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My name's Tom Zinnen. I help organize Wednesday Nite
at the Lab here at the
UW-Madison. I also work for UW-Extension.
And Wednesday Nite at the Lab is
Alumni Association and organized by the Wisconsin
Institute. UW-Madison Lifelong Learning
be able to introduce you to two Topeople who you may not have to
heard about before, but you've
That's Larry Meiller probably heard before.
and Steve Paulson from Wisconsin Public Radio.
I came to Wisconsin as a
the fall of 1975. And one of the things that was
really remarkable to me was Wisconsin Public Radio.
I came from Illinois, and we
( laughter ) don't have radio in Illinois.
a statewide Public Broadcasting But what System.t have is
We don't have anything like, or when I grew up there, we didn't
have anything like Illinois Public Broadcasting the way that
you have here, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public
Television. So for a long time now, I've had
the pleasure and opportunity to be able to enjoy Wisconsin
Public Radio. Larry Meiller, in particular,
is somebody I've listened to. I've been on his show before.
Here's his bio. After hosting a Public Radio
program for 34 years, Larry admits that the best part of his
day is the 11am to 12:30pm shift
Larry and his producer, Jim Packard, tend to focus on.
environmental issues, consumer
topics. Larry also teaches at the
University of Wisconsin Madison.
He advises about 100
graduate students in the undergraduates and several
Communication. Department of Life Sciences
Undergraduate Academic Affairs He's Assistant Dean for
and Life Sciences. in the College of Agricultural
and department committees. And he serves on several college
Steve. Now I'm going to introduce
and an interviewer with "To the Best of Our Knowledge," which is
abbreviated TTBOOK, a radio program at Wisconsin Public
Radio and syndicated nationally by Public Radio International
and XM Radio. "To the Best of Our Knowledge"
has won the George Foster Peabody Award in 2005.
Paulson has also received awards
News Association and the from the Northwest Broadcast
In 2006, he was a Templeton Cambridge Journalism Fellow in
Science and Religion. What we're planning to do
tonight is to have Larry give his presentation.
That'll run three or four hours.
Then Steve will give ( laughter )
Then we'll have combined Q&A. And as always, we're delighted
to have questions as they come
Just go ahead and ask the presenter as you would like.
Please join me in welcoming Larry Meiller to the lectern for
Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
It's really a pleasure for me to be here tonight to talk
a little about Wisconsin Public Radio, to bring science
information to the audience,
as well. and other kinds of information
my daily show, which is on from H11 to 12:30 every day, Mondayd
through Friday? Quite a few people.
How about my show that I do with Patricia McConnell,
"Calling All Pets." A pretty good number, too.
And how about Steve Paulson's "To the Best of Our Knowledge"?
Whoa! You're the popular guy tonight,
Steve.
are two very different kinds of Steve's prprograms. my program
Steve's is, I think he would
And I'm not going to say any agree, very highly produced.
I'll let him talk about that. But for those of you who listen
to my show, or who have listened
show. We take great care in selecting
our guests and our topics, but
produced. These are call-in talk shows.
People call in about a topic. They ask all kinds of questions.
The questions don't come in in any logical order.
They sometimes are off-track. They aren't worded in the best
way possible sometimes. So there are some interesting
challenges that you face when you're in a position like mine,
and do a call-in talk show, to
through the radio, particularly getwhen it comes to science.ople
And actually, it's kind of a
information across through challenge to get any kind of
If you think back to the, and most of you aren't old enough to
think back this far, but in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s,
radio was what you would call a family medium.
Families would literally sit
the dramas, and the adventure ashows, and the soap operas.to
That all changed in the '50s, when television came on.
That became the family medium.
did in kind of order to survive. And radio had to change what it
family medium to being an individual medium, more music
and a lot of other changes. Who sits around the radio these
days, staring at it and sucking up information?
Nobody! Nobody does that anymore.
And in fact, you might think of a radio as kind of like your
refrigerator. I like to think about radio like
a refrigerator. It's there, but you don't pay
much attention to it until
the refrigerator, or until you're hungry, in the case of
piques your interest in the case something, you know, sort of
What are we doing when we're of radio.
We're always doing something listening to radio?
We never just sit and listen to radio.
We're always doing something
Usually, when we're listening to else.
Or we're using it to get up in the radio, we're driving a car.
know, what the weather's like or the morning, to find out, you
the course of the evening. what happened in the news over
drive to work, usually we will, We or when we come home. we
Sometimes we'll be able to have it on while we're at work.
So the challenge for somebody like me is that the audience are
never paying full attention to
radio, because they're always what otherwise engaged. the
It's also interesting that
information out to people rbecause of the way we areng
trained to learn. There have been a lot of studies
done on how much people learn through their various senses
that they have. And I want to give you a little
test right now on that, on how
various senses. And if you think about 100% of
all we learn, what percent would
through touch? be learned, do you think,
Two percent, three percent? It's about 1-1/2 percent.
How about taste?
It's one percent. ( light laughter ) off.
How about smell?
It's about 1-1/2 percent. That's about four percent, which
leaves 96% for the rest.
Of all you learn, what And let's take sight.
learn through sight? percentage do you think you
You know what? I heard 60%, 50%.
85% of what we learn, we learn It's about 85%.
Only 11% we learn through our througears. eyes.
And that is radio.
So we have to do things creatively in radio to get
people's attention, and to get
so that they actually get it. thaNow, thinking about Publicem
Radio, and just thinking back a little bit, Public Radio was
known for years as a place to go
interviews. tWe also carry entire coursesm
taught by university professors.
taped them while they were doing We went into the classroom and
those tapes back. And we often, repeated those.d
And there were a couple professors who had been dead for
many years, but were still being
Well, we don't do that anymore. heBut it was a popular format.o.
And I think we had kind of a
high brow at the time. reputation of being a little bit
manager. Jack Mitchell was our station
the 1970s, and he asked me if HI'd be interested in doing a
call-in talk show on Wisconsin
Well, never done a call-in talk show on Wisconsin Public Radio.
I kind of liked the idea. There were some staff people at
the time who weren't too much in
They questioned whether or not favor of it.
anything from a call-in talk people could actually learn
But we went ahead and did it show.
I had the first call-in talk anyway.
still doing it after all these show on Public Radio, and I'm
It wasn't too long after we started these shows that
Margaret Andreas, who was also
see shaking your heads yes, you on threcognize her name. you I
She's a great person, a very
And she thought up a research project to test whether the
call-in talk show would be an effective way to learn, maybe
even better than the long-form
And here's what she did. interview.
she did with a doctor about a She recohealth issue.view that
It was very well done.
questions. The questions were great
order. They were in a very logical
answers. And the doctor gave some great
She made a copy of that report. SThen she wrote down the.
questions.
the questions exactly as she had She listened back and wrote down
She put them on individual slips asked them.
Then she put those individual slips of paper into a hat.
She had somebody else draw those
And so they came out in not a quelogical order at all.ime.
So question one turned out to be
Question five was number one, and so forth and so on.
Then she had some confederates, friends from the office mostly,
call in to a recording. She recorded them asking the
questions that she had written
down. dowAnd she recorded those.hem
She used a mixture of men and women, young and old.
She had some students call in and ask those questions, too.
And then she took their questions, and the new order of
questions, and put them on a
Then she put the appropriate tape.
order. answers from the doctor in that
One with her logical, one, two, three, four, five, and so forth,
set of questions. The other a call-in talk show
kind of format, where the questions were sort of jumbled
up, to be perfectly honest. And then we've got some groups
of students involved. At the university, we tend to
use a lot of students for research purposes.
And we told the students that they would be participating in
an experiment.
room on campus. And we asked them, once they got
there, and there were many
But we asked them to fill out a groups that form.in over time.
And later on, after they filled out this questionnaire, we'd be
giving them an experiment.
the form, I came wandering into So while tthe room.filling out
And I turned on the radio,
radio. except it clearly wasn't a
And it played one or the other It was a tape recorder.
So we didn't say anything about them listening to the radio.
In fact, we wanted them doing something else.
That's why we had them filling
And after the recording was played, a little bit after, we
gave them a test. We gave them a test on the
information that was in the interview.
And there were several groups that heard the one version, and
there were several groups that
Then we compared those results heard the other version.
standard interview against those between those who heard the
information in a talk show who had heard the same
It turns out, based on our format.
heard the call-in format testing, that the people who
significantly more questions. They had more knowledge about
the topic from the radio than those who had heard the
long-form interview.
entertaining. There were some questions asked
about how entertaining they thought it was.
That was a significant
Why would you think that would difference, as well.
Why would they learn more from a be the case?
to a more logical approach? disjointed iMm-hmm?w as opposed
( inaudible ) They would have to listen
more intently.
greater variety of voices. >> I think because of the
voices. >> I'll tell you what. of
There's something called the
Anybody know about the cocktail cockparty effect?fect.
I'll tell you what it is. Have you ever been at a party,
or at some event, and it's
And you're sitting there talking noisy.
concentrate on what they're to someone asaying.re trying to
You're really concentrating.
back here. And somebody mentions your name
effect. We constantly monitor our
surroundings, even though we're not consciously aware of it most
of the time.
different comes into our And when something new or
Then we either listen a little hearing, we check it out.
what we were doing before. bit more or we just go on to
work that way because of the The call-in format seems to
Sometimes, you know, somebody asks a question, we hadn't been
paying attention. But it's a new voice, so you
listen to it. And if you don't, all right,
that wasn't so great, so you go back to what you were doing.
And oh, there's another voice,
Oh that one, I'll listen to that asking another question.
So I think this definitely helps one.
Now, my shows are a lot of fun our learning.
variety of guests and topics to to do, becaucover.ave a broad
With my daily show, I'm on the
And many of those days, I have air 250 times a year, roughly.
90 minutes of the show, about topictwo 45-minute topics.er the
So over the course of the year, I might do roughly 350 or 400
topics on my show.
show, we do about 40 shows Then, the "Calling All Pets"
And we interview someone in one segment of our show every week,
too.
topics to cover. So there's another 40 or so
I get to know a little bit about It's really a lot of fun.
It's a nice break in the day a lot of topics that we cover.
Tom mentioned, you know, I'm for me.
And I have about 100 actually teaching.
got a bunch of grad students. uI'm over in the Department ofve
Life Sciences Communication most
And at about 10:00, I go to Wisconsin Public Radio, and you
know, sit down and kind of
And so, most of the time, I'm not at Wisconsin Public Radio.
I'm either with students, or I'm
never-ending committees that we teachave at the UW. the
So it's a nice break in the day for me to host that show.
As for topics, we cover topics
Wednesdays, today for example, all over the map.
environment and the usually out-of-doors.d to the
Scott Craven, UW-Extension
guest. wildlife ecologist is a great
world of Wisconsin wildlife. He talks about the wonderful
I do a show once a month on biofuels and research in that
area, on Wednesdays.
garden talk days. I think that's the highest
listenership day for me is
We talk about organic gardening, Friday.
And I feature a variety of trees, lawns, you name it.
I've had John Grisham on a authors during the month.
Everything from a person like John Grisham to state and
regional authors who have some
I do shows related to food, about health, exercise.
Phil Pellitteri was on today, an
We talked about bugs, actually entomologist.
The weather guys, Steve Ackerman today for 90 minutes.
Monday of the month to talk andabout weather and climate.ast
Jim Lattis of the UW Space Place
The only show I do regularly is on roughly once a month.
is a show I do with Bassam with science in the title
of chemistry. ShAnd that particular show, wer
call the World of Science.
specific topic of science, you So with only one show with the
of shows that are really science might not think that we do a lot
But as a matter of fact, if you think about it, even though my
programs are often advice oriented, how to grow better
flowers, or how to fix your house, or how to identify a
particular bird.
have science information in A large propthem.n of my shows
I was thinking about Sue Nitske,
I had her on my show. We were talking about food,
breakfast food. And she got into breakfast
labels. I learned about one of the
principal ingredients of my favorite breakfast food that I
have about four times a week. I think it's second on the list
or maybe third on the ingredient
there, is evaporated cane juice, list, so it's pretty high up
about. which I hadn't thought much
sugar. But you know, it's unrefined
who for a long time cooked for And Dave Knutson, who's a chef,
I had him on the show. the King of Norway.
one day about the chemical He had to explain to somebody
bread dough rise. Somebody wanted to know that.
And Bob Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, I had him on one
day.
discussion about the Jason And we got into a great
This is the year of the frog. I had an author on that not too
long ago, to talk about why amphibians are disappearing.
Phil Pellitteri gets into some
Some of the discussions get great dispretty heated. insects.
Bassam Shakhashiri was on once
intelligent design. Quite a large discussion about
that. I talked with a guest about
windmills as energy generators
And I got a big surprise on that once.
I assumed everybody would be in favor of windmills.
They are, you know, they use
It's clean. The wind isn't going to go away.
Well, I was really quite
people who called in, who were surprised at the number of
They were citing health reconcerns, noise issues,s.
unsightliness.
fairly uncontentious program And what I thought would be a
I guess you might say. turned into a real Donnybrook,
The guest was an My grandfather used to say that.
And he was upset. You know, he was mad about it.
And he said, well, you know,
They have no source of power people are complaining.
And unlike those of us who live in a place like Madison, where
there are coal-fired power
know, right next door. plants and smoke stacks, you
their energy, get their energy Those who were complaining about
And they would like to keep it shipped from a long ways away.
I thought that was a little bit uncharitable comment on his
part. But you know, there's probably a
little truth to that. And I had to think about my
role in the process, when you've
be it windmills or any kind of got that kind of show going on,
I feel like I have to take a topic.
I have to be respectful to my neutral roleguest.at process.
I have to be respectful to my audience.
And you know, once in a while, I
of the questions. sSometimes, I have to re-phrase
it a bit so our guest and maybe the rest of the audience can
understand what the question
And in commercial radio, if you've ever listened to
commercial radio call-in talk shows, the goal is often to goad
listeners.
And you know, I think my job is to help educate people, to help.
them learn, to have fun while we're doing it, and to keep the
program on topic as much as possible.
That's kind of how I see my goal, or my role at Wisconsin
Public Radio. Sometimes, it can be a problem
keeping the show on topic.
times when we went off in a Idirection that I never reallyf
intended. This last week as an example, we
had Bassam Shakhashiri on the program.
Now that day, Jim Packard told
He filled me in. me about it afterwards.
equinox. It was the day before the vernal
superstitious belief that you can stand a raw egg on end onlye
during the equinox. And this apparently comes from
the notion that due to the sun's
of the earth on the first day of equidistance between the poles
gravitational forces that apply. spring, there are some special
inclined, the first objection that comes to mind is the fact
that there's also an equinox on the first day of autumn.
And why isn't there any balancing of eggs in September?
Secondly, while it is true that on both equinoxes, the earth's
axis is perpendicular to the
are exactly the same length, sun, so you know, night and day
believe that the alignment there's no scientific reason to
the gravitation. causes any appreciable effect on
the equinox can cause this for And I guess, also, you know, if
pencil, or something else. eggs, why not for a broom or a
that response. Anyway, Bassam more or less gave
( laughter ) Immediately the phone lines.
You know, they all lit up. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
45 minutes, we had seven And over the course of the next
think they were really questions, or comments, I don't
They were comments from people questions.
One fellow said he had done it who insisted that it was true.
you know, at the point of the for 23 svernal equinox.exactly,
Another guy called in and said, no, for me, it has to be exactly
12 hours after. ( light laughter )
Somebody else called in and they had a whole string
of pictures showing the egg standing on end.
Well, it is true that you can balance an egg on end during the
vernal equinox. But it is also true that if
nimble enough, you can do it any
( laughter ) day of the week.
this, you might say what does this radio program have to dot
with science, or anybody's
Here we are talking about knbalancing an egg.e.
You know what?
It's fun. And it gets people thinking
about the equinox and science.
it in a different way. And it gets them thinking about
And I'll tell you what, Bassam, It pihe's a great guy.erest.
He has a wonderful Web site,
This is an aside. It's scifun.org
I highly recommend it to you. Go to it.
He says that after he does one
posts some things from my show. The number of hits on his Web
site just shoots up.
And he has some great information, again, on there.
He's got experiments you can do with your kids or grandkids, or
just do yourself. I've found a few of them just
fun to do, just myself. He's got some recommended books,
and his Christmas lecture, and a
You know, that's one of the cool things we do, to teach
people about science or anything
We can't always give a lot of detail on radio.
You know, I can't tell you how
that you're probably going to remember exactly how to do it
when I'm done or the next day.
And I can make you more aware of But I can pique your interest.
like that, that can entice you something going on in science
And I can even tell you where to to learn more about that later.
We're not great on the minute details on radio..
Two fellows who are really
radio are Steve Ackerman and great in talking science on
I call them the weather guys. They're on the last Monday of
the month on my show. And to do a good job, you have
to be able to talk about a
global warming, and do it in complex topic, like climate or
listen and learn from it, such a way obviously.e actually
And John and Steve are great
And they are funny. They know their stuff.
And they're able to communicate in a very friendly, off-hand
way, that helps us retain information.
The information comes out very
Sometimes you don't even realize smoothly.
from it, which is great. that you're learning something
concepts in ways that make sense They can explain technical
great in math or other ways. to those of us who aren't so
article about them in relation A Wisconsin newspaper wrote an
They talked about one of the to my radio show.
They called in and said, when John and Steve were on, the
caller asked if they had ever seen an "M" shaped rainbow.
You know, it's like this
This was like this. And the caller said she just saw
one.
questions. They peppered her with
answer. So after the show, Steve looked
through a bunch of optics books.
it, exactly, but there was one And he never found an answer for
it always happened over lakes. book that said when it happened,
probably some sort of solar And so,reflection. it was
So the next time he came on the show, he said yeah, you can have
an "M" shaped rainbow.
there was another caller who And then several months later,
who hadn't heard the earlier called in about the same thing,
And he said he saw this "M" shaped rainbow.
And of course now Steve knows.
lake? SThe guy said, how did you knowa
that? ( laughter )
Oh, man.
with smart, funny people every It's great to be able to work
My job, sometimes gets a little difficult because it requires me
to obviously be prepared. If an author, you know, is on
with his or her latest book,
Topics I don't know anything I read the book beforehand.
research on that. about, foAnd it helps.l do some
One time, I had a guest on to talk about how to deal with
stress. And she was great before the
show. I got on the show with her,
asked her the first question. Her mouth opened up.
She stressed out. Nothing came out.
( laughter )
"Before you answer that question, why don't I?"
So I answered my own question.
question and, so mouth came open And then I asked her another
So I answered that one. Then we even got a call and
somebody asked a question.
answer that question, let me And I said, you know, before you
She would always get out, "yes" give a shot to me.t question.
After that, something clicked,
the rest of the show. That was about three days later,
I started getting mail. I got quite a bit of mail.
And the gist of every one of the
talking all the time, why don't you let your guest do the
talking.
So that's my job. (It's a lot of fun.
It's interesting. And you learn a lot, I do, from
my guests and callers.
the call-in talk show, Callers are really a big part of
They're part of the program. obviously.
for the caller, we're really When you're answering a question
much or more, than for the doing it for everybody else, as
It's a very effective way to caller.
Dave Giroux, is an information learn.
the UW System. director for the president of
department, Life Sciences Dave did Communication.rk in my
And he was quite interested in
He did a study of callers to my what people show.from my show.
We got the numbers of people who
He called them back and he asked called us.
And they were pretty them about the show.
was great. complimentary about it, which
could give him a specific. But he also asked them if they
He asked for a specific piece of It was sort of near the end.
Larry Meiller's show. And everyone of them, could give
a piece of information, often in pretty great detail, of what
they had learned through the
He was pretty surprised. show.
potentially difficult topics But it shows that even with
people through call-in radio. likYou know what though?ach
There are other ways to teach people about science on the
radio.
different format from mine, but his is at least as effective.h
You heard the awards that he's
I want to turn to Steve now to tell us about "To the Best
of Our Knowledge."
( applause )?
It's fun watching radio people struggle.
( laughter )
the microphone is right there. >> Yeah, in the studio,
front of you. >> That's why I have engineers.
( laughter )
Yeah. ( no audio )ot it?
Can you hear me?
that I hope will somehow turn on And there's a magic box here
some excerpts from my radio here, becauseshow.going to play
And this has to click on for
And there we go. this to happen.
great pleasure for me to be Well, I havhere.say, it's a
It's great to follow Larry. As he was saying, our shows are
really quite different. The big difference, of course,
is that his is a live show. It's a call-in show.
He talks with listeners.
I should say that actually, I came out of that tradition.
My first five or six years at Wisconsin Public Radio were in
producing call-in shows.
probably don't remember this, but I believe you were on the
hiring committee that originally
One of the people. hired me.
There are obviously some So I have a debt here.
program, "To the Best of Our disadvantages, because my
As Larry was just saying, there are certain things that you get.
from that.
from people. You get that immediate response
helping them right away. You get the sense that you are
What we do on "To the Best of AnOur Knowledge," is we do.
pre-recorded interviews.
We edit them later. Usually the interviews are maybe
about a half an hour in length. We cut them down to anywhere
from say, seven to 12 minutes,
We put together four or five or so.
They are always on a related interviews in an hour.
And the advantage of that is topic.
over what we do. that we have a lot of control
goes on the air. We have total control over what
extra things. We can add, oh, it could be a
poem. It could be a bit of music that
comments on what we've just heard.
It could be a movie clip. And it's hopefully bringing a
little extra sparkle to what you
And the philosophy of the show hear.
different interviews that are iskind of related in some way.r
Let me give you an example of this, a science example.
We did a recent show about
And we told the story of a physics.
a time travel machine. physicist who's trying to build
could do such a thing. And physics, theoretically, you
poet who writes about physics. We put that interview next to a
science fiction movies and TV Tshows use and abuse the actual
world of physics. And finally, we talked about
real space travel.
about a mission, and how We talked about a guy who talked
So we went from the theoretical, dangerous that is.
culture, to real space travel, to the poetic, to the pop
To me, that's sort of the delight of putting together
"To the Best of Our Knowledge," it's this kind of mixing
of different kinds of things. And sort of the joy of producing
our program is when you feel
mix. like you're getting the right
is I'm going to play about What I'm going to do here
interviews that we've had on a half a dozen excerpts from
These will all be about one to "To the Best of Our Knowledge."
So you'll actually spend just a certain amount of time just
looking at me and listening while we do this.
I'm going to start out with a bit from an interview that I did
with the neurologist Oliver Sacks.
You may be familiar with him. He tends to write about very
strange things that happen in the brain, or brain
abnormalities usually.
"Musicophelia," which is about His latest book is called
of music. And what Sacks is, above all, is
a wonderful story teller. And here is the very first story
he told in the interview. Maybe.
Tony was a surgeon in his early '40s.
Very robust and athletic and
He had very little interest in extraverted.
And one day, this was in 1993, music.
It was an outside phone. he was on the phone.
A bolt of lightning flew out A storm approached.
the face. It gave him a cardiac arrest,
and along with this, an out of
He was resuscitated. body experience.
himself, except two or three And he seemed pretty much
called a sudden insatiable weeks later, he got what he
then to play piano music, then passion to hear piano music,
And in the course of about 48 hours, he really became
transformed.
That was his term. He became possessed by music.
the morning. He started getting up at 3:00 in
He got a piano teacher. He learned to transcribe.
He was at music when he came
He said his wife wasn't pleased. back from his surgery.
continued. And basically, this has
where music is profoundly >> You retherapeutic.er cases
For instance, you have worked with people with Parkinson's and
Alzheimer's diseases. And these people may not be able
to talk easily. They may not even be able to
move very well. But often, those problems seem
to disappear when they listen to
Yes, this is where things started for me as a physician
more than 40 years ago when I saw the patients I later
described in Awakenings.
transfixed with extremely severe These people are almost
sleepy sickness people. But music could liberate them in
the most remarkable way.
They could sing. They could dance.
They could think normally while Theythe music lasted.lly.
Music has a special use in
language, because even though athey may not be able to speak,t
they're usually able to sing. >> That's fascinating.
So you're suggesting then that
with language is a different the part of our brain that deals
for instance. par>> Oh, yeah, absolutely.g,
Well, you say something astonishing in your book, that
neuroscientists can actually
just by looking at the image of spot a prtheir brain.usician,
Oh, yeah, I was very
I wouldn't have believed it had I not seen this myself.
This is beautiful work, especially done by a man
comparing the brains of professional musicians and
non-musicians.
different areas, in the corpus And he found that in many
between the two hemispheres, in the auditory parts of the brain
and in the motor parts of the brain, and in the visio-spacial
parts of the brain, there was a real enlargement of gray matter
in musician's brains. So that although you can't look
at a brain and say that's the brain of a mathematician or a
visual artist, you can look at a
the brain of a musician. brain and say this is probably
A wonderful story, I think. So let's just talk for a moment
about what that interview is
It's not really an interview about.
although that's certainly part about how the brain works,
It is an interview about how of it.
brain is. It's also the story about, or
tells a story about how one person's life can totally change
because something happened to his brain.
It's about what makes music so
So when I think about this, and I think about how we do science,
I think this is certainly an
it's not strictly informational. interview about science, but
through the steps, sort of the It's not just sort of taking you
the brain. road steps, of what happens in
story. It tells this partly through
core principles that we have on "To the Best of Our Knowledge,"
which is somewhat different that
And that's that ideas are not whatthe same as information.ow.
And I start with the basic
are swimming in a sea of premise that we, as a culture,
With the Internet, we have more information that we can do, more
than we can process.
Best of Our Knowledge," is to sort out the stuff that really
matters from the things that may
strictly informational. Now, to some degree, you could
say science is an accumulation
But information itself often of information.
It sort of goes in one ear and does not make for great radio.
original, so unexpected that it outqualifies as what I callso
a "gee whiz" story, just sort of knocks you out
because it's so original. But most science stories are not
like that.
least the kinds of things that So in my experience of, at
work best are those science we interviews where ideas are to
really being talked about.
mean it's the kind of thing that And when I talk about ideas, I
think about it, maybe to debate it causes youit. mull over, to
It's, you know, you'll remember this interview that you heard on
the radio and it'll spark a conversation you'll have later
at the end of the week. When that happens, I feel like
we've succeeded.
in an hour long program, I feel Ilike we've done a pretty goode
job.
communicators are great story A lot of tellers. science
Oliver Sacks is one.
is another one. My colleague, Anne Strainchamps,
recently interviewed Krulwich about the science show that he
co-hosts. It's called "Radio Lab" and it
comes out of New York City. In this next bit of tape, he
talks about a show that he
The underlying question of this program was, what are zoos for,
and are the animals in the zoos really wild.
Imagine a wild tigress
She could eat you if she sitting in her cage.
and you're gone. were hungry, ( growls )
imagine a mother coming into the Think of that tigress and then
taking the baby out of the pram, zoo with a baby in a pram, and
her baby right in front of the and lifting it up and putting
there's just glass between the tigress, maybe 3/4 of an inch,
Saying, "Look, Darlene, babythe big kitty.ss.
Look at the big kitty." Now, the cool eyes of the
tigress are staring at what could, to the tigress, look like
food. And the mother's putting her
most precious thing, her own
wild animal. daughter, right in front of a
picture. So something's wrong with this
that this is a wild animal. Or maybe it isn't a wild animal
anymore.
I'm going to play one more What is it?
Anne did with Krulwich. eThis will include a bit of his
own radio show. And listen to how he puts
together this radio show to tell
Wouldn't it be fun for the his story.
something? cats to chase around a mouse or
Does anyone do that? And we looked around.
carcasses, dead, hairy carcasses In Europe, they give hairy
And you can watch the animals fight over the carcasses and rip
up the hair.
that's gross, except in southern In the United States, they think
a wild animal feeding for Ohio, special guests only.y have
We went to that.
since my wife told me about it. We made sure we got there early
to check it out.
out. >> The carcasses were already
microphone and sort of gives a The zookeeper comes out with her
Part of our enrichment little...
Description, carcass program...
All of the animal's behavioral needs, as well as
their psychological needs.
listening to the interpretive discussion of this, because as
she is doing this...
They let the tigers into the >> I think I heard a door.
( dramatic, and lively pen.
mu Watch, the big one's coming thedown!rs.
One of the tigers just
the carcass. streaks across the pen and grabs
playing with it. And like, starts immediately
years of zoo-going, I have never And I have never seen, in all my
Like, at one point, one of the seen a tiger move that fast.
by the ear. You could see, like, the little
cow face. And it was dragging it around.
What were people doing? Were they cheering?
Were they crying? >> There was nobody there that
seemed to be disturbed by it. >> Really?
Although, here was a
many times. convThe children would say,any,
"What is that?
And the parent would say, W"It's a baby cow."
And the kid would say,
That's how they eat, honey. >> Well, that's what he eats.
And the child would say,
I don't eat cow. "I don't eat cow."
And the parent would say, "What? Of course you eat cow."
When? >> At home.
You eat hamburger.
a hamburger is. >> That's made out of cows?
Sure is.
shocked look on the kid. >> And there would just be this
conversation like five times. And >> Why is it dead?that
Because it's food, honey. >> And then, from China, we
found out that when you go to the zoo, you can buy a goat, and
feed the live goat to the cats. And people do.
So we got on a bus in Beijing,
We bought a chicken and fed it went out to the zoo.
So that's an excerpt from the radio show, "Radio Lab."
And I have to say, I love that
there. sound piece that we heard from
together. There are three layers of sound
in it.
The sound actually being at the zoo, hearing the parents and the
kids talk to each other.
who's talking about that. It's sort of a simultaneous,
narration.
punch of, you know, the Sonarrations working together.e
It kind of reinforces, one
And then you have the music. reinforces the other.
does, it just makes it fun. And yoIt gooses it up. music
It adds drama to the story. You could totally do that piece
without the music.
It just adds interest to it. You don't need the music.
radio, is bringing together Thatdifferent sound sources. of
And again, it's all about storytelling.
Let me tell you one of the
this business who are thingeneralists, who are nots in
scientists, have to deal with.
complicated, arcane information. How do we deal with really
You know, frankly, when some of the scientists talk about things
that are very theoretical, I
they're saying is right, because just sort of hope that what
wherewithal to challenge them. I don't really have the
talking to certain kinds of But I hscientists. I love
Theoretical physicists. I think theoretical physics is
just fascinating. It's so mind blowing, a lot of
the ideas.
possibility of time travel, of Think about black holes and the
physics. parallel universes, and quantum
certain. The idea that reality is never
probability. We can only talk about
And it so happens that some of It's great stuff.
been especially fascinating the pioneerpeople.sicists have
And often, the best way to talk about science is by talking
about the people who study it,
science itself. Some of the science will come
out, but it's through the people's stories that is often a
way into the science. And a perfect example of that is
Albert Einstein.
Albert Einstein inevitably deals Of course, any interview about
And here's the question about with theEinstein.f genius.
Was he just smarter than
Or does genius have to do with everyone else?
It's a question that I asked thinking in a radically new way.
Isaacson. his lateHe said this., Walter
He questioned every premise.
He hated rote learning. One headmaster basically sends
him packing.
from a high school in Munich. EiAnother amuses us by sayingout
Einstein won't amount to much.
Polytechnic on a second try at He finally gets to the Zurich
But once again, he's able to getting admitted.
professors there. So by the time he graduates, he
can't even get a recommendation from a professor.
In one lab class, he had thrown away the instructions, tried an
experiment his own way and blew up the equipment.
They put him on academic
Do you have favorite stories probation.
nature, as he was coming of age? that illustrate his rebellious
thinking. >When he is sitting there as as
patent clerk, in 1905, because
else. he He can't get a job at ahing
university or a high school.
applications. And he questions every single
premise.
synchronize clocks, because it's At one point, they try to
of obsessive about getting in Switzerland, and they're kind
Switzerland. clocks synchronized in
time zone. They had just gone on Standard
to synchronize the clocks send a And all of the devices they used
The signal travels at the speed signal betof light.two clocks.
And he is sort of rebellious. He even questions the premise of
how do we know two things are simultaneous.
Einstein sort of rebels against those premises, and says we have
to define how the signal would
something's happened at the same get to us, to tell us
And that's when he comes up with the notion that if you're
moving, that signal would get to
you're standing, say, on the you in a different way than if
So, what's simultaneous is train platform.
motion. And from that, he comes up with
the theory of relativity. >> Was that a brand new idea?
Did he just pluck this out of nothing, or was he building on
certain intellectual ideas that had come before?
He had two great ideas that create 20th century physics.
Quantum theory and relativity theory.
Both pop into Einstein's head when he's a patent clerk in the
same three month period, in the spring of 1905.
And both of them are what you could call quantum leaps.
By quantum leap, it doesn't just
disconnected leap. mean a big leap, it means a
built incrementally on something It means a leap that isn't just
The notion that light is both a wave and a particle is just a
new, out-of-the-box way of
Secondly, relativity theory. thinking.
dealing with this subject. You had really smart professors
bodies and why the speed of They'rlight is constant.oving
But it takes this patent
time slows down for you, as you eapproach the speed of light.t
Even after he makes this leap,
they're all reading that paper, and they still don't quite get
it. So yes, this was something
totally imaginative and rebellious.
Let me back up for a moment and talk about how we put
together our program, "To the Best of Our Knowledge."
It's interdisciplinary by nature.
We try to bring together
same hour. different kinds of people in the
"To the Best of Our Knowledge" We joke that the perfect hour on
a scientist, a comedian, and would have a historian, a poet,
personal story. Of course, an actual show never
works that way. But you know, we can try.
And I think there are a couple
kind of eclectic mix of guests. oAnd I think it's especiallyis
important with science, because it can be so dense.
The subject matter can be hard
And I think sometimes, to get.
bit like fixing a meal. proYou have the appetizer.s a
You have the main course, the side dish and dessert.
Or to think about it more specifically in radio terms, you
surround your big think interviews with brain candy.
And so, we're kind of always
into our show. looking for brain candy to stick
show more fun, more listenable, As Lmore listener friendly.e the
And I can tell you, it's
you do radio this way. actually kind of nutritious when
approach is valuable for another I think the interdisciplinary
It breaks down what years ago was described as the two
cultures. The idea of there's science and
then there's humanities, and the
each other. They have different languages.
And I don't really think that's true, actually.
So that's kind of one of the
show. Let me give you an example of
this. Here's a poet who loves physics.
Hyperspace. >> A poem by Fleda Brown, Poet
Laureate of Delaware. >> Tree trunks seemed to keep
shrinking all winter. And by mid-March, the Elk
River's visible in blips from horizon to horizon when the
sun's going down. Some things I want I only get a
glimpse of. Coltrane at his gentlest.
You can still hear what's harnessed though.
He might be playing Soul Eyes,
His sax is opening its mouth but it's not just eyes.
I have a theory of a net laid across as a kind of protection.
It is like latitude and longitude.
Or more abstractly, the warp and
thinking that separates day from wolf of belief, the kind of
on. Suppose the universe began as ao
tear in the fabric of another universe.
On a two-dimensional plane, the tear would look like a
pushed-out curve, the shape of
What if there were ten Coltrane's saxophone.
the three of space, and the one diof time, and the rest arein
hidden. They might be quivering out
there like branches of invisible
branches. tThis is a very religiouse
feeling, beyond belief. Not everything is vertical or
horizontal. I keep thinking I should do
something instead of just stand here.
It is all so beautiful, for the few minutes I can see the flat
plane of blazing water through
on the brink. th>> Physics seems to pop upun
pretty often in a lot of your poems.
Why does this appeal to your
Honestly, I think there are few things closer related than
poetry and physics. You go back to John Keats, the
English poet, able to be in mysteries, and doubts, and
uncertainties, without any
reason. irriWell, okay, Heisenberg'st or
uncertainty principal.
You stay in one place and you discover that everything is.
shifting. No matter where your focus is,
it shifts the entire universe as you change your focus.
And so I've been reading a lot
think it's just the richest mind of science lately, because I
It's fascinating. forIt sounds like especiallyof.
quantum physics, because it's so
Yeah, it's so weird, of course, it's weird.
And it's weird, and the interesting thing is poetry is
kind of based on looking at the gaps between things, not the
things. I mean, if you want things, you
go to prose.
concrete object about what But poetry gives you the
unsaid things between the gaps. And that's exactly where all of
physics is going right now. >> I have to say, I have never
thought about this before.
physics and poetry. TI have one last bit of tape In
want to play. This comes from a time when I
was in Cambridge, England recently.
I had a journalism fellowship to
science and religion. And one of the people I metn
there was a delightful gentleman
retired physicist from Open namedUniversity in London.o's a
He also wrote a series of best-selling novels about
theoretical physics, about
and so on. relativity, quantum mechanics,
series is these books were for And what's remarkable about the
They're told from the perspective of a fictional girl
who travels in thought bubbles
Einstein. And I asked Russell Stannard to
read me a passage from one of the books.
She sat there thinking, just
the old days, Uncle discussing for a minute, it had been like
She and her uncle had this science with her.
Her uncle was able to think so wonderful secret.
thought bubble. It was like the ones you get in
comics, but this one wasn't in a
It would sit there, right above his head, wobbling about.
And that was only half the
When he thought mega-hard, secret.
into the bubble. he was even able to beam her
exciting adventures exploring the universe in a space craft,
all done through the power
The discoveries she made in that spacecraft had helped her
no end with her scientific
A real team, they'd been. But all that was over now.
The last time she went on one of
the spacecraft in a black hole. >> That's wonderful, thank you.
What made you want to write children's books about Albert
Einstein and physics? >> Well, I got to university to
study physics.
first time, I cam across And it was there that, for the
And it just blew my mind. EinI thought it was the mostity.
wonderful thing I'd ever come across.
Because it comes up with
faster the go, time slows down. So if you travel fast enough,
close to the speed of light, you
I tried telling, you know, my friends about what I'd now
discovered, and they just weren't interested.
They just said this is
It can't be true. It's against common sense.
But then I came across a saying by Einstein himself, who
described common sense as those layers of prejudice laid down in
the mind before the age of 18.
know. I thoOne really ought to be, you
introduced to these ideas when
when we're young. youAnd in fact, one should beow,
introduced to it in school. You shouldn't have to go to
university to find these things out.
So I thought, yes, one ought to try and get it across to
children, young children. >> I love that quote.
"Common sense is those layers of
before the age of 18." prejudice laid down in the mind
that's what we can do with our In some ways, I hope that
cut through those layers of prejudice to get us questioning
about some of our basic assumptions.
And maybe at times, we can see
And partly what we're doing, and the world in a new way.
that really inspires a lot of Iscientists, is we're motivatede
by that wonder in the world.
And that's what we hope to The wonder of the natural world.
In some ways, I see my role on convey on the radio, as well.
from what Russell Stannard does thewith his children's books.nt
I want people to get excited
And I found that you can talk about all kinds of big, very
complicated ideas, mind blowing ideas, if you do it in a way
that's radio friendly.
thing that both Larry and I have And that's sort of the kind of
Usually, it's by finding experts been talking about today.
specialty, who are good at who are passionate about their
And it's often through good costorytelling.t.
There's one other thing that I
alive. think makes a science story come
something at stake here, that That'ideas really matter.ere's
They feed our minds.
And they help us understand our place in the world and in the
cosmos. That's the reason why I like to
talk about science on the radio.
( applause ) Thank you.
I have one. ( inOkay, sure.
So I think there is some time for Q&A for the both of us.
We'll just sort of be together. >> Together!
Sure? ( inaudible )
Is there any difference in
a longer format show an hour-long show, or I guess,
Getting the point across in five and then a five-minute show.
there something specific that you'd say is different about the
useful tactics? >> So the question is, is there
a different way of doing science
it fun in a five-minute format effectively, especially making
Larry, do you want to take that versus an hoone?ong format.
Oh, thanks, Steve.
Well, you know, it's probably a lot harder to do it
in five minutes.
it in five minutes. But, you know, you would use the
same kind of principles that you
I mean, what you want to do is would use in a longer form.
attention, right away, to get yothem to stop and listen.'s
And then, you give the
fun and interesting. information in a manner that is
little human interest kinds of Even in five minutes, you can do
And then you come up with your things.
And it is harder, I think, to do conclusions.
know, sometimes we have to do ithings in two minutes, or evenu
one minute. Sometimes, I have to talk about
my show, and Steve probably does, too, in 17 seconds.
We have to say what we're going to do.
And we try to do is get people's
the information they need, attention right away, give them
in a way that we use picture hopefully in a friendly way, and
sensible. lThen we sort of drive it home.
The other thing that I would
the really short form, let's say add to that is I think that in
probably going to have to be a a five minute interview, it's
Yes. lot more structured.
arc of a narrative. >There's often a beginning, a
middle and an end.
telling a story, you're kind of Anadvancing an argument.ot
Then you want to wrap it up.
you have to do that quicker. And obviously, if it's shorter,
shirt, is there really such a >thing as a green flash on ther
horizon at sunset?
There is. >> Every time, on the earth, or
on the water, or what?
really a green flash that occurs >> The question is, is there
And typically, it's only seen, at sunset.
like the Caribbean standing on frankly, if you're in someplace
someplace, and looking at the the beach isun.rbados, or
And there is a little flash that
It's been documented. How it happens, I can't tell you
off the top of my head. >> I have to tell you, this is
funny that you asked that.
Florida about a month ago. I was just on vacation in
beach with some friends. And we happened to be out on the
And we were thinking, are we There was a really bright sun.
And so we all looked. And two of us, we were looking
at the same thing.
it. And I was looking, and I don't
know. It's, you know, a fraction of a
second. And I'm wondering if it's, you
know, there's something a little
( inaudible ) >> The Astronomical Society.
And I have actually seen the
You usually need to have a very flat horizon.
It doesn't have to be the sea,
opportunity. but that's usually the best
because the atmospheric And it iconditions. visible,
It's caused by the fact that the
like a prism. So the last bit of light as the
sun disappears is in the blue and green end of the spectrum.
That's what gives you the flash.
ask us to repeat all that, Tom. >> I ( laughter )not going to
That was really a good answer.
Steve, I was amazed to hear you mentioned "Radio Lab,"
because I was going to ask you
A friend of mine recommended it to me a little while ago.
I listened to it, only a few
And I'm wondering what you episodes actually, for content.
My reaction was this is extremely well produced, very
entertaining, but there's a lot of effort put into it to be
entertaining. I thought the sample that you
played maybe didn't capture that
other moments might. aspect of it as much as some
layers, like you mentioned. TVery casual conversation thatd
I think is excruciatingly carefully planned in advance,
I suspect.
about it. It's kind of entertaining, but
it's also kind of the MTV of
It's fast. radio.
And maybe that's what it takes It's a little bit disjointed.
I don't know. If that's true, something about
that is a little sad, but maybe that's the world we live in.
I'm wondering what you think
The question is, the radio about that.
Lab," that comes out of New York, which has very fast paced,
lots of editing, highly produced, is that an effective
way to talk about science.
And I also know that it's incredibly labor intensive to
put that together.
even scheduled regularly because It's a program that, it's not
So it's not a once a week it takes tooprogram.me to do it.
It's, they maybe do six hours a year, and that's it.
And they sort of put it on
the programs. hAnd it's highly acclaimed ine
Public Radio circles. I know what you're saying a
little bit about is it kind of
clever. goiI mean, that would be thetoo
criticism in a way. And this, in a way, points to a
larger, philosophical discussion
is, I mean, there's sort of the highly produced, versus more ofh
the old-school kind of talk radio.
I don't think there's a right answer there.
I mean, I think there's a place for both of those kinds of
things. >> Yeah, it is less expensive to
do the kind of show that I do for Public Radio.
I have a producer who's half-time, Jim Packard, who does
a great job.
hours a day. And you know, I'm there a couple
night, and all that sort of You know, I'thing.ing books at
But you guys at "To the Best of Our Knowledge," that's a great
program, but you have several people working.
Yeah, depending on how you
about five full-time staff count our staff, we have roughly
hours a week. And two hours a week is pushingo
it. We can't always do it.
It's very labor intensive.
tape, and then with tape, you're Anytime you go from live to
exponentially. editing, it adds up
to do before each program? >> How much homework do you have
how did he know the answer to When I lthat question?t like,
The question is, how much homework do we have to do for
our programs. And in my case, as I said in my
talk, if it's an author, I read the book.
If it's, some topics, you know, I have a pretty broad knowledge
of, you know, garden talk on
lot of preparation for that, Fridays, I don't have to do a
it. But for other shows, my producer
Jim Packard helps enormously. Every day when I come to the
station, I have a packet of materials that he's put
together, newspaper pieces, maybe a chapter out of a book,
or you know, magazine stories.
before I go on the air. AnPlus, I will have, you know,e
one of the things about a job like ours is that we are never
really off-duty.
read at least a couple of daily I and Stevnewspapers. does too,
I get two weekly magazines. I read at least a book a week,
more like two books a week. And so, you're constantly
keeping yourself informed about what's going on.
I'm sure that's the case. >> Yeah, I do a lot of reading
in advance, too.
found, about how much you should There's a fine line, I have
I absolutely believe that you should go into an interview
prepared. And I think winging it usually
is not the best idea. You can be too prepared, or you
can know too much.
And so, because you are the stand-in for the listener there.
Then the other thing that's tricky, and it's almost more of
a philosophical question, I find, about how you think about
radio, is okay, you've read the book.
You know what the person is going to say.
You're asking the question to elicit the story.
You already know what the story is.
So, do you feign ignorance
Or do you, are you kind of there?
It's a tricky one, because you up front about it.
story. want the person to tell the
But there also can be a certain Yoamount of artifice there.y.
And it's just an occupational hazard.
One of the problems, or one of the issues we have with
"Calling All Pets," the other program that I do with Patricia
McConnell, who has her PhD in zoology and animal behavior.
You know, we'll have a
about animal behavior, and I behaviorist who's written a book
well that she knows at least as much, and often times more than
the person we're interviewing.
in those. For me, it's never a problem,m
because I never know more than
But for her, it gets to be a my guest.
doesn't want to come off real conundrum, because she
the information. sounding like she doesn't know
So there is a fine line. >> Right.
Public Radio is "Car Talk." >And I thought it particularlyom
interesting that the National Science Foundation were some
of the original funders for "Car Talk."
I think they're mostly known
But the other thing that's for being funny.
more than most shows that I know, help develop the ways that
people can think and analyze a
It has to do with cars, but that problem.
diagnosing problems, how to ask questions, and then how you go
out and test those ideas. That's a huge idea.
And I'm wondering if you know other places besides your shows
and "Car Talk," where that's
through strongly. And it's clearly something that
they're trying to do. So it's basically, in your
thing, where you say 85% of what
If 11% is hearing, it's also the we learn is sight.
analyze a problem. whole how we use language to
emphasize that type of thing in Araddition to what you do withat
your call-in and your conversations that you guys have
on your desk right now. >> This one comes to sort of
Click and Clack.
just a second. I'll go back to my own show for
John Martin are as close to Click and Clack of anybody that
I have on my show, because you
approach that they take, and now, they're funny and the
So they're probably the two best back and forth.
I'm going to have to think from my own show.
from any other of our programs. >> Yes, I'm having a hard time
answering that. I mean, one of the things, I
don't know if everyone realizes about "Car Talk," and this is
also true with Larry's show,
live shows. "And so, they're actually taped
and edited. So, they can be changed.
And the producer of "Car Talk," I know does a fair amount of
mixing and matching, to sort of,
all of that kind of stuff. you know, doctor the pacing and
not just the way it happened. So>> Yeah, and in "Calling Allis
Pets," for example, the Saturday
record it, I was at the station shat 20 minutes to seven thiswe
morning.
essentially, from about 7:30 to about 10:00 recording that show.
And it's, we start and stop.
because there's 100 and some When people call the show,
When they call the show, they get a recorded message that
says that we're going to be on the air.
This is a recording.
for our next show, which is going to be recorded such and
such a date, go ahead and leave your number, name, and the
nature of your call.
100 and some, room for about 100 And our answering machine holds
And it fills up every week. And then the producer sits down
and listens to all 100 of them. And then she picks out the ones
that we're going to use.
tell us what they are. And she, Cynthia, she doesn't
of the calls, or anything. She doesn't tell us the nature
going to ask. But she'll pick the ten or so
that we might use.
women, east coast, west coast, And she'll pick some men, some
She'll kind of mix it around a north and south.
But we never really know. So when we're recording, it's
kind of real time for us. But if the caller says, I'll
say, hi, you're on "Calling All Pets," and the person says,
"Good morning." Then we have to say, oh, we
have to start over again. ( laughter )
Some of the shows, you know,
in the evening, or whatever. some places it's aired
starting and stopping that way. But otherwise, we don't know.
But it is edited after the fact and put together.
We do it pretty much in the order that it comes.
But she plans the order ahead of
So you know, there's somebody from the east coast, and then
there's somebody from the south.
Then there might be somebody, you know, usually the later call
is from Alaska, because we're recording at 9:00 in the
morning, and it's pretty early
It's easier to start on the east in Alaska.
later. coast, where they're an hour
Referring to the way that people learn, has anyone looked
at if the learning that occurs
mental imagery about what when peothey're hearing?n create
I know when I read a book, I
it. So when I hear things on radio,
I tend to just see it in
Has anyone looked at that component of learning?
Well, a lot of the things,
class. you know, I teach a broadcast
about is the use of picture And one oflanguage.gs we talk
And so you try to use picture language when you're on the air.
You know, I had somebody on the air talking.
Somebody asked a question about bats.
And you know, how do I get them out of my house.
And you know, well, the guy says, well, a bat can, you know,
a bat can fit through a hole 3/4
And I said, oh, about the size of an inch in diameter.
And he said, yeah, it's about the size of a dime, actually.
And so, 3/4 of an inch, versus
That image transfers. So we try to do that in our own
presentation. I don't know if that answers
your question.
for people. But we try tMm-hmm? the pictures
I listened to a radio show
an origami folding exercise. once where they told how to do
imagery. And they did that with the
sitting right down with someone Usualdoing it step-by-step.from
It was pretty amazing to hear it
do it. over the radio and being able to
Yeah, I can tell you right now >> To be able to actually do it.
that description beforehand. there was some thought put into
the top of a person's head. Those are the kinds of things
you really have to think about
But you don't ever want it to sound like you've thought about
it a lot beforehand, or it maybe
It has to come like normal even written it out.
And I will say that there are a few people in Public Radio who
are sort of famous for their
word pictures. ability to paint these kinds of
And Ira Flatow kind of made his reputation by, back when he was
a reporter, by doing that kind
Most science reporters don't, ofrankly.
It's hard to do that well.
Who's really good? >> It's really hard.
Ira Glass has "This American >> Ira Flatow.
wonderful Public Radio program, but it's not a science show.
I've learned a lot from Public Radio over the years.
And I definitely turn on to listen to the program, starting
from 6:00 in the morning on.
( laughter ) >> We love you.
AM NPR and FM NPR, that's it. >> Other questions?
Thanks, everybody.
( applause >> Thank you.
)