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Trevor Paglen - From
“Apple” to “Anomaly”
traces lines of algorithmic
logic through 30,000
images to reveal how AI
judges our world. From
26 September in the
Curve gallery at London’s
Barbican Centre.Read
The Canary and the
Hammer (Mack) tells the
troubled global history
of gold. Prompted by the
financial crisis of 2008,
British artist Lisa Barnard
spent four years and
crossed four continents
to assemble these
images and documents.Play
Space Company
Simulator by studio
Intermarum and
All in! Games puts
you in charge of what
(if you are smart) will
grow into a massive
space corporation,
launching satellites
and stations into orbit.Join Vivian Li to hear about the power of mini organs
at New Scientist Live on 10 October
newscientistlive.comback on my heels was the idea that
a cubic millimetre of your cerebral
cortex – about the size of a grain
of sand – has enough storage
capacity to contain all the movies
ever made, including trailers. The
real problem I had was keeping
the head and brain from being the
whole book, because everything
about you that is really fascinating
is from the neck up.
Isn’t one of your children a doctor?
Did that influence you?
My eldest son was in medical
school for years and years. When
he’d come home at the weekends,
if he and I went to the pub, he
would tell me really excitedly
about some technical stuff,
electrolytes or ribosomes. I was
kind of captivated, enchanted
really, by how taken he was by
the human body.
But I came to realise that
although he came to know
everything you need to know
in order to practise medicine,
he didn’t know a lot about things
like why Alzheimer’s disease is
called that. I realised that there
was an awful lot about the body
that even he didn’t know. So that
got me interested in it as well.
Did researching the book take
you to interesting places?
Yes, my doctor son is attached
to Queen’s Medical Centre in
Nottingham, and is friends
with Ben Ollivere, a professor
and orthopaedic surgeon
there. He invited me to visit the
dissecting room and to spend
time with people who took me
through the human body – in
the most literal sense.
right direction with anything.
Seriously, I don’t think the world
has ever been as crazy and as
unprepared for the future as it
is right now.
One thing that particularly
disturbs me is how untrusted
scientists have become. I grew
up in a world in which anybody
who had a lab coat on was
believed automatically. Maybe
we were a bit naive, but we’ve
gone in the other direction and
a lot of people are automatically
suspicious of almost anything
scientists tell them.
I don’t understand why,
when it’s so obviously sensible
to at least cautiously accept, say,
global warming as something
we need to do something about.
The consequences are so bad
if we don’t – you’re not going
to make the world a worse place
if you’re wrong. I struggle not
to be too depressive about the
world now.What do you want to do next?
More science books?
What I’m going to do next is just
nothing. The greatest luxury is
to go somewhere and not have
to write about it. ❚Scans allow us to delve into the
head and brain, which Bryson
believes are the most fascinating
parts of the body
How did you find that?
I’d never done anything like
that before and wasn’t sure how
I would respond. I didn’t know
whether it would make me queasy.
Initially it did, very slightly. But
you become captivated by what
they’re teaching you.
The thing that I will always
remember is how completely
different the body is. An
opened-up human body, a cadaver
drained of all life and colour, is just
a slab of meat – not very different
from your Christmas turkey.
To me that was all the more
marvellous, to think that these
innards I’m looking at were until
recently this person who used to
sit up, laugh, smile, have dreams
and fall in love and do all of these
things. And all that did it was
this flesh, this kind of mass of
undifferentiated organs. The body
gets described in terms of being a
machine – it’s nothing like that. It’s
just tissue, and yet, miraculously,
look what it does.A few years ago, you were very
involved in a UK campaign to clean
up the countryside. Are things
better now?
I don’t think we’re going in the