Dr. Allan Hamilton | Author of The Scalpel and the Soul

March 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! It’s a beautiful day out here in New York, still a little bit crisp in the air but there’s just a hint of spring coming around the corner. We have three authors on the show today and one musician; I’m excited about it. My first guest will be Dr. Allan Hamilton and his books called The Scalpel and the Soul and I’ve got a guy on who wrote a book called Abramo’s Gift – it’s a beautiful novel by Donald Greco. My third guest on the show is the youngest brother of the McCourt family. Of course there’s Frank and Maliki and this is Alphie McCourt. His book is called A Long Stones Throw, a beautiful memoir. At the end of the show I’ve got some musicians coming on as always and James Reams is joining me today with his band the Barn Stormers. So without further ado, my first guest on the show, Dr. Allan Hamilton, the writer of The Scalpel and the Soul. . Welcome to the show.

Dr. Hamilton: Thank you for having me Dr. Kent.

Dr. Kent: This is such an interesting issue. My father is a doctor and I know quite a bit about doctors just from hanging around them all my life and it’s not something you hear about too often, the soul.

Dr. Hamilton: Well it sort of one of our its we don’t feel comfortable sometimes talking about and one of the reasons that I actually tackled the topic was I went into my training and the first part of my career as a surgeon very unprepared if you will for some of the spiritual challenges and emotional challenges my patients were going to face and as you watch that process, it gradually begins to reflect on your own life and your own values and I thought that sort of took me by surprise if you will.

Dr. Kent: It’s really an experience that just about everyone has in society at one point. Being there, thinking about the scalpel and the soul as it were. In the emergency room waiting area, waiting for a family member to come out, this and that. It really is an emotional place, the hospital.

Dr. Hamilton: It is kind of a crucible and for many people it’s going to represent not just the moment of tremendous threat but also a potential challenge and even spiritual transformation. Many patients will come through a severe illness or major surgery and will have focused for them what their values really are, what they want their legacy to be and in many cases a lot of my brain tumor patients, cancer patients really have crystallized what they want their lives to be about and the purpose of their lives.

Dr. Kent: Here’s a question you might not get all the time but I have a curiosity about the word scalpel. It’s a word that came up on the campaign trail by both candidates this last year and I think we have a serious fear of that device, the scalpel and its only certain people that we trust with that and we trust them with our lives.

Dr. Hamilton: The scalpel is an interesting symbol. First off if you think about it, it really is a knife, like any other knife and yet its held with a completely different kind of grip and one of the most difficult things for young surgeons to learn is basically the way of wielding that scalpel so it actually is cutting tissue the way you want. And that when you cross that threshold, it’s really as if the scalpel suddenly has become a part of your hand, of your fingers. It’s no longer just an instrument but it carries a very special significance and you know it’s the knife that’s used in healing but still has a lot of the connotations of a knife. I always say surgery is only a few steps away from murder.

Dr. Kent: Wow. That’s a great statement, and a terrifying statement. Now, we have such a stigma attached to doctors these days. What’s your take on that? In the world of people who say I’m going to sue my doctor and this and that, there’s a real trust issue and it really does come down to there’s a fine line between murder and surgery. A lot of people think, go ahead.

Dr. Hamilton: Well I think you’re right. I think first off I think there’s a spiritual crisis going on in the midst of the whole medical health system. Medical adverse events, which is our fancy word for mistakes, errors, are the fourth leading cause of death now in the United States. Five times more people die a year from medical adverse events than those that die on the highways in America. So the publics trust in terms of public trust, the healthcare industry is right behind the food handling industry and the nuclear waste industry; we’re third.

So we really have lost the publics trust and one of the reasons is we’ve gotten farther and farther removed from the patient and the immediate relationship and sense of a partnership and the sense of being if you will united with the goal of healing. I think patients are gradually starting to feel more and more estranged. If you watch video tapes and do a study, the average time from when a surgeon walks in the room to the time the surgeon walks out with a signed consent for surgery is seven and a half minutes. So in 7-1/2 minutes you go from meeting a complete stranger to putting your life in their hands and asking people to trust a system like that I think is asking an awful lot. There’s almost no other situation in the world where we come up against that asked of us.

Dr. Kent: What’s interesting is that you talk about directly on your website, which is allanhamilton.com, there’s the soul often needs more than an intensive care unit can provide and I’ve experienced times in the intensive care unit visiting a family member and its not a place that; its an emergency place, its keeping people alive and its not a pleasant place to be. Where does the soul belong in that?

Dr. Hamilton: Well I’ll give you a very good example. I was just with a group of residents and we were next to a little boy in the ICU after surgery for a tumor. It really was an important point to remind the residents to step away from the patient’s room and the family and the immediate area if they wanted to have a discussion about certain things. My feeling was I don’t want the patient hearing a word here or a word there that has very significant connotations. I think you need to be aware that there’s an awful lot of stress in that ICU and we don’t want to add to it we want to actually address some of those emotional demands and that’s why I think we tend to look at the body in the ICU and often forget how desperate the soul is for support at the same time.

Dr. Kent: You are a neurosurgeon and I find it fascinating that someone who deals so much with a concrete part of a human beings body in such a sensitive area also thinks about the soul and a spiritual side to things. How does the physical tactile part of things connect up with the other side?

Dr. Hamilton: I think there’s a disconnect. I think one of the reasons I got so interested is because you’re working on the brain and because yes its an organ but it is a mind, it is the personality, it is the entire life experience, the values, you know, love and its all there and yet you’re just looking at an organ and at the same time very aware that the whole integrity of a person is in that organ. You can’t see it, you can’t see what love is, you can’t see where altruism and sacrifice and hard work or fear are; you don’t see that when you’re working on it, you just know that its there and you have to be aware that this is in some ways you’re inside a temple. It isn’t like any other organ. If you take somebody’s piece of bowel out or even fix their heart, you’re not changing the fundamental character of the person and yet with this surgery we can actually end up doing that or removing speech or you can confuse sending somebody up so their completely confused or have no memory. I think it makes you feel as if you’re far more connected with something beyond just the anatomy and the physical.

Dr. Kent: So let’s talk about the book itself, The Scalpel and the Soul. Its done very well and being carried by The One Spirit Book Club at Borders among other things and now why did you decide to write a trade publication? This is certainly not written for a medical journal, it’s a wonderful read. What did you want people to take away from it?

Dr. Hamilton: Well I think it’s a conversation because on one hand as I explained earlier, people aren’t talking to us and training us as physicians that we’re going to be dealing with it and at the same time you have a huge number of patients and a growing number of patients who say no, I’m not just a body with a disease I’m a human being with a soul and a heart and that has to be addressed at the same time so I think what you have is one group of people who want to open up a dialogue with their physician and I think the other thing is you have a group of physicians who are saying why cant we even have a conversation about this?

Why can’t we all know that miracles are happening every day? We all have had patients where we’ve said this patient isn’t going to survive another week and yet they say I have to wait another four months for my son to come back from Iraq so I can say goodbye and they do it. If this is just a process, how does all that happen? How did they summon the emotional strength, the spiritual strength, the will to impose their needs over a biologic mechanistic process so they could reach closure with their loved ones. That’s really what’s miraculous and that’s where you want to have the conversation between physician and patient.

Dr. Kent: How has the reaction been from your colleagues in your community? The books done very well and I’m sure many a doctor has picked this up.

Dr. Hamilton: Well surgeons, which I’m one, we’re the arch-conservative, the republicans of the medical world so I’ve had a lot of colleagues who’ve said you’ve been a surgeon 30 years, you’ve been chairman of the surgical department, how could you have sat down and written a book about spirituality like this? I’ve gotten very good reactions from the younger doctors, they give me a lot of hope because they say we’re glad somebody’s talking about this and made the subject no longer taboo. Then you have the intermediate group; I had a colleague going up in an elevator with me I’ve known for 20 years and he was saying I cant believe this book you wrote about spirituality and then he walked out of the elevator, turns around and says to me on the other hand I always know when something bad has happened to my children even before the phone rings. I said, so you have a sense of being connected to something beyond yourself and he says yeah. I said, well that’s what the books about. So I think its run the gamut.

Dr. Kent: Wow, well it’s such a fascinating title and with your background especially fascinating and I encourage everybody to go out and pick this up. The Scalpel and the Soul and of course this is available from the Reading Group at Borders, the One Spirit Book Club. What are you working on now?

Dr. Hamilton: I’m actually working on another book about spirituality and our connection with animals so that’s the second book.

Dr. Kent: I got to say I can’t wait to read that one. I’ve got a great connection with my golden retriever so.

Dr. Hamilton: Yeah.

Dr. Kent: Well thank you so much for being on the show, this has been fascinating and we can find out more about Dr. Allan Hamilton on his website, www.allanhamilton.com and everywhere books are sold. Thank you so much for chatting with us.

Dr. Hamilton: Thank you it’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is a fellow named Donald Greco and we’re going to talk to him in a minute about his novel called Abramo’s Gift. Come on back for that.

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John Michael Greer | Energy Crisis

January 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with John Michael Greer [22:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Fascinating discussion with Druid Environmentalist John Michael Greer just before Obama’s inauguration. More about John Michael Greer from his website:

John Michael Greer: The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of some eighteen books, including “The Druidry Handbook” (Weiser, 2006) and “The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age” (New Society, 2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

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Interview with John Michael Greer | Sound Authors Radio

January 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday January 16th and I’ve got four great guests on the show today. I’m very excited about it. Its inauguration week and I’m excited about all of the events happening this week. There’s no guests on the show talking about that specifically but I’ll certainly ask the guests what they’re thinking. I have some really varied topics on the show today, one of the authors has written a book about the Middle East, one has written about the ancient Middle East, the pyramids, but it’s my honor to welcome to the show John Michael Greer who is the author of The Long Descent. A Users Guide to the end of the Industrial Age. And there’s a beautiful front cover on the book, little men descending down the gears. So welcome to the show John Michael Greer.

John Michael Greer: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be on.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this book.

John Michael Greer: Well basically do you remember back in the 1970s the last time we had an energy crisis when a lot of scientists were saying you know we’re going to have to change the way we do things pretty dramatically and then in a few decades oh we’re going to hit a wall when we get to the 21st century?

Dr. Kent: Right.

John Michael Greer: The point of my book is basically they were right and we’re in the process of hitting that wall now and we’ve got to try to figure out what we’re going to do about it.

Dr. Kent: Now you are a certified master conserver. Tell me what that is.

John Michael Greer: Okay, I don’t know if this is true out in your end of the country but a lot of states out on the west coast where I live have programs like the master gardener program, there are master composter programs, very good things put on by the local agristations or in part by state governments put on to train citizens to do very useful things. In fact during that last energy crisis there was a thing called the master conserver program and people who took part in it did classes in conservation of various kinds and then they did a certain amount of community work and they got their certificates and I’m one of the people who went through that program back in the day. So the publisher was really kind of looking around for something that would make an unofficial sounding credential and I said well try this one. Really there are no experts in this field, the field of where we’re headed as a society, where we’re headed as a culture. We all have to try to figure it out as we go along.

Dr. Kent: You are also called the Grand Arch Druid and you also have a great blog at the archdruidreport.blogspot.com but tell me about what that is.

John Michael Greer: Well there you’re basically touching on my religion. I’m a druid, I belong to the old faith of the old nature worshipping faith of the Celts or rather its modern version, recreation, redevelopment. It so happens that after various years of doing various things within the druid community in 2003 I was elected head of one of the druid orders in this country, the Integral Druids of America. Now grand arch druid sounds like an exciting title; that is ### get you a cup of coffee but it does come with an unusual looking hat which is something.

Dr. Kent: Very good. So this book itself it’s got such a gorgeous cover like I said. The long descent and here are these men just they could be women but descending these years. Talk about the general premise behind the book. A user’s guide to the end of the industrial age.

John Michael Greer: Okay, it’s a user’s guide to the end of the industrial age. One of the things that we tend to get when people start talking about the future these days is that either they think things are going to go on pretty much business as usual off for the foreseeable future. We get more and more exciting technological toys and stuff but no real dramatic changes on the one hand. Or on the other hand you have the people who are convinced that next Thursday or something like that everything is going to crash into ruin and be bombed and starving survivors roaming the landscape and anything you watched in Mad Max and so on. And nobodies talking about what life in between those two very extremes are.

That’s what was brought up in the 1970s in the various problems in the relationship we face to living outside our planet mean that we’re not going to be able to continue business as usual for very much longer. We’re already starting to have some major problems with that. But that doesn’t mean that everything’s going to fall apart in a hurry. What we’re facing instead is what I’ve called as the title suggests the long descent. A long, slow potentially fairly rough transition from the high tech industrial sort of society we have now to societies of the future that have a lot less energy and a lot less natural resources to pass around and that are basically working with a much simpler technology than we’re used to using today. So that’s the basic theme of the book.

Dr. Kent: Once you’ve hit some key words for what the pundits are talking about right now. Talk about your view of what’s happening right now in politics and society and all of that?

John Michael Greer: Well politics I think if society were a glass of beer, politics is the foam on top. Politics is froth; it’s how we argue about the changes that are going on and there are some important things going on in politics. I’m delighted; the candidate I voted for is about to be inaugurated its going to be a very historic day for this country. But the real changes that are going on, the changes that are defining what our political leaders and what we ourselves can accomplish, have to do with our relationship with the planet.

They have to do with the amount of oil that’s being produced, the amount of oil that can be produced, because we’ve actually pumped out a lot of the world’s total petroleum at this point; and various other resources. And what the petroleum geologists, what the scientists are telling us is that we’ve actually used more than half of most of our energy resources now and so we’re looking at a situation where we saw last year the price of oil went zooming through the atmosphere and then we crashed and basically its like a little bubble. When the price was going up everybody bought into it, bought oil futures zooming up at $143 a barrel, and then when it turned down everybody bailed out of it and sent it crashing down to what it is, $38. And we’re going to see more of that. More of that volatility. You won’t be able to tell from one year to the next what the price of gas is going to be. And it’s not going to be what it is today.

Dr. Kent: Now in a situation like that, we’ve got a brand new president and he promises change and I find that very exciting but you talk about in your book very clearly that the change needs to come from the bottom not the top.

John Michael Greer: Yeah, well it’s important that we have leaders who are inspiring, its important that we have people in politics who are willing to embrace the idea of change and not and I’ll trot out Dick Cheney’s line about the American way of life is non-negotiable. He’s wrong. In a sense he’s right, there’s no way we can negotiate to keep the American way of life we’ve had. It’s going to change and it’s great that we have somebody moving into the white house on Tuesday who is in tune with the need for change. But yeah, the real change has to come in our own lives. It doesn’t matter what the government does, if we’re not willing to bite the bullet and live a little more simply and a little less extravagantly than we’ve all been doing this last quarter century or so, changing the government aren’t really going to help them unless they change.

Dr. Kent: Well I have my best friend in the world has trained in organic farming and it’s a fascinating world and it’s actually creeping into somewhat of the corporate environment. What’s your take on local and organic versus whole foods or large scale organics?

John Michael Greer: Basically I mean even the corporate organic is a step in the right direction because among many other things organic farming uses less energy. Most of the pesticides, most of the various organic chemicals, those are actually made most of them from petroleum. So by cutting that out, we’re decreasing our dependence on oil. The next step of course is to move from big corporate organic farms that ship food all across the country to local farms producing local foods for families. And that’s the next step and its going to happen simply because while we’re going to see these variations drastic variations in the price of oil, and the price of gas, diesel fuel in turns, its generally going to trend upwards, just as its been trending upwards in most of the last decade.

So basically we’re in a situation where those people want to be thinking about where their food is coming from not tomorrow but ten years from now need to be looking at local organic farms. We need to see city councils and county councils making changes and there’s zoning to encourage small local farming. And also just to be people who are willing to pay that little bit more to shop locally, to support the local farmers. That’s going to do a huge amount of benefit for the future. As well as the fact that locally grown organic food is usually fresher and tastes better.

Dr. Kent: I’m curious about your background in terms of when did you get into the organic farming to thinking about all this. I know that you’ve published several books and this is sort of a new venture for you into kind of a mainstream trade crowd. Talk about that a little bit, your past.

John Michael Greer: I originally got involved with this back in the 1970s when I was a teenager. The energy crisis was a big thing and I did a lot of reading, a lot of studying in those days. When I first went to college I ended up, I lived most of the time at a little organic farm just past the campus of western Washington University in Washington. So I would be going to classes during the daytime then coming back and helping to tend the farm, getting up early to milk the goats and things like this and so it was a very perfect way of living in its own way. I mean I was living in a small cabin with wood heat and no running water but you would be surprised how pleasant that could be.

So when the 1980s came and we had Regan saying America is back and getting further backward all the time although I don’t think he ever said THAT, and everybody just covered their eyes and covered their ears and the “I cant hear you, I cant hear you” to the ecological problems or anything I just kind of kept with them but mostly was involved with my faith, the druid faith, which is also very supportive of nature and so when I got into writing much of what I was writing those days correlated to that faith and to the traditions true to that. There were people interested in reading what I had to say.

I thought it would be a complete waste of time to try to write something for the general public about this sort of thing but a few years back Richard Feinberg an excellent, excellent author wrote a book called The Party’s Over, which was a discussion on big oil and it actually sold quite well and I went wow, okay I guess its time to start talking about this. So I launched my blog the Arch Druid Report and started talking about people living out the end of the industrial age and it actually got quite a large audience. So from that the book sort of followed.

Dr. Kent: I don’t know all that much about druids. In fact, all I know about the word druid is from what I’ve read in some of the literature I read as a child. Tell me a little more about how that influences your views about the world and all of that.

John Michael Greer: Druidry is a very diverse faith. The standard joke is if you have a question ask it to three different druids and you’ll get at least five different answers. But broadly speaking druidly treats nature as sacred nature, nature is holy. We see nature as that in which we live and move and have our being and there is people in the druid community who talk about that in various different ways whether they want to talk about God or whether they want to talk about the gods and goddesses and whether they want to talk about nature as a sacred presence within themselves, its very much a nature centered religion. So for us, anything that benefits nature, anything that helps nature move in harmony and that helps us move in harmony with nature, that’s a sacred act and anything that defiles or disturbs nature is what Christians would call sin. You can see how this plays in pretty closely.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely and I can also see how it plays in well with last night George Bush gave his final escape speech and he talked about the good and evil that everyone thinks is good and evil and I find that fascinating from a man that’s viewed as sort of this Jesus figure to the religious right here and a Hitler figure to a lot of the rest of the world.

John Michael Greer: Yeah, good and evil are challenging terms and it gets very challenging when you try to pin them on a human being as if you’re playing pin the tail on the donkey. I think part of George Bush’s problem is that he was very ready to see the world as full of good guys and bad guys and nothing in between and that’s really not the way the world works. I mean everybody has some potential for good and some potential for evil and some people exercise one more than the other but we of course need to realize that we are human beings, we aren’t cardboard cutouts that wear white hats or black hats or what have you.

Dr. Kent: Now, in terms of the general, there’s also an extremism of opinion on environmental issues; if it’s global warming, the whole worlds going to die in five years or it doesn’t exist. Or with oil its either lets just use oil and drill off the coast and go here and there or lets just go completely to wind. What’s your take on where we’re going?

John Michael Greer: Well, you put your finger on a very important point, which is that this country right now is obsessed with that kind of dualistic thinking. It’s either or, all the way to one extreme or all the way to the other extreme and it’s as though here’s your choice: you can drown or you can die of thirst. Take your pick. But there’s a middle ground and the middle ground is where we need to be in terms of the future we’re facing that’s taking shape. With regard to global warming its pretty obvious to me that the people who are insisting it doesn’t exist are mostly funded by big oil companies and they’re propagandists but at the same time the people who are insisting we’re all going to be cooked in five years are simply going to the opposite extreme and trying to circulate scare stories in order to get their point of view accepted. Neither of those is productive.

We need to look among other things at what happened in the prehistoric past with global warming that happened many, many times. It’s not a new thing and so we need to get outside this sort of Hollywood catastrophe model and instead look at okay, what happens when the earths temperature changes? Because it does every ten thousand billion years you have these drastic changes in temperature; the worlds been through it before. We haven’t, not as civilized; I mean we have but we were living in caves at the time. So we can learn a lot about that instead of getting stuck on this kind of apocalypse thing. In the same way, in terms of petroleum, are we going to go off petroleum? Well, probably not while there’s petroleum still available because it is so cheap, so easy to pump out of the ground and it’s so useful.

It’s probably still going to be used. On the other hand there’s not actually that much of it left, especially in this country. America was the first country in the world to establish a petroleum industry, we were the first country to start pumping our oil reserves out and we’re further along in what petroleum geologists call depletion of the earth, you know the process of pumping ourselves dry than any other country on earth. So saying drill baby drill may make a good political slogan but it’s not a functional strategy.

Dr. Kent: So kind of in closing talking about industrial society we all learned about the industrial revolution in grade school and it stuck around with some of us and this is such an extreme little bubble that’s going on in the last 30 or 40 years where now everyone has as many cars as they want, as big a house as they want, stuff everywhere and I’m part of that. It seems to me like this is even more of an extreme industrial revolution. How do you define what we’re going through and where, is it possible for us to go towards a more organic society and things like that?

John Michael Greer: Well I think you put your finger on the right word there by calling it a bubble. Just think of the way the housing prices went nuts over a few years back, especially in places like Las Vegas and phoenix where people were buying houses. Not because they wanted to live in them, not because they thought anyone would live in them but because they thought they could sell them for twice the price in the future. We have this kind of speculism mentality, this notion of getting something for nothing and it’s really pervaded our society at this point. So we think it’s perfectly reasonable to have eight cars in the driveway.

Who cares if we drive one than seven of them at the most, there’s this idea that it doesn’t matter. What we’re in the process of learning as we move into the second great depression right now is that it does matter, is that we’ve wasted a huge amount of money, and resources, and labor and time of stuff that actually doesn’t matter that much. So can we make the transition? That’s not a question, we’re going to make the transition simply because the opportunity to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them isn’t there any more.

So the question is what can we do about it? Well we do have all this stuff and I suspect one of the big industries of the next decade or so is going to be recycling all that stuff. There’s probably useful raw materials and things in there so yes we’re going to make the transition. Is it going to be a rough road? Very likely, especially for people who have kind of built their identity around this notion that whoever dies with the most toys wins. A friend of mine has a t-shirt that says whoever dies with the most toys still dies. I think that’s an attitude we might want to cultivate.

Dr. Kent: Exactly, so what’s in your garden right now? Probably nothing much but I don’t know Oregon very well.

John Michael Greer: No right now up in Oregon we don’t have snow on the ground just at the moment, but it was below 20 degrees Fahrenheit. In terms of the garden right now, the perennial orbs are doing very nicely, our rosemary; nothing slows rosemary down. Everything else is basically a food for winter, we’ve got the very first traces of buds on the blueberry bushes and the leeks are doing fine, leeks always do fine. In fact, they need a good hard freeze before they really get tasty. Other than that, the garden is very quiet.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been such an honor speaking with John Michael Greer; he’s an organic gardener as well as a wonderful author of many books. He is the Grand Arch Druid of the AODA and his blog is at thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com and of course the book is called The Long Descent. A Users Guide to the end of the Industrial Age. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

John Michael Greer: Thank you very much for having me on it was a real pleasure.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show will be the author of a different kind of historical book called the Secret of the Great Pyramid: How one mans obsession led to the solution of ancient Egypt’s greatest mystery. That’s by Bob Brier and we’ll talk to him in just a minute.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Science, Spirituality, Religion, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Politics, PODCAST

Interview with James D. Stein | Sound Authors Radio

December 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. We’ve all been glued to the TV set watching Michael Phelps and all the rest and it makes us think about numbers. He won by one hundredth of a second; I don’t even know how fast that is. With the physics and all of that, of swimming, of volleyball, we’re all thinking about how mass explains the world. So my next guest on the show hopefully can give us some enlightenment about that. His name is James D. Stein and he’s the author of How Math Explains the World: A Guide to the Power of Numbers from Car Repair to Modern Physics. Welcome to the show.

James D. Stein: Thank you very much Dr. Kent, thanks for inviting me on this show. Incidentally, in the time that Michael Phelps, the one one hundredths of a second, a radio program can travel from Chicago to Los Angeles at that.

Dr. Kent: Can you give us some enlightenment about how they could possibly get one hundredth of a second faster?

James D. Stein: Its always amazed me that there are certain activities which it seems like the winners win by very small amounts and of course what they do is in the old days when they had mechanical stop watches I can remember that with the mechanical stopwatches you saw hands go around and they stopped time to within about 1/5 or 1/10 of a second. But nowadays the timing is electronic and actually what NBC did was they showed you the underwater view and at the moment that Phelps’ finger touched the end wall, it registered on the sensor system and the other swimmer who came next, I think he was ###, touched a very small amount later, but you could actually see it because its interesting that your eye can actually pick up the difference of 1/100 of a second. Of course because their all within the same second, the same machine, it was easy to see that Phelps touched first and it registered on the machine.

Dr. Kent: So do you watch the Olympics and find yourself calculating through mathematical situations? Do you see the math in the Olympics?

James D. Stein: I certainly see it but I must admit where I find that it’s most interesting and where it’s actually discussed with some extent in my book is the way that the scoring in events like gymnastics is so difficult. The same happens virtually in any sport that is subject to scoring by human beings rather than the electronic scoring of races. It turns out that the problem of deciding who won the gymnastic event is very similar to the problem of deciding who wins an election and one of the great results of mathematics in the 20th century is something known as Harold’s Impossibility Theorem in which he showed that there was no perfect way of implementing a democracy and that’s very similar with the problem of deciding who won an Olympic gymnastics performance.

If you take a look at a contested election in which you have three people, it’s very difficult to decide who should be the winner in case one person doesn’t win a clear majority of the votes. One of the ways this happens and one of the ways that we decided was the person who gets the most first place votes but there are lots of people lots of areas where the elections are decided by taking the top two contenders and having them run off. And you can get different results depending upon which way you decide the election.

I happened to see for the Olympic high beam, what they did was they had a tie breaking procedure between the Chinese girl who ended up winning and Nastia Luiken who ended up finishing second and they actually had the same number of votes initially. They both had exactly the same score, but there was a very complicated tie breaking procedure, which ended up with the Chinese girl winning it. Had they adopted a different equally sensible tie breaking procedure, Luiken would have won.

Dr. Kent: So there is a lot of subjectivity every day of our lives.

James D. Stein: Yes, it occurs with some frequency. What mathematics does, mathematics is perfect with regard to the things that it discusses, the computation it makes et cetera, but when it comes to solving problems that actually exist in the real world math turns out practically like any other endeavor and it has its limitations. That was my motivation in writing the book. There are three very important results which show the limitations of what we can know about the universe and these results were discovered in the late 20th century. One of them which I just talked about was the impossibility theorem of Kenneth Arrow which showed that you can’t come up with a perfect method for implementing a democracy, a perfect method for electing people when you have more than two candidates. That’s actually impacted our lives in several different ways. It impacted us during the 2000 election for instance.

One of the things which also affects our lives is it turns out that we can’t measure everything precisely in the universe. We can’t know everything about the universe. This was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and it turns out that has fantastic ramifications. If you look at much of the electronic equipment that has been invented over the past 75 years; the computers, the lasers, the magnetic implements and imagers, they all depend on quantum mechanics which in essence tells us that there are limitations to what we can know. And finally, mathematics itself is not impervious to its inability to know things.

One of the key results in mathematics in the 20th century was known as Riddell’s Incompleteness Theorem; it’s a theorem about the limitations of logic by the Austrian mathematician (Kirk Ridell) and he showed that there are mathematical truths which logic is incapable of proving.

Dr. Kent: The way you speak is so similar to the actor on television on the show Numbers, and I’m sure you get all the time students and others that say, “Oh, that’s just like on that show Numbers.” What’s your opinion of the math on that show?

James D. Stein: Well I’ve only seen a few shows of it. I think anything that brings a higher level of awareness of mathematics is good because quite frankly mathematics you can go through you could go through months of the newspaper and never see an article about mathematics. So for there to be a hit show about mathematics is I think wonderful. My only objection to the show and there’s a Cal Tech mathematician who acts as advisor so in some respects in fact in many respects the show is pretty accurate when it talks about mathematics. But I think in order to add to the drama of the show, the things that mathematics can do are probably in the real world not as impressive as the things that go on in the show.

I think there is a tendency on the part of the people who haven’t really studied mathematics to think that there’s sort of this mystical or magical aspect to mathematics. For instance, when you talk about the television show Numbers, there are lots of mystical disciplines which rely to some extent upon numbers and relationships between mathematical quantities. In fact the original numerical mystics were the partheganons.

The parthagerists, the guy who invented the theorem about the right triangle, he was very much into the sense that numbers explained everything. It turned out that he found out that there were limitations to what the arithmetic of the Greeks could do. I think that if people were more educated about mathematics they would be able to realize that this is a tremendously useful tool but its not a mystical or magical tool and it’s a tool that they can acquire a facility with beyond the arithmetic of balancing their checkbook and whatever else they might use arithmetic for on a daily basis.

Dr. Kent: I’m intrigued by a couple of things. One is the book itself; How Math Explains the World. It’s a fun topic now and I got to say Numbers is part of the reason that I’m so intrigued by it but I grew up loving math so there’s two issues there. One is maybe you could give us an example or two of how math explains the world in your book and the second part is how is math taught in schools today? When I was a kid I had wonderful math teachers and I spent a lot of time on it. Is it the same these days?

James D. Stein: First of all let me say that I’ve had several radio interviews. I’ve had a bunch but you are the first talk show host who has said “I loved math when I was growing up.” Most of them had bad experiences with it so Dr. Kent, you are unique. But one of the examples in the book, in fact the one that I lead off with is one of the dilemmas that we constantly face. Why doesn’t the garage have our car ready when they say they were going to? It turns out that it’s a very competent scheduling that a garage has to do; it’s a very complicated problem.

If you look at what mathematicians would call a problem; paying the monthly bills. When you finally decide to pay your monthly bills you have a stack of envelopes, you got your checkbook, you write out a check, you put it in the envelope, you put a stamp on it and you continue doing this and you can see the stack of envelopes dwindling and you can get a sense of when the job is going to be done. If you look at what a car garage has to do during repairs.

Let’s say that they have four different cars in the shop and they have a bunch of mechanics and each car needs different things to be done to it. So you start constructing a hypothetical schedule and you get close to the end and all of a sudden you realize all of those four cars in the shop need the hydraulic lift at exactly the same time. This is obviously a bad schedule; you’ve run into a bottle neck. So you tear up the schedule and start again. Even when you get the schedule completed you can look at the schedule and say if I’d only changed the spark plugs on the Chevy I could have been through a half an hour sooner. That’s what makes scheduling an extremely difficult problem.

Mathematics looks at all sorts of problems from the very simple ones to the very difficult ones and it assesses how difficult the problem is, whether or not they’re going to be able to solve it and what the best way to do it is. One of the things that has always fascinated me is that in the 20th century it turns out the difficulty of solving the mathematical problem turns out in many aspects to be an asset to us. That’s exactly how the password on your bank account and ATM machines is protected because it’s related to a mathematical problem factoring a very large number that’s a product of two prime numbers. These turn out to be immensely difficult problems. They put a computer network on factoring such a problem and it turned out that the computer network took nine months to do it.

That gives you a lot of faith that your bank account is secure. It’s nice to know that this is a really difficult problem and this is one of the things that mathematics tells us. In fact it was the reason that they adopted this method of password security on ATM machines and computer various accounts that we use passwords on. That takes care of your first question. As far as teaching mathematics today, I think that mathematics has always to some extent become a hard sell the older you get. Younger kids almost always find mathematics intriguing. Because it’s not just a fact that they’re given, its something they can explore and see for themselves. They can see that two plus four equals six and five times four equals twenty and that the facts in the multiplication table are true and they can perform more complicated tasks. But as they get older they do not stay so interested in it.

There are people of course who do get interested in it and math teachers today are every bit as dedicated as the ones who you had whom you enjoyed when you were younger. I was lucky that I had some great mathematics teachers too, starting with my father but I think part of the problem today is that there is so much in the way of competition for someone’s time, especially students. I remember when I was growing up what you did was you had school, then you played baseball and at the end of the day you went home and did your homework.

Now you have school, you have soccer practice, you got to make sure that you have your Facebook entries up to date; you have to IM and text all your friends et cetera. It’s a more complicated process growing up today and as a result, that time has to come from somewhere and sadly it tends to come from school because kids are reluctant to give up their enjoyable time.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been a real honor speaking you; I could speak with you all day about how math explains the world. That’s the title of James D. Stein’s book, A Guide to the Power of Numbers from Car Repair to Modern Physics. It’s put out by Smithsonian Books and that’s part of Harper Collins. It’s been a real honor chatting.

James D. Stein: Thank you very much Dr. Kent. I enjoyed it too.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is a musician. Her name is Carol Ann and she plays with Red Molly. I’m going to play a song from Red Molly called The Mind of a Soldier, and then we’re going to chat with her about that. Come on back.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Science, Sports, TRANSCRIPTS, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Lillian Brummet | Sound Authors Radio

December 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is Friday, August 22, 2008. The Olympics isn’t quite over and during this Olympics and during this year we’ve been talking a lot about green issues. Some folks say that they’re sick of it but I’ll never be sick of it. This is a book called Trash Talk written by Dave and Lillian Brummet. I have Lillian on the show with me; welcome to the show.

Lillian Brummet: Oh, thank you very much for having me on today.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about Trash Talk, An Inspirational Guide to Saving Time and Money Through Better Waste Resource Management.

Lillian Brummet: Sure well actually Trash Talk started with a column that was published internationally by numerous publications and it just kept on growing right up until early 2007 when we moved onto other things. But in 2004 several years after we had started this column we realized that we just weren’t getting all of the information out there in the limited space that the column would allow. For writers out there we know that freelance writing with columns you’re kind of limited to whatever that publication gives you as far as word count.

Sometimes we only had anywhere between 50 to 500 words, sometimes 750 word pieces between these different publications. So what we ended up doing was we found that we were very limited on the amount of information that we could share on any one topic and we really felt that this information should be out there and that’s why we published Trash Talk and its had great success. Wonderful embracing from all over the world; it’s been wonderful.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about very simply I grew up with reduce, reuse and recycle. Are we still there?

Lillian Brummet: Yes.

Dr. Kent: How do we talk about that for the 21st century?

Lillian Brummet: Well I think its wonderful that our generation was brought up with a reduce, reuse, refuse mentality and honestly the attitude in north America has been picked up like no other sport or activity in north America and Europe as well. This is a wonderful thing; its something we need to embrace but there is a lot of people who are not being green in their lives, they’re not recycling, they’re not composting, they’re not participating and they’re not seeing the need for it. The reason they’re not seeing the need for it is because really they’ve been bombarded with all kinds of negative information from the news and the media.

They don’t really see how their individual effort is going to have any kind of impact on the amount of problems that our world is facing when it comes to global warming and various other issues, landfill issues, all kinds of issues. No matter where you look there’s some kind of issue. The people see this and think what kind of action can I possibly make against this impossible thing? What possible difference in value can I really have? And that’s what Trash Talk is; we show the real and measurable difference for every action that we take.

We show them the kind of impact they can have as an individual. Also we show them the amount of money that they can save with each of these actions. In the book Trash Talk we list them according to alphabetically with the things you would normally find in your trash bin or your recycle bin. We show you ways of recycling and reusing them and finding new uses for them and we also educate you on the product. What happens to that product when it goes through the waste management processes?

Also the production of that product and the environmental costs that is involving so we can simply make a difference as consumers as well when we get to that cash register. What are we bringing home and making ourselves deal with? So I think that the green movement is a wonderful thing and I’m so excited to be a very small part of it. It’s a wonderful place to be right now; the world is changing and it’s just wonderful to see all the stuff that’s happening.

Dr. Kent: Now you do a whole bunch of things. You write of course and you also host a radio show and things like that. Tell me a little bit about what your goal is from all of this.

Lillian Brummet: Honestly it started with a vehicle accident. I was involved in a three car pile up – I was in the middle, and it really changed my life. I went through a year of physical therapy, I went through chronic depression, I lost the career and failed the business that I had built up. Everything had changed in my life and I started to really question where I was going. Keeping up with the Joneses or keeping up with the rat race or the social wheel that we’re all running on. I was realizing that all this wasn’t really where I was meant to be because all of that effort and that work that I had put into it was taken away from me in a snap of a second and it took years and years of effort to get to that point.

So I looked at my life and thought all of my acquirements, all of the things that I had done was so worthless and I wanted to have a positive legacy. I was really shook up; it was a life changing moment. I was really fearful of my existence you know when you go through something like that it really makes you vulnerable when you feel your mortality and I wanted to make a difference. I never knew and from that moment it made me wake up. I never knew when my life was going to be taken away from me and I wanted to use the time that I was given to make a difference and that’s when I started writing. That’s the passion behind everything we do.

Trash Talk empowers people to make a difference as an individual starting right where they are in their homes, in their offices, where ever they’re standing, whatever they’re doing we give them an option to make a difference and we show them how to do that. Towards understanding we’re showing people how to move beyond abuse, neglect and problems with growing up with issues and that it can be overcome. We show that life’s journey, my life journey and sharing that information and inspiring others to grow beyond their pain and live a life of purpose. This last book we really wanted to release that because people were contacting us to get advice on how to market their work and we really felt that offering this book for a very frugal price; it’s available for less than $10.00.

It’s an e-book right now and we wanted to make sure that was available for people so they could promote their work because the world of writing is so important for everyone to support. For one person just sharing their thoughts and ideas can inspire someone to become a great leader later on and so the world of literacy is so important for us to support. So really that’s my passion behind everything that we do. Our blog, our newsletter, our two radio shows is really just to create positive change across the globe by inspiring other people. Showing them that it can be done and helping them to lead a more proactive positive life.

Dr. Kent: You also work with writers at times, right?

Lillian Brummet: Yes.

Dr. Kent: What kind of advice do you give writers who want to get to the place that you are with their writing?

Lillian Brummet: Really the key is to keep on pursuing and don’t let negativities or obstructions get in your way, which is a very common thing to have happen in a writers world. There are so many obstacles that we have from family to paperwork to reaching beyond our own personal limitations and areas we’re not comfortable exploring such as public appearances and these kinds of things. Those kinds of things actually deter writers from continuing to pursue this craft and I encourage people to see beyond that and you’ve got to see beyond that passion.

If you don’t have that passion it’s very difficult to see beyond those difficulties you may be encountering. I really believe with the new technology thing, everybody is working on computers now and most writers work on computers. There’s all kinds of wonderful tools of course for researching the work that their doing for publishers so I think its great; this technology. I think it’s a wonderful tool for writers and has really accelerated the world for us. The way that we can contact people on an international scale now with the internet and really that’s where our readers are. People aren’t going to book signings as much, they’re not going into bookstores and they’re not going into libraries as much.

It’s well known, studies have shown that numbers are dwindling and bookstores and libraries are suffering because of that. This is a really important thing for us to of course support as well. But as writers we know that our audience is going onto the internet and so that’s where we need to build the recognition. We need to have a name recognition and a positive presence on the internet so that people can find us and we appear as experts in our subject. That’s so important for us to do.

Dr. Kent: So what are you working on next?

Lillian Brummet: Right now we’re working on our second edition of the book. Its been very successful and its been on several recommended lists for writers, courses and writers’ experts, coaches, they’ve put it on their recommended lists so we’ve been told by our publisher that its going to be coming out again in I believe October or November of this year. We don’t have an exact date yet and it’s coming out as a hardcover book and it’s just a wonderful thing.

So we’re working on that and of course it’s a new edition so we’re offering more new advice and things that we’ve learned in the last year since that book had been published. We’re offering more than 140 more resources because the book actually offers 500 resources originally; the e-book offers 500 resources that people can click on with their mouse and get instant promotional opportunities for the work that they’ve written. So we’ve added an additional 140 and I believe there’s going to be possibly 200 resources added to that as well. It’s really increased in size and what we can offer with it and that’s what we’re working on right now.

Of course the two radio shows, managing those and keeping the guests and organizing all of that. You know how that is; you’re dealing with guests well in advance and making sure that they’re going to be coming in on time and all the details are all worked out. So that eats up a lot of our time; marketing our three books of course and we also have another book that we’re working on. It’s sort of a family project really. It started with my mom who is a market gardener or was a market gardener; of course she’s retired now. We took all of the information that she had of over 30 years of hands on gardening and we worked with that knowledge and our own expertise in regards to that.

We’re members of the Canadian diversity organization and as such we work with Canadians and feed banks and various international feed banks with the organization and we work to preserve the genetic identity of the crops that are available to our future generation. So with all of that experience and knowledge we’re putting that into this book and we hope to have that available in the next couple of years. We’re just working on the manuscript now for that book.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been a real honor speaking with you. We can find Trash Talk, An Inspirational Guide to Saving Time and Money Through Better Waste and Resource Management on the web and it’s been a real honor speaking with Lillian Brummet.

Lillian Brummet: Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Kent: No problem. Now my next guest is James Stein. His book is called How Math Explains the World: A Guide to the Power of Numbers. From car repair to modern physics and you’re going to want to come back for that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Science, Health, History, TRANSCRIPTS, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

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