Harvard University Press Blog

Cicadas Cicadas Cicadas

It’s just about cicada time here on the East Coast, when millions (billions?) of these strange, noisy creatures will make their way up through the dirt, looking for love. They’ve been waiting down there in wingless nymph form, feeding on the dilute sap of plant roots while they undergo the longest juvenile developmental period of any insect. When the ground reaches 64 degrees and they emerge, outnumbering humans hundreds-to-one and nearly deafening us for our troubles, well, it’s gonna get a bit freaky. Not for nothing did the colonists at Plymouth in 1634 dub them locusts, despite little resemblance to the Biblical grasshoppers.

As entomologist May Berenbaum assures, though, there’s nothing to worry about. “It’s not like these hordes of cicadas suck blood or zombify people,” she says. It’s just such mistaken attribution of outlandish abilities that inspired Berenbaum’s “modern bestiary,” The Earwig’s Tail. She’d come to realize, she writes in the book’s Preface, that “the majority of the most bandied-about insect facts familiar to the general public aren’t facts at all.” In The Earwig’s Tail she takes on twenty-six of “the most firmly entrenched modern mythical insects,” and, in many cases, leaves us with an even more fantastic truth.

When she gets to cicadas, Berenbaum turns to politics and Washington D.C., where the emergence of “Brood X” (the various populations of cicadas run on different schedules and are given roman numeral names) coincides with a presidential election every sixty-eight years, most recently in 2004.

Here’s Berenbaum:

First to take metaphorical advantage of the infestation was the Republican National Committee. On May 14, 2004, at the height of the emergence, 700,000 registered Republicans received an email attachment from the Republican National Committee. A narrator intoned, “Every 17 years, cicadas emerge, morph out of their shell, and change their appearance. The shells they leave behind are the only evidence they were here. Like a cicada, Senator Kerry would like to shed his Senate career and morph into a fiscal conservative, a centrist Democrat opposed to taxes, strong on defense . . . But, he leaves his record behind . . . when the cicadas emerge, they make a lot of noise. But they always revert to form, before disappearing again.” The voiceover accompanies a time-lapse film of a cicada eclosing and expanding its wings and ends with an animated cicada morphing into John Kerry.

The Kerry campaign’s retort? “Maybe, if given another 17 years, President Bush could create a job in Ohio.” Cicada burn.

Cicadas also had a cameo in presidential politics in 1902, Berenbaum reports, when President Theodore Roosevelt “was practically drowned out while trying to give a Memorial Day speech defending national policy to impose ‘orderly freedom’ in the Philippines.” The experience of inundation seems not to have adversely affected his feelings on colonialism.

We’ll wait to see what metaphors are made of this coming return.

Stop Motion Environmental Humanism

Environmental Humanities, an open-access journal launched in November 2012, aims to “invigorate current interdisciplinary research on the environment” by bringing together scholarship in the humanities and the natural and social sciences.

Last fall, in preparation for the launch, the journal’s Editorial Board was invited to respond to the following “short provocation”:

We now often hear a lot about post-environmentalism and post-humanism as two parts of a broader critique of notions of “the environment,” “the human,” and indeed the humanities themselves. In this context, is there something a bit perverse about embracing the environmental humanities? What value is there in this trans-paradigm scholarship? What are the perils?

HUP author Timothy Morton (The Ecological Thought and Ecology Without Nature) and his Rice University colleague Cary Wolfe produced the following video response. Morton’s is the British voice, Wolfe’s is the other, and Allan Whiskersworth is The Cat.

 

Volume 1 of Environmental Humanities, which includes a piece from Morton, is available online now.

Reducing Land to Plantation, Human Being to Hand

Most of the cotton grown in the Mississippi Valley in the 19th century was the hybrid strain Gossypium barbadense, otherwise known as “Petit Gulf.” The strain was patented in 1820 and prized for its “pickability,” as Walter Johnson explains in River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, new this week. Petit Gulf’s singular dominance in the region produced what Johnson characterizes as a “radical simplification” of both nature and man: “the reduction of landscape to cotton plantation and of human being to ‘hand.’ ”

These two simplifications were intimately linked, but their limits differed. “Cotton mono-cropping,” writes Johnson, “stripped the land of vegetation, leached out its fertility, and rendered one of the richest agricultural regions of the earth dependent on upriver trade for food.” The land, then, could become what was made of it, at least for a time. Human beings, though, could not so readily be reduced, as scholars have long been helping us to see.

And yet, according to Johnson, some of the undeniably important work on slave subjectivity has by now perhaps distanced us from the facts of life in the Cotton Kingdom. From River of Dark Dreams:

The history of the enslaved people who toiled in those fields has generally been approached through durable abstractions: “the master-slave relationship,” “white supremacy,” “resistance,” “accommodation,” “agency.” Each category has been indispensable to understanding slavery; together they have made it possible to see things that otherwise would have been missed. Increasingly, however, these categories have become unmoored from the historical experience they were intended to represent. The question of “agency” has often been framed quite abstractly—counterpoised against “power” as if both terms were arrayed at the ends of some sort of sliding scale, an increase in one meaning a corresponding decrease in the other. But “agency,” like “power,” is historically conditioned: it takes specific forms at specific times and places; it is thick with the material givenness of a moment in time. “Agency” is less a simple opposite of “power” than its unfinished relief—a dynamic three-dimensional reflection. The history of Gossypium barbadense suggests that beneath the abstractions lies a history of bare-life processes and material exchanges so basic that they have escaped the attention of countless historians of slavery. The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit.

While it is easy to lose sight of the elementally human character of labor—even that of forced labor—in light of the salutary political effect of labeling slavery “inhuman,” it is important to recognize that slaves’ humanity was not restricted to a zone of “agency” or “culture” outside their work. When slaves went into the field, they took with them social connections and affective ties. The labor process flowed through them, encompassed them, was interrupted and redefined by them. Slaves worked alongside people they knew, people they had raised, and people they would bury. They talked, they sang, they laughed, they suffered, they remembered their ancestors and their God, the rhythms of their lives working through and over those of their work. We cannot any more separate slaves’ labor from their humanity than we can separate the ability of a human hand to pick cotton from its ability to caress the cheek of a crying child, the aching of a stooped back in the field from the arc of a body bent in supplication, the voice that called time for the hoes from that which told a story that was centuries old.

Johnson’s first book, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, did a great deal to document the inseparability of hand from humanity. Soul by Soul, published in 1999, is one of the 100 significant books we’ve chosen to highlight from our first 100 years, and over at our centennial site you can read an excerpt detailing how slaves could sometimes “create themselves in the slave market,” braving great risk to shape their own sale.

Market-Based Disaster Justice

The devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy has shone floodlights on the workings of disaster relief—which many see as one of government’s core functions—as well as on Mitt Romney’s previously-stated desire to defund FEMA and privatize its functions. With less than a week to go before the American presidential election, it’s important to imagine what market-based disaster protection and relief would look like. Below, in a brief excerpt from Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World, Rob Verchick explains why such an approach would never appropriately address the inequalities that disasters always exacerbate.

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According to the market-based approach, hazard protection should be allocated the same way other goods and services are allocated in the marketplace. Protection should follow explicit or implicit market signals. The current resurgence in America of the market-based approach might accurately be said to have begun when President Ronald Reagan proclaimed in his first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”

Reagan’s approach to market solutions is grounded in an intellectual movement called neoliberalism, a revived form of traditional liberalism that champions free markets and individual liberty in an economy gone global. As geographer David Harvey puts it, “[n]eoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.” Some may believe that neoliberalism as a guiding principle is waning in the Obama administration. This is not entirely so. While it is true that President Obama and, perhaps, the public have embraced a more optimistic view of government and its role in American life, current economic forces will ensure that American law and international law continue to follow a market approach to solving big problems. Thus the goal, from a disaster justice perspective, is not to reverse the market approach (as it can’t be done) but to make space within the neoliberal framework for a vocabulary of justice. In this area, the Obama administration may prove a helpful ally.

From the neoliberal model, three relevant corollaries follow. First, neoliberal policy seeks the efficient allocation of resources. “Efficient,” here means optimizing aggregate social welfare in a context of limited political and material resources. “Efficient” does not always mean “fair,” and for this reason free-market ideology is sometimes described as “amoral.” Second, free markets are much better at allocating resources than are governments or other organized institutions. This is what Reagan meant by “Government is the problem.” Third, neoliberalism promotes an ethic—some would say “virtue”—of self-sufficiency and the stoic acceptance of unfortunate consequences. Individuals are expected to assume the risk of participating in the market, and to adapt quickly to changing landscapes. “Instances of inequality and glaring social injustice,” in this view, “are morally acceptable, at least to the degree in which they could be seen as the result of freely made decisions.” Indeed, as neoliberal philosopher Robert Nozick has argued, efforts to redistribute wealth in order to rehabilitate economic losers creates its own injustice by treating affluent individuals as a “means” to enhance the “ends” of those who are less affluent.

Can Ecotourism Save the Great Apes?

Craig Stanford is Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology and Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California. In Planet Without Apes, which we’ll publish next month, he details the very real threat of extinction facing the great apes, and urges us to consider the consequences of failing to reverse this course. In the post below, Stanford explains the complex role that ecotourism can play in protecting the great apes.

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Recently, the latest of a decades-long series of incursions by rebel militias into the Virunga Volcanoes of eastern Africa–the last stronghold of the mountain gorilla–led to a bizarre scenario. The rebels invaded a large forest tract in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, driving out the park rangers and conservationists who toil to protect the gorillas and run a thriving ecotourism program. This sort of chaos has happened many times before. But this time the rebels proceeded to set up their own version of ecotourism, and began offering gorilla treks to unsuspecting (or uncaring) foreign tourists. They offered a discounted rate over the actual ecotourism program, charging $350 to hike out to a gorilla group and spend a thrilling hour sitting with the giant apes. The guerillas were now exploiting the gorillas.

Such bizarre ironies are not new to the mountain gorilla conservation effort, which has been beset with challenges over the past forty years that are often stranger than fiction. The gorillas’ range straddles the border of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The border is poorly marked but well-known to local people and park rangers, who know exactly where one can walk safely without fear of being attacked, blown up by a land mine, or murdered by rebels who live in relative safety on the other side. The gorillas, of course, know no such borders, and they cross and recross at will. Their wanderings through mountain meadows in search of the foliage and bamboo that make up their diet take them out of protected areas and into no-man’s land. This is an enormous challenge for ecotourism, as guides must navigate not only the apes’ world of steep mountain slopes and rainy weather to take their tour group to the animals; they must also navigate the human milieu of rebels and bandits who enter the forest in search of affluent and vulnerable western tourists.

Mountain gorillas were made famous by the late Dian Fossey, who pioneered the study of this largest of the world’s primates. Her zeal in protecting her study site at Karisoke, which sits on the Rwandan side of the border, eventually led her down a path of counter-productive tactics that included threatening the local populace who were threatening her gorillas. After her death in 1985 (at the hands of either an angry poacher or an ex-employee, depending on one’s theory of the murder), her former graduate students approached the government of Rwanda about a new strategy for protecting the gorillas that would rely more on carrots than sticks. A plan was developed to initiate visits to the gorilla groups by tourists, who would pay a hefty fee for such an intimate wildlife encounter. Most of the fee would go to the government, but a small portion of each tourist permit fee would build clinics and schools, improving the quality of life for villagers who otherwise relied on small-scale farming, and who illegally cut firewood and poached wildlife from the forest. The forest and its inhabitants were suddenly worth more alive than dead. Gorilla ecotourism was born.

The mountain gorilla, Earth's largest primate. (photo by Craig Stanford)

Today, tourists can trek to gorilla groups in all three countries that straddle the border. The favored site varies from decade to decade depending on instability in the region, since infrastructure disappears and the place can become downright dangerous during times of political turmoil. During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, only one gorilla was killed even as nearly a million people were brutally murdered. But parts of the forest at Karisoke were left scattered with land mines, and ecotourism understandably fell to a trickle for several years. Meanwhile, Uganda became a major player in the gorilla tourism business, with more and more of the gorilla groups in nearby Bwindi Impenetrable National Park habituated to tourists. Ecotourism was developing rapidly in Bwindi when, in early 1999, a rebel attack on the tourism camp at Buhoma was carried out by Rwandan rebels who launched their incursion from neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. Western tourists were kidnapped and marched back toward the Congo border. Some were released; others were murdered. Ecotourism in Bwindi ended abruptly, only to resume when the Ugandan military established a major presence in the camp.

Gorilla ecotourism is and will always be fragile. Years of careful planning can be ruined by a single criminal act, or by the outbreak of another civil war. For local people, the disruption of tourism means a halt in essential income. But despite all the setbacks and challenges, it has been the savior for at least this one very endangered cousin of our species.

 

"The Sea Was Not Immortal"

From W. Jeffrey Bolster’s The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, new this month:

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For centuries, from Cape Cod to Newfoundland the return of fish, birds, and marine mammals—each in their season—sparked quiet rejoicing in fishing towns and outport villages. Many of those communities had few economic alternatives to harvesting the sea, and fishing folk chose to believe that the sea would provide forever. That belief dovetailed with the attitude of naturalists and scientists, who often insisted, at least until the mid-twentieth century, that the sea was eternal and unchanging, even though almost every generation of harvesters noted evidence to the contrary and raised disturbing questions about the perpetuity of the stocks on which they relied. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, fishermen’s hard-won knowledge all too often disappeared as new technologies increased catches. Bumper catches obliterated memories of how the same number of men, with the same gear, fishing in the same place, had been catching fewer fish as time passed—an indicator that stocks were diminishing. Shoreside naturalists’ insistence that the sea was eternal and fishermen’s periodic loss of vernacular knowledge that stocks were declining reinforced each other. Combined, they camouflaged one of the northwest Atlantic’s great untold sea stories, a true tale of changes in the sea.

An irony sharp as a sculpin’s spines pervades that story. No profession has ever placed more emphasis on avoiding disaster than seafaring. Mariners instinctively anticipated danger, maintained a sharp lookout, and constantly scanned their surroundings for indication of the slightest problem. To relax vigilance was to court catastrophe. Yet disaster struck for both fish and fishermen, periodically in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, then universally at the end of the twentieth century, in part because neither fishers nor scientists nor policymakers chose to believe that what they were seeing was happening. The sea was not immortal.

 

Slow Violence and Our Better Angels

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that, despite the violence saturating our media, we are actually living in a time of unprecedented peace for humanity. We have inner motives towards violence, he explains, but also towards peacefulness, and society has been arranging itself in ways that allow the latter to prevail more and more often. The book has been one of this fall’s biggest, and its surprising argument has led it to be reviewed and debated widely.

Judging by the FAQ posted to Pinker’s website, a common concern among people engaging with The Better Angels of Our Nature is Pinker’s definition of violence. His explanation:

I use the term in its standard sense, more or less the one you’d find in a dictionary (such as The American Heritage Dictionary Fifth Edition: “Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.”) In particular, I focus on violence against sentient beings: homicide, assault, rape, robbery, and kidnapping, whether committed by individuals, groups, or institutions. Violence by institutions naturally includes war, genocide, corporal and capital punishment, and deliberate famines.

Another refrain among readers: what about more abstract forms of violence, like economic or environmental? Pinker responds:

The fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It’s not that these aren’t bad things, but you can’t write a coherent book on the topic of “bad things.”

To which we say: fair enough. And yet some of the critique of Pinker’s book has put us in mind of Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, a book we published earlier this year. Nixon’s book is driven by his conviction that we need to politically, imaginatively, and theoretically “rethink” what he calls “slow violence,” a class of violence that doesn’t align with what Pinker refers to as the “standard sense.” From Nixon’s book:

By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.

Pinker’s violence is one dependent on intention to do harm, and one may argue that an absence of intention distinguishes Nixon’s slow violence from Pinker’s more traditionally understood forms. But Nixon begins his book by quoting from a confidential World Bank memo written in 1991 by Larry Summers that indicates that we’d be mistaken to assume that these slower forms of violence are free from malevolence:

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. . . . I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles. . . . Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?

Insects and Delicacy

Everyone knows you have to be delicate with insects. Most of us have probably made the mistake of handling the wings of butterflies or moths, accidentally removing some of their “dust,” which is actually comprised of the scales that they need to fly. Who hasn’t, as a child, been a little too careless and mauled a ladybug? Or, among those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in regions they populate, let curiosity get the better of us when handling a lightning bug or firefly? You have to be delicate with insects.

Well, here’s some insect news requiring a slightly different brand of delicacy. As Science put it in a story last week: “Tiny Bug Makes a Riot With Its Privates.” Or, in the words of the BBC: “‘Singing penis’ sets noise record for water insect.”

That’s right. From the BBC story:

Scientists from France and Scotland recorded the aquatic animal “singing” at up to 99.2 decibels, the equivalent of listening to a loud orchestra play while sitting in the front row.

The insect makes the sound by rubbing its penis against its abdomen in a process known as “stridulation”.

Researchers say the song is a courtship display performed to attract a mate.

On average, the songs of M. scholtzi reached 78.9 decibels, comparable to a passing freight train.

First off, let’s note that “stridulation” is not actually defined as “rubbing genitalia against belly.” Mark Denny and Alan McFadzean explain in their book Engineering Animals: How Life Works, in a chapter on animal communication:

Sound is just a vibration: to make it you have to move things. Most insects and other noisy arthropods achieve this by stridulation—rubbing one body part against another. Generally this action involves a body part that acts as a file and another that acts as a pick: ideally the pick is connected to some sort of resonant structure, such as wing panels. The file is dragged across the pick (or vice-versa) and a noise is generated.

So this bug, the Micronecta scholtzi, a freshwater insect that measures just 2mm, is stridulating its way to the rumble of a freight train. The scientists who made the discovery say that if body size is taken into account then the M. scholtzi are the loudest animals on earth. The fact that the bug makes this call underwater explains why scientists are just now noting its extraordinary volume, as 99% of the sound is lost when transferring from water to air.

In his recent book Cricket Radio: Tuning In the Night-Singing Insects, John Himmelman explains everything about the calling of crickets and katydids, the singing insects we’re likely most familiar with. Crickets and katydids stridulate with their legs, a more common variation than is practiced by the M. scholtzi. In crickets the file and pick, or scraper, are together referred to as the “stridulary organ,” but in the case of the M. scholtzi that begins to sound like a bit of a euphemism. Himmelman also explains that some grasshoppers engage in a different kind of noisemaking, known as “crepitation,” in which the rapid opening of the hind wings creates a crackling sound.

We built a web page that lets you hear the different calls of some of Himmelman’s crickets. Have a listen to them, and then go hear what the M. scholtzi sounds like, courtesy of the BBC. It’s sort of like a maraca. Not so delicate after all.

Climate Change Meets the Little Mermaid

Robert Verchick, author of Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World, sent us the following report from Copenhagen, where rising sea levels are soon to threaten many of the city’s most cherished landmarks.

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Denmark’s famed “Little Harbor Lady,” or in English, “Little Mermaid,” has had her share of antics and perils. She’s been photographed by millions in Copenhagen’s harbor, carted off and shown at the 2010 World’s Fair in Shanghai, beheaded (several times), dynamited, splashed with pink paint, and enveloped in a burqa. An environmental nerd for all occasions, I look at her longing face and wonder, How long before the rising sea swallows her up? Bolted to that rock in the sea, a shaft of concrete now inserted into her neck, what will she do? Or, for that, matter, what about the thousands of others who call coastal Copenhagen home? Is anyone thinking about this?

Many experts expect the world’s seas to rise somewhere between 1 to 1.5 meters this century, depending on location (and, of course, it could be more). Add to this a potential for stronger storms and much higher storm surges and you see why cities like Copenhagen, London, New York, and Miami are all in the crosshairs.

Danish experts have begun using computer-enhanced mapping techniques to predict what a high-tide of 2.26 meters—what they believe a "20-year event" might look like in 2110—would do to the city. The result leaves an inner city map covered in blue, including the Danish Stock Exchange, the Royal Library, and the city’s stunning Opera House. For this reason, the country is developing a proposal for a dike along Copenhagen’s North Harbor and an area called Kalveboderne to protect some of the city’s most treasured assets. For areas lying outside the protected region, which includes the Opera House, engineers are considering elevating roads and introducing architectural adjustments.

Back in New Orleans, where I live, we are also strengthening our fortress walls. At the opening of hurricane season this month, city residents took comfort (perhaps) in the strongest flood-control system ever constructed for the region. My favorite part is the Lake Borgne Barrier, a 1.8-mile-long castle-toothed wall, anchored by 66-inch-wide, 144-foot-deep concrete columns. The structure, which cost $1.1 billion and was built in just two years, is designed to block the kind of crashing hurricane surge brought by Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 swept through the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and Industrial Canal into the heart of New Orleans.

As I continually remind my students, resistance, while expensive and complicated, is not always futile. But it must be done with full knowledge and disclosure of what residual risk remains. And it must incorporate a strategic use of natural barriers and other natural systems to amplify the protection value. That means restoring and preserving natural buffers like beaches, wetlands, and flood plains.

The importance of natural shields, what coastal engineers call “soft-armoring,” is gaining attention all over the world. Indeed, the Obama administration has proposed a draft of revised standards for flood-control and other water resources projects that would require the “wise use of floodplains” and maintain a presumption in favor of nonstructural solutions to flood management. That would be a terrific start. But other policy innovations must follow. As legal researchers at Georgetown’s Climate Center are learning, many federal permitting systems that apply to coastal structures are designed to favor “hard armoring” proposals, often fast-tracked through general permits, over less familiar “soft armoring” techniques.

And what of Copenhagen’s Little Harbor Lady? Standing next to her, assuming my straightest posture, I estimate that a high-tide of 2.26 meters would at least encircle the waist of this pensive lass, though I like to imagine those finned ankles would do her some good. Staying afloat, you know, is mostly about preparation.

Errol Morris and the Flying Frog

Last week, from the Twitter account of filmmaker and writer Errol Morris:

What next, indeed. James Livingston, the author of Rising Force: The Magic of Magnetic Levitation, the book that inspired this discourse, spoke with us recently for an episode of our podcast. He explains the levitating frog.

Have a listen:

 

HUP Podcast - James Livingston 

 

But, maybe first, have a watch: