- SIMON: Are you having problems with Gmail? I have a feeling that people are sending me emails, but they aren't showing up in my inbox.
- AINSLEY: Yeah, your marriage proposal never got to me.
- SIMON: I didn't--
- AINSLEY: Shut your mouth.
You Talk to Me
Interviews and conversations that speak to us.
Simon talks to Ainsley about Gmail outages
Sarah (age 3) talks to her dad (a Chemistry professor) about "Why."
- SARAH: Daddy, were you in the shower?
- DAD: Yes, I was in the shower.
- SARAH: Why?
- DAD: I was dirty. The shower gets me clean.
- SARAH: Why?
- DAD: Why does the shower get me clean?
- SARAH: Yes.
- DAD: Because the water washes the dirt away when I use soap.
- SARAH: Why?
- DAD: Why do I use soap?
- SARAH: Yes.
- DAD: Because the soap grabs the dirt and lets the water wash it off.
- SARAH: Why?
- DAD: Why does the soap grab the dirt?
- SARAH: Yes.
- DAD: Because soap is a surfactant.
- SARAH: Why?
- DAD: Why is soap a surfactant?
- SARAH: Yes.
- DAD: That is an EXCELLENT question. Soap is a surfactant because it forms water-soluble micelles that trap the otherwise insoluble dirt and oil particles.
- SARAH: Why?
- DAD: Why does soap form micelles?
- SARAH: Yes.
- DAD: Soap molecules are long chains with a polar, hydrophilic head and a non-polar, hydrophobic tail. Can you say ‘hydrophilic’?
- SARAH: Aidrofawwic
- DAD: And can you say ‘hydrophobic’?
- SARAH: Aidrofawwic
- DAD: Excellent! The word ‘hydrophobic’ means that it avoids water.
- SARAH: Why?
- DAD: Why does it mean that?
- SARAH: Yes.
- DAD: It’s Greek! ‘Hydro’ means water and ‘phobic’ means ‘fear of’. ‘Phobos’ is fear. So ‘hydrophobic’ means ‘afraid of water’.
- SARAH: Like a monster?
- DAD: You mean, like being afraid of a monster?
- SARAH: Yes.
- DAD: A scary monster, sure. If you were afraid of a monster, a Greek person would say you were gorgophobic.
- (pause)
- SARAH: (rolls her eyes) I thought we were talking about soap.
- DAD: We are talking about soap.
- SARAH: Why?
- DAD: Why do the molecules have a hydrophilic head and a hydrophobic tail?
- SARAH: Yes.
- DAD: Because the C-O bonds in the head are highly polar, and the C-H bonds in the tail are effectively non-polar.
- SARAH: Why?
- DAD: Because while carbon and hydrogen have almost the same electronegativity, oxygen is far more electronegative, thereby polarizing the C-O bonds.
- SARAH: Why?
- DAD: Why is oxygen more electronegative than carbon and hydrogen?
- SARAH: Yes.
- DAD: That’s complicated. There are different answers to that question, depending on whether you’re talking about the Pauling or Mulliken electronegativity scales. The Pauling scale is based on homo- versus heteronuclear bond strength differences, while the Mulliken scale is based on the atomic properties of electron affinity and ionization energy. But it really all comes down to effective nuclear charge. The valence electrons in an oxygen atom have a lower energy than those of a carbon atom, and electrons shared between them are held more tightly to the oxygen, because electrons in an oxygen atom experience a greater nuclear charge and therefore a stronger attraction to the atomic nucleus! Cool, huh?
- SARAH: I don’t get it.
- DAD: That’s OK. Neither do most of my students.
- [originally posted here: http://www.scq.ubc.ca/a-dialogue-with-sarah-aged-3-in-which-it-is-shown-that-if-your-dad-is-a-chemistry-professor-asking-%E2%80%9Cwhy%E2%80%9D-can-be-dangerous-4/]
Richard Jones talk to Tom Corelis about Last.fm
- TOM CORELIS: Last.fm has a pretty large database of information that listeners have input in there through our scrobblers. What’s it like acting as proprietors of such a large database of listener’s habits?
- RICHARD JONES: Well, it’s great obviously, it’s what our service is built around and it’s a major asset. It’s great to have all that data that’s fairly unique as well – I can’t think of anyone who has that kind of database that uses it for the same things we do. It gives us a unique opportunity to do some quite funky things with the data. That’s one of the fun things about working at Last.fm as well: there’s so much knowledge and so many things that you can extract from that database. Obviously, we’re doing our best in doing a bunch of stuff with it; we’re always looking at it in different ways and always sort of thinking, “what happened if we tried this, or what happened if we tried that?” and we can actually go back to the raw data and runs some numbers and come up with some other ideas. So yeah, it’s great.
- TOM: What were the inspirations behind Last.fm and Audioscrobbler?
- RICHARD: There were originally two different projects, really. I was working at Audioscrobbler in 2002. Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel were working at Last.fm completely in isolation but [we were] only a few miles apart from each other. The inspiration behind Last.fm was that Felix and Martin were originally running an online record label where you could upload MP3s, but they had so much content that they didn’t know what to play people.
- [Last.fm] used to have a radio station that was just random, and so they wanted to help people find the right music to listen to, and Last.fm really grew out of that.
- At the same time, I was working on Audioscrobbler and my motivations were basically to be able to discover new music without having to do all the legwork of reading all the music magazines and keeping up to date with current affairs and so on, so I wanted to find a technical measure to discover new music – but I was also partly interested in the sort of personal statistics side of things.
- People would ask you, “Whats your favorite band?” It’s a hard to question to answer, first of all. Technically when people answer, what they say their favorite band is isn’t always what they listen to the most. It’s what they perceive to be their favorite based on what’s trendy or what some of those other influences facts are. It was quite interesting form me to see the difference between sort of perceived tastes and what you thought your favorite music was, compared to what you’re actually listening to the most. For most people, there is a discrepancy there that was interesting to find out.
- TOM: What kind of hardware powers the Last.fm main site? What about the Audioscrobbler database?
- RICHARD: I checked how many servers we’ve got, and we have about 350 to 400 powering the whole service. Obviously, we do a lot of different things: we have the radio side of things, the number crunching, and the web service. The hardware that we use is fairly standard stuff: it’s all Intel and AMD machines, all rack-mounted hardware. We’ve have some blades as well. There’s not really any exotic hardware.
- TOM: I’m told your site is a big customer of Sun Microsystems.
- RICHARD: We actually have a mix right now. A few years ago we were buying from a local supplier here, and over the years it became more important to us to get really power efficient equipment, because at the data centers in London and the UK power is a real premium; it was hard to get enough power. So we started looking around for machines that were more tailored to low-powered stuff.
- So we have a mix of different suppliers but right now we’re buying quite a lot from Sun. We just got some new low-power blades that we’ve put in to do web serving, and our main database – with which we use PostgreSQL – is also on Sun hardware, for example. So yeah, we’ve been getting some good stuff from them. Sun seems to make a good range of servers that are quite conscious on the power requirements, and are quite good about giving you the spec about how much power they’re going to draw.
- TOM: Out of curiosity, how much space does it take to store such a big database? I’d imagine that probably stretches into the hundreds of terabytes.
- RICHARD: We have the database itself, there’s the raw data, and then there’s all the mp3s as well, and then there’s all this additional data that we’ve computed over the top in kind of different layers. Yeah, it’s in the hundreds of terabytes, though I can’t give you an exact number.
- We actually do a lot of our storage and processing in Hadoop, which is a framework based on a paper that Google released on the same subject. So, that’s actually a distributed computing framework written in Java.
- TOM: How big of a challenge is it to normalize, or clean up, the data that Audioscrobbler receives from clients phoning home? I’ve noticed some pretty amazing corrections to metadata in my music collection over the years, just by paying attention to my “recently listened tracks”. A Japanese artist will, for example, show up in Last.fm printed in Japanese characters as opposed to whatever I had entered [in my MP3 file’s tags].
- RICHARD: I’d say that’s one of our biggest challenges, trying to stay on top of massive cleanliness problems. For everything we fix, another 10,000 people scrobble the song with the wrong spelling, so it’s a never-ending battle, really.
- But earlier this year –actually right at the start of this year -- we released a fingerprinting system that really helps us. So in the scrobbler software now, as well as scrobbling the names you claim, it actually reports an audio fingerprint. That’s actually helped us behind the scenes to match up the songs with all the same but have a different spelling. We’ve made a lot of progress this year, and although not a lot of it is visible yet, we think that next year we’re going to roll out a lot of these changes and actually fix even more problems. It is a huge challenge; the common numbers are something like 300 million different tracks that we’ve recorded (that’s in tons of different spellings), and about 20 million different artists – but obviously not all of those are valid. So that’s the challenge. We still haven’t quite answered the question of how many unique artists there really are -- there’s obviously much less than what we actually have because of all the misspellings. It’s an ongoing problem and it will never be solved, because there’s always new music being released as well and so you have to constantly keep updating the system. But we’ve made a lot of progress, and we’re working on that for next year as well, so we’ll continue to address it.
- TOM: As a last.fm user since 2005, whose play count is close to 20,000, I have always had equal parts apprehension and fascination with the “Recently listened tracks” feature. I’ve heard all kinds of stories about how that feature has been used or misused: bosses checking up on employees, ex-boy/girlfriends stalking former partners, and people checking to see if someone’s at their computer by checking if they played anything recently. I’ve noticed that you guys have played around with the timeliness of that data and when it’s available to the general public – but what’s Last.fm’s official position on this feature? Has it been a controversial inclusion?
- RICHARD: That feature has been there since the very first version, and it’s always been one of the most popular features that people actually talk about – because people actually use it and put it on their blog and keep it updated. So I think that, for the most part, people really love it.
- We did introduce, earlier this year, an option to hide all the real-time data: if you don’t want anyone to know if you are online right now, you have the option to disable all your real-time data which includes recently-listened tracks.
- Some people are a bit concerned about it, but part of our service is to broadcast your music tastes to the world. So it’s part of what we do, it’s quite a big part really: actually saying to the world, “this is what I am listening to right now,” and Last.fm wouldn’t be the same without it. But like I said, we do have the option to hide that data if you want to keep that a secret.
- Personally, I like it – it’s a great feature to have.
- We have some interesting stories over the years, actually, where people have used it [to help track down a stolen laptop.] We get emails once or twice a month saying, “my laptop was stolen, and I can see the person who stole it is playing music on my iTunes right now,” and then we have actually helped the police track down people’s laptops … from the scrobbling feed on their account.
- TOM: Was that in the U.S. or in the UK?
- RICHARD: Yes, it’s happened in the U.S. actually – it’s happening around the world but people in the U.S. have contacted us a few times.
- We don’t make a point of logging the IP address [in our data collection], but when [thefts have] happened we put a watch on the account, allowing us to collect the IP address the next time it’s used.
- TOM: Do you have any thoughts on the weaknesses of Audioscrobbler/Last.fm’s methods for figuring out various artist statistics? For example, Nine Inch Nails is now my “top artist” by a wide (230+) plays margin, simply because “Ghosts I-IV”, with its 36 tracks, turns out to be great background music for writing. Play that a few times and all of the sudden Nine Inch Nails now has twice the weight compared to other artists who put out a more conventional CD. Has Last.fm run into statistical anomalies with things like this?
- RICHARD: That’s a good question. We’ve had many people suggest different ways over the years; one of the common things that come up in our forums is that people say, “You know I’d really like to track my tastes based on the number of minutes I’ve listened instead of the number of songs I’ve played.”
- We’ve introduced a couple of different ways to deal with this kind of thing. One of the things we’ve done more recently is divide up your listening into different time periods now; in the past, you used to have just one chart which [contained] your overall top artists. But now we have weekly, monthly, three months, six months, twelve month [charts], so we don’t necessary look at what you listen to over all time.
- When it comes to recommendations and Last.fm radio, it takes into account a whole bunch of different factors as well. We try to figure out when it’s appropriate to play something – we don’t just look at the number of plays. We look at a bunch of other things as well: tags, time of day, the context, and things like that. So we hope it doesn’t skew the system too much.
- One of the other reasons we track the play count like that is because when Audioscrobbler and Last.fm were conceived, all the existing music recommendation services back then (which was early 2001, 2002) used to ask you to rate stuff with a 1-to-5 star system, or like, give it marks out of ten. That was actually a huge amount of effort to put in, and it didn’t seem to give very good results. You’d spend ages rating stuff and in the end it didn’t particularly reflect your tastes as well as it could have, so we think that just tracking the number of plays is the best balance to figure out your tastes.
- In the end, we want to recommend new music based on what you actually listen to, not just what you say you like, because that tends to give better results.
- TOM: Last.fm recently introduced a new site design that seemed to have met with a bit of a mixed reaction among long-time users. A lot of people felt the old design worked pretty well. Why the redesign?
- RICHARD: Since we’ve started, we added a lot of features to Last.fm. We are very feature driven. We reacted to what our users said they wanted – they would ask for an events feature so we added an events feature, for example – and we gradually added more and more things to the site. We felt that the site design and the layout had, over time, suffered because we’d added a lot to it without stopping to think and reorganizing it. What we did this year was sort of took a step back, and looked at all the features and the things we’d added to the site, and then rethinked how we’d lay them out and make them more accessible.
- We did a lot of usability studies, and we did a lot of tests with some of our existing users. We have some usability labs in Las Vegas that we used for that as well. So what we did was we ended up with a new design that we thought people would find easier to get around and easier to understand. But obviously a lot of our users knew the old design really well; it’s always hard to adjust and it was a bit of a shock to the system initially for a lot of people. Looking back now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think we would have spent more time introducing it to people and getting a bit more feedback.
- It would have been nice to have a much longer beta period, and the beta would have addressed a few of the other concerns that came up before we launched.
- We learned quite a lot from that experience, but I think on the whole it was for the better.
- TOM: What does last.fm have planned for the future?
- RICHARD: Ooh, well, some more of the same. We’re expanding onto a lot of different devices now; that’s been a bit of theme recently. We’re on the iPhone, we’re looking very seriously at an Android app, we’re on the Sonos, we’re on the Logitech squeezebox, and we’re on more devices than we can keep track of. We’re trying to make sure that wherever you listen to music, Last.fm is there, and you’ll be able to scrobble the songs that you listen to.
- One of the things we hear from users is that once they start using Last.fm, and once they start scrobbbling their music tastes, they feel like it’s a waste if they actually listen to music on a system where they can’t scrobble it. We’re trying to make sure that Last.fm is available everywhere.
- Of course we’re going to be putting a lot more effort into the website as well, looking at what features we can improve or add, and in general improvements as well. Also, recommendations are still very important to us, and we will be working on our recommendation system … we think that’s going to be a big thing in 2009, because obviously there’s going to be more choice. There’s more music being made all the time, so we need to stay on top of the game there.
- We think we’re in a really good position right now, we think we have the best music recommendation engine, but we also have to keep working hard to maintain that position.
- TOM: This is more of a personal request, but I have to admit that “paint it black” is one of my personal favorite features. The preference for this setting is not saved to my profile, though – it seems like I have to click that every time I log in. Any chance of having that permanently saved?
- RICHARD: [chuckle] It should be stored in a browser cookie, but I guess if you log out then it destroys the cookie. The “paint it black” thing is a popular feature; I guess I’ll pass that on to the web team and see what they have to say about it.
- I can’t promise anything about it now.
- [from http: //www.dailytech.com/Full+Transcript+of+Last+Weeks+Lastfm+Interview/article13836.htm]
Joe Bataan talks to Oliver Wang about Ghetto Records
- OLIVER: Tell me about Ghetto Records — you started it while you were still signed to Fania but not recording for them, right?
- JOE: Yeah. I started Ghetto Records to show that it could be done. It was out of rebellion, of course, like most of my life was. That's when I became a threat to the industry, especially [to] Morris Levy with Roulette Records and Jerry Masucci of Fania.
- OLIVER: What was the first album on Ghetto Records?
- JOE: Paul Ortiz [Y La Orquesta So]. I produced them and Paul Ortiz became a big hit, because the guy sounded like me. I had a big hit with Oritz: "Tender Love."
- OLIVER: This was sweet soul?
- JOE: Very, very, very romantic cha-cha ballads, yeah.
- OLIVER: How many albums did you end up overseeing on Ghetto?
- JOE: I think three: Ortiz, Papo Felix, and [Eddie] Lebron.
- OLIVER: As in the Lebron Brothers?
- JOE: No, totally separate.
- OLIVER: If you were still signed to Fania, how did you manage to get distribution for your records? Couldn't Masucci have shut you down?
- JOE: Yeah, he tried to put a wrench in it, but of course [the distributor] didn't care, as long as they could sell a record. I learned that in this business, if you're selling records, nobody cares, they'll take it. They'll probably get threatened by the other guy, but they'll sneak it, they'll take 100 [units] here, and 200 there.
- OLIVER: Where did you get the capital to get this done?
- JOE: I started the label with this guy who was a drug dealer, George Febo. Of course, I ain't ask where [the money] came from.
- OLIVER: How did you know Febo?
- JOE: Through the streets, like anybody else, you bump into one guy... We knew everybody in the streets. We knew the drug dealers, and the pimps... that was just a way of life, it was nothing strange about it.
- OLIVER: What was Febo's interest in starting a label?
- JOE: I think he just wanted popularity; his thing was just to be noticed, and a way to watch his money probably. Of course it backfired. When he got smart, he tried to ease me out of it...sort of bought me out. Like a lot of people, he took my ideas and decided to do it himself.
- OLIVER: Did he continue to release records on the label?
- JOE: Yeah, I think he had Candido, Richie Ray, and I think there were a couple other albums. He had some success, then it started folding. That's when he gave it back to me...it was sort of a setup because I didn't know the phones were tapped and all that. He was involved with a lot of drugs, and apparently he got hot and I think was under federal investigation. I wasn't involved [in the investigation], thank God.
- OLIVER: Did you end up releasing more on Ghetto?
- JOE: No, it was in total shambles financially. [Trying] to make ends meet without any capital was just too difficult.
- [read this interview in its entirety at http: //waxpoetics.com/content/?article=bataan]
Mo talks to Heather Perry about trepanation
- MO: How did you first hear about trepanation, and why did you decide to have it done?
- HEATHER PERRY: The first time I heard about trepanation was when I was a kiddie. I was really into Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and I remembered that Lennon had mentioned that he wanted it done. He had spoken to Bart Huges about it, and Bart had said that he didn't think Lennon's cranial sutures had healed anyway, because he was such a creative person. At the time, I just thought "Wow! That's a bit freaky" and didn't think much more about it. Then later on, I did a lot of acid, which kind of mashed my head up a bit. I remember getting these pressure or tension headaches, and thinking that John Lennon said he was going to do it to relieve the pressure. By the mid-nineties, I started to realize that it wasn't dangerous, and decided that I was going to it if I could find somebody to give me a hand. But that proved to be quite difficult, so then I let it drop for a while. One of my initial reasons for wanting to have it done was for more mental energy and clarity. I had been working in Cheltenham, and got made redundant. I bought a computer, got online, and eventually got in touch with Pete Halvorson in the States, who had trepanned himself in the early 1970s. I was going over for a wedding anyway, so we arranged to meet so he could help me with it.
- MO: Didn't Bart Huges decide to trepan himself after taking acid, because he believed that trepanation was the next step in expanding his consciousness?
- HEATHER: Yeah... certainly the first self-trepanners in the 60s and 70s - they all knew Bart - and me, we'd all done a lot of acid. I once found a website that theorized that taking too much acid encouraged people to trepan, which is just ridiculous. I just think that the kind of people who take acid are more experimental, so might be more likely to try that kind of thing if they're really into consciousness expansion. I never thought "Why don't I trepan myself?" while I was tripping. But actually, Amanda Fielding was tripping when she first did hers. She knows Pete, and had her first trepanation around the same time as Pete, in the early 70s. She paid a doctor to do it back then, and found another to re-do it a few years ago because the bone had grown back. I spoke to her on the phone just after I was trepanned. Bart's theory about trepanation wasn't as a result of a 'trip' though, he'd studied medicine.
- MO: So do you subscribe to Huges' theory that trepanation can lead to a higher level of consciousness by increasing the blood brain volume?
- HEATHER: Yes and no. It certainly does initially when you're trepanned. In fact, Pete now has doctors down in Mexico who will do the operation, and they take MRI scans pre- and post-trepanation. After the operation the ratio of brain blood volume to cerebrospinal fluid is increased. I'm not sure if that's true for everyone. Maybe it depends on the size of the hole. It's probably variable from person to person, depending on the person's unique physiology, and on whether the bone grows back. What Huges was saying was that it allows the heart beat to pulsate through the brain better. Funnily enough, I know a woman with an autistic son. Autistics have trouble with empathy don't they? When I told her about my trepanation, she said her son had hit himself on the head with a hammer and fractured his skull when he was younger, and that afterwards he was noticeably more empathetic. He stayed like that until the wound healed, so I guess the blood was moving to that part of the brain to heal it. Because she'd noticed that it had an effect on her son, she didn't think that I was barking mad. There have been a few other cases of people who have been accidentally trepanned and reported similar kinds of effects.
- MO: How exactly did you perform the trepanation?
- HEATHER: I used a hand trepan initially, but that wasn't proving to be terribly successful. Then there was a problem with the people who owned the property we were staying in, so we decided we'd have to just leave it. I wrapped my head up in a towel and we got out of there. A couple of days later, we had another go. We abandoned the hand trepan and got an electric drill instead. I injected myself with a local anesthetic and then slashed a big T-shaped incision in my scalp, right down to the bone. I was sat there in the bathroom feeling quite relaxed and they started with the drill. It didn't take that long at all, probably about 20 minutes. Eventually I could feel a lot of fluid moving around. Apparently, there was a bit too much fluid shifting around, because they'd gone a little bit too far and I was leaking some through the hole, but this wasn't especially dangerous as there are three layer of meninges before you get to the brain.
- MO: How did you feel immediately afterwards? Even though you didn't do the trepanation specifically to treat your depression and chronic fatigue, was there any improvement in your condition?
- HEATHER: Something definitely happened after the operation. There was a shifting around of fluids, and I felt an intense sense of peace and relaxation. It was a little bit trippy in that nice shiny sort of way. If I were to compare it to drugs it would be like acid mixed with some kind of opiate. It certainly seemed to help with mental clarity and overall well-being, and I remember that feeling lasting for quite a while. Afterwards I reduced my dose of antidepressants for a while. But I don't think it's long-lasting, because it's probably healed over. I don't know whether that's because I need a bigger hole or because of my under-active thyroid, which I was diagnosed with just recently. Sometimes, when I've been trying different thyroid medications, it kind of feels like I did post-trepanation so I'm wondering if it's not permanent for me because of my condition. I think we'll have to wait and see what those doctors Pete now has working on it say about it.
- MO: So are you thinking of re-opening the hole or making another one?
- HEATHER: I don't know. I mean surely it takes years for the bone to grow back over a half-inch hole, because Amanda's was smaller than half an inch I think and she's just had hers redone 30 years later. I'm not sure whether the bone's grown back over the hole in my skull. It's hard to tell really, because the skin grows back over it so you can't see it.
- MO: Do you advocate trepanation for everyone? Is it a miracle cure that can be used to treat any ailment?
- HEATHER: No, it's not something that I would advocate it for everyone. After all the press stuff I was contacted by various organizations, like the ME [Myalgic Encephalomyelitis] Society, asking me to go and give lectures, and there were people writing to me from all over the world asking me if they should have it done. I'd tell them that they should make their own decisions. It's just something that I decided to try, to see what it was like, so there's no reason why I should be counselling them on whether or not they should have it done too. It's definitely not a miracle cure either. Having said that, I'd be a bad one to ask about the overall long-term effects, because I think my thyroid condition makes it hard to really know. Sometimes when my thyroid meds are working OK, I think I'm feeling the same buzz that I was getting post-trepanation. Maybe for me, whilst the hole was still open, it was enough to kind of boost my brain up to feel that way all the time. My head is a bit of a random one to test it on anyway, particularly as I'd done a bit too much acid to begin with.
- MO: You say it's not dangerous, but neurologists say that there is a danger of infection and brain damage. According to the news stories, you had to be rushed to hospital.
- HEATHER: Actually, I wasn't rushed to hospital. We went to see Bill's doctor, who was a GP but he was into alternative kind of therapies. When he checked me over the following morning he said that we'd pierced the first meninges, but he didn't seem overly concerned. He told me to eat Jello and drink plenty of water to stay hydrated. I had a cough, so I was a bit like a whale - every time I coughed, some fluid would come out of the hole in my head. He gave me some medicine for that and also prescribed me some kind of Chinese herbal remedy. I think maybe we did it in the wrong place because there is an artery there somewhere which is quite close to the surface, so in retrospect maybe we should have done it in a slightly different place. I was aware of the risk of meningitis, but we were taking precautions, and everything was well sterilized in an autoclave. But it shouldn't be that dangerous really. The trepan I used was tapered, so that it would have been impossible for me to go into the brain.
- MO: How do you feel about the media coverage of your trepanation? Was it accurate?
- HEATHER: The media went mad. Apparently, back in Utah, where I was trepanned, they stared thinking that we had started up a cult, and were showing films in the local schools warning kids about it. It was just a totally hysterical reaction from everybody, especially the media. Pete had got this documentary crew [from the ABC 20/20 programme] because he's quite interested in promoting trepanation. He's got his website and he thinks everybody should have it done. The idea at the time was to try and make out that I did more of the operation, so that he wouldn't get busted. I started it off, then they [Pete and Bill] took over from there. That's what we wanted to get across in the documentary - that they weren't in any way imposing it on me. But the people at ABC were absolute bastards, because they set us up. Pete joked, off camera, that we'll call it a religious practice so that we couldn't get prosecuted, then the guy repeated that in the programme, which annoyed us a bit.
- Back in England, my ex-boyfriend sold the story to the News of the World, and he made it look really, really bad. The story made me look like a real idiot; it was on something like page 30, with the headline "Missing graduate lost in America leaking brain fluid". We'd talked to a solicitor about trying to stop it, but he said that there was nothing we could do. That story was just complete nonsense too. It completely misportrayed the whole thing, trying to make Pete look some a cult leader or something. In fact, I had contacted him, and dragged him into this unnecessary mess that he didn't need. Afterwards, he got arrested for practising medicine without a licence, and it cost him lots of lawyers' fees. But then he did encourage the publicity.
- I happened to have mentioned to one of the journalists that I had been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, and they thought that would make a good headline. It had nothing to do with my chronic fatigue or depression, specifically, but the papers decided to link those things up. The journalists thought it must have been out of desperation. That's why they reported that I was drilling a hole in my head as a last ditch attempt to feel better. They felt it had to be something really severe to make me do that. But it wasn't out of any kind of desperation at all. It was basically a consciousness expansion experiment.
- [from Neurophilosophy](http: //scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/08/lunch_with_heather_perry.php)
