D. Sean and the Dinosaurs
One thing that has become painfully obvious: jobs and money come through kinship and reputation. Knowing someone is often more important that knowing anything. When people marvel at how small the world is, I marvel at how many different, non-overlapping small worlds this world is. We don't call it 'class' in America, because most people honestly believe that it is a meritocracy, even if that meritocracy ultimately points back to your SAT scores in high school (or to which high school you were zoned for) and your scholarship to Harvard (or your scholarship to Waynes College of Cosmetology). Most are frustrated by, but resigned to this fact, those who aren't rage against affirmative action or decry the ailing public school system. Does it self-select? Not without help from others. No one is exempt from this structure it seems, certainly not without disingenuousness: My access, therefore, could not have come without two things: in the case of Partners, my affiliation with MIT, and in the case of Amicas, my acquaintance with Sean Doyle.
Sean deserves a thesis all his own. I've been to Sean's apartment twice. The first time was for a movie. Sean's apartment contains a giant plastic brachiosaur head attached to one wall of the living room. It juts out into the center of the room, perhaps looking for leaves on a chandelier (there is some argument about the exact composition of its diet). It absolutely dominates the room. I was there to watch films by Jan Svankmeyer and eat Tibetan momos. However fascinating the films, I could not stop looking at the brachiosaur. In the kitchen, there is a plastic inflatable pterandon, or perhaps another species altogether, it is dark. The films, which Sean has rented for me and another guest, Johanna, are the Czech filmaker/animator's short films, and his feature length Faust. We watch them on Sean's circa 1985 Amiga monitor. Sean has no television, preferring this small relic of Atari's success as primary veiwing station. It works very well.
We watch Faust, which mixes several of the versions with puppets, animation, live-action cinema, and filmed theatre in a circular narrative. We liesurely discuss absolute knowledge (the ostensible subject of the film) over ice-cream. Sean fast-forwards through the shorts to one in particular that fascinates us: The Ossuary. It is a film of a Czech ossuary, jump-cut in a manner that makes it look animated (a svankmeyerian signature), set to syncopated jazz and a female voice reading a Jacques Prevert poem about drawing a cage to attract beautiful birds. The ossuary is indeed cage-like; an elaborately constructed church-like crypt filled with elaborate chandeliers, banisters, thrones, settees, all made from human bones: victims of a 14th century plague. Beautiful enough to lure the dead back to life.
I had heard of the director, but not this particular piece, which Sean had tracked down over the internet (either this, or another had been ordered directly from Czechoslovakia). This kind of discrimination permeates every aspect of Sean's life. His dilletantism, as he modestly refers to it, is deeper than most people's expertise, in science and in the arts. Before the momos are all gone, he demonstrates this again, by bringing out a book he has been reading: The Developmental Biology of Butterfly Wing Patterns. The book details the experimental research of butterfly wing patterns, an ideal semiotic register of the developmental parameters and sequences of the cell. Sean explains: "That's another project that I would start in my copious free time: a visual database of butterfly-wing patterns for use in doing developmental biology." It is a precious example of Sean's focus on the processing of visual information. The tools he uses, wavelet encoding in particular, constantly find such examples in the wide world of science around him. Later, in an interview, I asked him to elaborate on something he often mentions: that he would rather be creating software for scientific research projects involving dinosaurs' fossils and other organisms.
S: In the latest scientific American, which I was just showing Adrian, there are these tomographic projections of mosquito knees.
C: Mosquito knees?
S: That shows the sort of resolution that you can get from these different techniques. But then one of the things that you can do, like once you can get tomographic projections of these things or you can build models of it (you know, wavelets are one of the techniques) you could use all these techniques for building models of, basically polygon approximations of the fossils or the organisms. Obviously this will work very very well with insects since there aren't that many insects systematists— that is, people that study systematics— in the world, it's sort of a dying specialty. But you know if you could digitize enough of these creatures and build the representation in a way that you could search by shape, and find analogous structures, in other organisms, that might be a way to help draw relationships between different creatures. You could look at— say if you sequence the DNA for different creatures you might find convergent structure in a wing or a leg or something like that, long after these two lineages divided, and that might give you some information about what sort of things were likely to arise, and how the mechanism of DNA expressing itself can be constrained and not constrained, because you can build these better models of the shapes of things. If you digitize a whole range of species with this technique, you wouldn't even need to kill them or take them apart it's just fairly low doses of x-rays. You can look at them over time and establish growth patterns and if you could specify what those growth mechanisms were mathematically you might be able to look for differences between species. Or if you found a specimen, you could say, "well its not like any of the ones I had before, but it fits in between here and here so it's the same species or something. With insects its fairly hard, because they change and they molt, they can change fairly rapidly in body plan, but I think it's one of the interesting things in science, you got all these techniques, its true in medicine is well, you got all these techniques that can get you more and more data, but the traditional form presenting them is such that people haven't adjusted.
C: so, in a way, it seems like it's not just a change in scope and scale, but a qualitative change in the way the data is represented, so that you can actually do different kinds of experiments.
S: Sure, imagine that, for the home market, you could, if you had these polygon representations of dinosaurs, there's no reason you couldn't print them out in three dimensions, and have life size dinosaur kits for cheap. [Laughter] you know, out-replicate Barney on the planet, that would be a very important thing to do. But also for scientific study, just being able to compare— I mean right now if you want to measure something on a bone, you have to call up the person who has that specimen, and asked them to measure it. If you had these representations you could play around with it, and you can probably find patterns that right now you couldn't. But it's not enough just to accumulate the numbers, you need a way that people can digitize lots of stuff quickly, and safely, and the mechanism for sharing it, visualizing the data. And because I'm curious about lots of different things, making it accessible is important— because what do I know about this stuff other than what I can read in the gutter or in Science or Nature. You know, I'm a dillettante. And so the idea that instead of having to read these long descriptions, you can just say that there's this— you know, say off the sqasimosal bone, there's this sort of process that's unusual, I can say, well, so I know that's on the head [points]... it's on the skull... but what does that look like in other creatures? And since I don't have a command of the literature, and I haven't seen a lot of these specimens, its hard for me to make the instant association: 'Oh its like this in Triceratops, but not in Proceratops.' You know, to be able to navigate back and forth like that, would be very fun for a dillettante like me. It might be of scientific use as well.
Last Modified 11-Sep-99 9:24 PM ckelty@mit.edu
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