During their search for a destination they stumbled upon an abandoned cabin on a small island within Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia. Little did they know they would spend the next 10 years as full-time caretakers of the property.
Bea: Though the island was free of cougars and bears, wolves were a real issue. We had repeat encounters with a succession of packs, and one particular loner, given to watching us and our pets quietly from a distance.
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Bea: Something became clear from the outset; we tended to recall the facts in hilariously different ways. What to do? John put me in charge of piecing together a detailed timeline and story arc from our correspondence, photo records, and house notes. That worked, but we soon butted heads over what to include and what to skip. We chose to specialize: he in the general storytelling, and me in local history, our neighbors in the Sound, and things such as earthquake facts and figures.
Bea: The community was there all along, but in summer only. The rest of the year we had the beach mostly to ourselves. Come May and June, however, joyous waves of kayakers turned up, and there began a great parade of sportfishing and whale-watching boats just offshore.
The kayakers were our people of course, and our steady presence, year-in and year-out, gave them all a bit of a homing spot, as well as, on occasion, a refuge or source of help. One particular school group helped us with a project each year, be it bringing up firewood from the beach or clearing a path toward high ground for a tsunami escape. For a time, we provided food storage for another group, and we liaised with Parks over wolf sightings and campsite maintenance. There were meals shared at our house, meals shared on the beach, stories told by driftwood fires or, in the off-season, by our crackling woodstove. Our dog Lolita spent much of the summer on the beach, shepherding people or stealing their Frisbees.
I was most interested in the wacky color shifts of sea and sky for my paintings. I need beauty around me, and Vargas took it to a new level. Bea tended to look to human interest and the detail of pools and patterns, but she too had her eye on the sea and sky. How could one not in such a setting? She showed much greater dedication than me and, as a result, most of the photos in the book are hers.
Bea: Clayoquot Sound is a vast and complicated place: a big swath of convoluted coastline held to a broad watershed. Its essence was conveyed by books such as "Tofino and Clayoquot Sound: A History (M. Horsfield and I. Kennedy, 2014, Harbour)" and "Chasing Clayoquot: A Wilderness Almanac (D. Pitt-Brooke, 2010, Greystone)."
Our book only attempts to capture the moods and intense rewards we found on the northwest corner of one beautiful island on the outer coast: our window to a natural world ever in flux, a small-scale paradise rich with mystery, excitement, seasonal companionship and deeply satisfying work.
Bea: For me it was seeing the photos again and placing them in the text. I was delighted when [our publisher] Heritage House invited our input on that. We both had fun with the captioning.
John: Rather than reshaping my perspective, I would say it reinforced a pre-existing perspective I had on friendship, adventure, self-reliance, and a sense of home being what you make it; reliant not upon place as I had originally expected, but upon the people sharing that place with you.
Bea: Truth is, the adventure has shaped my perspective on life, but life since we left the beach had changed my perspective on our adventure also. Ten years ago, "home" moved with us to a lovely old place near the Nanaimo River, and we found fresh perspective looking back and looking forward.
Yes, Clayoquot Sound is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Yes, the western half of Vargas Island is a Provincial Park Reserve. But all around it there remain logging operations, open-net fish farms, and, within visual range of our old home, the baffling threat of a copper mining development. Paradise found, paradise lost?
Note: This American Life is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Prologue: PrologueIra GlassI think probably every two years, I read an article about some scientist who thinks there might be a way, building off chicken DNA or whatever, to figure out the DNA of dinosaurs and bring one to life. I feel like I run into these stories all the time. There were those scientists a couple years ago who were talking about how you could take Neanderthal DNA and use it to create new Neanderthals.
As an artist I am trying to get new ideas all the time by talking to people and collaborating with others. My Portrait Project has brought me and my work into the homes of hundreds of Chicagoans. ChicagoArts has brought art from Chicago to people all over.
So, how does Parr start to design an escape room? He starts by thinking about things. I expected to hear Parr, a puzzle-writing enthusiast, to mention that he selects certain types of puzzles to begin or that he works on puzzles and then adapts them to the rooms, but he does not. He starts by thinking about the theme and then, most importantly, thinking about the objects attached to that theme.
Parr, in general, works alone, with his laptop. He gathers information, constraints, and theme requirements from his client (oftentimes the owner of escape rooms), then gets to work thinking of objects that relate to the theme that can be turned into a puzzle. Then, he draws out a flowchart, with puzzles as the boxes, showing how the puzzles will be revealed and how they will relate. Finally, he works one by one to fill out these puzzles.
Parr, like all designers, combines detailed expertise (e.g., he has written puzzles and games for years to wide audiences, he knows how a group of six averagely smart players would perform on a puzzle) with some practices that may be more universal to experience design (e.g., creating flowcharts to map the user experience, walking around and paying attention to the world in order to come up with creative ideas, or starting with a theme). However, to delve into what makes Parr a designer of experiences (as opposed to a designer of Culture or artifacts), we must examine his focus. As Parr emphasized, order and flow take a paramount position when designing an experience. So, despite the fact that Parr designs artifacts, like the bank rolodex filled with clues, his focus is on the experience and how one clue leads to the next. The rolodex is arbitrary. Another bank-themed puzzle Artifact could fulfill the same purpose. What matters to Parr is that the theme is maintained, and the clues are released in the right order with the right mix of puzzle-type.
I hope this post helped shed some light on the practices of an actual designer. Our posts can sometimes present theory, or tell stories, but interviews grounded in practice can illuminate some of our ideas as well. Also, before I go, I want to thank Andrew Parr for sitting down with me to discuss his business, his puzzles, and his way of working.
It started in 1931 with a German computer, which was actually presented to Hitler and he saw no reason to have computation and rejected it. It did a small fraction of a calculation. 0.000007 calculations per second per constant dollar.
So, I thought for 40 years, for various reasons, it would continue. Maybe in wartime it would grow more quickly. But the rate is not affected by anything that's happening, including wars and so on. This is an example of the exponential rate of technology.
A lot [of the future] comes from this graph. We didn't have large language models 80 years ago, or even three years ago. But if you can figure out what is required in order to create [new innovations and technologies] you can predict [the timing of] various things.
In 1999 I projected the [AI advances] would continue at this pace. I figured we would pass the Turing test within 30 years by 2029. Stanford felt that was very alarming, and so they held an international conference, and AI experts came from all over the world. They felt I was very over optimistic.
They felt it would take a hundred years. I'm still saying 2029, and it turns out to be pessimistic. A lot of people are saying [we will pass the Turing test] by next year. Some think it's already happened. However, the Turing test is actually not very well defined. (Turing wrote an essay about it.) So, I figured people would say we're passing a Turing test, but it wouldn't be real until most agree that we're passing a Turing test. I think that'll start next year.
Our ability to create something that's super human is around the same speed. If you look at a large language model, there are certain things that an LLM can't do that humans can do. But there are lots of things an LLM can do that humans can't.
Take some obscure philosophy problem and say who can do this and it can write you a very intelligent essay about it and it takes about 20 seconds. No human being can do that. In fact, you can ask it anything and it can answer it pretty intelligently. No human being can do that.
[AI is] already going way beyond what a human being can do. This is what's driving technology. And this is just an example, a very important example. [The exponential growth of computation] is key to technology progressing.
Most economists have no idea that things progress in an exponential manner, and they're surprised that long term predictions are much more realistic because it takes into account the exponential. But most economists do not use an exponential at all. But this is exponential. It's going to pass 100%. And at that point, we'll be using one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the Earth. We have 10,000 times more sunlight to meet all of our energy needs than we need. We'll pass that within 10 years. 152ee80cbc
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