some ripe old age but you had many different serious conditions including impairment of your cognition.
Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com
[voices_in_ai_link_back]
Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.
from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2019/09/05/voices-in-ai-episode-95-a-conversation-with-eric-topol/
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juliettespencerus · 5 years
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Powerful Topics in Medicine Interview with Sayer Ji
Marc David, Founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, interviews Sayer Ji who is a widely recognized researcher, author, and founder of greenmedinfo.com. Greenmedinfo is known internationally for providing open access, evidence based resources supporting natural and integrative healing modalities. Marc and Sayer discuss how true health is life empowerment and why so many people are choosing natural remedies.
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Transcript:
Marc: Welcome, everybody. I’m Marc David, Founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are in The Future of Healing Online Conference, and I am here with one of my favorite thought leaders in the nutrition and health and transformation space, Sayer Ji. Welcome, Sayer Ji.
Sayer Ji: So good to be here, Marc. I love your interviews and what you’re doing, and it’s always  a great pleasure to be in your events.
Marc: Thanks! The feeling is so mutual. Let me just say a quick few words about you for anyone who’s not familiar with your work.
Sayer Ji is a widely recognized researcher, author, and presenter, a member of the Global GMO­Free Coalition and advisory board member of the National Health Federation and Fearless Parent. He’s a reviewer and editor of The International Journal of Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine and the founder of one of my favorite online resources and one of the world’s most widely referenced, evidence­based natural health resources of its kind, and that’s greenmedinfo.com. Now Sayer Ji founded greenmedinfo.com in 2008 to provide the world an open­access, evidence­based resource supporting natural and integrative modalities.
That’s how I first found you was just doing what guys like us do. We poke around   online and we find stuff. Somehow I found GreenMedInfo and my jaw just dropped!  Then I spent a little time stalking you and finding out more about you. I’m like, “Wow!  I’ve got to meet this person.” I’m a huge fan of your work, and we’ve gotten to have some great conversations. I’m wondering if we could just start out a little bit, big picture of just how you personally got on your journey into the work that you do. How did you end up here?
Sayer Ji: Well, it’s a very similar story. We had spoken about how you also had come to this movement because of health issues, and I think both of us suffered early on from    types of illnesses that made it necessary to be within the conventional medical system.   I know I had an inhaler until I was 20, always by my side because I would periodically have severe bronchial asthma episodes and have to go to the hospital and undergo what felt like experimental procedures to open up my lungs.
It wasn’t till I got into nutrition, diet, learning about cow’s milk affecting asthma incidents and then weed and all the other things we all know about now that I was
liberated from that system. Over time, it just became really a passion for me to identify what—today people want evidence. They want peer­reviewed, published research because if they don’t have that, well, then coin to the powers that be, it’s just not true. When you have self­healing experiences and you see the wonder of something as simple as turmeric or Echinacea or vitamin C, you just want to tell the world.
That’s when, through happenstance, I was exposed to the National Library of Medicine’s database, which is 23 million citations presently. You can go on  pubmed.gov and search and it’s this huge ocean of data that you just jump into, like you’re swimming looking for clinical pearls. You just sit there on the edge and fish with your keywords, and you can find the most amazing research supporting what you and   I love to advocate for, natural healing.
Marc: These days, you and I were talking before this conversation. There’s so much opportunity available to us. It just feels like there’s an explosion of, in a sense,    personal empowerment because we now have access to information like never before, and we have access to kind of dig into that information. I’m just wondering when you kind of take the temperature of the people in your world, the people who come to GreenMedInfo, what is the general sense when it comes to people’s relationship with health, with health information, with integrative modalities? What are you seeing from the big picture?
Sayer Ji: I agree with you. It’s like this massive wave of enthusiasm when it comes to the technology we’re using now. It’s amazing to think that there are thousands of people around the world that are now able to stream into this conversation, and we’re able to make available what we want to share to them. That technology has really created sort of a literal manifestation of a global brain so that we’re all connected, we all can share what we feel is valuable, and it’s just created such an empowering movement because previous to this we were kind of dependent on the priests of the body, the physicians    or the scholars who stated that they know the truth, but it was very hard to get to it.
In fact, just 20 years ago, you couldn’t even get to the National Library of Medicine’s database without modem speeds that were, I think, a thousand times slower. It was, I think back then, $100 an hour and now you go on GreenMedInfo and you can get tens of thousands of studies or go on Medline and get millions, and it’s such a Copernican revolution.
But on the other hand, people are overwhelmed and the information is too voluminous so that they’re kind of paralyzed. What you and I think to try to do as well is to try to translate some of that and make it more understandable as best as we can so that people can have chunks of edible wisdom that aren’t going to give them indigestion.
Marc: Well put! Let me ask you this question. What do you notice when it comes to just the health, in general, of the population. Since you’ve been doing this work, would you    say, “Wow! We, the collective we, we seem to be getting healthier or maybe we’re kind of staying the same or maybe things are getting worse.” I look at statistics. I look at my friends. I’m trying to gauge these things. I’m just wondering what’s your big picture assessment of sort of health of the world, health of humans?
Sayer Ji: Wow! Well, it appears that I believe there’s been no time that I can think of in recorded history and we can assume even pre­recorded history, and things have been so polarized. We have little pockets where you can get some of the highest quality food that probably has ever been produced using technologies like biodynamic farming, using sea salt derived hydroponics so that it’s really clean and in high mineral, and yet we also live in a time when it’s a miracle any of us are standing because we’re in the kind of post­industrial, chemical apocalypse where there are hundreds of thousands of chemicals that have no regulatory oversight, that the industries have released directly into our food supply, our cosmetics, our air, our water, and now they’re in our bodies lodged there. There’s no toxicology research that has ever assessed the notarial  effects, the synergy of more than one of these compounds at any single time.
When you look at what are called toxicants or synthetic often petrochemical derived substances, additives, pesticides, and then, of course, almost every pharmaceutical on the planet that has FDA approval, the kiss of death, technically, is a petrochemical derivative.
We’re all being poisoned. It’s a miracle that we all are still standing and feeling okay, which speaks to the resilience that I think later hopefully we can expand on, just the amazing ability of our body to heal itself and overcome what, in really scientific terms, shouldn’t really be possible. Yeah, it’s really a tough time. I think there’s cognitive dissidence where we have all this great stuff available. You have so many choices, but then on the other hand, we don’t. Our choice is to be exposed to chemicals has been taken away from us. We can’t even tell if there are GMO, Roundup­laden ingredients
in our foods because it’s not mandatory to label them, so it’s a tough time, I think, for everyone.
Marc: I love how you mapped it out as a time of tremendous polarization. It’s so true. I got in the shower this morning and recently I bought this natural shampoo that was made by essentially two young hippies, and it’s truly all natural, all organic, handmade. This is  the best shampoo I’ve ever used. I felt great and I think of just a week ago I was in a hotel somewhere and I forgot to bring my shampoo, and I’m using whatever is sitting in the hotel room. I remember putting this stuff on my hair and thinking, “I am going to   die!” Because I’ve so trained my body to enjoy what’s natural or real or organic, that when something different shows up, I really react.
Sayer Ji: Oh, it’s so true! In fact, that’s the problem for those who are educated out there on   these topics is that once you realize, for example, just a year ago, a study was  published on the effect that Roundup has in infinitesimal concentrations. We’re talking about the parts per trillion range, and then recently I had a discussion with Jeffrey   Smith about the paper and he believes that it implies they’re parts per quadrillion range has an estrogen­like effect on breast cells so that it causes cancer, a proliferative    effect on the cells lines.
It’s just amazing to think that that’s possible, so now you live in a world where you think, “Oh, my gosh! Okay, it’s not the dose that makes it poison, but any amount of this substance.” In fact, even diluting it can have a greater endocrine disruptor or cancerous effect. It just makes you kind of go batty because previously you didn’t know about it. You weren’t freaking out. All the stress hormones weren’t there. You were just kind of ignorantly blissful, so there is a really difficult situation for all of us here now that we didn’t even have a decade ago.
Now that we’re aware, it can get scary and we have to know what to do with that information. That’s where, I think, I know you do this a lot. I try really hard is to find that research that also shows that even though things are so bad, there’s hope and that there’s an amazing resilience that we can access to overcome even what seems like a very bleak situation.
Marc: It feels like one of the things that you and I both do is we’re educators, and there are parts of that job that are so, to me, thrilling because I’ve been in a classroom since I was sitting in kindergarten, and I love learning. In the health field, getting back to this
polarization thing, there’s a topic that I would love to talk about with you just because I know you’ve really taken this on, and it’s the topic of vaccinations.
Let me just preface my question by saying, for me personally, this is a topic that’s very near and dear to me because in my infancy I almost died a handful of times, and my immune system collapsed and my lungs—I became intensely asthmatic within minutes after I was vaccinated. I really spent the first 13 years of my life struggling, going from hospital to hospital and doctor to doctor.
There’s so much information now coming out about the problematic nature of    vaccines, which previously vaccines are kind of like motherhood. You don’t question it. You don’t question the value of a mother. How dare you! I’m just wondering if you can just give us some big picture pieces of what you’ve noticed as you’ve started to    explore this topic and see what other experts are saying. What’s sort of going on  behind the scenes here?
Sayer Ji: Well, it’s a great question because I’m a curious individual, and of course, my whole platform is based on really looking at the research as a standard for asking questions like, “Okay, I’m not just going to say, ‘Echinacea is good for a cold.'” I’ve experienced it. I’ve talked to hundreds who have, but unless the powers that be have evidence to prove it, it’s really not going to have any meaning and doctors aren’t going to feel compelled to use it. For Echinacea, I spent about a week looking at every published study ever in Echinacea and I indexed all the relevant studies from GreenMedInfo showing value. We have now 70 studies on its benefits.
I did the same with vaccines and I wanted to see what the research was like. The studies that showed benefit, I wanted to look at the affiliations. Was this a study    funded by a drug company or a vaccine company? Is this a study funded by the government or is it independent? After looking at a lot of studies, I was shocked to find that the evidence to support the health policy that the CDC’s immune—the vaccine schedule, for example, isn’t really compelling. It was actually quite a shock to find this, and it was extremely meaningful to me because I have two small children. I have two daughters and when I’m being told that for their safety and the safety of society they should receive 60+ vaccines by age six, it’s a really serious problem because, of course, so many of their peers are sick.
We have the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world, and we have the highest number of vaccines, and this has been studied in depth. In fact, SAGE published a study showing that the multiple vaccines are likely causing this, then it really brings up red flags.
Again, the research is very shockingly not pro­vaccine. That’s really where my journey started with questioning whether there’s really any sanity to the whole process of vaccination, which is unfortunately mistakenly equated with immunization. This is what   I really dislike when I hear this. Someone will ask, “Have you immunized your  children?” The problem is vaccination is not equivalent to bona fide immunity. They’re already assuming that all the questions have been answered, effectiveness is proven, and that’s not what they do. They use surrogate markers often now, which means they inject something into a patient. They see the antibody levels rise, and they equate an elevated antibody titer with real­world effectiveness or protection from a pathogen.
That is absolutely not evidence­based medicine. It’s really a way to fast­track approval and also evades the problem, which is real­world effectiveness is almost impossible to prove. The reason is you can never prove that any single vaccine prevented any single disease because the outcome is a non­event.
In other words, if you’re intervening and you’re choosing to vaccinate, you can’t prove that the person didn’t get chicken pox because of the vaccine, because guess what? They have an immune system. How can you say the immune didn’t do it? It’s impossible to prove. When you look at the assumption that this is evidence­based, the notion that vaccines confirm immunity, it’s based on very broad epidemiological  studies, which are extremely weak in terms of evidence quality.
Marc: What happens from here is that what I’ve noticed in the conversation going on around vaccinations, there’s this big sort of black hole around vaccinations and autism.
There’s even a connection that you were mentioning before potentially with GMOs. What are some of the pieces that you have seen come together in terms of what might be some of the unwanted effects of vaccinations that we should be aware of?
Sayer Ji: Well, #1 is when you look at the PDF inserts for the vaccines. This is really all the manufacturers are beholden to the public to provide. You’ll find listed clearly the ingredients, which are so shocking to see that yes, they took Thimerosal, a type of mercury out of vaccines around—I think it was 2005 is when they started to kind of pull  it out in acknowledgement that everyone was raising red flags. “How can you inject
mercury into any healthy individual when you know if you’re playing with a mercury thermometer your mom says, ‘You can’t do that. It’ll stay in your body forever.'” We know that pregnant women shouldn’t eat types of fish because they can cause all types of serious harm to the fetus. But they inject it directly into children.
So what they did is they switched it out for aluminum, aluminum hydroxide, and it’s   also extremely neurotoxic. It doesn’t belong in the body. It serves no biological role whatever that we know of. What we saw is that the rates of autism continue to expand to the point where it’s truly an exponential increase. The problem, of course, is that there are those out there who claim it’s a genetic epidemic or there’s some type of environmental set of causes that we haven’t yet identified, but has nothing to do with vaccines.
But by definition, a genetic epidemic is an oxymoron. I mean there’s no such thing, you can’t—genetically, in theory, it takes thousands and thousands of years for a change in the DNA sequence to confer some type of radical change in disease risk, so it’s pretty ridiculous.
When it comes down to the sort of emperor not wearing any clothes, the problem is    that if the CDC was to acknowledge that the brain damage caused by vaccines is   linked to this dramatic increase in autism spectrum disorder cases, then the whole process of protecting the manufacturer from a lawsuit, and of course, the government’s role in hiding data which showed the connection between certain vaccines and autism would be exposed. Really the whole credibility of the conventional medical  establishment would implode.
It’s a big deal because globally the CDC is still considered by many nations to be sort  of the ultimate authority. What they do is it’s called “science by proclamation” or “evidence­based medicine,” is that when you go to the CDC’s site and they talk about  a particular topic like say measles being deadly. One in a thousand people with measles die or some kind of ridiculous distortion of the truth—they don’t reference research. What you see in the mainstream media, thousands of articles on the   dangers of measles is they reference the CDC as their authority, but in this chain, you don’t see reference to actual proof, which is the assumption that somehow the CDC is on top of the evidence chain of command and that they are talking from a perspective of science. It’s actually quite the opposite.
Marc: We have such a—it feels like a powerful opportunity because we have to educate ourselves and we really have to kind of dive into the information and at least listen to those who are diving into the research and go, “Huh? What’s happening here?” It feels like it gets back to personal empowerment.
I remember when I was a kid and I used to learn in grade school about all the information that was coming out from the FDA on the food pyramid, and I should be drinking a lot of milk and eating a lot of breakfast cereal and eating Pop Tarts. That was the reigning nutritional—and margarine, for goodness sakes! That was the reigning nutritional wisdom of the day that was sort of governmentally approved.
Sayer Ji: Yes, I mean one thing is so clear factually, which is that in 1986, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund was launched, which sounds great. If you’re injured by a vaccine, which, of course, many people in mainstream media say doesn’t ever  happen, that you get compensated. But what actually it did was it indemnified manufacturers from liability, from manufacturing a product that can cause harm or death in the exposed populations.
It also kept it from being possible to sue a physician or pediatrician, for example, who is just without any thought to bio individuality or any type of susceptibility that their patients may have to injury, being sued or being liable for pushing the agenda.
Since the beginning of this program, $3 billion has been paid out to those in this  country who have been injured by vaccines as settlements. Anyone who claims that there isn’t a massive burden of injury caused by vaccines can look to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund and know that isn’t true. Furthermore, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, theirs only captures approximately 1% of the injuries that occur because it’s a passive reporting system.
There’s so much negative pressure keeping these reports from being heard because,   of course, if you’re a pediatrician, you have  thousands  of  patients.  You’re administering all these vaccines, and your children are getting harmed, they’re getting brain damage. No one in that position is going to acknowledge that the vaccine caused harm because they’re saying, “They’re safe and effective,” to the parents. In fact,   they’re saying, “If you don’t take this, you’re going to harm someone else. You can’t go to school.” I mean it’s just such a really terrible system, but the facts speak for themselves. Over $3 billion in compensation has been paid out by our government for
vaccine injury, so it’s really disturbing that the so­called “skeptics,” right, they’ll    question a mother’s observation that after early vaccine their child went through a sudden regressive state, but they won’t question that the public facts, which are that   the manufacturers have no liability just like the nuclear power industry, the government underwrites the risk for private industry. That is the worst type of collusion that is possible when you’re dealing with the health and wellbeing of little children.
Marc: How can people empower themselves in this area and learn more? Do you have any resources that you recommend for the inquisitive mind that wants to go, “Huh? This is interesting. Where do I go?”
Sayer Ji: Well, the first thing is common sense because when you think about things, for example, “Oh, wait. They want me to vaccinate my children with 60 vaccines so their kids don’t get infected. But wait a second. They’re fully immunized. How come they’re not super immune, then?” There’s a task and acknowledgement by those rabid pro­vaccers that, “Oh, my gosh! If your kids don’t vaccinate, my kids are in danger.” If that was true, then why are you giving your kids vaccines? They’re supposed to work.
So #1, commonsense. Number 2 in this category is that the whole justification for vaccination is based on the fact that when challenged in nature to wild­type exposure, chicken pox, measles, our body meets the challenge and then has lasting immunity. In fact, it’s conferred for a lifetime, whereas the vaccine schedules peppered through with these boosters because the vaccines failed to convert any kind of significant immunity. In fact, they often result—like chicken pox results in a worse form of herpes zoster, which is—or varicella, which is shingles—is that they just make the disease worse.
The idea that vaccines now are required for us to be immune when for literally millions of years that’s all we had was an immune system. It’s just if we apply commonsense, we won’t fall prey to the propaganda that immunization vaccination is truly the lifesaving—it’s the sacred cow of conventional medicine. It’s their Holy Grail. It’s their holy water. It doesn’t work. When you look at the actual implementation of mass immunization in the United States, you’ll find the decline occurred after sanitation, refrigeration, improved nutrition, better hygiene protocols, less crowded. All of those factors were dramatically reduced at the time of decline of the diseases that we now have the vaccines for like measles and chicken pox and rubella was after there was already a success through changing the terrain and not trying to eliminate germs,  which actually help us to regulate immunity and confer lasting immunity.
Then #2, because your question was the research is so abundantly clear. We released  a PDF document of 1,000 studies. You can download it for free on greenmedinfo.com. Showing over 200 serious adverse health effects linked to the CDC’s vaccination schedule that really no one in the mainstream media is discussing. This goes from autism spectrum disorder to diabetes type 1 to psychiatric issues to bowel problems. I mean it’s really quite disturbing. The problem is that without informed consent, without   a parent knowing that these risks are there, then this is not abiding by the Nuremberg Code of Medical Ethics. That is a serious humanitarian issue. Not only is it unconstitutional. It is illegal. It’s unethical. It’s all the things that we don’t want to    believe that our government would force upon us, but the truth is so clear.
Marc: The download from your website of free—1,000 studies.
Sayer Ji: Yeah.
Marc: PDF showing the not so pleasant effects of vaccinations. I mean congratulations on creating that labor of love. I know that was a lot of work!
Sayer Ji: Thank you. It just was done for my own process of learning that really the research doesn’t unequivocally support the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, and if that’s true, then there’s nothing to stand on because you can’t use eminence or authority­based medicine in this day and age and assume that you’re going to have credibility in the eyes of those who have sick children because of these sorts of pharmaceutical products being shoved down their throats and one­size­fits­all is what they’re doing. It’s just completely—it’s unreasonable.
Marc: Yeah, this conversation reminds me once again it feels like the zeitgeist. It feels like   this is­­the times that we’re living in right now. I mean just think of straight up nutrition. So many of us have to find good food, so if you’re born into this world, there’s a very good chance that you’re born into sort of an unnatural toxic way of eating. That’s the probability. You’re going to be exposed to mass­produced food, nutrient­depleted food, food that’s laden with chemicals, pesticides, GMOs. You don’t have to do anything.
That food will come your way. If you travel across the United States in a car, there are stretches for hundreds and hundreds of miles on the highway where all you can do is stop at a gas station and there’s nothing real or nothing fresh.
All I’m trying to say here is that I think we live in a time when we can’t take for granted that we have to go find the good. We have to find the good food. You have to go find  the good health practitioner. You have to go find the good people, the people that are your friends, that will care about you. We’ve got to look for it. It doesn’t just come flooding in. oftentimes, it seems like we have to wade through a lot of disinformation to find the treasure, and it just feels like that’s the times that we live in.
Sayer Ji: Totally, yeah, the default trajectory for all of us is disease and suffering, unfortunately and packaged in a way that it seems as if it’s the opposite. You look at something that says, ��All natural.” Well, it’s guaranteed to be synthetic. It’s just everything Orwellian, and in a way, like you’re saying, it’s forcing us to become to conscious and aware in  our daily decisions. It’s forcing us to become more spiritual in that sense because ultimately choice is the most powerful thing that we are bestowed in this life because we can make a choice to go ahead and get good food or decide that we’re going to investigate vaccinations instead of letting our children just be pulled into the system.
There are many like­minded individuals doing this. In fact, the beauty of this summit or conference is that a lot of you listening are pre­selected. You’re like me and Marc and you’ve already kind of come to this conclusions. Together it’s like a new mycelium or  the sort of undercurrent in the soil of people that are working together to create a   better world. Yeah, it’s a very interesting situation. It’s not easy to be healthy, but it makes you very aware and it gives you an opportunity to be very conscious if you are going to make this your lifestyle.
Marc: Here we were moments ago. We were talking about vaccinations and how it’s called immunization. Have you been immunized? I oftentimes think of the immune system   that we don’t always give it the sort of beautiful definition that it deserves. Just you and   I being able to sort of reach out and look at concepts or information that might not be healthy, that might be toxic. That’s sort of the psychic immune system at work. Us getting together and having a conversation and sharing it with other people. That’s a collective immune response saying, “Wait a second. There’s information coming into  the system and we want to alchemize that a little bit or we want to stop that or we want to do something with that.” There are all different ways that I think immunity has to  exist, and I think maybe immunity in the realm of mind might be as important as anything. It’s kind of where it starts in a lot of ways.
Sayer Ji: I love that! Absolutely, because you look at notions like herd immunity, which really are not based on any type of evidence. It’s just this assumption that you reach a certain point in the herd where a certain number are infected, and then therefore they end up being immune.
When you apply that to humans and vaccines, it’s really more of just a metaphor that has been taken in a very literal sense, but the herd concept is true. When I post information to Facebook, for example, on questioning vaccines and I’m referencing Lancet or some high­impact journal, it’s amazing how few people will actually look at the research that they claim is so important, the science, and they’ll constantly question and say, “This isn’t true. The CDC says it’s not true.” It’s remarkable. We need to cultivate an immune system for the misinformation because it is truly like a disease.
I like the term meme, because a meme is an idea that has viral components. It’s like ideology. It takes over, and in fact, consumes biological resources. The notion is that if you’re, for example, looking at life in terms of the biological instinct to reproduce, there are religions where, for example, being a martyr or not reproducing is fundamental. So we have to start understanding that ideas have more power than genes on some level, and they are infectious, and we need to start, like you said, exerting greater immunity against false and dangerous information. When it comes to medical information today,    I think we have the ultimate religion. It’s the science that devours all other religions or the religion that devours all other religions is this notion that somehow science is going to give us the answer and the only way, and then when we apply it politically, you don’t even have a choice. It’s like the ultimate fascism.
Marc: Usually I think when people hear the term “science,” we often think it’s a bunch of    guys in white coats with gray beards nodding their heads and agreeing with each other and sort of somehow connected to this higher, irrefutable wisdom and science, it’s the Wild West, really.
Sayer Ji: It is. It’s so the Wild West. It’s a projection. The whole notion that you can separate subjectivity was destroyed with quantum mechanics. We know that just based on how you’re looking at something it’s going to change it manifestation. If you’re looking for a particle of light, it’s particle. If you’re looking for a wave, it’s a wave. Completely different substances.
No one can sustain the concept anymore that there’s just this impartial observer and there are these little atoms or little mathematical entities that we’re going to determine this is true for everyone. That’s really not how it works. It doesn’t mean that the other is true in its pure subjectivity, but yeah, science is an investigative open attitude. It’s   about being aware of what you’re perceiving. It’s about really being a reasonable,    using commonsense individual. It’s not some kind of high­level, Greek, Latin, reading tealeaves type of occupation. It’s really misunderstood.
Marc: So along this concept of memes and how they’re so powerful and how they can take over. There are a lot of good memes out there, and I know you like to keep your eye    on how food is information and how even plants are imparting energies and    information that we’re not always aware of. I’d love to spend a little bit of time on that topic just because I find it so fascinating, some of the different ways to look at food, not just as merely a package of nutrients, but energy and information.
Sayer Ji: I love it! I mean because we started out really appreciating the healing properties of other entities within our environ, so if a plant was able to heal us, it had a soul and energy and it had compassion. It was able to give us its essence and we’re consuming it. It’s not living anymore. It’s a sacrificial, mutually—it’s like a spiritual relationship. It sounds all poetry and sort of a bunch of gobbledygook, but now the science is confirming this, in my opinion, because after spending so many years looking at the research on turmeric, there are 7,200 studies published right now on it on Medline. I started to index piece by piece the studies showing benefit and found over 600   different health benefits that this one plant seemed to impart to mammals, because some of the research is on rodents, etc.
I was like, “Is that possible?” I mean you think about a drug. It has one benefit they’ve already—which is actually a side effect, and then 75+ adverse effects, which usually include death, depending on the dose. Then you see something like a plant that can heal 600 different conditions. Then I analyzed the physiological actions by which it was doing these miraculous things. It was just amazing! Over 170 different ways documented that it’s able to modulate a certain pathway in the body.
Over time, it came to me and this was based really on one study published in the Journal of Nutrition and Cancer, where they took the retinoblastoma cells, a type of neurological cancer that’s extremely hard to treat, and they added curcumin to that environment, and within a matter of just a few minutes, it was able to downregulate
903 different genes and upregulate 1,319 other genes and start to turn the cell into a non­cancerous cell.
What that showed me was there’s infinite amount of information that just one biomolecule in turmeric contains because turmeric has 1,000 chemistries. It’s an intelligent, orchestrated, complex food plant. One of its compounds has all this information. That’s an intelligence that no chemical we use to treat cancer has. Then also, it embodies truly an ability to alleviate suffering in higher multicellular species like a human or a rat. That’s really, to me, an environment of compassion. When you look   at the mythos, the lore associated with turmeric or back to the Indian tradition, it’s   linked with a number of goddesses. It’s the embodiment of one who shined a bright   light of compassion and has all these different names.
To me, it was just an illustration on how today we have the mythos, the old stories, all the plant wisdom that was once passed down orally. Then you have this almost alien­like entity of science. It’s coming in and it’s scanning all the way down to a molecular level, all these different substances trying to say, “No, it’s just about the chemistries.” But even that approach has led us to the point where we have to acknowledge that there’s a miracle going on that nothing even close to this type of medicinal action can be reproduced through a chemical. I think we’re finding once again that the ancient approach to healing is really the one that we need to re­employ in this day and age.
Marc: Beautifully put. It feels like we are living in a time when it’s easy to miss, to not   perceive the intelligence that’s around us that is part and parcel and has created the natural world and us. There’s such this mindset that wants to reduce humanity to a bunch of random molecular collisions, and we lose the fact that we are this brilliant creation. My body is a brilliant creation. It’s easy to take the plants for granted. Here you’ve picked one plant and shown this impossible to re­create intelligence. We can’t,  in a laboratory, create that kind of intelligence into turmeric. We can’t create that in a prescription drug, as you described. Maybe a prescription drug might have a couple of actions. I know every time a drug company finds that their medication actually has this other positive effect that they didn’t even intend, they get all excited.
Sayer Ji: I know, right? It’s usually a side effect, so you take something like Lunesta. It’s a neurotoxic chemical that’s been linked to increased mortality from all causes. So basically its side effects that are probably almost killing you, knocking you out, and
then they repackage it into the intended beneficial, pharmacological action. It’s just insane when you think about what they’re doing.
I wanted to point out that I agree with you that we’re living in a day and age where   really medicine has converted us all into objects of control, not intentionally,   necessarily, but the ultimate outcome is that it has nothing to do with healing whatsoever. It has to do with if you have a planet full of billions of bodies, the best way to control, organize, exert influence over those bodies is to control their definition of  their self through medicine. It’s actually rather disturbing, but I think that’s true, is this is really a global, political control system. It has nothing to do with healing any longer.
Marc: Well, it just reminds me that a healthy human has the launching pad to be an amazing creature. I don’t just mean somebody who can run faster and jump higher. A healthy human can fulfill one’s potential, can fulfill one’s personal, emotional, spiritual potential. A healthy human is unstoppable. I think health, in a lot of ways, can really—it propels   us to our genetic potential, our inborn spiritual potential, and that can be dangerous.
I think you look back in history. Some of our greatest leaders and our most revered peacemakers get shot and killed. It’s almost as if the times are asking us to find that baseline of health, not just so I can be thin and sexy. That’s nice. That’s interesting, but it just feels like health is so much more. Health is empowerment.
Sayer Ji: Yeah, it goes pretty deep because you think about—I like to think about sort of the little miniature Big Bang that occurs in the womb through embryogenesis. You start off as  just an egg and a sperm, and from that moment, a miracle occurs, which for some reason, we forget soon after birth maybe because of a colicky baby driving us crazy   that humans are an explosion from the void, from nothing into something. There’s no way we can explain this miracle through any present scientific notion.
That’s what happens on a daily basis. Again, that’s the miracle of how we’re exposed   to absolutely devastating nutritional compatibilities, toxic and exposures all day long, stress is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and we’re still holding together, feeling quasi­healthy. It’s because it’s not that we depend on solely the biochemistry of our food, as you know, because this is what you do all the time through your amazing platform The Psychology of Eating. We are a soul that has a body, not a body that has a soul. I mean there’s an element where the body has a soul. It could be a prison if
we’re really not healthy, but as you have done such good work with, this isn’t pseudoscience. It’s not new age. This is the truth.
I even have some examples I’ve mentioned before in previous talks. The New England Journal of Medicine found when those who had received a cancer diagnosis were told either they had it or they didn’t, regardless if it was actually a false positive or not. They had up to 26.9 fold increase risk of heart­related death within one week if they had   been told they had a cancer. You can imagine the power of belief is so strong that they literally died internally and physically because they gave up hope that they could live because they had cancer.
The other is true, too. If a doctor comes in and says, “Guess what?” The person could have a serious cancer. You’re totally healed. It can completely induce within the body an elimination of that condition. There are documented examples of this. The reality is that I think on the one hand we are thinking we’re these molecules mashing together, this hunk of flesh, this carcass. Then on the other hand, we’re starting to see the research itself, the science, proving that our belief, our choice, is fundamental in determining our health outcomes.
Marc: There’s the good news. Really, the good news is, on the one hand—I was thinking as you were speaking how you started getting very poetic. There’s a place where, if you really dive into science and you dive into the science of life and you really follow it, you have to become a poet almost because we hit these places where science just   reaches its limits in that moment, and we can’t explain the miracle. We can’t explain   the beauty. We can’t explain this invisible big bang that happens in the womb that produces a life form out of really nothingness, out of this tiny amount of nothingness. We can’t reproduce that in a laboratory. It’s impossible.
Sayer Ji: No, it’s such a beautiful thing. You could condense it down to this, which is that science is truly the system where you have to see it to believe it, and then you have traditionally religion or the finer arts and all that are about you have to believe it in order to see it. Actually, technically my background is philosophy and I focused on phenomenology, which is all about going to the things themselves. You have to open up your eyes, get rid of your assumptions, and try to really perceive what reality is. In that case, there was something called a “perceptual faith,” so you didn’t throw down assumptions on what you were seeing. You were just opening yourself to it, so it doesn’t have to be religion, but the idea is that you’re open and you think that
possibility is there for healing, for all the things that we’re so scared of and maybe not being the only way of looking at it.
Yeah, I think that we’re getting closer to acknowledging the self­healing ability of the human body and soul is so profound that even though we’re seeing the darkest times  in history coalescing, even the conspiracy theorists and Orwell and all these folks had predicted, we also are being forced to recognize that we are truly the priority agent in our experience in that we can affect profound change just through some really basic choices and believing in ourselves.
Marc: Let me ask you this question. In your work, what gives you hope?
Sayer Ji: What gives me hope? Well, in my work, what gives me hope, really, is the response   that I see to those that are just looking for alternative information, because when I started, I was just a hobbyist. I just was compelled by the research. I wanted to share it because I was like, “Wow!” You start out writing a few articles, and before you know it,   it went from just being a little database and a couple blogs to having several million visitors every month. It’s not really based on anything new. I still write maybe once  every other day and people out there are responsive because really this kind of information has been completely blacklisted. It’s causing this kind of ripple effect where now people are going to your site, they’re going to my site, they’re making choices not based on just their doctor saying, “This is what the CDC says you’re going to do this or you’re going to die.” They’re questioning things. They’re saying, “Well, really? Well, here’s research saying that’s not true.”
I think that ultimately it’s really beautiful because the Internet has given us a platform that anyone can use for free, speed of light, and really end up empowering themselves in a way that never was possible before. I’m hopeful. I’m definitely hopeful.
Marc: Well, Sayer Ji, I so appreciate how you have really brought together so much information and really been faithful to the research and compiling it and just saying, “Okay, here. Here’s what science says. Here’s some of the buried treasure that you might not know about.” That’s kind of how I see you. It’s like we sort of send you into the wilderness of information, and you come back with the nuggets that are really useful for us. So thank you, thank you, thank you. I would just love if you can share with us how we can stay in touch with you and your world and what we should know about.
Sayer Ji: Oh, thanks! Well, I love connecting through our newsletter. I try to do that daily. We  send out a daily newsletter. Then Facebook is okay. They recently censored our article on removing ovaries for preventing cancer, but regardless, that’s still presently a way that a lot of our fans connect. Other than that, really, I encourage people to actually go through our site, pass through it, go to pubmed.gov themselves and give it a little try.
It’s the global brain’s convulsion dedicated to medicine, and it’s just a miracle.
You go in. Say you have diabetes and you want to learn about diabetes and ginger. Type in “diabetes and ginger.” Seventy studies and it’s just amazing when you look at the primary literature, which by the way, almost no doctors do. You start realizing,  “Wow! If this is true, then maybe I could start using natural medicine,” like their intuition is telling them. So it’s good.
Marc: Beautiful, my friend. That’s GreenMedInfo.com.
Sayer Ji: Thank you.
Marc: Which is any time somebody asks me what are my favorite online research resources for health, medicine, transformation, that’s #1 on my list, so thank you for the work that you do. Really appreciate it, my friend.
Sayer Ji: Thank you, Marc. I feel the same about your work.
Marc: Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. I appreciate you. I’m Marc David, on behalf of The Future of Healing Online Conference. I’ve been with Sayer Ji of GreenMedInfo.com. Lots more to come, my friends.
from Healthy Living https://psychologyofeating.com/powerful-topics-in-medicine-interview-with-sayer-ji/
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projectnero · 5 years
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PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE: THE SENTINEL
The last person to join our Team, just at the end of 1910, it should be noted that Mr. McCarthy is the most innocent of us all. Despite his skills, most of the team sees him as someone to be protected; this is in large part due to his naivete and ever-growing fondness for his teammates, as well as his ability to endear himself to anyone he meets.
I figured this was one of the more imperative profiles to go ahead and get out there, because Mr. McCarthy, as an extremely empathetic man, serves as the team’s emotional translator. His unique ability to see everyone’s perspective makes him a good storyteller, and I would be lying if I said that he wouldn’t be an asset to the transcription of this project. As such, Mr. McCarthy will be providing incident reports and analyses of interpersonal behavior on the team.
NAME: Siomon Mac Carthaigh
ALIASES: Simon, Mr. McCarthy, Druid, Sentinel, Crybaby, Loverboy, Tree-hugger
AGE: Born 1432
HEIGHT: 6′6″
WEIGHT: 200 lbs.
SPECIES: Enhanced Human (Subspecies: Magic; Divine)
NOTABLE ABILITIES:
Mr. McCarthy is a hyper-sensitive person. While for most people this would be a hindrance in every-day life, Mr. McCarthy’s job as a guardian to those who cannot speak for themselves is only made easier by his aptitude for emotions and stimuli.
Due to Mr. McCarthy’s connections to Abnoba and Cernunnos, he is strengthened whenever connected to the Earth; note that, while in other cases, this would be incredibly restricting due to wording, the Celtic gods are not ones for word puzzles or riddles. Anything made from Earthly materials qualifies as “Earth”, essentially meaning Mr. McCarthy is, for lack of a better term, omniscient. 
We would be absolutely fucked if aliens came to Earth, but otherwise, Mr. McCarthy is a radar, GPS, sonar, AND targeting system all wrapped into one. 
Mr. McCarthy’s magic serves to make him the single best surgeon and combat medic on the team; his high value to the team means the brass is unwilling to send him out directly into the fray, however, so Ms. Agave serves as the field medic, with Mr. Takahashi taking those in dire need of medical attention directly to Battalion to be addressed by Mr. McCarthy. He has never once lost a patient.
Though his abilities are not as extensive as Mr. Kennedy’s, Mr. McCarthy is capable of shifting into a number of different creatures, as is the case with most druids. His favorite forms are the bear, the goat, and the raven.
Mr. McCarthy is somehow capable of siphoning his divine blessings to the team, providing energy, vitality, and strength to each member of the team. To say I’m jealous would be an understatement. If I could spread even a single brain cell, a single DROP of Apollo or Thoth’s great enlightenment to ANY of my team members, we would have taken over the world by now. As it stands, Mr. McCarthy is only to provide blessings for short-term engagements, as one of the side effects of blessing people with Cernunnos’s will is... ah... increased fertility. This means lots of hormones, and the need to breed clouding every person’s better judgement.
Mr. McCarthy’s natural affinity for spirits, plants, and animals has helped his relationship with Ms. Agave immensely, and oftentimes the two bounce off of each other, working as a cohesive unit. Ms. Agave has expressed a potential interest in having her family moved to The Tearmann Grove, a forest in Northern Ireland under Mr. McCarthy’s protection. 
Mr. McCarthy’s increased stamina, strength, endurance, speed, and vitality (we will not mention the fertility part) has helped him to carry out tasks that would normally require the strength of hundreds of men; as it stands, Simon’s addition to the team has meant that Mr. Amos no longer needs to do all of the heavy lifting.
Cernunnos’s blessing has granted Mr. McCarthy massive rams horns that, should he find himself cornered, he can use to gore enemies; not even the strongest armor can stand up to his horns.
Finally, the druidic runes and tattoos inscribed on Mr. McCarthy’s body provide a sort of defense system, should anyone attempt to capture him; touch must be verified and approved by Simon first, otherwise his body will naturally reject any and all contact in a rather... excruciating manner. Imagine going to place your hand on him in one spot and ending up being burned with the fires of a thousand suns, or placing a hand on another rune and feeling the pain of being put to death in an electric chair. His body is a temple, but more or less one of those temples you see in an Indiana Jones movie.
NOTABLE WEAKNESSES:
Simon has an incredibly weak constitution. It is hard to tell what will set him off, but if something is gross or upsetting enough, he will either cry, run away, or vomit. This has made confronting him with problems infuriatingly confusing because on one hand I trust this man to put his hands inside of my guts when they’re falling out, but at the same time he is a child I wish to hug and assure that everything will be alright.
Despite his tolerance for emotions and stimuli, he has been known to be overwhelmed at times, rendering him incapacitated in a multitude of ways for days. During this time, Mr. McCarthy can generally be found laying in bed, trying to read a good book or sleep. The symptoms are very common with those of fatigue and exhaustion.
Simon’s many blessings have the unfortunate side effect of giving him the disposition of a wild animal. Is he capable of reasoning? Yes. Does that mean he is any less bestial? Hell no. I once walked into the common room to see him in his goat form, chewing on a tin can. He stared into my eyes as he swallowed it whole. It was a traumatizing experience.
Simon requires an extensive amount of time for meditation and preparation before a task is to be carried out, and interrupting even one of his chants or incantations is grounds for starting over. In worst case scenarios, interrupting a chant has been known to summon horrible demonic entities. Be fucking careful people.
Simon is averse to violence, as am I. He is not above getting his hands dirty when need be, but that is a last resort. He has described himself as a lover and not a fighter, and despite being the guardian of both this team and his sacred grove, the druid only uses force when all else has failed.
DIAGNOSES:
Hyper-sexuality, due to increased vitality given by Cernunnos.
High-Functioning Autism.
Hyper-Sensitive Persons Disorder.
Empathy.
ADHD.
BACKGROUND:
Hello! Simon here!
There is not much to tell about my family; my father was a Celtic druid and my mother was a Greek acolyte. My twin sister and I followed much of the same route.
Keep in mind when I say “twin”, my sister does not look a thing like me. I am pale, with some tan marks here and there, with the appearance of an Irishman, while my sister has the skin color and complexion of a Central Asian woman. This is how it has always been in our family.
Our names, bodies, appearances are all determined by who we choose as our patron deities. We have been coveted by Gods of every major pantheon; our decision is made when we are 18, and then our bodies change to match.
I was seduced by Cernunnos and Abnubo, and so when I made the decision to serve them, I was given rams horns, suns for eyes, and a pale complexion with long red hair. I chose the name Siomon Mac Carthaigh. She chose the name Minerva Stanis. She was deadset on serving Athena ever since she was 12.
I headed out into the world, emigrating to Ireland to begin planting and caring for my Sanctuary. A Grove where creatures of all kind could live in peace. It is my only purpose in this life. I guard it with my life.
Sometimes I write to Minerva, who owns a small book shop in Athens that she uses as a front for her alchemy and witchcraft. Sometimes she writes back, tells me about all the battles she had seen with Athena. Sometimes I smirk to myself. She never wanted to be a champion for glory, never wanted to fight, and she chose Athena simply because she would give her freedom; and yet Athena had just as many enemies as the next God.
It ended up that I had the most peaceful and relaxing job of the two of us. I hang out with animals, tattoo my body, and tend to plants. At least I did.
In the early 1900s, I received a divination from my patron Gods for the first time in 30 years. It was time for me to spread their will and serve alongside mortals. I was told about this project, despite it barely being a thought in Dr. Fero’s head. I sought them out, but by the time I arrived, Dr. Fero had already found everyone else.
Now I listen to people’s problems and provide emotional support. Still not as bad as fighting Manticores.
Poor, poor Minerva.
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sunshineweb · 5 years
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In Praise of Mediocrity, Being Happy, And Learning How to Learn
Here’s some stuff I am reading, watching, and thinking about this weekend…
Book I’m Reading – The Art of Learning One of the best books on the art of learning I’ve read is, well, The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. I picked it up again this week, and it was as refreshing as the original read.
Josh is a champion in two distinct sports – chess and martial arts. He is an eight-time US national chess champion, thirteen-time Tai Chi Chuan push hands national champion, and two-time Tai Chi Chuan push hands world champion. In his book, Josh recounts his experiences and shares his insights and approaches on how you can learn and excel in your own life’s passion, using examples from his personal life. Through stories of martial arts wars and tense chess face-offs, Josh reveals the inner workings of his everyday methods, cultivating the most powerful techniques in any field, and mastering the psychology of peak performance.
One of my favourite chapters is titled – Making Smaller Circles – which stresses on the fact that it’s rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skillset. Josh writes that depth scores over breadth when it comes to learning anything –
The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick. Our obstacle is that we live in an attention-deficit culture. We are bombarded with more and more information on television, radio, cell phones, video games, the Internet. The constant supply of stimulus has the potential to turn us into addicts, always hungering for something new and prefabricated to keep us entertained. When nothing exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So we look for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through magazines.
If caught in these rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound surface fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below.
When these societally induced tendencies translate into the learning process, they have devastating effect.
Josh’s idea of making smaller circles is a great way to decide how to live, what to read, and how to invest sensibly.
To reiterate, the concept of making smaller circles, as outlined in Josh’s book, stresses on the fact that it’s rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skillset.
When it comes to investing, this concept applies in the way that you must do just a few small things right to create wealth over the long run. You just need some simple ideas. You just need to draw a few small circles. And then you put all your focus and energies there. That’s all you need to succeed in your pursuit of becoming a good learner, and a good investor.
Articles I’m Reading If there’s one podcast transcript I read almost every month, it is the one from Farnam Street’s session with Naval Ravikant, the CEO and a co-founder of AngelList. Naval is an incredibly deep thinker and challenges the status quo on so many things. This aspect comes out very clear in this podcast.
One of my favourite sections is when Naval talks about the idea of being happy –
When it comes to learn to be happy, train yourself to be happy, completely internal, no external progress, no external validation, 100% you’re competing against yourself, single-player game. We are such social creatures, we’re more like bees or ants, that we’re externally programmed and driven, that we just don’t know how to play and win at these single-player games anymore. We compete purely on multi-player games. The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single-player.
On the aspects of learning and what to lead kids to learn, Naval said this –
I think learning should be about learning the basics in all the fields and learning them really well over and over. Life is mostly about applying the basics and only doing the advanced stuff in the things that you truly love and where you understand the basics inside out. That’s not how our system is built.
We teach all these kids calculus and they walk out not understanding calculus at all. Really they would have been better off served doing arithmetic and basic computer programming the entire time. I think there’s a pace of learning issue.
Then there’s finally a what to learn. There’s a whole set of things we don’t even bother trying to teach. We don’t teach nutrition. We don’t teach cooking. We don’t teach how to be in happy, positive relationships. We don’t teach how to keep your body healthy and fit. We just say sports. We don’t teach happiness. We don’t teach meditation. Maybe we shouldn’t teach some of these things because different kids will have different aptitudes, but maybe we should. Maybe we should teach practical construction of technology. Maybe everyone in their science project, instead of building a little chemistry volcano, maybe you should be building a smartphone.
* * * Ben Carlson, author of the blog and a nice book by the same name – A Wealth of Common Sense – recently wrote about few financial advices he thinks are not talked about much but offer big financial payoffs. One such advice, and that I believe makes great sense, is about why time and health matter more than wealth. Ben wrote –
Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son William was far and away the richest person in the world after doubling the inheritance given to him by his late father in just 6 years. But the burden of wealth brought him nothing but anxiety. He spent all of his time managing his substantial wealth through the family’s businesses, which meant he had no time to enjoy his money or take care of his body.
He once said of a neighbor who didn’t have as much money, “He isn’t worth a hundredth part as much as I am, but he has more of the real pleasures of life than I have. His house is as comfortable as mine, even if it didn’t cost so much; his team is about as good as mine; his opera box is next to mine; his health is better than mine, and he will probably outlive me. And he can trust his friends.”
William also told his nephew, “What’s the use, Sam, of having all this money if you cannot enjoy it? My wealth is no comfort to me if I have not good health behind it.”
All the money in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t have the time or the health to enjoy it.
This is one timeless advice, I think.
* * * Before the internet, and before people lived in large cities, the circle of people our ancestors may have come into contact might be only a couple hundred people. Out of two or three hundred people, it may have not been too hard to be in the top tenth percentile at something.
Now, when your circle of acquaintances is the whole internet, being in the top tenth percentile of anything takes years of determined effort. Our brains still have expectations rooted in these smaller communities: That we should be able to create something exceptional and praiseworthy for our efforts.
Amidst this, it was fresh to read a perspective in praise of mediocrity –
If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following. When your identity is linked to your hobby — you’re a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber — you’d better be good at it, or else who are you?
You see, there is no disgrace in appreciating mediocrity, in accepting our limits. And, by the way, the reason we call them limits is because rejecting them is what gets us into trouble.
Thought I’m Meditating On
There are two things I would never say when referring to the market: “get out” and “it’s time.” I’m not that smart, and I’m never that sure. The media like to hear people say “get in” or “get out,” but most of the time the correct action is somewhere in between. Investing is not black or white, in or out, risky or safe. The key word is “calibrate.” The amount you have invested, your allocation of capital among the various possibilities, and the riskiness of the things you own all should be calibrated along a continuum that runs from aggressive to defensive. ~ Howard Marks, in Mastering the Market Cycle
Video I’m Watching Do schools kill creativity? You bet they do. In this video, Sir Ken Robinson, noted British author, speaker and international advisor on education in the arts, provides ample proof that schools do kill creativity. He also makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. This is another one of my favourite videos!
youtube
Enjoy your weekend, — Vishal
The post In Praise of Mediocrity, Being Happy, And Learning How to Learn appeared first on Safal Niveshak.
In Praise of Mediocrity, Being Happy, And Learning How to Learn published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/
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theinvinciblenoob · 5 years
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Alice Lloyd George Contributor
Alice Lloyd George is an investor at RRE Ventures and the host of Flux, a series of podcast conversations with leaders in frontier technology.
More posts by this contributor
Solving the mystery of sleep
A conversation with Dean Kamen on the myth of “Eureka!”
From Elon’s Neuralink to Bryan Johnson’s Kernel, a new wave of businesses are specifically focusing on ways to access, read and write from the brain.
The holy grail lies in how to do that without invasive implants, and how to do it for a mass market.
One company aiming to do just that is New York-based CTRL-labs, who recently closed a $28 million Series B. The team, comprising over 12 PHDs, is decoding individual neurons and developing an electromyography-based armband that reads the nervous signals travelling from the brain to the fingers. These signals are then translated into desired intentions, enabling anything from thought-to-text to moving objects.
Scientists have known about electrical activity in the brain since Hans Berger first recorded it using an EEG in 1924, and the term “brain computer interface” (BCI) was coined as early as the 1970s by Jacques Vidal at UCLA. Since then most BCI applications have been tested in the military or medical realm. Although it’s still the early innings of neurotech commercialization, in recent years the pace of capital going in and company formation has picked up. 
For a conversation with Flux I sat down with Thomas Reardon the CEO of CTRL-labs and discussed his journey to founding the company. Reardon explained why New York is the best place to build a machine learning based business right now and how he recruits top talent. He shares what developers can expect when the CTRL-kit ships in Q1 and explains how a brain control interface may well make the smartphone redundant. An excerpt is published below. Full transcript on Medium.
AMLG: I’m excited to have Thomas Reardon on the show today. He is the co-founder and CEO of CTRL-labs a company building the next generation of non-invasive neural computing here in Manhattan. He’s just cycled from uptown — thanks for coming down here to Chinatown. Reardon was previously the founder of a startup called Avegadro, which was acquired by Openwave. He also spent time at Microsoft where he was project lead on Internet Explorer. He’s one of the founders of the Worldwide Web Consortium, a body that has established many of the standards that still govern the Web, and he’s one of the architects of XML and CSS. Why don’t we get into your background, how you got to where you are today and why you’re the most excited to be doing what you’re doing right now.
W3 is an international standards organization founded and led by Tim Berners Lee.
TR: My background — well I’m a bit of an old man so this is a longer story. I have a commercial software background. I didn’t go to college when I was younger. I started a company at 19 years old and ended up at Microsoft back in 1990, so this was before the Windows revolution stormed the world. I spent 10 years at Microsoft. The biggest part of that was starting up the Internet Explorer project and then leading the internet architecture effort at Microsoft so that’s how I ended up working on things like CSS and XML, some of the web nerds out there should be deeply familiar with those terms. Then after doing another company that focused on the mobile Internet, Phone.com and Openwave, where I served as CTO, I got a bit tired of the Web. I got fatigued at the sense that the Web was growing up not to introduce any new technology experience or any new computer science to the world. It was just transferring bones from one grave to another. We were reinventing everything that had been invented in the 80s and early 90s and webifying it but we weren’t creating new experiences. I got profoundly turned off by the evolution of the Web and what we were doing to put it on mobile devices. We weren’t creating new value for people. We weren’t solving new human problems. We were solving corporate problems. We were trying to create new leverage for the entrenched companies.
So I left tech in 2003. Effectively retired. I decided to go and get a proper college education. I went and studied Greek and Latin and got a degree in classics. Along the way I started studying neuroscience and was fascinated by the biology of neurons. This led me to grad school and doing a Ph.D. which I split across Duke and Columbia. I’d woken up some time in like 2005 2006 and was reading an article in The New York Times. It was something about a cell and I scratched my head and said, we all hear that term we all talk about cells and cells in the body, but I have no idea what a cell really is. To the point where a New York Times article was too deep for me, and that almost embarrassed me and shocked me and led me down this path of studying biology in a deeper almost molecular way.
AMLG: So you were really in the heart of it all when you were working at Microsoft and building your startup. Now you are building this company in New York — we’ve got Columbia and NYU and there’s a lot of commercial industries — does that feel different for you, building a company here?
TR: Well let’s look at the kind of company we’re building. We’re building a company which is at its heart about machine learning. We’re in an era in which every startup tries to have a slide in their deck that says something about ML, but most of them are a joke in comparison. This is the place in the world to build a company that has machine learning at its core. Between Columbia and NYU and now Cornell Tech, and the unbelievably deep bench of machine learning talent embedded in the finance industry, we have more ML people at an elite level in New York than any place on earth. It’s dramatic. Our ability to recruit here is unparalleled. We beat the big five all the time. We’re now 42 people and half of them are Ph.D. scientists. For every single one of them we were competing against Google, Facebook, Apple.
AMLG: Presumably this is a more interesting problem for them to work on. If they want to go work at Goldman in AI they can do that for a couple of years, make some dollars and then come back and do the interesting stuff.
TR: They can make a bigger salary but they will work on something that nobody in the rest of the world will ever get to hear about. The reason why people don’t talk about all this ML talent here is when it’s embedded in finance you never get to hear about it. It’s all secret. Underneath the waters. The work we’re doing and this new generation of companies that have ML at their core — even a company like Spotify is, on the one hand fundamentally a licensing and copyright arbitrage company, but on the other hand what broke out for Spotify was their ML work. It was fundamental to the offer. That’s the kind of thing that’s happening in New York again and again now. There’s lots of companies — like a hardware company — that would be scary to build in New York. We have a significant hardware component to what we’re doing. It is hard to recruit A team world-class hardware folks in New York but we can get them. We recently hired the head of product from Peloton who formerly ran Makerbot.
AMLG: We support that and believe there’s a budding pool here. And I guess the third bench is neuro, which Columbia is very strong in.
Larry Abbott helped found the Center of Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia
TR: Yes as is NYU. Neuroscience is in some sense the signature department at Columbia. The field breaks across two domains — the biological and the computational. Computational neuroscience is machine learning for real neurons, building operating computational models of how real neurons do their work. It’s the field that drives a lot of the breakthroughs in machine learning. We have these biologically inspired concepts in machine learning that come from computational neuroscience. Colombia has by far the top computational neuroscience group in the world and probably the top biological neuroscience group in the world. There are five Nobel Prize winners in the program and Larry Abbott the legend of theoretical neuroscience. It’s its an unbelievably deep bench.
AMLG: How do you recruit people that are smarter than you? This is a question that everyone listening wants to know.
Patrick Kaifosh, Thomas Reardon, Tim Machado the co-founders of CTRL-labs
TR: I’m not dumb but I’m not as smart as my co-founder and I’m not as smart as half of the scientific staff inside the company. I affectionately refer to my co-founder as a mutant. Patrick Kaifosh, who’s chief scientist. He is one of the smartest human beings I’ve ever known. Patrick is one of those generational people that can change our concept of what’s possible, and he does that in a first principles way. The recruiting part is to engage people in a way that lets them know that you’re going to take all the crap away that allows them to work on the hardest problems with the best people.
AMLG: I believe it and I’ve met some of them. So what was the conversation with Kaifosh and Tim when when you first sat down and decided to pursue the idea?
TR: So we were wrapping up our graduate studies, the three of us. We were looking at what it would be like to stay in academia and the bureaucracy involved in trying to be a working scientist in academia and writing grants. We were looking around at the young faculty members we saw at Columbia and thought, that doesn’t look like they’re having fun.
AMLG: When you were leaving Columbia it sounds like there wasn’t another company idea. Was it clear that this was the idea that you wanted to pursue at that time?
TR: What we knew is we wanted to do something collaborative. We did not think, let’s go build a brain machine interface. We don’t actually like that phrase, we like to call them neural interfaces. We didn’t think about neural interfaces at all. The second idea we had, an ingredient we put into the stew and started mixing up was, was that we wanted to leverage experimental technologies from neuroscience that hadn’t yet been commercialized. In some sense this was like when Genentech was starting in the mid 70s. We had found the crystal structure of DNA back in the late 40s, there had been 30 years of molecular biology, we figured out DNA then RNA then protein synthesis then ribosome. Thirty years of molecular biology but nobody had commercialized it yet. Then Genentech came along with this idea that we could make synthetic protein, that we could start to commercialize some of these core experimental techniques and do translation work and bring value back to humanity. It was all just sitting there on the shelf ready to be exploited.
We thought OK what are the technologies in neuroscience that we use at the bench that could be exploited? For instance spike sorting, the ability to listen with a single electrode to lots of neurons at the same time and see all the different electrical impulses and de-convolve them. You get this big noisy signal and you can see the individual neurons activity. So we started playing with that idea, lets harvest the last 30 or 40 years of bench experimental neuroscience. What are the techniques that were invented that we could harvest?
AMLG: We’ve been reading about these things and there’s been so much excitement about BMI but you haven’t really seen things in market things that people can hack around with. I don’t know why that gap hasn’t been filled. Does no one have the balls to go take these off the shelf and try and turn them into something or is it a timing question?
The brain has upper motor neurons in the cortex which map to lower motor neurons in the spinal cord, which send long axons down to contact the muscles. They release neurotransmitters that turn individual muscle fibres on and off. Motor units have 1:1 correspondence with motor neurons. When motor neurons fire in the spinal cord, an output signal from the brain, you get a direct response in the muscle. If those EMG signals can be decoded, then you can decode the zeros and ones of the nervous system — action potential
TR: Some of this is chutzpah and some of it is timing. The technologies that we are leveraging weren’t fully developed for how we’re using them. We had to do some invention since we started the company three years ago. But they were far enough along that you could imagine the gap and come up with a way to cross the gap. How could we, for instance, decode an individual neuron using a technology called electromyography. Electromyography has been around for probably over a century and that’s the ability to — 
AMLG: Thats what we call EMG.
TR: EMG. Yes you can record the electrical activity of a muscle. EKG electrocardiography is basically EMG for the heart alone. You’re looking at the electrical activity of the heart muscles. We thought if you improve this legacy technology of EMG sufficiently, if you improve the signal to noise, you ought to be able to see the individual fibers of a muscle. If you know some neuroanatomy what you figure out is that the individual fibers correspond to individual neurons. And by listening to individual fibers we can now reconstruct the activity of individual neurons. That’s the root of a neural interface. The ability to listen to an individual neuron.
EEG toy “the Force Trainer”
AMLG: My family are Star Wars fans and we had a device one Christmas that we sat around playing with, the force trainer. If you put the device around your head and stare long enough the thing is supposed to move. Everything I’ve ever tried has been like that has been like that Force Trainer, a little frustrating — 
TR: Thats EEG, electroencephalography. That’s when you put something on your skull and record the electrical activity. The waves of activity that happen in the cortex, in the outer part of your brain.
AMLG: And it doesn’t work well because the skull is too thick?
TR: There’s a bunch of reasons why it doesn’t work that well. The unfortunate thing is that when most people hear about it that’s one of the first things they think about like, oh well all my thinking is up here in the cortex right underneath my skull and that’s what you’re interfacing with. That is actually —
AMLG: A myth?
TR: Both a myth and the wrong approach. I’m going have to go deep on this one because it’s subtle but important. The first thing is let’s just talk about the signal qualities of EEG versus what we’re doing where we listen to individual neurons and do it without having to drill into your body or place an electrode inside of you. EEG is trying to listen to the activity of lots of neurons all at the same time tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of neurons and kind of get a sense of what the roar of those neurons is. I liken it to sitting outside of Giant Stadium with a microphone trying to listen to a conversation in Section 23 Row 4 seat 9. You can’t do it. At best you can tell is that one of the teams scored you hear the roar of the entire stadium. That’s basically what we have with EEG today. The ability to hear the roar. So for instance we say the easiest thing to decode with EMG is surprise. I could put a headset on you and tell if you’re surprised.
AMLG: That doesn’t seem too handy.
TR: Yup not much more than that. Turns out surprise is this global brain state and your entire brain lights up. In every animal that we do this in surprise looks the same — it’s a big global Christmas tree that lights up across the entire brain. But you can’t use that for control. And this cuts to the name of our company, CTRL-labs. I don’t just want to decode your state. I want to give you the ability to control things in the world in a way that feels magical. It feels like Star Wars. I want you to feel like the Star Wars Emperor. What we’re trying to do is give you control and a kind of control you’ve never experienced before.
The MYO armband by Canadian startup Thalmic Labs
AMLG: This is control over motion right? Maybe you can clarify — where I’ve seen other companies like MYO, which was an armband, it was really motion capture where people were capturing how you intended to gesture, rather than what you were thinking about?
TR: Yeah. In some sense we’re a successor to MYO (Thalmic Labs) — if Thalmic had been built by neuroscientists you would have ended up on the path that we’re on now.
Thomas Reardon demonstrating Myo control
We have two regimes of control, one we call Myo control and the other we call Neuro control. Myo control is our ability to decode what ultimately becomes your movements. The electrical input to your muscles that cause your muscles to contract, and then when you stop activating them they slowly relax. We can decode the electrical activity that goes into those muscles even before the movement has started and even before it ends and recapitulate that in a virtual way. Neuro control is something else. It’s kind of exotic and you have to try it to believe it. We can get to the level of the electrical activity of neurons — individual neurons — and train you rapidly on the order of seconds to control something. So imagine you’re playing a video game and you want to push a button to hop like you’re playing Sonic the Hedgehog. I can train you in seconds to turn on a single neuron in your spinal cord to control that little thing.
AMLG: When I came to visit your lab in 2016 the guy had his hand out here. I tried it — it was an asteroid field.
TR: Asteroids, the old Atari game.
Patrick Kaifosh playing Asteroids — example of Neuro Control [from CTRL-labs, late 2017]
AMLG: Classic. And you’re doing fruit ninja now too? It gets harder and harder.
TR: It does get harder and harder. So the idea here is that rather than moving you can just turn these neurons on and off and control something. Really there’s no muscle activity at that point you’re just activating individual neurons, they might release a little pulse, a little electrical chemical transmission to the muscle, but the muscle can’t respond at that level. What you find out is rather than using your neurons to control say your five fingers, you can use your neurons to control 30 virtual fingers without actually moving your hand at all.
AMLG: What does that mean for neuroplasticity. Do you have to imagine the third hand fourth hand fifth hand, or your tail like in Avatar?
TR: This is why I focus on the concept of control. We’re not trying to decode what you’re “thinking.” I don’t know what a thought is and there’s nobody in neuroscience who does know what a thought is. Nobody. We don’t know what consciousness is and we don’t know what thoughts are. They don’t exist in one part of the brain. Your brain is one cohesive organ and that includes your spinal cord all the way up. All of that embodies thought.
Inside Out (2015, Pixar). Great movie. Not how the brain, thoughts or consciousness work
AMLG: That’s a pretty crazy thought as thoughts go. I’m trying to mull that one over.
TR: It is. I want to pound that home. There’s not this one place. There’s not a little chair (to refer to Dan Dennett) there’s not like a chair in a movie theater inside your brain where the real you sits watching what’s happening and directing it. No, there’s just your overall brain and you’re in there somewhere across all of it. It’s that collection of neurons together that give you this sense of consciousness.
What we do with Neuro Control and with CTRL-kit the device that we’ve built is give you feedback. We show you by giving you direct feedback in real time, millisecond level feedback, how to train a neuron to go move say a cursor up and down, to go chase something or to jump over something. The way this works is that we engage your motor nervous system. Your brain has a natural output port — a USB port if you will — that generates output. In some sense this is sad for people, but I have to tell you your brain doesn’t do anything except turn muscles on and off. That’s the final output of the brain. When you’re generating speech when you’re blinking your eyes at me when you’re folding your hands and using your hands to talk to me when you’re moving around when you’re feeding yourself. Your brain is just turning muscles on and off. That’s it. There is nothing else. It does that via motor neurons. Most of those are in your spine. Those motor neurons, it’s not so much that they’re plastic — they’re adaptive. So motor control is this ability to use neurons for very adaptive tasks. Take a sip of water from that bottle right in front of you. Watch what you’re doing.
Intention capture — rather than going through devices to interact, CTRL-labs will take the electrical activity of the body and decode that directly, allowing us to use that high bandwidth information to interact with all output devices. [Watch Reardon’s full keynote at O’Reilly]
AMLG: Watch me spill it all over myself — 
TR: You’re taking a sip. Everything you just did with that bottle you’ve never done that before. You’ve never done that task. In fact you just did a complicated thing, you actually put it around the microphone and had to use one hand then use the other hand to take the cap off the bottle. You did all of that without thinking. There was no cognitive load involved in that. That bottle is different than any other bottle, its slippery it’s got a certain temperature, the weight changes. Have you ever seen these robots try to pour water. It’s comical how difficult it is. You do it effortlessly, like you’re really good —
AMLG: Well I practiced a few times before we got here.
TR: Actually you did practice! The first year two years of your life. That’s all you were doing was practicing, to get ready for what you just did. Because when you’re born you can’t do that. You can’t control your hands you can’t control your body. You actually do something called motor babbling where you just shake your hands around and move your legs and wiggle your fingers and you’re trying to create a map inside your brain of how your body works and to gain control. But gain flexible, adaptive control.
AMLG: That’s the natural training that babies do, which is sort of what you’re doing in terms of decoding ?
TR: We are leveraging that same process you went through when you were a year to two years old to help you gain new skills that go beyond your muscles. So that was all about you learning how to control your muscles and do things. I want to emphasize what you did again is more complex than anything else you do. It’s more complex than language than math than social skills. Eight billion people on earth that have a functioning nervous system, every other one of them no matter what their IQ can do it really well. That’s the part of the brain that we’re interfacing with. That ability to adapt in real time to a task skillfully. That’s not plasticity in neuroscience. It’s adaptation.
AMLG: What does that mean in terms of the amount of decoding you’ve had to do. Because you’ve got a working demo. And I know that people have to train for their own individual use right?
Myo control attempts to understand what each of the 14 muscles in the arm are doing, then deconvolve the signal into individual channels that map out to muscles. If they can build an accurate online map CTRL-labs believes there is no reason to have a keyboard or mouse 
  TR: In Myo control it works for anybody right out of the box. With Neuro control it adjusts to you. In fact the model that’s built is custom to you, it wouldn’t work on anybody else it wouldn’t work on your twin. Because your twin would train it differently. DNA is not determinative of your nervous output. What you have to realize is we haven’t decoded the brain —  there’s 15 billion neurons there. What we’ve done is created a very reduced but highly functional piece of hardware that listens to neurons in the spinal cord and gives you feedback that allows you to individually control those neurons.
When you think about the control that you exploit every day it’s built up of two kinds of things what we call continuous control — think of that as a joystick, left and right, and much left how much right. Those are continuous controls. Then we have discrete controls or symbols. Think of that as button pushing or typing. Every single control problem you face, and that’s what your day is filled with whether taking a sip of water walking down the street getting in a car driving a car. All of the control problems reduce to some combination of continuous control (swiping) and discrete control (button pushing.) We have this ability to get you to train these synthetic forms of up down left right dimensions if you will, that allows you to control things without moving but then allow you to move beyond the five fingers in your hand and get access to say 30 virtual fingers. What that opens up? Well think about everything you control.
AMLG: I’m picturing 30 virtual fingers right now —and I do want to get into VR, there’s lots of forms one can take in there. The surprising thing to me in terms of target uses and there’s so many uses you can imagine for this in early populations, was that you didn’t start the company for clinical populations or motor pathologies right? A lot of people have been working on bionics. I have a handicapped brother— I’ve been to his school and have seen the kids with all sorts of devices. They’re coming along, and obviously in the army they’ve been working on this. But you are not coming at it from that approach?
TR: Correct. We started the company almost ruthlessly focused on eight billion people. The market of eight billion. Not the market of a million or 10 million who have motor pathologies. In some sense this is the part that’s informed by my Microsoft time. So in the academy when you’re doing neuroscience research almost everybody focuses on pathologies, things that break in the nervous system and what we can do to help people and work around them. They’ll work on Parkinsons or Alzheimers or ALS for motor pathologies. What commercial companies get to do is bring new kinds of deep technology to mass markets, but which then feed back to clinical communities. By pushing and making this stuff work at scale across eight billion people, the problems that we have to solve will ultimately be the same problems that people who want to bring relief to people with motor pathologies need to solve. If you do it at scale lots of things fall out that wouldn’t have otherwise fallen out.
AMLG: It’s fascinating because you’re starting with we’re gonna go big. You’ve said you would like your devices, whether sold by you or by partners, to be on a million people within three or four years. A lot of things start in the realm of science but don’t get commercialized on a large scale. When you launched Explorer, at one point it had 95 percent market share so you’ve touched that many people before — 
Internet Explorer browser market share, 2002–2016
TR: Yes and it’s addicting, when you’ve been able to put software into a billion plus hands. That’s the kind of scale that you want to work on and that’s the kind of impact that I want to have and the team wants to have.
AMLG: How do you get something like this to that scale?
TR: One user at a time. You pick segments in which there are serious problems to solve and proximal problems. You’ve talked about VR. We think we solve a key problem in virtual reality augmented reality mixed reality. These emerging, immersive computing paradigms. No immersive computing technology so far has won. There is no default. There’s no standard. Nobody’s pointing at any thing and saying “oh I can already see how that’s the one that’s going to win.” It’s not Oculus it’s not Microsoft Hololens it’s not Magic Leap. But the investment is still happening and we’re now years into this new round of virtual realities. The investment is happening because people still have a hunger for it. We know we want immersive computing to work. What’s not working? It’s kind of obvious. We designed all of these experiences to get data, images, sounds into you. The human input problem. These immersive technologies do breakthrough work to change human input. But they’ve done nothing so far to change human output. That’s where we come in. You can’t have a successful immersive computing platform without solving the human output problem of how do I control this? How do I express my intentions? How do I express language inside of virtual reality? Am I typing or am I not typing?
AMLG: Everyone’s doing the iPad right now. You go into VR and you’re holding a thing that’s mimicking the real world.
TR: What we call skeuomorphic experiences that mimic real life, and that’s terrible. The first developer kits for the Oculus Rift you know shipped with an Xbox controller. Oh my god is that dumb. There’s a myth that the only way to create a new technology is to make sure it has a deep bridge to the past. I call bullshit on that. We’ve been stuck in that model and it’s one of the diseases of the venture world, “we’re Uber for neurons” and it’s Uber for this or that.
AMLG: Well ironically people are afraid to take risks in venture. If you suddenly design a new way of communicating or doing human output it’s, “that’s pretty risky, it should look more like the last thing.”
TR: I’m deeply thankful to the firms that stepped up to fund us, Spark and Matrix and most recently Lux and Google Ventures. We’ve got venture folks who want to look around the bend and make a big bet on a big future.
via TechCrunch
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7/27/2017 DAB Transcript
2 Chronicles 19:1-20:37 ~ Romans 10:14-11:12 ~ Psalm 21:1-13 ~ Proverbs 20:4-6
Today is the 27th day of July. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I'm Brian. It’s great to be here with you today, as we move into the back half of this week and continue the journey forward. We've been reading from the Gods Word translation this week. Today second Chronicles chapter 19 verse 1 through twenty verse 37.
Commentary:
OK. So, we remember after Solomon's reign that the kingdom of Israel split into two. The northern and the southern. Right? The northern kingdom of Israel. The Southern kingdom of Judah. And, so, we went through all those kings and all of those stories and eventually the Assyrian Empire came in and defeated Samaria. And it fell, which is the capital city of the northern Kingdom. And the ten northern tribes were carried into exile and then vanished from history. During that conquest, the Assyrian Empire was trying to take the entire land. And, so, they invaded Judah and cities were falling but Jerusalem didn't fall. And this was in the time of king Hezekiah. And there was all this intimidation going on. And Hezekiah went into the temple and prayed. And the next thing you know, the Assyrians are withdrawing. But they leave this really nasty note behind that their coming back. And Hezekiah takes this note and spreads it before the Lord in the temple and says, there is no hope basically. There is no hope but you. You are only hope. You are the only God. Come and save us. We see a very similar story take place in today's reading during the reign of king Jehoshaphat, who is also a good king, who was also a reformer, like Hezekiah. So, Jehoshaphat hears that a horde is coming across the Dead Sea to attack Jerusalem and it's a multinational force, it's a coalition that's coming. So, if you’re standing on the shore of the Dead Sea and looking across the Dead Sea - if you're standing in modern day Israel and you look across the Dead Sea - you will be looking into the country of modern day Jordan. But in this time, in this biblical time we are reading about, if you looked across the Dead Sea, you would be looking into the country of Moab. And to the south of Moab would be the border with Edom. People from that side of the Dead Sea were coming across the Dead Sea with the staging area at Ein Gedi because this was a fresh water source in the desert. This is one of the places that David was hanging out in and hiding when he was on the run from Saul. So, this horde is on its way over and there is no hope. So, king Jehoshaphat is in the temple, like Hezekiah, praying the same kind of prayer, hear me God because there's no way out of this. We don't know what we're going to do. We're outnumbered. We have no way. Without you we have no way. And, so, the messaging that he receives prophetically is that, all you really need to do is go out and be a witness. You not going to fight anything. You just need to go out and see the salvation of your God before you. And, so, they did. And God confused the army's. I mean, they were allies in their proposed battle with Jerusalem but they were different countries and they weren't all on the same page and something somewhere sparked them off. And they started fighting each-other. And, so, out in the desert they destroyed each-other. And Israel simply got all of the loot from the battle.
Over and over we see these kinds of stories. These, against all odds stories. I mean, the story of Jesus is one of those stories. All throughout the bible we see these stories where there's no way out. Right? You’re hemmed in and there's no way-out. And you’re going to get wiped out. But then you're not. Then God comes. And there is salvation. In all of these stories there is salvation. So, like, the story that we read today may have, like, historical value and even metaphorical value, which is what I'm doing right now with it. But underneath it all, it's the story of salvation - that God comes to save. That’s the whole story, all along, throughout this great book that we are journeying through together. And, so, once again we have this opportunity to take a step back from our lives, just a moment, while we're here around the global camp fire, where it's safe and think, ok, I have been facing these kinds of circumstances. I have faced them in the past. I am facing them now we're I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know how this is going to work out. And I'm driving myself crazy trying to figure that out. Every spare synapse in my brain, even while I'm not thinking about, is processing in my subconscious - how I'm going to get out of this - when you're not going to get out of it by yourself, likely. And, so, the bible also brings us to this place of understanding that when there is no hope, there is no hope outside of God. Because this is how we’re made. This is what we're made to be - intertwined and connected in relationship with God. And, so, what we learn in the scriptures is that, surrender is a part of that story, letting go is a part of that story, release is a part of that story - for a couple of reasons. All of these extra brain cells that we’re burning, trying to chomp out some sort of workable plan to extract ourselves from the impossible, it may or may not work. Even if it does though, we’ll wind up right back where we started. How many times do we have to go around this mountain? Right? I mean, how many times do we have to do this circle? Surrender offers us the opportunity to rest. It's not ours to do. And maybe we got ourselves into this mess. And maybe it's going to take a minute to get out of this mess. But it doesn't have to be alone, solitary, abandoned. It’s none of those things. But when we fall in our Father’s arms a whole different thing starts to go on. It's not ours to figure out. Our Father is with us and He is more powerful than anyone or anything on this planet. King Jehoshaphat came down toward the desert to the watch tower and saw that his enemies had destroyed themselves. And they were enriched because of it, without having to do anything. Sometimes we don't really have to do anything but be still and know that He is God and listen and do what He says. May we take that reminder today. That's the offer of relationship with God. We can take it or leave it. It's up to us. But may we take it.
Prayer:
So, Father, we take it. We take Your mercy and Your grace. We take Your love and Your kindness. We accept that we have no right to any of this other than that You have adopted us into Your family and made us join hands with Jesus. That’s so mind blowing. It's hard to even get our minds to even wrap around the concept -  that You have loved us so much as Your created, as Your children, that we’re all in on this. We're all part of the same story. You have brought us into this great story of relationship with You and moving through life in this world and moving through eternity together. And, so, why we turn to such lesser things is really confusing. But we do. But we’re not right now. We’re turning to You and You alone. You are the only hope in impossible situations and in every other situation. So, come Holy Spirit, we open ourselves to you. We fall into Your mercy. We fall into Your arms and we rest. Because it's been so stressful lately. We rest. Come Holy Spirit. Fill us again. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Announcements:
dailyaudiobible.com is the website. It’s home base. It’s where you find out what's going on around here. Plenty going on all the time. So, be sure to check in.
We’re going to do another Facebook Live in the Sneezing Jesus discussion group that's on Facebook. And you can find that at facebook.com/groups/sneezingjesus. What a great group. If you haven’t gotten in there, you should. It’s really inspiring. We’re going to do another one and talk about small groups and talk about some of the material in the book – one week from today, the third day of August, 7:00 p.m. Central Standard Time. And, so, we’ll look forward to that. Make plans. Looking forward to seeing you there.
One other Sneezing Jesus thing. If you have the book and its had some meaning for you. If you would mind going back to Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever you got it and putting in a review for it, that would be helpful. That's always helpful. We always get that kind of word back that we should do that and I’ve not mentioned it. And I’m not going to pound it. Just, if you have chance, that would be awesome. It’s so weird because when you write something, like, when I write something, by the time that I get it done all the way through to its launch and release date, this quite a bit of time. And, so, you just never know. But this has really struck a nerve all over the place and it’s been really, really interesting to watch because that prayer for a sneeze heard around the world is happening. And that is that is humbling. And I want it to continue because it's the good news. It's exactly with Paul was talking about in Romans today when he said, but how can people call on him if they don't believe in him? And how can they believe in him if they haven't heard the message? And how can they hear if no one tells them the good news? And how can people tell the good news if no one sends them? How beautiful are the feet of the messengers who announce the good news? Ya, that's what's happening. And it's humbling that we all get to be a part of that, a part of the ongoing story. So, anyway, I say all that to say to say, come on over and get into the discussion in the discussion group and we’ll do another Facebook Live a week from today.
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And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.
Community Prayers and Praise Reports:
My name is Janet. I live in Mobile, Alabama, the United States. I am coveting the prayers of the same. ___ for my daughter and son-in-law, Tony and Rachel. They have three children. Tony was injured on the job about three years ago. And those kids have been taken down the path of destruction ___ things. Please stand with me for my children and my grandchildren. They are now trying to take their house. Doctors have not been able to determine what Tony needs but he was injured on the job and he has since lost his job. He is working again but he is not making enough money to continue living where they live and how they live. And I just know that a breath, just a breath, of the Savior, would save these children from this and prove to them that ___ Lord. Because our Father is a glorious Father and loves us so much. And I just need you saints to stand with me, that their lives would be touched, and the pain would be addressed, and would have the wisdom that they need to make the right ___. I’ve been listening to the DAB for two years now and it has just been such a blessing to me and I just want to thank all of you, every single one of you saints, and I can't wait to see you all in heaven. ___ praise God for you daily and I pray for you daily – every one of you – every one of you that are suffering. In Jesus’ name, I thank you. God bless you, one and all. Bye
Hey. Good morning ___ fellow DABbers. My name is Jill and I am calling from southern CA. Today is Monday, July 24th and I just listened to the podcast for some of the prayer requests and there was this one, four word prayer request – please God help me. So, I would like to encourage all the DABbers ___. Let us please pray for that brother in Christ who just called out ___. First of all, I’d like to say, boy, young man, I’m glad you called in. That was my prayer about eleven years ago, and off and on throughout my whole life. God hears our ___, He hears those simple ___ please God help me prayers. So, may God bless you. Thank you for calling. And let all us fellow DABbers just ___. Alright everybody. To the King. To the Kingdom. Chow and God bless.
Hello DAB family. This is Joyful Noise from Southern California. Let's pray. Heavenly Father ___. I believe it was Caleb but You know her name and You know heart, Lord. I'm praying over her depression and she shared that she’s struggling physically. I'm not sure what that is but God, again, You know. ___ great position, God, you can heel whatever affliction she is struggling with God, whether they are emotional or mental, or physical. God, I just pray healing over her, Lord. You tell us that You ask us to come to ___ prayers and supplications as the widow to the wicked judge, persistently, Lord. And only You know why things continue when we've been praying God. And I just pray that You pour out Your Holy Spirit over her and Your encouragement let’s her know that she is loved right where she is God. And that You are for her not against her. And that You are with her through this all God. I just do pray, right away, instant healing God. I just pray this over her and I know the DABbers are joining me in in this prayer God. I also pray over Victoria Soldier, who I love, and I know You love her too God, who’s been praying for my son, struggling with extreme insomnia and she’s praying ___ fervently. I’ve never met her and it’s a debt I can never repay, never repay. That he’s now beginning to be healed of that and it’s being lifted. And, oh my gosh, You’re such an amazing Father in heaven. ___ children God. And I’m so thankful for that. I pray also, healing over our children. And all of the Grady’s of the world that are on all college campuses and all high school campuses and everywhere that the next generation ___ gathers. I pray many Grady's in these groups and in these forums…
Hi DAB. This is Roxanne and today is July the 24th and I was listening today and in between two prayer requests…my brother David from Kansas…I would have sworn I heard your voice crying out to the Father for help. Feeling ____ I know it was you. I promise ___ moved when I heard your voice. And you know, my brother, if I hear you, know that our heavenly Father hears you as well. Praying for you David, that the Father would relieve you from your pain and any distress that you might have and that the Holy Spirit would give you peace in your heart. We love you David ___. Thank you so much DAB, for your faithfulness. I love you all so very much. God bless you all. God bless you David. Keep the faith my brother.
Good morning Daily Audio ___ or should I say good afternoon? This is ___ from ___. I am calling for praise reports. First, I’d like to say that I get the job as a medical technologist with a company that I went and interviewed for to ___. I was given a job offer, which I accepted. Yay! And I start on July 31st. I am really looking forward to this new adventure in my life. And the next thing I wanted to talk about was ___. About two to three months ago ___ was in and she challenged us to give to the Daily Audio Bible. I used to give to the Daily Audio Bible when I lived in another country and had a really good job and free, single, just engaged and could pretty much do what I pleased with my money with no ___. And that changed and I gave up my job and I moved countries. And we became a single income household and I felt, my husband doesn't share my faith in many ways and ___ taking money from our household to give away in a way that he doesn’t understand because of how he looks at it and. So, I had stopped giving for a while but it was a huge burden to me and I kept saying, Lord if you give me a job, then I will give to the Daily Audio Bible ___. And then this lady about two to three months ago said, you know, no matter how small it is, give. And I decided to sit down and look at our family budget and found a way to remove a portion from it and contribute to the Daily Audio Bible family. ___ as if it’s in our budget. A step of faith. And, I want to say, to my surprise, my husband didn’t even comment on it, even if he noticed the movement, because it really didn’t affect our budget one bit. And, so, I was ___ more. And now I am looking forward to my job because I'm going to be able to post even more. So, I guess I want to say, I want to challenge part of who of maybe waiting for that breakthrough to actually contribute because my grandmother ___. Give from little so when you have much it will be much easier to give from much, if that makes sense. And so, if you just have a little, no matter how small, just start contributing from there and God will open the windows of ___. I hope you guys are having a wonderful day and I’m so happy and feel so blessed to be a part of the Daily Audio Bible family. Have a wonderful day everyone.
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fluentlanguage · 7 years
Text
9 of the Best Resources for Learning Spanish Online
Finding credible resources for language learning can be difficult and time-consuming, but don't worry...I'm here to help! Welcome to a new blog series called 9 Best Resources. Every month, I'll bring you trusted and reliable apps, courses, books and more.
The series kicks off with one of the most popular languages among learners everywhere: Español! 🇪🇸💃🏾🇲🇽🇦🇷
In a Hurry? Get These By Email!
I've put all of my top Spanish resources plus 5 more indie tips into a handy PDF page so you can access everything from one page. Get it for free by singing up to the Fluent Cool Kids Club, my huge online library full of awesome bonus content.
Insider Info Comin' Right Up..
Here at Fluent Language, I love supporting independent language producers. So my indie Top 9 means that these resources are not part of a big corporation or brand of language businesses. They're insider tips that you might have not discovered otherwise.
There has never been a better time to learn Spanish, and with these 9 indie resources you'll be using the language comfortably in no time.
1. Fluent Spanish Academy
My friend Olly Richards is fluent in a whole bunch of languages, but I'm never more impressed than when he speaks Spanish. ¡Que sexy! Olly knows what it takes to become confident, and he knows that being stuck on "intermediate" can be frustrating.
He runs Fluent Spanish Academy, a programme designed to guide you through the plateau and into language fluency. His programme includes:
Live training and weekly audio Spanish lessons to take with you wherever you want
Real recordings of conversations between native Spanish speakers, plus transcripts
Engaging short stories
A private online community for his Spanish Academy members
Motivating monthly challenges where you can work with other members
There is currently a waiting list to join the Fluent Spanish Academy, however Olly offers free samples of their material while you wait for your place. Check out the Spanish Academy site
2. Easy Spanish YouTube Channel
Easy Spanish have numerous videos that help you learn 100% authentic and natural Spanish. Created by polyglot favourite Easy Languages, the videos offer a mix of language and culture by chatting to people on the streets about certain aspects of their culture or language.
It's informal, it's not very time-consuming - each video is less than 10 minutes, perfect to cram in as a working break between your studies. And most importantly it's fun and fulfils that wonderful language learning motivation: wanting to hear from real people who live somewhere else!
3. XKCD Comic En Español)
Randall Munroe's beloved XKCD webcomic has a global following, so much so that the community of fans decided to create a Spanish version! XKCD en español is available for all strips that the translators found "translatable", and there's enough to keep you going for days and days.
Another perfect study break, or try adding XKCD it into your daily routine. Reading one comic strip a day won't make you fluent, but it will get you used to seeing and reading written Spanish, and these short strips fit into the busiest of days.
4. StudySpanish.com
When I ask Spanish learners for their online favourites, one resource that was always mention is StudySpanish.com. This site offers Spanish courses for three different levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced.
StudySpanish has been around since 1988, when it was a pioneer in educational websites. They have two different membership levels, one of which is free! Don't worry, the site's design is not stuck in 1988 and I found it inviting and easy to navigate.
5. Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish
(UK Amazon Link | US Amazon Link)
Margarita Madrigal's textbook on how to learn to read, write, and speak Spanish in only a few short weeks with her proven method has become something of a cult classic as far as language books go. Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish begins by teaching you the past tense since this is the tense we use when we tell stories, and telling stories is a lot more interesting than repetitive sentences introducing ourselves.
The book's approach is focused on communication, so you'll get most out of this for boosting the speaking skill. Serious students will do well to support this with a grammar book.
The book was originally published in 1953 and is still praised today, more than 60 years later! A must-have for keen learners.
6. Language Transfer
Language Transfer is a platform providing language courses for free in podcast and PDF-form. Project costs are funded through a voting campaign and occasional donations from users. The founder, Mihalis Eleftheriou, works with native speaker volunteers that he sources from the users of LT. The courses are user-funded and users can vote with a small sum of money to decide on the language or level of the next course. They have a complete Spanish course just waiting for you to get listening!
7. El Blog para Aprender Español
El Blog para Aprender Español, written in Spanish with the occasional English translation or guideline, offers free materials for download to use to practice your Spanish. The blog is run by Raquel and María, both Spanish ELE teachers from Madrid with experience from classrooms across Europe.
El Blog offers you everything from an insight into Spanish culture and life in Spain to basic grammar lessons. And if you like these two ladies, you can book them for one-to-one Skype Spanish lessons.
8. PractiSpanish
Hiring a tutor is one of the best investments you can make. Getting a professional tutor can make the difference between "Una cerveza, por favor" and true, authentic communication.
PractiSpanish is a tutoring site created by Lucía, Sonia and José, three experienced and certified Spanish tutors. The website was born out of what they viewed as the most important thing that Spanish students need: a place to practice and apply all the theoretical knowledge available.
These guys are different from giant directories like italki because they are obsessed with encouraging our students to "refresh" their Spanish brain cells between the sessions: replying to emails in Spanish, writing feedback, recommending new Spanish songs, suggesting not to wash the dishes unless there is a Spanish radio or TV channel playing, etc.
If you want creative and enthusiastic Spanish tutors, PractiSpanish is an option you must not miss.
9. Say Something in Spanish
I am a HUGE fan of Say Something in Welsh, so imagine my excitement when I found out about their Say Something in Spanish range!
Say Something In Spanish's system is simple: they say something in English, you say it in Spanish, and then you hear it twice in Spanish.
By turning language learning into a game of words, SSI allows you to explore a new language without the pressure of instant perfection. SSI started out with a very successful Welsh version of their language course, and their Spanish version is just as good.
Try a sample and Say Something in Spanish immediately on this sample page.
Do You Want Even More Insider Tips for Learning Spanish?
I've put all of the above Spanish resources plus 5 more indie resources into a handy PDF page so you can access everything from one page. Get it for free by singing up to the Fluent Cool Kids Club, my huge online library full of awesome bonus content.
Have You Used Any Of These Yet?
Are you using the resources above? Got any other insider tips for Spanish? Let me know in the comments!
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