In honor of our 1 year anniversary, we here at 90ways have spent the last week talking about ourselves. And so, in honor of our ongoing dedication to science and scientific analysis, we are going to explore the biological basis of self obsession.

As with anything even vaguely psycho-social (or really, psycho-anti-social), the term narcissism comes from Freud. In the biological context, though, this term takes on a truly ironic meaning. The word narcissism comes from a character in Greek mythology, Narcissus, who was obsessed with his own reflection and thus spurned the sexual advances of the nymph Echo. He was punished by the Gods (turned into a flower) and never able to "consummate" his love in any way.

From a biological perspective, the last thing any self-obsessed young man wants to do is reject the advances of the beautiful (read fertile) Echo. To be narcissistic in the biological sense is, to some degree, to be nymphomaniacal (Is it a coincidence terms from Greek mythology continue to arise? I think not). About 10 years ago, a group of scientists led by W John Livesley suggested that 64% of narcissistic variability among people is accounted for by genetics. Scientific literature also differentiates between "cerebral" narcissists and "somatic" narcissists. The former gain positive feedback from academic or intellectual achievements, while the latter gain positive feedback from physical or sexual achievements (what they call "conquests").

Where do we here at 90ways fit into all this? Clearly we are of the cerebrally narcissistic order. The trickier question is that of our genetic inheritance. On some level, the Internet itself has yet to get past its own narcissism, and we are therefore doomed to it ourselves. The most popular method for navigating the Web, Google, exploits the Web's self-obsessed nature: one's appearance in the Google hierarchy depends solely how many other sites your can get to link to your site and not at all on your presence anywhere else in the world. How can one avoid this trap? How does a small, enterprising dailyodical grow beyond the narcissism of the World Wide Web? That remains to be seen.

Can anyone say print magazine?

Hypertext Markup Language -- HTML to its many, many friends -- has evolved like many languages: in fits and starts, over many years, and it now allows for a lot of variation. Misplace a slash or jury-rig a work around and it gets your drift anyway. Although this sort of chaos allows people to make mistakes and could perhaps be seen as friendly, it's really no way to write a programming language.

Because of HTML's history of leniency, the Internet now speaks several dialects of the same language. The first thing every web page communicates to a browser is in which variation of HTML it's written. The browser can speak all those dialects or, at least, it thinks it can. Since the rules have always been a bit fast and loose, each browser tends to interpret things a bit differently. Internet Explorer reads HTML one way to account for say, how Microsoft's Front Page writes it; Firefox reads it another way. The same page looks different on two different computers. The Internet is cheated of some of its universality and as long as there are competing, almost proprietary ways of writing HTML, it is more difficult to switch among hardware and browsers.

As the supervisory body for the growth of the World Wide Web, the ominously named W3C, seeks to codify HTML. In 2000, after releasing a number of transitional versions of HTML, the W3C officially recommended XHTML. By merging the power of XML with HTML, XHTML not only teases apart style and content, but also makes writing mark-up language a strict business. Which means that every web page follows the same rules, can be read in one universal way, and will look the same in every browser.

And obviously hasn't worked that way. For the already existing millions of sites written in varied and idiosyncratic HTML, browsers must make exceptions. And so long as there are exceptions, why re-write your site at great expense in XHTML? We were lucky. We came late and were able to write the code for 90ways.com in XHTML. We believe that following a more rigid set of rules benefits the digital commons and allows the Internet to get about the more important work of universal communication. Also, XHTML is written in all lowercase letters, which looks much more hip.

If 90ways exists in this intersphere to make intellectual rigor fun again, then the science house exists to do the same for science. Not fun like balloons or birthday cake, but fun like enjoyable and worthwhile. Science has a bad rap for being difficult to understand, but we are here to say that it doesn't have to be that way. Science starts with a disadvantage because it often requires such specific, non-instinctual rules to understand. You probably won't be able to figure our what the word nucleosome means (an arrangement of proteins around which DNA strands are wound) if it is not explained first. At the same time, even thoughd science writing for an audience of mostly non-scientists requires consistent explanation of "basic" concepts, its really just like telling a story. You wouldn't tell a story without introducing the characters, right? The goal is to make these stories engaging by instilling them with things that are more readily familiar like cultural references, jokes, and analogies. If all goes well, a reader stays with us through the whole piece, and comes out on the other end with a deeper understanding.

We want to spread the word of science, because its more important now then ever before. Not only has science made fantastic leaps in the past 50 years, but it now has unprecedented involvement in the daily lives of almost everyone on the planet. From Global Warming, to Genetically Modified Crops, to health treatment, it is vital that all are informed about science, to be able to make choices and to not just let the scientists decide for the rest of us (or in the case of global warming, let the non-scientists decide.) Not only that, but there is an incredible richness and joy to the scientific basis of the world. Did you realize that everyone's a trillionaire? (we humans have over a trillion cells in our bodies, all working together to make us work.) This is the goal of this house, to be a part of a campaign for science.

 

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