I’m in Rome at the National Geographic Science Festival
, co-produced by Codice Edizioni which, not entirely coincidentally published, the Italian version of my book Took Big to Know. Jane Goodall is giving the opening talk to a large audience full of students. I won’t try to capture what she is saying because she is talking without notes, telling her personal story.

She embodies an inquiring mind capable of radically re-framing our ideas simply by looking at the phenomena. We may want to dispute her anthropomorphizing of chimps but it is a truth that needed to be uncovered. For example, she says that when she got to Oxford to get a graduate degree ― even though she had never been to college ― she was told that she should’t have given the chimps names. But this, she says, was because at the time science believed humans were unique. Since then genetics has shown how close we are to them, but even before that her field work had shown the psychological and behavioral similarities. So, her re-framing was fecund and, yes, true.

At a conference in America in 1986, every report from Africa was about the decimation of the chimpanzee population and the abuse of chimpanzees in laboratories. “I went to this conference as a scientist, ready to continue my wonderful life, and I left as an activist.” Her Tacare Institute
works with and for Africans. For example, local people are equipped with tablets and phones and mark chimp nests, downed trees, and the occasional leopard. (Takari provides scholarships to keep girls in school, “and some boys too.”)

She makes a totally Dad joke about “the cloud.”

It is a dangerous world, she says. “Our intellects have developed tremendously.” “Isn’t it strange that this most intellectual creature ever is destroying its home.” She calls out the damage done to our climate by our farming of animals. “There are a lot of reasons to avoid eating a lot of meat or any, but that’s one of them.”

There is a disconnect between our beautiful brains and our hearts, she says. Violence, domestic violence, greed…”we don’t think ‘Are we having a happy life?'” She started “Roots and Shoots
” in 1991 in Tanzania, and now it’s in 99 countries, from kindergartens through universities. It’s a program for young people. “We do not tell the young people what to do.” They decide what matters to them.

Her reasons for hope: 1. The reaction to Roots and Shoots. 2. Our amazing brains. 3. The resilience of nature. 4. Social media, which, if used right can be a “tremendous tool for change.” 6. “The indomitable human spirit.” She uses Nelson Mandela as an example, but also refugees making lives in new lands.

“It’s not only humans that have an indomitable spirit.” She shows a brief video of the release of a chimp that left at least some wizened adults in tears:

She stresses making the right ethical choices, a phrase not heard often enough.

If in this audience of 500 students she has not made five new scientists, I’ll be surprised.

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Newton showed that the tides are produced by the gravitational pull of the moon and the Sun. But, as a 1914 article in Scientific American pointed out, if you want any degree of accuracy, you have to deal with the fact that “the earth is not a perfect sphere, it isn’t covered with water to a uniform? form depth, it has many continents and islands and sea passages of peculiar shapes and depths, the earth does not travel about the sun in a circular path, and earth, sun and moon are not always in line. The result is that two tides are rarely the same for the same place twice running, and that tides dif?fer from each other enormously in both times and in amplitude.”

So, we instead built a machine of brass, steel and mahogany. And instead of trying to understand each of the variables, Lord Kelvin postulated “a very respectable number” of fictitious suns and moons in various positions over the earth, moving in unrealistically perfect circular orbits, to account for the known risings and fallings of the tide, averaging readings to remove unpredictable variations caused by weather and “freshets.” Knowing the outcomes, he would nudge a sun or moon’s position, or add a new sun or moon, in order to get the results to conform to what we know to be the actual tidal measurements. If adding sea serpents would have helped, presumably Lord Kelvin would have included them as well.

The first mechanical tide-predicting machines using these heuristics were made in England. In 1881, one was created in the United States that was used by the Coast and Geodetic Survey for twenty-seven years.

Then, in 1914, it was replaced by a 15,000-piece machine that took “account of thirty-seven factors or components of a tide” (I wish I knew what that means) and predicted the tide at any hour. It also printed out the information rather than requiring a human to transcribe it from dials. “Unlike the human brain, this one cannot make a mistake.”

This new model was more accurate, with greater temporal resolution. But it got that way by giving up on predicting the actual tide, which might vary because of the weather. We simply accept the unpredictability of what we shall for the moment call “reality.” That’s how we manage in a world governed by uniform laws operating on unpredictably complex systems.

It is also a model that uses the known major causes of average tides ― the gravitational effects of the sun and moon ― but that feels fine about fictionalizing the model until it provides realistic results. This makes the model incapable of being interrogated about the actual causes of the tide, although we can tinker with it to correct inaccuracies. In this there is a very rough analogy ― and some disanalogies ― with some instances of machine learning.

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