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By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Rom Harré, Linacre College, Oxford and Georgetown University, Washington DC, is the author of Pavlov’s Dogs and Schrödinger’s Cat: Scenes from the Living Laboratory. In it he looks at the controversial role of living things – plant, animal, human – in scientific experimentation from a new perspective: setting aside moral reflection it examines the history of how and why living creatures have been used. In the original post below, Harré talks about ways in which living things has been experimented with – not necessarily on – throughout history.

Animals and plants have played a part in science since Aristotle began the study of embryology by opening one of a clutch of fertilised eggs each day until the last one was due to hatch. Recently reflections on the way living creatures and their remains have been used in research has centred on the important moral problems that this raises. Not much attention has been given to how organisms have played a part in science more broadly. I was struck by the fact that most discussions were centred on experiments on animals and little was said about experimenting with animals. The role of plants in science was largely ignored – after all few people believe that flowers feel. Nevertheless there is a surely a kind of moral depravity in laying waste a stand of plants.

Scientific research is as much a practical matter of managing equipment as it is sitting in one’s study building theories. What sort of equipment do scientists use? There are instruments that react to temperature, the presence of gases, the lapse of time, and so on. Equally important are pieces of apparatus that are used to study natural processes in isolation from the complexities of the real world. They are simplified versions of natural things and processes. In short they are models or analogies of the real thing. A calorimeter with a mixture of ice and salt is a kind of analogue of the ocean, and we can use to study what happens when the sea freezes,  but in comfort of home, so to speak.

People used animals and plants for certain very specific purposes. Roland Beschel estimated the age of glacier moraines by the diameter of lichens calibrated in the local churchyard, an organic clock. John Clarke constructed a model world for a group of voles out of an old swimming pool he had come across by accident as an apparatus for studying the effect of overcrowding on populations. Barry Marshall used his own stomach as an apparatus for testing the helicobacter theory of peptic ulcers.

Suspending our moral feelings we can follow Stephen Hales’ studies of blood pressure with experiments that could lead only to death of the animals he chose for this purpose.  In the imagination we can attend Pavlov’s lecture in which he demonstrated the nervic hypothesis of digestive control using a dog he had surgically modified for the purpose. Stephen Hales worked tirelessly to improve the lot of prison populations, and Ivan Pavlov built a monument to honour of the dogs that played an essential part in his researches. Marie Antoinette insisted that some animals be sent aloft in a balloon before human aeronauts were risked, just as dogs preceded people into space.

Sometimes the animals and plants are imaginary – such as Erwin Schrödinger’s famous cat. Sometimes the living apparatus is the site of an infamous

It's been a writing week and so I haven't had art to post. But this morning I played around with a brush pen. I haven't used one much before (kind of obvious, huh?) but really like the feel of it. Plus it gets me away from my natural inclination to cross-hatch everything. Good to try something new every now and then.

The leaves are starting to turn around here. Beautiful, really. It's overcast and damp today, however, and I can't help thinking the air smells kind of like... dog poop. Must be the humidity.

1. What goes up, must come down.
2. You never want to start anything with a headache.
3. New discoveries are always being made.
4. Vectors, vectors, vectors.
5. It doesn’t hurt once you get used to it. Some people even enjoy it.
6. One word: Friction.
7. Size isn’t everything. Sometimes the smaller ones take longer to do.
8. For every push there’s an equal and opposite shove.
9. Simple harmonic motion.
10. It’s always fun to experiment.

As Penguin's Digital Publisher, I've had any number of conversations over the last few years with traditional book editors where I've tried to convince them that we're in 'the content business' rather than 'the book business'. I've realised, as I eat my lunch alone, that in a company full of book-lovers these editors don't really want to think of themselves as content producers, however I dress it up in sexy new-media jargon. Or, perhaps, because of the new-media jargon.

It's quite hard to know what to expect from Bookcamp which is now only a few days away. Publishing conferences (this is not one of them) are often quite dry events - 'Supercharging Content Acquisition and Productivity for Publishers', anyone? - and a lot of the real action takes place outside the conference room in nearby corridors, bars and hotel lobbies. The only time I've seen someone demo something that they had actually made at a publishing conference, they got a standing ovation.

At Bookcamp we're hoping to see lots of things people have made or hear them discuss what they might like to make in the future. I'm looking forward to following discussions about how we get children hooked on reading, hearing about authors' fear of the internet and learning why everything on the internet is the opposite of how it is in print! And I'm excited to meet some new people who share an interest in and passion for books and stories and, yes, technology.

But most of all I'm looking forward to being surprised on the day. It's a day of bookish experimentation and we're going to find out what happens when a bunch of smart, creative, enthusiastic people get together to think about how we might save, repair, rethink and rebuild the book for the 21st century. I can't wait.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

PS Please note that because of space restrictions we can't accept any more attendees but we'll report back here soon after the event and perhaps even try our hand at custom, print-on-demand publishing to produce a record of the day.

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The Consolation of Philosophy, written by the sixth-century Roman politician Boethius while he awaited execution for treason, was the subject of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on New Year's Day. Suggesting that this book is better than any self-help manual you're likely to find cluttering up your local bookstore at this time of year, this Radio 4 programme drew a line from Plato and Aristotle via Boethius to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and, finally, Camus in an attempt to show how a rational, philosophical approach to the pain of existence could be at the least consoling and at best exhilarating.

This immediately brought to mind Jeff VanderMeer, who has been immersing himself in some of the great philosophical works of all time, served up in bite-sized chunks in Penguin's three Great Ideas series. He has set himself the task of reading and writing about one book each day for sixty days. He has just finished the first series and has taken a short three-day break to re-charge his intellectual batteries before embarking on phase two. Some might say that far from finding consolation in reading these works back to back, Jeff is actually creating for himself a world of pain, if not a world at the very least riddled with doubt and confusion. But that is to underestimate Jeff: a writer exhilarated by good writing.

Regardless of Jeff's state of mind, his readers, judging by their comments, have found this endeavour both entertaining and instructive (though Jeff, borrowing from Schopenhauer, has taken to calling these same readers his 'fellow sufferers'). The process itself is simple: Jeff posts every day about the book he read the night before, quoting a striking line, providing a brief summary, posing a question for his blog readers, and providing a long commentary on his experience of reading it.

And it is intriguing to see not only how these thinkers and philosophers speak to Jeff but also to each other through this experiment. Jeff has said that he often recognises the ghosts of ancestral writers in the words of those who came after them. While sometimes he wonders how different certain tracts might have been had others, yet to be written, come before. Would the Communist Manifesto, for example, have been any different, had Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which unreservedly placed humankind in the red-in-tooth-and-claw jungle of the animal kingdom, been published first?

His comparisons are also fascinating. I'd never have expected to see Swift and Ruskin directly compared to one another, but Jeff's delight in their use and mastery of the extended metaphor shows the keen eye of a fantasy writer at work. I also enjoyed this playful description of Orwell's writing: 'good prose is a window pane, but sometimes the pane is dirty or cracked, and sometimes it has the reflective qualities of a mirror, or even a hint of soft green fungus growing in the gutter between glass and wood.'

Perhaps most interesting of all is that Jeff finds many of the texts not only highly relevant today but also he suggests that often we have failed to heed the ideas or lessons contained within them. Anyone dispirited by the misadventures of the American government of George W Bush over the last eight years will find that Rousseau's The Social Contract still has a lot to teach, he tells us. While his assessment of Paine's Common Sense ends with this question: Has the United States ???in the flesh??? lived up to Paine???s faith in it as an idea?

This is the history of thought as dialogue, which underlines the title of this series of books and provides proof, if any were still required, that what Jeff is doing here is far from frivolous.

Here are links to the first series of Great Ideas as read by Jeff:

#1 - Seneca???s On the Shortness of Life
#2 - Marcus Aurelius??? Meditations
#3 - St Augustine???s Confessions of a Sinner
#4 - Thomas ?? Kempis??? The Inner Life
#5 - Machiavelli???s The Prince
#6 - Montaigne???s On Friendship
#7 - Swift???s A Tale of a Tub
#8 - Rousseau???s The Social Contract
#9 - Edward Gibbon???s The Christians and the Fall of Rome
#10 - Thomas Paine???s Common Sense
#11 - Mary Wollstonecraft???s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
#12 - William Hazlitt???s On the Pleasure of Hating
#13 - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels??? The Communist Manifesto
#14 - Arthur Schopenhauer???s On the Suffering of the World
#15 - John Ruskin???s On Art and Life
#16 - Charles Darwin???s On Natural Selection
#17 - Friedrich Nietzsche???s Why I am So Wise
#18 - Virginia Woolf???s A Room of One???s Own
#19 - Sigmund Freud???s Civilization and Its Discontents
#20 - George Orwell???s Why I Write

It's balm for an unhappy world.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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No one could ever accuse Jeff VanderMeer of being a slouch.

I became interested in the author's work in 2001 and since then he has written and had published three novels and four collections of stories (including the epic City of Saints and Madmen), edited alone or with an accomplice (often his wife Ann) six short-story collections, and contributed reams of fascinating material to internet discussion forums, his very popular blog Ecstatic Days, the Amazon Blog Omnivoracious, Bookslut and the Huffington Post. If I've left anything out – and I'll bet I have – it's entirely his fault and not mine. I just can't keep track of everything he's up to this or any other day. (I'm also beginning to suspect there's more than one of him: perhaps he's cloned himself – twice.)

However, there is one thing he's currently up to that I've just got to tell you about.

A couple of months ago, Jeff contacted me with an idea he'd had. He'd seen that Penguin had a new set of Great Ideas out (that makes three sets, sixty books in total) and he wanted to blog about them. Nice idea, I thought. They're good books, beautifully designed.

Then I read the rest of his email. He wanted to blog about EACH book in all three sets. Okay. Brave man to set himself such a task. But then it got ridiculous. He wanted to review one book per day for sixty days.

If anyone else had suggested this to me, I'd have suggested right back that they were an idiot.

Even Jeff, I've noticed, isn't claiming with one hundred per cent certainty that he can go the distance. But he's going to try. And he's started.

Yesterday, the first post went up: Seneca's On the Shortness of Life. And it's not a short post and it shows a great deal of understanding about just why certain classic works remain vital and interesting. Get over there and check it out. And go back each and every day for the next fifty-nine days. Lend him your support in this endeavour.

No slouching now.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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It's been an exciting and stressful couple of weeks in the world of books and frankly, I'm suffering from information overload. Last week three big US publishing companies announced redundancies or restructurings causing one commentator to ask whether book publishers should be compared with car companies or banks. Makes a change from us being compared to record companies, I suppose.

Despite, or perhaps because of The Fear, the last week has also seen a spate of interesting digital announcements from the big publishers. Our sister company in the US have announced the launch of Penguin2.0, a suite of forward-looking applications. Over here HarperCollins have announced that they are putting ebooks on the Nintendo DS and Macmillan are doing the same on the iPhone via the Stanza reader. All nice interesting work with the general concept of giving the customers as much choice as possible in how and when they access books, and on what devices.

So rather than announce any bookish experimentation of our own (for now!), we're going to sponsor a day of bookish experimentation instead and host what we are calling Bookcamp in the middle of January. Our plan is for this to be a day of talking and doing - examining the role of the book as an object and as a delivery mechanism for content.  We're inviting authors, typographers, cover designers, printers, technologists, retailers, literary agents, publishers and geeks to come along and consider if and how technology can transform and perhaps improve on The Book. Will print on demand mean the end of the bookshop? Will ebook technology allow everyone to be their own publisher? Will printed books go the way of vinyl and become collectors objects? Are games the new novels? And, most importantly, what is the use of a book without pictures and conversations?

To help us make this a day of making and building as well as talking, we've roped in Russell Davies and James Bridle to help plan and execute and we've invited a bunch of excellent people who we hope will have fun taking apart and rebuilding the book - and perhaps the book business - for the 21st century. There are still a few spaces spare, so if you think that you might have something to contribute, share or show send us an email and let us know what you've got in mind.

We'll cover the event on this blog and on twitter in the new year - now at least we've got something to look forward to after the winter break!

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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Most writers out there know what Nanowrimo is, or have at least heard this strange word bandied about in blogs and forums. For everyone else, Nanowrimo is basically a collective decision with writers all over the world to complete a novel (or at least 50,000 words) in a month. The month of November in fact, which is 12 days away. There are two sides to the Nano debate--the avid, Nano is the

I was visiting my filing cabinet today, looking for an early draft of a manuscript as I set out on revisions again. When I couldn't find it where I'd thought I'd put it, I ended up wading deeper and deeper into the murky depths of my dead files. Deep in the back of the cabinet, I rediscovered old stories that I wrote way back when--you know, the ones begging to be written that first called us to

This strange looking vine with huge leaves popped up in our little side garden at the beginning of summer. I decided to leave it, figuring it was some sort of seed that sprouted from the undercooked compost I'd put down. And besides, by mid to end summer the roses usually looked fairly ratty, so at least it would add some green. But what was this mystery vine? We soon had a clue....



















Could it be a Butternut Squash?















It was! It was a Butternut Squash! So we cooked it up. Yum! We should have let it ripen a bit more on the vine, but it was delicious, anyway.















We've also been growing cucumbers, zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes and peppers. This was our first year experimenting with container vegetables. Not everything has been a bountiful success, but we did okay, considering the strange weather. (At least we kept the deer away!) We'll experiment some more next year.















It feels good to play with a garden, or a story, or a piece of art... Read the rest of this post

As I mentioned in my last post, I had imposed an extremely short deadline for a first edit on my book, In Between, determined to get it off my hard drive and into Becca's hot little hands by the end of the week. Because I am a notorious fiddler, editing and revising is unbelievably painful and slow for me. My solution--a 10 minute time limit per chapter. And the verdict? High hopes, yes. Good

No, I don’t mean the musical kind, I mean the cannot-leave-this-para-alone-and-move-on kind. Seriously, this is so me—I’m like the poster child for fiddling. I can start revising a first draft and boom, look up two hours later to see I’m still on the first page. *screams* I swear, some days I long for the past when I knew squat about good writing and thought revision had more to do about

This is a short film I directed for the King Of Kong DVD.




I don't know if you're familiar with this movie, but it is great. It's an epic battle of good and evil. It's about Steve Wiebe vs. Billy Mitchell for the highest score on Donkey Kong. The movie is really more about the players.

After watching this movie, I think that Weibe deserves the title, BUT I also think the Billy Mitchell is an AMAZING gamer! One of the top of our lifetime. He's portrayed as the villian, but he is still deserves the recognition for his gaming feats. Just to put it into perspective, there probably wouldn't even be competative arcade gaming if it wasn't for Billy Mitchell.

Jon felt that the movie needed some kind of historical perspective of the actual Donkey Kong game, so the short was born.

I sure didn't do this short alone! We were under the gun for this one. We turned it around in 2 weeks--and that's all after hours work! It was a huge labor of love for everyone that worked on it at I Am 8bit Studios:

Written and Produced by Jon M. Gibson
Told by Eric Bauza
Music by 8 Bit Weapon
Designed by Steve Lambe and I
Animated by Tony Mora and I
After Effects by Matt Gadbois

Here's my animatic, just be warned, the whole thing is rough and on yellow post-its.



Every short starts with what is called a color script. This is a way to keep and overview of the whole film's color. It's a way to plan out the intensity and relationships of all the colors in all the scenes in order. Color is SUPER imporant. It basically dictates the emotions in the film--all following the story that is.

"Shiggy" Shigeru Miyamoto. I hope I've done him proud!


I loved designing DK. I must say that I despise the new DK design--ruined by RARE.


Here's some of Steve's Nintendo businessmen:

Thanks again everyone for such a fine job, and especially New Line for paying for it!

Here's a plumber and a pipe. He doesn't know its a video game. He's just trying to do his job. What will happen Next?

P

Mario's Breakfast
Originally uploaded by Alan Defibaugh.

Mario here has made it to L.A.! He's featured in:

I am 8-bit: Version 2.007
April 17 - May 12, 2007

OPENING NIGHT EXTRAVAGANZA!!! (No admission, Free to all!)
TUESDAY, APRIL 17 from 7 to 11 p.m.

Over 200 original pieces of art from over 100 artists

Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight
7020 Melrose Ave.
Los Angeles , CA 90038

Go check it out tonight if you live local!

Just so happens I made this for the IGN "I am 8-bit" call for entries. Enjoy!