The big PR moment on the Oscar’s Red Carpet last night was surely Sacha Baron Cohen’s Dictator accident with Ryan Seacrest.

One of the few surprises came before the ceremony began, when Sacha Baron Cohen approached the E! host Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet. The comedian was in character from his new movie, “The Dictator,” and carried an urn filled with what he described as the ashes of Kim Jong-il, the deceased leader of North Korea. The comedian spilled the ashes all over a shocked Mr. Seacrest, saying, as he was hustled off by security guards, “When someone asks you what you are wearing, you will say Kim Jong-il.” Mr. Seacrest was not amused.

Sure. Seacrest was shocked, SHOCKED (YouTube)!

Shakespeare begins with one thing then at the end reveals it to be something else. Consider the Shakespearian structure here.

You Cannot Persuade a Falling Apple which means if you are a maven with a Falling Apple, arrange demonstrations of Falling Apples, then point the Other Guys to your TACT. The rest is persuasion gravity. Now, just for the fun of it, let’s pretend that the Weathermen 2.0 do have Falling Apples. How do you explain this?

Last week, DeSmogBlog published a batch of internal fundraising memos from the Heartland Institute, a climate-skeptic group. But who leaked them? Turns out, it was Peter Gleick, a prominent climate researcher at the Pacific Institute, who says he lied to obtain the documents.

So. I’m a scientist with Falling Apples and I fraudulently obtain information from sources that dispute me, lie about my theft, then go public . . . in the Huffington Post . . . to admit it? We know this is neither science nor persuasion, but only farce, yet this is what rolls as strategy and tactics in the Weather Wars.

Peter Gleick wears the muggle mask with his poignant confession and apology.

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

Stated another way, Gleick is Sincere and when you are Sincere neither Science nor Persuasion matter more than your own Authenticity. Gleick illustrates the problem when your self concept merges with the Attitude Object, in this case his beliefs about climate. He hacked information with tricks likely learned from those Nigerian prince scams, leaked it, lied about it, and then came clean in the light and airy New New Journalism of the HuffPo, speaking some kind of Truth to Power.

And, we know how the Climate Change Chorus will persuade from this. Gleick will become a hero. You’ll hear calls that desperate times demand desperate measures and that when your opponents are criminals you must commit crimes to catch them. This persuasive and scientific failure will change nothing in the CCC. In fact, for many this will become a new avenue of shouting. But look beneath the obvious.

It is persuasion instructive to understand how this happened with Gleick. By all accounts this behavior is way out of range for him even with his passionate sincerity. Why did a good man and National Academy scientist do this?

Over at the Huffington Post, Gleick explains that he had first obtained a Heartland “strategy” document last year from an anonymous source that appeared to lay out the group’s plans to spread doubt about climate science. This is the two-page document that Heartland says is a forgery and “total fake” — a suspicion shared by many commentators — and, notably, is the only one of the Heartland documents to attack Gleick by name.

Make sure you see this. An unknown person devised a fake Strategy Memo from the hated Heartland Institute and put Gleick’s name in it. This person then anonymously sent it to Gleick. This is a theatrical trick straight out of Shakespeare. The dropped letter dripping with enough truth to make the lies sting. And it struck Gleick in the heart.

Is this Strategy Memo fake? Heartland admits all the other leaked documents, but disowns the fake. A mere visual comparison suggests the fake is not on the same font and format as the other Heartland documents. It looks like a fax while the other appears as PDF documents. Worse, there’s hardly a smoking gun admission of a burglary, a blonde, or a bomb. While likely a fraud, the Memo is about a mild an infamy a Bad Guy can commit. But, you read your name in that Memo and Shakespeare takes over. Gleick, like Othello, found the lie in the fraud more compelling than all the truths that would lead others to see the fake. The lie strikes the heart of the man and the rest is tragic gravity.

Mavens, consider this Bard play. If you read Shakespeare – and mavens, you do read Shakespeare – you know that poisoned letters always kill the receiver and the sender: Iago as the dark example. Listen for the sound of another body hitting the floor and you’ll know you’ve arrived at Act V of this tragedy.

One of the great problems in communication history is the loss of original recordings of old TV shows. Either through carelessness, accident, or degradation, old broadcast TV programs that once delighted millions are lost to posterity. What to do? Scan the heavens!

While searching deep space for extra-terrestrial signals, scientists at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have stumbled across signals broadcast from Earth nearly half a century ago. Radio astronomer Dr. Venn described how he made the historic discovery after analysing a number of signals originating from the same point in space. “I realised the signal was in the VHF Band and slap bang in the middle of 41-68 MHz. It was obviously old terrestrial television broadcasts, but they seemed to be originating from deep space.” After boosting and digital enhancement the resulting video signals are remarkably clear.

Realize the implications.

“We now know these are original broadcasts. So far we have recovered about 7 weeks of old television signals from space. Every day in our lab is like traveling back in time. And speaking of which we have just started the digital recovery of signals that contain lost Doctor Who episodes.

And you thought astrophysics was for geeks.

My nephew Patrick Booth is completing his Masters at the University of Michigan in Jazz. He’s part of an ensemble called the Creative Arts Orchestra and they’re on tour this week. Fortunately they did a stop at WVU at our Creative Arts Center and delivered a one hour session that was both performance and demonstration. It was one of the oddest and most interesting musical events I’ve experienced.

Begin with a jazz orchestra. That sounds like Duke Ellington and a Big Band doing their style of jazz. Well, the CAO is a large collection of diverse instruments, like an orchestra, but the improv element moves the group into entirely new territory. The CAO has about 20 players, saxophones, trumpets, trombone, flute, drums, bass, piano, guitar, but then cello, electronic keyboard, stand up bass, and vocalists. Each player and instrument has a definite tone and in some combinations (piano, drum, bass; sax, bass, guitar) they seem entirely familiar, but cello, sax, vocalist, and trombone? Now, add in the demands of improve and the concept sounds insane at first, but if you like music you begin to see the possibilities, especially for players. To make the experience work you cannot simply play what you want, you have to play what you and the other players in the orchestra can make sound good. In other words,

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

Melanie and I arrived early and caught the CAO warming up in the performance room. They sounded like hell. Loud, each playing their own instrument in their own warmup style, but you could hear players connecting to each other, like birds calling in a noisy woods as they echoed each other’s themes. After the warmup, all the players gave feedback to each other about who they could hear or couldn’t, the peculiar acoustics of the room, how combinations of sounds from different players worked. After this brief feedback session, the orchestra left the room until Showtime, trouped back in, and then took off.

This time you could easily hear the coordinated difference between the improv performance and the discombulated rehearsal. Everyone was listening more accurately to each other. More interestingly, people were clearly trying to do something for the Other Guys. Sometimes they just mirrored the Other Guy as a sign that I’m here and I’m hearing you. They then worked to create tonal openings for each other so that they not only played coherent music, but that the registers and qualities of their sounds also played together. Let me illustrate.

For one number, the orchestra let two players run an improv duet. I believe the director knew that Melanie and I were in the audience, so he selected Patrick, who plays sax, and then Patrick chose as his duo partner, a drummer.

Patrick began the improv and played solo for several measures to establish the theme. It sounded immediately odd because the theme came across as more rhythmic and percussive rather than melodic. The drummer came in, picking up the percussive feel, then elaborating on it, making it more complex. Patrick followed by making his sax percussion have more tone, more shape with each note. The drummer then answered by making his percussion sound more melodic, tonal, shaped. As odd as it seems, the drum began to sound like a sax, the sax began to sound like percussion, and they were both making a melody with rhythm. This can only happen if you play by the Rule simultaneously.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

Now, of course, the persuasion metaphor here evaporates because neither player is trying to “change” the Other Guy. Patrick was not trying to get the drummer to a particular TACT nor was the drummer moving Patrick to a TACT. Their mutual focus upon each other was aimed at creating a joint effort, a Sphere of Between, the creative output of two pushing and playing each other to create one. And just to continue my crazy metaphor-making, the duet was closer to good relational communication where two people push and play each other not to fulfill an individual goal, but to make that Sphere of Between, that relationship grow.

If you are reading this on time, Saturday, February 18, 2012 or by Sunday, February 19, 2012 by 10pm, you can observe the persuasion process of improv jazz at this link. The CAO will be performing at the Bowery Poetry Club in the East Village of Manhattan on the evening of Sunday February 19. The live stream of the performance begins at 10pm. If you load the link, you’ll see that in jazz improv, It’s about the Other Guy.

P.S. The CAO visited WVU because a current WVU Music faculty member once played in the CAO while working on his degree at UMich. During his intro for the orchestra he disclosed that the experience changed his perspective on music and after watching the CAO in action I can see why. An improv orchestra crashes theory, practice, performance, cooperation, and creativity against the rock of live action. You could not play in this context and not change from it.

John Allen Paulos asks in the NYT:

Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?

Paulos, a scientist or at least a mathematician, never answers the question with authority, clarity, or precision which is odd from a guy whose profession worries about decimal places. He just notes how few scientists – even including physicians, dentists, and veterinarians – currently reside in Congress, then observes other countries and all their scientists in government. He likes China as an exemplar but apparently doesn’t know that Chinese citizens don’t vote for their government officials so why you’d use that as an example to answer a question about elections is another oddity.

Paulos misses the fact that scientists almost never run for office in the US. You can’t win if you don’t run, so the absence of doctorates on the ballot goes a long way to answering the question. Further, most scientists typically find their way into government through Executive branch appointments, like me (if you can stretch the definition of “scientist” to include a jabbering yahoo like me) or a more famous Steve, Steven Chu, the current Secretary of the Department of Energy. I can testify that there are a lot of scientists in the US Government in much the same way there are a lot of scientists in the Chinese Government – unelected, but still reporting for duty. Why would scientists go to all the effort an election requires when you can simply get hired for the job?

Of course, an Executive job is not the same as an elected official and even Dr. Chu has learned how powerless a Cabinet Secretary is in the face of an entrenched and angry member of Congress. If Chu wanted to change the world, he’d get elected which goes back to Paulos’ question. Why don’t we elect scientists?

The answer to Paulos’ question is already well known, at least in theatrical circles. The great George M. Cohan, legendary Broadway star, answered the question with the song I’d Rather Be Right.

I’d rather be right than Presidential.
I’d rather be right than wealthy or wise.

This from the 1937 smash Broadway hit, I’d Rather Be Right, starring the great Cohan in the musical from Moss Hart and George Kaufman (book) and Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart (music and lyrics). You see the persuasion point. If you’d rather be right it means you’d rather be sincere which means you’d aren’t following the Second Rule: It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

A democracy answers Paulos’ question for him. When everyone is eligible and you almost never win, reality is telling you something if you’ll just listen.

P.S. George M. Cohan invented the showman Broadway style over 100 years ago and proved himself a persuasion maven on the stage. You’ve perhaps seen his statue at Times Square in New York without realizing it.

If you do any work that is remotely performance based in front of live audiences, you need to study Cohan. Here’s a YouTube clip from a PBS documentary. If you can handle the shocking racial stereotyping, here’s another YouTube clip that features Cohan in blackface working with Jimmy Durante (another live performance master; put him on your list, too). If you work crowds, steal Cohan’s moves, dazzles, shakes, and styles like I once did.

P.P.S. Performance bonus! Tough guy Jimmy Cagney (you dirty rat) earned his Best Actor Oscar portraying Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy. Cagney floored everyone with his tap dancing (YouTube) that captures the Cohan style – angular, athletic, yet graceful. Who knew that the tough guy who smeared a grapefruit (YouTube) in a woman’s face could be so smooth on his feet?