500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

Now that I am famous I need to share everything with you. I write this from deep within my soul. (“Hey, really dark in here. Can hardly see.”)

As Yogi Berra once said, navel gazing is not a maritime pastime anymore, it’s happening everywhere. Had we known Greta Garbo like we know today’s celebs, we would have learned she could be pretty crabby. But, in her day, she did mystery really well. Made her more interesting than anybody on Jersey Shore and most anybody whose face appears really big on a multiplex screen today.

“The world, you see, no longer has any tolerance for — let alone fascination with — people who aren’t willing to publicize themselves.”  – Ben Brantley, writing in the New York Times

Garbo had a personal brand – but it was all about not knowing her. How’s that possible? For those who have never heard of a great writer named Thomas Pynchon, here’s a photo that might be of him, but I’m not sure.

I read Pynchon because I heard he was good, not because of his headshot. Same with Joyce Carol Oats, Paul Theroux and Joan Didion. Confessional types; but not on TMZ much. Don’t know if they punched a hotel clerk or shagged a starlet. Didn’t matter.

Garbo wouldn’t exist today. So what? We have Mel Gibson instead. I don’t like, however, to dwell on what was, or on Mel Gibson. There’s a bright future ahead, but you’ll have to keep reading to find out what it is. Just don’t skip to the end because that would hurt my feelings. Famous people like me like to be listened to. I go to a famous persons’ support group for that. Sadly, everybody talks over everyone else.

“I don’t have a lot of patience for people who consider themselves gurus, and if you ever ask me about my personal brand, I will stop what I’m doing specifically to invent the technology that will let me stab you in the face over the internet.” – Alison Gianotto, @Snipeyhead

Hey, rough crowd in this 500 words. Just give me a minute to adjust my athletic cup and keep writing.

Snipeyhead’s words resonate with me, but I realize that Martha Stewart, Donald Trump, Deepak Chopra and Richard Branson are all successful personal brands, filling a public need to identify with a person in order to purchase a product. They have also become gurus. Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore bring reality-tv-show personal branding to documentaries. Picasso had a personal brand. You can still buy the striped fisherman shirts he wore and they are closely identified with him. Try picturing Donald Trump wearing one and you will become nauseous. I’m still getting used to the power of personal branding and surprisingly (even to me) I respect it.

Doing what Garbo (or Didion) did won’t work now. You make a movie, you market yourself. If the noise of the web/highdef/streaming/facebook/twitter-verse bothers you, then set fire to your laptop in an act of defiance. Maybe you can play Adolph Menjou movies on a white sheet in the jungle.

I have a better idea. Board the train (it’s a metaphor, ok?) with me and use technology to reach the people you need to reach. Look at what Crowdstarter, Kickstarter and Participant are doing. That bright future? I met with director Thomas Napper the other day and he said something profound. “The reality shows have forced documentaries to be about something.” Documentaries have to stand out because they need to be about causes. Huh. That’s not about me. Still, it has merit.

What’s small group activism? A writer and a yoga teacher head down to the Gulf to save sea turtles. That’s small group activism. Really small. Just two guys on a mission. They want to charter a boat, haul slimed turtles from the sea, clean them up and transfer them to the right facility.

Here are their qualifications:

Brock Cahill teaches yoga at Yogis Anonymous. He has a passion for the sea and especially sea turtles.

Peter Lawrence also cares deeply about the sea and is an accomplished novelist and screenwriter.

That’s it. Nothing else on their resumes, except that they are tapping into what they believe to be a huge movement of those who are turning away from bureaucracies because they don’t trust them anymore, and are turning instead to small, focused, local action by individuals.

Will you believe BP when it announces that the spill is capped and the bad days are done?

The news folks will gobble that up as fact. Not so, however, with small groups on the ground. Recovery in the Gulf is years away. The crime scene is being run by the criminal – BP – so the crime reports are suspect. BP is using a chemical called Corexit to disperse the oil.   It is likely harming the Gulf and causing cleanup crews to report respiratory distress, dizziness and headaches. As Peter wrote in his email, “Of that chemical, it’s enough to say that BP owns its manufacturer and its use is banned in the UK. Lucky the Brits can use up their stockpiles in their one-time colony.” Brock reported that another small group of activists led by documentary director Josh Tickell experienced burning eyes and skin rashes after exposure to Corexit.

Corexit is “effectively sinking the oil down into the water table where it will be much harder to clean up, and honestly, much harder on all the life in the sea. But it will look better from a satellite picture! Oh man. Shortcuts suck.” – Brock Cahill

I know Brock Cahill because I’ve taken his yoga class. I know Peter because long ago and far away I worked for him when I wrote scripts for a superhero cartoon called ThunderCats. They are both superheroes to me now, and not just because Brock can do yoga poses that I cannot pronounce and Peter is a great writer. They are superheroes because they both recognize that large media organizations have lost sight of their mission to investigate and report, fearlessly. Now the yoga teacher and the writer need to get the job done. Fearlessly.

As I write this, they are on site in the Gulf,  figuring out exactly what can and can’t be done, how to circumvent the bureaucracy of the clean up and achieve Brock’s mission – direct action to save sea turtles. They’re raising money for a boat and assembling a volunteer crew. “We’ll have a marine biologist on board,” Peter wrote. “We’ll be properly equipped…” to save as many turtles as possible.

“We’re independent and determined. This is our world just as much as it is BP’s, Big Oil’s or the government’s which, last time we looked, was financed and elected by us. That is, by individuals exercising democracy. We will not take no for an answer,” Peter wrote.

You can follow Brock Cahill on Twitter for updates. He posts to his blog and Facebook page often.

Photos courtesy Brock Cahill

I am married to a holy vibe chick. Can I discuss this with you? We all know that women like to share. Holy vibe chicks like to share a lot. If they share a whole lot together they have something called a share-gasm. In fact, they are capable of multiple share-gasms, if conditions are right and there are enough lighted candles. It is a little intimidating, as a man, to witness this. Most of us men are capable of only one share-gasm at a time, and after that we have to rest a little before we go again.

Being married to a holy vibe chick (for a year, thank you for the congratulatory notes and checks) has brought many wonderful things into my life. I’ve learned to cook vegetarian and I am proud to say that I’ve stopped eating meat. Well, that’s not true. When I am away from my holy vibe chick I do eat chicken and pork sometimes, and it feels wonderfully illegal. I drink whiskey too, and port, which can seem holy, if it’s vintage 1977 port. After yoga I often get the urge for a good pinot noir, and I almost succeed in convincing myself that pinot after Pincha Mayurasana is spiritual in that it involves spirits. But that rarely works. I settle for organic juice squeezed from the sweat of yaks, which is all that we have in the refrigerator. Then I drink pure water to cleanse my soul, dress all in white and stare at the sun for an hour.

Holy vibers certainly do wear white a lot. This isn’t a problem here in Southern California, but if some holy vibe chicks went out in a snowstorm we might lose them in a blinding, monochromatic whirl of deep meaning. Did I mention that when you are living in the magnetic pull of a holy vibe chick everything has deep meaning? If you have a runny nose, a medical intuitive like Louise Hay will explain that means “inner crying.” I have been working through some running injuries, a balky knee and now a healing heel, which are apparently an expression of the transitions I am undergoing, or plain stupid overtraining. Take your pick. (Hint: Plain stupid overtraining is not the holy explanation.) Various Hindu goddesses have a hand in finding us a good parking space. Spiders and crows are messengers. We place fresh flowers on Lakshmi’s altar and ask her where our new clients will come from.

Consulting goddesses for their advice is novel for me. But I have learned that holy vibe chicks also consult other people about things. I am something of a lone wolf, and also male. I think about something for a minute and then I do it. There was a Seinfeld about this. Men hunt down a shirt and buy it. Women gather to discuss what shirt to buy. In a holy vibe household, few decisions are made alone. That’s the real beauty, of course. We find connection with ourselves and a community. Come to think of it, looking at the world as a place of deep meaning is a good way to live. It builds compassion; it brings focus and passion to life. Self-examination leads directly to self-improvement. Yoga feels good. It’s so true that the holy vibe chick I married is a deep friend who has taught me a lot. I love my holy vibe chick!

Oh my god, I think I just had a share-gasm.

Lakshmi image by Ravi.  Photos by Lee Schneider.

One day in the mid 1970s, a pre-school teacher living in Sweden named Hilde Back decided to sponsor an African student. Hilde, a Holocaust survivor whose parents were killed in the camps, lived modestly as a refugee in the safe haven of Sweden. Every month she put a few dollars in an envelope and sent it to a Kenyan boy named Chris Mburu. This was enough to get Chris through school. (In Kenya, at the time Chris was in school, students had to pay for their primary and secondary school education. Today, primary is free in Kenya, but secondary still costs.) Chris was inspired by his mysterious benefactor who lived so far away. Not only did he become a star student, he moved on from his village to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School. He became a United Nations human rights advocate, a post he holds today.

One small act – a couple of bucks – changed his life. But it gets better. Chris decided to honor the benefactor he had never met. He established the Hilde Back Education Fund to sponsor more Kenyan students, to improve more young lives. Eventually he tracked down the 80-year-old Back and brought her to Africa to see the results of her generosity.

Hilde Back and Chris Mburu

It sounds a little like fiction, but this is the true story told in A Small Act, a documentary directed by Jennifer Arnold. Jennifer attended the University of Nairobi with Chris’s cousin, and experienced firsthand what Kenya was like. She wanted others to have the experience of a prosperous Kenya with a sizable middle class. She set out to make a film about that and discovered even more.

“My mom was Peace Corps. I come from a long tradition in my family of, ‘just do what you can to help other people.’ We all believe in that in my family. Small actions totally make a difference.” – Jennifer Arnold

Jennifer Arnold, director of "A Small Act"

Her film was initially intended to simply show a balanced view of Africa. Along the way, she discovered Chris and Hilde. As their story unfolded before her lens, Jennifer filmed in villages without electricity, using only battery power for the camera, and sometimes couldn’t understand what was being said. (She speaks some Swahili, but many of the people she filmed spoke Kikiuyu.)

A Small Act was accepted at Sundance, and while it screened there with Chris and Hilde in attendance, Jennifer tells this remarkable story: “At Sundance, audience members started handing Chris and Hilde and us checks and cash. They were all donations to the fund. They donated $90,000 over the course of 10 days at Sundance. Then a philanthropist who saw the film just donated a quarter million dollars, just based off seeing the film,” she told me.

What the film has taught her is this simple truth: If you feel like you can make a positive change once, you will do it again.

A Small Act premieres on HBO at 9PM ET, July 12. Working with Jennifer, HBO is launching a campaign called “What’s Your Small Act?” and as part of it, the network has partnered with a website called Network For Good. At selected screenings of A Small Act viewers will receive a $10 gift certificate that they can use to donate to the charity of their choice.

If you want to know more about the Hilde Back Education Fund, click here.

A SMALL ACT Trailer 2010 from Jennifer Arnold on Vimeo.

Acknowledgments: Hilde Back photo, courtesy Hilde Back Education Fund. Chris Mburu and Hilde Back, courtesy Harvard Law School. Jennifer Arnold portrait by Lee Schneider. A Small Act trailer courtesy Jennifer Arnold via Vimeo.

Many nature films build a bridge of empathy between human watchers and animal protagonists, and most nature filmmakers work with charismatic on-camera talent, you know, like Lassie and Flipper and gorgeous supermodels like Bengal tigers.

Mark Lewis doesn’t do any of that.

He doesn’t cast Lassie. He focuses his documentary lens on the bit players of the animal kingdom – the extras – and he turns them into superstars. I didn’t think I could ever like a rat. But after seeing Mark’s film RAT, I never felt so warmly toward vermin. I never thought I could really like a chicken. But Mark’s The Natural History of the Chicken had me thinking of chickens as lead actors. Then you have Cane Toads: The Conquest, his 3D epic about a toad invasion in Australia.

“Ultimately, it’s an entertaining film experience,” Mark said.  “Why 3D?  We wanted to submerge or place the audience into the world of the toad.  3D is the ideal way to do that. I’m not trying to preach, I’m trying to entertain. Nothing gives me greater satisfaction, after the years of work making this, than to see people laughing and cheering as they watch the film.”

The film recently screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Also at the LA festival, One Lucky Elephant, Lisa Leeman’s warmly told and heartfelt documentary, ten years in the making, about the relationship between a circus producer and his favorite elephant. I didn’t think I could shed a tear watching an elephant movie, but Lisa’s movie can do that to you. More about elephants later. For now, let’s start small.

“The toad is a heroic character in this,” said Robert DeMaio, the editor of Cane Toads. Turning a tiny toad into a heroic character is no small feat, but the transformation starts with where you put the camera.

“Mark’s approach is to move the camera down,” DeMaio said. “The animal is suddenly on an equal footing with the audience. So there’s no condescension.”

Lisa Leeman (director, on left) and Christina Colissimo (producer, right)

DeMaio edited RAT, The Natural History of the Chicken, and other Mark Lewis films, so he has helped shape storylines that reveal the deep relationship possible between animals and people. This relationship zone is where Lisa Leeman goes so admirably in One Lucky Elephant. In the film, we experience how an elephant becomes a daughter to a circus owner, and how that situation sadly cannot hold when the elephant cannot live among humans any more. Her separation from her human “father” to live among her sister elephants is wrenching, powerful and ultimately redemptive – it makes us question our dominion over animals. Sure, we’re at the top of the food chain – but who’s really in charge?

You could say that the title characters of Cane Toads are insignificant creatures, but in the film they dominate the humans who obsess over them. Viewed through the Mark Lewis lens, the meaningless little toad becomes – literally – huge.

“I think that’s the theme that all these Mark Lewis films have, that there is meaning within the meaningless,” DeMaio said. “You look for those things that are in your day-to-day life invisible, but if you sort of shine a light on them, there’s something to be learned.”

When this hit me (in 3D no less!) I realized I was on to something – a heightened form of empathy. The people in a Mark Lewis film are precisely-framed eccentrics, truly one of a kind. But then I realized the animals are, too. The vermin in RAT, the meal on your plate in The Natural History of the Chicken and yes, the annoying toads are individuals who count. You certainly can’t ignore toads who are taking over your country. This passionately-observed world is unnerving for humans. Masters of the universe? I don’t think so. Not when a lowly toad can rock your world.

Those 3D glasses really did take me to another dimension.

Photos by Lee Schneider

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

The reason they call Whole Foods “Whole Paycheck” is that while walking its hallowed aisles you can find the most expensive red peppers that ever lived, and also the most expensive salt, and even the most expensive yogurt imaginable. Some of this is justified. The peppers, for example, listen to Mozart as they grow and watch “Baby Einstein” videos. The salt comes from the tears of extremely pure Buddhist nuns living at high altitude. At least, I think so. I’m not really sure, because I’ve been a little fuzzy of late as we try to feed two people on less than $150 a week, and that means we’ve been subsisting solely on Whole Paycheck’s organic carrots, organic apple peels and organic hummus parceled out a teaspoon at a time. Can you hang on a minute? I’m having a dizzy spell again. Ok, I’ve had a sip of organic water and I feel better.

Is it worth it to eat organic? Worth the money? Worth the hunt for the store that sells organic? Worth the travel woes when there is absolutely nothing to eat in a hotel and a Cheeze Doodle is staring you down at night in a strange town?

I can back away slowly from a snack food vending machine in a hotel. But what about a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that suggests organic food has no nutritional benefits over ordinary food?

Whole Foods, can I have my money back?

Not so fast. Let’s look at the data. The researchers reviewed 162 scientific papers published over the past 50 years. They found the nutritional value of organic food wasn’t all that different from the cheap stuff.

“A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance,” said Alan Dangour, one of the report’s authors.

Bummer. I might be trying to justify my purchase of organic broccoli costing, by weight, the same as a handful of diamonds, but I have to ask: Did those researchers ask the right questions? Should we only consider nutritional value? People argue that organic tastes better, and research studies show that some organic foods contain more antioxidants associated with preventing heart disease and cancer. But there’s one argument in favor of organic that I really can’t get around.

How many different kinds of pesticides would you like to eat for dinner?

A study conducted at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health and Community Medicine found that children who ate conventional food carried “significantly higher” metabolites derived from pesticides than children who ate organic. The conventional food kids were, you’ll pardon the expression, pissing pesticide derivatives.

Monsanto, the company that makes RoundUp, the stuff you spray on weeds, also made Agent Orange, the stuff sprayed on Vietnamese, and partnered in 1967 with IG Farben, the German company that made Zyklon-B, the stuff Nazis sprayed on Jews in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Monsanto does a brisk business making the pesticides sprayed on your supermarket produce. Suddenly that non-organic supermarket carrot starts to look pretty sinister. How did it get so orange, anyway?

The good news is you don’t have to buy organic everything – conventional onions, sweet peas and avocados are ok – here’s a full cheat sheet from Dean Karnazes’ blog in Runner’s World.

In the meantime, I am prepared to make you an offer on that tiny container of organic shaved Parmesan.

Just my opinion, but Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are both dilettantes driven by ego and fueled by too much money. They think they can get elected by saying just what our Governator said in order to get elected. They are dilettantes because, like Sarah Palin, they want to do the job because it will make them look cool to their friends. When the going gets tough they will run away, like Sarah Palin, and become dilettante journalists on Fox. But, wait – there’s hope! There are also some visionaries around here.

A visionary is someone who looks at the same things we all see and sees something different. For example, Elon Musk made money when he co-created PayPal, but he’s a visionary for creating an electric-car company called Tesla, and he’s proven himself a visionary again by partnering with Toyota to bring a $30,000 electric car to market. Seth Godin is a visionary for re-imagining marketing as a form of education, and Jacqueline Novogratz is also a visionary for using capitalism to bring dignity to the poor. All of these visionaries have something in common. What is it?

“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I mean to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.” — John Stuart Mill

This is not a time to be thinking conservatively. It’s a time for visionary thinking that cuts across boundaries. Some may contend, “Yeah, like Palin and Fiornia!” and I say to them I only get 500 words here so stop interrupting and go write your own article. Fact is, I haven’t seen much bold thinking in politics that wasn’t also stupid. (See quote above.)

I’m going to veer away from Carly and Meg and concentrate on some visionaries I’ve met recently and examine how the engine of their success is all about cutting across boundaries. At Public Architecture in San Francisco Richard Neill and I ran a workshop this week called “How to Tell a Story Online.”

It was for changemakers and activists, and we showed them how to transform a social issue, or the story of a neighborhood, or a cause, and make it into a short video piece intended to play online and inspire people. I think this is a new frontier, a re-inventing of video media that blurs the boundary between advocate, journalist, urban planner and storyteller. It requires visionaries – and there are more than a few of them at Public Architecture.

On the same day as that workshop, I spoke on a panel at the American Society of Media Photographers. Photographers like to control what’s in focus, but many of the photographers I met that night were experiencing a disorienting blurriness. Their editors are asking them to blend video and stills, and this makes for an identity crisis. To be a journalist, an illustrator, a shutterbug and a cinematographer are all becoming the same thing. I’m told that beer and Dramamine consumed together can help with this unstable feeling, but luckily photographers are by nature iconoclasts, and they need to reinvent themselves anyway all the time, so they don’t need Dramamine, they need to let the boundaries fall where they may.

Let’s welcome more visionaries who are ready to remix, recombine and renew. I’d rather focus on them than on dilettantes who pretend to be prepared, but really are right where they are not supposed to be.

Don’t get me started on people who wear sandals to fly on an airplane.

Binocular photo: M0Rt3s via Flickr and Creative Commons License. All other photos by Lee Schneider.

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

My mother used to do yoga regularly, and once she tried Bikram, the kind of yoga where they dress in hot pants and heat up the room until your eyes melt.

She didn’t like the puddles of sweat and got up to leave in the middle of the class. The teacher was aghast.

“You can’t leave! What about the toxins? You have to get the toxins out of your body!”

My mother responded, “Fuck the toxins.”

I’ve always liked the sound of that. I know there are toxins in us, but we are not dirty. We don’t need cleansing. We are not originally sinned. Most importantly, nobody’s more pure than anybody else. Holier than thou doesn’t work for me.

There are yoga classes in LA where you have to audition to get in. There are people out here on the Left Coast of Crazyland (to borrow a friend’s coinage) who are telling me about conscious parenting classes, suggesting that the rest of us bumbling fools have been doing this parenting stuff with a can of warm beer in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. (Some of us have.) The assumption is that the conscious people (and parents) are going to be ascending to a higher plane, while the rest of us will be consumed in an inconvenient fireball. (“Before you consume me in that fireball I need to check my email one more time.”)

This creates a spiritual caste system. You have your vegans with the glassy, golden light in their eyes and you have the rest of us coffee-drinking, indulgent humans moping about in parking lots scratching off Lotto tickets. I believe it’s a fantasy that people can be “saved.” Saved from what? People are morally messy, lack focus in their day-to-day activities and eat too much candy. People are impure. The world resolutely lacks absolutes. So how are we going to get better?

Scientists are documenting that we are soft-wired to feel empathy. If you feel joy or anger I can feel that with you, and the same neurons will light up in my brain as though I’m having that experience myself. Jeremy Rifkin wrote a 700-page book about this called The Empathic Civilization, but you can look at an animation that tells the story in a couple of minutes. (Not only am I impure, I also like to save time.)

“Empathic moments are the most intensely alive experiences we ever have. We empathize with each other’s struggles against death and for life. One acknowledges the whiff of death in another’s frailties and vulnerabilities. No one ever empathizes with a perfect being.”
-Jeremy Rifkin

Empathy means you become part of another’s experience, of a family’s, of a nation’s, and a planet’s. In the empathic world, there’s no spiritual caste system, no holier than thou – we’re equals. If we extend the concept of empathy to its outermost then we can connect with anyone, and we can save the planet, too. I think that’s a true spiritual democracy.

Photo credit: j_silla via Flickr and Creative Commons License.

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

Watch a movie for free. Everybody likes the sound of that. Except for people who work at movie studios, marketers and big ad guys who are running around the side of that building right now and puking into paper bags – that’s how upset they are. Filmmakers are taking it one day at a time and taking one antidepressant a day.

“Free” happened with music, with stock photography (on Flickr) and now, with movies. Pricing is on a roller coaster straight into the dirt. I hate roller coasters. I’d rather deal with scary clowns. But there’s no escaping that more videos have been posted to YouTube than have been seen on television in the history of the medium.

“Do you know why they call it a medium? Because it’s rarely well done.” –Fred Allen

A lot of videos on the web are free and a lot of them are junk. But at the end of a day watching them I often sit back with a rosy sense of satisfaction and think, Man, that was junk. In other words, they get me nowhere.

What about free media that is good, and further, free media that inspires people to do good? Now you’re on to something. KarmaTube is all about “do something” videos that are intended to help everyone be the change they want to see in the world. (Yeah, it’s a quote from Gandhi.) The KarmaTube guys are like that – they want to find a way to massage your consciousness so you’ll do one small good thing that leads to other good things and then to real change.

As a documentary director, I’m working with KarmaTube on a channel of my recommendations for films that are inspiring, cinematic and nudge the world. Want to help me? Send suggestions for inspiring cause and change-advocating short films to @docuguy and I’ll recommend those that I like to the KarmaTube board. To give you some ideas, here’s a film I’ve recommended called Unshaken. Beautifully directed by Paul Pryor, it’s a moving first-person appeal made bolder by unforgettable images. Paul Hawken gives a great speech in this talking-head-fest with surprisingly powerful visuals. Check these out and more on KarmaTube.

David J. Neff is a busy guy. Once upon a time he designed online and media communications for the American Cancer Society. Now he’s writing about non-profits in 501derful.org.

Lights. Camera. Help. is project he started to match filmmakers with non-profits. Then there’s the film festival he’s doing in Austin, the world’s first, David told me, dedicated entirely to nonprofit and cause-driven films. “The films we show here have to have that call to action,” David said. He’s looking for films with a mission and those that move you. Judges will choose finalists based on cinematic considerations, but they want to know if the movie asks something of you. Any film that heavily features a cause will be considered. This includes films by or about nonprofit, non-governmental or grassroots organizations. Feature length films, shorts and public service announcements are ok to submit. The deadline is June 30th. Go for it and you could get your movie screened in Austin July 29-August 2nd.

Going from free and foolish online to free and worthwhile is progress. Still, that “free movie” thing continues to give my bottom line a headache. How do you give away a movie for free and still pay back investors? Working on it. Will get back to you.

Gandhi image credit dougdelshaw via of Creative Commons License.

An example of fractal geometry in nature

500 Words on Thursday | by Lee Schneider

I was in a room with people cheering about fractal geometry. Not a small room and not a few people — a couple hundred of them. Later, I was in another room to hear a doctor speak about female menopause and I stayed for the whole talk. Yes, the speaker covered prostate screening also and I was working, covering the event for the Huffington Post, but the speaker was that good. I looked around the room during both talks. Lots of everyday people. All ages. Hip and unhip. No Phi Beta Kappa keys in evidence, though one of the talks, the fractal geometry one, got technical as it delved into Mandelbrot Sets. There are times that I’d rather drive into oncoming traffic than try to understand what a Mandelbrot Set is, but the speaker was so good we were all on board.

It was science for the people.

The event was the I Can Do It conference in San Diego and it covered topics like integrative medicine, how to live in a state of happiness, (“Would Vermont work for that?”) and some fringy stuff, at least for me, like past life regression. (Why in their past life was everyone a king or a queen? Wasn’t anybody a garbage man in the Middle Ages?)

How do you get people to cheer for fractals? Science education is top-of-the-list for a lot of people. Educators worry that kids are turning away from careers in science. American Idol seems the shorter route to fame and fortune, and you don’t even need to know how to sing.

Elliot Washor

Elliot Washor is one of the people who’s thinking hard about how to fix this. In the US, one student drops out of school every 12 seconds. Elliot is co-founder and co-director (along with Dennis Littky) of Big Picture Learning. Big Picture has started new schools and changed existing schools. They’re willing to get their hands dirty – literally. Elliot wrote recently about a welding simulator that he thought was really cool. It empowered the operator to learn a real-world skill and some math, too. Michael B. Crawford, author of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” has written compellingly about how people who work with their hands might be happier than people who push ideas around on computer screens.

Dr. Bruce Lipton

If you take the body out of learning – well, it’s just a lot less interesting to learn things. Why not keep it in? Include the tactile and physical part of learning and learning stays relevant. Why did those speakers I heard have people cheering? The answer is also about the body. The speakers were Dr. Bruce Lipton and Dr. Christiane Northrup, and they both had everyone’s attention for one reason. They were giving us vital information about our wellness, and everybody’s interested in that kind of science.

Science for the people reaches out to include persons of every age and gender. I might even go to another menopause talk if Dr. Northrup is speaking.

Dr. Christiane Northrup