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A Sex Talk for the Computer Illiterate

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(Everything You Wanted to Know About the Coming Techno-Apocalypse but Were Afraid to Ask)

Nine-year-old: “Today in science we learned that babies are made when the sperm from the man and the egg from the woman join together, and it grows into a baby.”

Mom: “Yup, that’s it. All you need to know. Glad that’s settled. Want to watch The Voice now?”

Nine-year-old: “But, mom. . . how do the sperm and egg get in the same place? If the egg is inside the woman, and the sperm is in the man, then how does the sperm actually get in there?”

My website was hacked recently, and it prompted my own questions—not just why someone would target my podunk little website and replace it with an image of Kemal Atatürk —but also how likely are hackers to take down entire electrical grids, as Ted Koppel has warned, and will they be able to hack our self-driving cars, or spy on us through our smart fridges, and how does any of this computer stuff work, anyway?

I mean, what the hell actually is digital data? I have these vague images of cellphone signals emanating from towers that never seem close enough to my house for me to get good reception and circuit boards sitting inside hard drives like miniature cities, with miniature Jeff Bridges riding miniature motorcycles around them, and somewhere among all that technology are columns of neon green ones and zeroes scrolling past, like in The Matrix.

But what is data, really? And how does it get in there? If you search the internet for information that puts it in layman’s terms, you might find, as I did, that the explanations aren’t simple enough. I needed the equivalent of “the penis goes inside the vagina,” so I decided to come up with my own version.

Before I break it down for you, let met tell you why I think it’s so important to know this. One glance over to the couch, where my husband is composing emails on his iPad, my eleven-year-old is reading a book on her Kindle and my fourteen-year-old is making funny faces at her phone, Snapchatting I guess, is enough to remind me. Technology has already infiltrated most aspects of everyday life, and the fact is, we’re just getting started. With exponential technologies, from artificial intelligence to virtual reality to the Internet of Everything, we’re on the verge of transformations that seem like they are right out of the movies: computers that learn, nanobots that treat cancer cells and leave the healthy cells alone, brain scans that translate neural activity so others can see what you’re thinking. Shit’s about to get real.

Up until now it has been fine for us to stumble cluelessly through the field of blossoming technology, picking up new devices like magical tulips: look, this one plays music! It’s even still somewhat endearing to be out of step with innovation: Oh sure, I use Facebook, but I just can’t wrap my brain around Twitter! We marvel at how easily our kids navigate new apps and raise our eyebrows when we see babies commandeering their parents’ iPhones. It’s all sort of novel and strange, and even a little scary. But the world is still the real world, with technology injected into it.

What I’m talking about is a future where the world is technology, and we have to inject reality into it.

This is not way off in the future. This is in fifteen to twenty years. This is when your daughter is finishing her residency or walking down the aisle.

They are called exponential technologies because the rate they are developing isn’t following a standard, linear progression. It may seem that way at first, but one day the progress will leap ahead too quickly for us to catch up. As Peter Diamandis explains in his excellent book BOLD, if lily pads growing over a pond are doubling every day, then at some point they will grow to cover half the pond. It may have taken weeks and weeks for that to happen. But what you have to understand is that the very next day after that, the entire pond will be covered. That’s exponential technology.

So now that I’ve gotten your attention (I hope!), here’s what I can offer to help: A simple explanation of how all that digital stuff actually works.

How Data Works

When a One and a Zero love each other very much. . . no, but really, digital data is kind of like the offspring of Adam and Eve, or One and Zero, from which everything else is created. The result is a code, or language, that tells the computer what to do.

All digital information is just a series of ones and zeroes in various order, which spell out the code that computers translate. 01100001 represents the letter A. 01110011 is the letter S. So, write 01000001 01010011 01110011, and you just cursed in binary! Everything can be tranferred into binary, and all those teeny tiny codes are sent over wires, or the internet, as machine language that the computer understands.

But who makes the ones and zeroes in the first place, you ask? Well, the ‘source’ is electricity (if you need to know how electricity works, God help you. I mean, watch this and then come back). But the electricity that is flowing is only made into data, or packets of information, when it is turned on an off by a switch, because the interruption of the flow separates the electricity in little bundles of energy These packets, as I explained earlier, register as on and off/one and zero (I like to imagine Bugs Bunny raising and lowering the switch that signals intermission at the theater, so people keep rushing in and out and trampling Yosemite Sam). When the switch is down, the current flows, and that is represented by a one. When the switch is up, the current is broken, and that is represented by a zero.

So for the color blue, for example, the computer translates the machine language of ones and zeroes and sends an electrical signal to the monitor, which has components made of reactive material, such as liquid crystal, that respond to the varying amount of electricity and make tiny bits of the screen a particular combination of Red, Green or Blue, depending on what number combinations are sent.

The same basic principle applies to the monitor displaying these letters. And that’s how these words got in front of you! Nevermind that these words are themselves symbols that our eyes send to our brains to be decoded. . . that’s about all the bandwidth I have for today.

This is all just a starting point, but I hope it will encourage you to go out and do some investigation of your own. Otherwise, in the near future you won’t just be kind of annoying, like your seventy-year-old aunt who doesn’t know how to get her photos off her phone and onto her computer. You’ll be like someone from the Stone Age who has woken up in a room full of Turkish cyber hackers.

Or, to put it more simply, like someone who never got the sex talk: pregnant, without knowing how you got that way.

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Why You Should Dress up for Halloween

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We’re spending seven billion dollars on Halloween this year. Seven billion. Sometimes that irks me, like when I trip over the neighbors’ cheesy fake headstones on my way to borrow some pumpkin carving tools (to reduce my contribution to said seven billion) and end up draped in synthetic spider webs. Or when I drive past yet another witch wrapped around a tree. You’d think those clumsy hags would have learned to fly by now, or at least change out their tacky, striped tights. Witches don’t wear leggings anymore, people. The ones I know all wear Lulu Lemon.

Then there’s the reject candy that sits in your house till June because, let’s be clear, the only person who ever eats a Mounds or a Good n Plenty is the person who has never tried one. Yet the bags of mixed candy we buy are at least 20% filled with stuff no one wants. I did a few high-level calculations and broke down the cost of a typical assortment: one bag of 30 pieces of individually wrapped Reese’s Cups, Kit Kat, Hershey Bar and Mounds costs $4.86 at Wal-Mart. That means there are 7-8 pieces of each type of candy in that bag. You’re never going to eat the Mounds, so let’s just subtract them. What you’re getting is 22-23 pieces of candy for $4.86. Well, you can buy a bag of 26 Reese’s Cups for the same price! Rise up with me, people, and refuse to prop of the Mounds industry any longer!

I still advocate spending a little time and money on your costume, though. Spooky thrills and candy aside, dressing up is the undead soul of Halloween. Whether you stick some cat ears on your head or go all out with a Marie Antoinette wig and gown, taking the opportunity to transform yourself once a year isn’t just entertainment; it’s an opportunity to shift your perspective. As actors (and costume designers) know, there is power and freedom in adopting the form of a different person or creature. Since the days people worshipped Shiva and Dionysus, masks have been used to release people from their ordinary identities and give them a reprieve from societal norms. Masks help people to imagine what it’s like to be transformed into ‘the other,’ or to explore a deeper identity within themselves. Putting on a long, black coat, slicking my hair back and striding through a party in leather boots and dark glasses makes me feel like I could tap into the power of the Matrix and dodge those bullets every bit as well as Trinity. It’s a fun experiment; how often do you get to wear your sunglasses at night if you’re not Corey Hart (without annoying everyone, that is)?

We all get stuck in our personas. It’s great to have the chance to try something new on and shake up old mindsets. When my thirteen-year-old told me earlier this year that she wanted to start taking ballet, I thought, “Really? Isn’t it too late? How do you start ballet at thirteen? You can’t even touch your toes.” Fortunately, I knew better than to say it out loud. How the race toward achievement makes me automatically think thirteen is too old to start anything is a topic for another day.

As it turns out, she loves ballet. She never complains about going, as she used to with soccer. She’s still not very flexible, but she’s standing up straighter. The interesting thing is that happened almost immediately—when she put on the ballet costume, in fact. As Amy Cuddy points out in her Ted Talk on body language, “Power posing—standing in a posture of confidence even when we don’t feel confident—can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact on our chances for success.” Shifting your physicality, whether through a new posture or a new costume, is a small but important way to explore new ways of seeing the world.

So if you’re not already dressing up tonight, throw on a costume. It might not make you stand up straighter; it may even hunch you over, if you’re Quasimodo, but regardless, you’ll see things a little differently from that angle. Maybe we’re getting something important out of our seven billion dollar investment after all.

The Gun Debate: Will Science be the Answer?

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Like most people, I try not to think too much about things that upset me, but whenever there’s a fresh horror reported in the news—like the story of the six-year-old boy who survived heart surgery only to be shot and killed on a walk to the park—I am momentarily forced out of my bubble. I have to face the fact that Missouri is fourth in the nation for gun deaths. More people die here from guns than from car accidents. St. Louis has become so notorious that friends in my former city of Los Angeles—Los Angeles!—ask me how I can live in such a dangerous place.

But when I bring up the subject of gun regulations to any of my Missouri neighbors, I get the standard narrative: regulating guns won’t keep criminals from getting them; It will only hinder responsible citizens’ rights to defend themselves. After all, guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

And I agree with that. Guns are not the problem. But the epidemic of gun violence is a problem. And St. Louis is at ground zero of that epidemic. Fortunately, St. Louis also has many wonderful things about it—there are some of the country’s best hospitals and doctors saving the lives of an increasing number of young children who are getting shot. There are people working tirelessly to make things better in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods. There are moms rallying together to talk common sense about guns. And there are world class institutions, like Washington University, that are putting their energy into tackling gun violence as a public health issue.

I was fortunate to see representatives from all those groups come together on Tuesday night, when I forced myself to get out of my bubble for a few hours and attend the launch of Washington University’s year-long initiative, “Gun Violence: A Public Health Crisis.” Basically, the school’s Institute of Public Health is tackling the issue of gun violence like it’s a disease. Understand the epidemiology, risk factors, the environment, the interventions. Look at the data. Make recommendations based on real information from a diverse array of perspectives in different disciplines. That’s how the issues of tobacco deaths and automobile accidents were approached, and improved. As keynote speaker Alan Leshner said, “This is a very complex problem. There isn’t just one solution.”

That may be the hardest point to convince people of. Whenever I ask people or read commentaries about the gun debate, I hear a lot of ‘single solution’ hype. It’s because of easy access. Or it’s because of gang violence. Or untreated mental health issues. Or violent video games. Whatever the viewpoint, it is absolute in its certainty that it’s THE reason. Rarely does anyone acknowledges how complicated a situation it is and how much we really don’t know. Does closing loopholes to prevent criminals from getting guns actually work? Are guns three times more likely to be used against a family member than an intruder, as one report suggests? Does gun safety training help?

According to Leshner, no one, regardless of their views on guns, has been objecting to the collecting of data. But that wasn’t always the case. The CDC didn’t look into the effects of gun violence on health for 20 years, specifically turning away from this ‘loaded’ issue until now. As a result, we know far more about the effect of crooked teeth on periodontal disease than we do about patterns in the spread of gun violence.

I would like to know more. I’d like to make an educated decision about the pros and cons. Guns are not inherently bad, and I want the right to own one. But if I have better information that shows the risks of keeping a gun around far outweigh the rewards, I can make better decisions. I think sky diving looks fun, but I know the risks, and to me, it’s not worth the reward. Cars can be dangerous, but because we have regulations in place that make it relatively safe, I accept the risk. If someone is hurt in a car crash, I don’t condemn the car. I also don’t drive at five miles an hour because that’s safer. I survey both ends of the spectrum and find an area in between that I’m comfortable with. We live in a dangerous world, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It can’t be all or nothing.

It’s a complicated problem. There is no single solution. It’s going to take a lot of different kinds of effort on the part of a lot of different kinds of people.

So by all means, let’s not wait. Let’s try something now and pursue parallel paths as we gather the data. I started by going to a panel discussion after a long day, when I would have preferred to put my feet up and play Candy Crush Saga. It wasn’t much, my tiny attempt to emerge from my bubble. It was a ridiculously small and accomplishable action, a speck, not even an atom—a quark of effort, really.

But as any scientist will tell you, enough quarks together makes a sun.