The Science of Birds - Birds and the Scientific Method

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

👕 Bird Merch —  Get yourself some bird shirts!~~~In this episode, host Ivan Phillipsen steps back from bird facts themselves to explore the process behind them: the Scientific Method. He breaks down how scientific understanding is built, from that first spark of curiosity in the field all the way through hypothesis testing, data collection, and peer review.To provide a simple example, Ivan walks through a real published study on a familiar backyard bird, tracing how scientists questioned a long-standing assumption about how the species finds its food and designed an experiment to get closer to the truth. Along the way, the episode touches on hypothesis testing, experimental versus observational study design, and how researchers interpret and discuss their results once the data are in.Support the show

Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. This episode, which is number 138, is all about how science works. Science is, of course, at the heart of this podcast. It's right there in the name. But what is science?

On this podcast, I share many facts about birds with you. And of course, these facts fall under the broad category, the umbrella of science. One way of thinking about science is that it's a body of knowledge about the world. But science is so much more than just a bunch of facts. Because they had to come from somewhere. They are the end products of a process. a process of discovery called the scientific method. This is a structured, no-nonsense way of figuring out how the world works.

Instead of relying on guesswork, gut-level intuition, tradition, or superstitious mumbo-jumbo, the scientific method uses evidence to test ideas. Some might argue, and I would agree, that the scientific method is like ice cream and rock and roll. It's one of the greatest things humans ever came up with. It is just so powerful and so awesome. And it's all the more impressive because it runs against the grain of our natural instincts. As our species default mode for explaining how the world works, we seem to be hardwired to rely on narrative stories, pattern-seeking, and confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to prefer, seek out, and remember information that supports what we already believe, while ignoring or dismissing evidence that contradicts what we already believe. So confirmation bias can blind us to what's really going on. For many thousands of years, humans have turned to authority, dogma, and intuitive ideas to understand how the physical world works. Like, sure, it seems like the sun orbits the Earth, right? the sun goes around the earth, just look at it. That must be how it works. That idea just feels right and it's

what your eyes are telling you. But scientific evidence completely changed how we understand the relationship between the earth and sun, and in doing so, changed how we understand our own place in the universe. Empirical skepticism is the practice of withholding belief in an idea until that idea is backed by solid, observable evidence, and testing, rather than taking it on faith or authority. This kind of skepticism was formalized into the scientific method hundreds of years ago by smart folks from multiple cultures. The scientific method offers us a counterintuitive idea that truth is not decided by status, elegance, or tradition, but instead by a structured, reproducible, interrogation or confrontation with reality. By insisting that we should use the scientific method

to figure out the world, humans have built this amazing tool for systematically overcoming our own cognitive biases. In modern daily life, the scientific method is the invisible foundation beneath almost everything around us. If you feel like you have a good life, science is probably one of the big reasons why that's the case. The scientific method has allowed us to understand the universe at the grandest scale, gravity, the formation of stars, planets, and black holes, and at the other end of the scale, there's the quantum world of atoms, photons, protons, quarks, and much more. We've learned about the elements and chemical reactions, the history of the Earth over the last four and a half billion years, and the evolution of life, genetics and genomes,

anatomy and physiology, how brains work, the interactions among species that describe ecosystems, how climate and weather work, the invention of simple machines like wheels, levers, pulleys, and gears, the invention of complex things like car engines and jet engines, skyscrapers, computers, fiber optics, satellites, nuclear energy, solar power. And there are all the medical breakthroughs like antibiotics, vaccines, MRI machines, MRI machines, organ transplants, gene therapy. The list goes on and on and on. And most importantly, of course, we all benefit from the countless applications of the scientific method to the study of birds. Don't just take it from me. Here's a quote from an essay by Stephen D. Fretwell, titled,

On the Philosophical Basis of Ornithology, published in 1980. Quote, Ornithology is an important activity in the affairs of men. The study of birds is no mere whim. Rather, all effective civilization is dependent on the level and nature of the character in its citizens, and the practice of ornithology can build character. People are edified by their exposure to bird study. End quote. So, like shoveling snow, washing the dishes by hand, or military school,

Ornithology builds character. And according to Mr. Fretwell there, civilization is indirectly dependent on ornithology. If that's true, then the responsibility I bear as the host of this podcast is far greater than I ever imagined. I'm bringing ornithology to the masses, edifying people and keeping civilization from falling apart. Okay, enough messing around. Let's get on with the real meat of this. episode. It's going to be organized more or less like a typical scientific paper, which is essentially a progression through the steps of the scientific method. The first section is the introduction. Then there's the materials and methods section, followed by results, and then a discussion section at the end. And hey, if you already know all this stuff, that is super cool.

I hope you'll enjoy this episode as a kind of review. Okay, let's put on our white lab coats and nerd out. The scientific method begins with a person simply noticing something and then wondering what the deal is with that something. You're out bopping around, hiking in the woods or something, when you observe something that piques your interest. For example, an animal's appearance or its behavior. And that observation makes you wonder.

questions pop into your mind. Why? How? Again, people hundreds or thousands of years ago, and even some people today, would seek answers by turning to superstition or to folk wisdom. But if our goal is to understand the reality of the physical world, science is a far better path to getting answers. So let's consider birds. Most birds that are active in the daytime, diurnal birds, seem to use their sense of sight to find their food. But we also know from scientific studies that birds have really good hearing, good auditory abilities. For example, research on Australian magpies has shown that these birds can use their hearing alone to locate the larvae of scarab beetles buried in the dirt.

The magpies can hear the very quiet, low-frequency sounds of the larvae as they wriggle around in the soil. Now, the reason I'm talking about this is that I'm leading up to an example, one that will follow for the rest of the episode. And that example is the American Robin, Turtus Migratorious. This is one of the most familiar songbirds in North America. American Robbins are kind of everywhere on this continent. This bird has a black head, a broken white eye ring around the eye, gray upper parts, and bright, rusty red underparts. It's a diurnal species and often forages on the ground for invertebrates during the summer months. A robin runs around here and there looking for invertebrates to snatch up.

By some accounts, earthworms make up about 20% of a typical robin's diet at that time of year anyway. We frequently see American robins hunting for worms on our lawns in the summer. A robin runs a few steps, tilts its head to the side for a couple of seconds, and then quickly pecks into the dirt to catch a worm. It pulls the worm out and either eats it right there or brings it back to its nest. A robin isn't successful on every attempt, but it's generally pretty good at this and can catch up to 20 worms in an hour when it's on its game. For a long time, scientists believed robins relied exclusively on their sense of sight

to find their food, including earthworms. That belief was reinforced by an excessive. experimental study on American Robbins published in 1965. That study came to the conclusion that, yes, these birds use only their site to find earthworms, only visual cues. Then several decades went by with everyone accepting this as a scientific fact. Co-workers chatting around the office water cooler in the 70s and 80s would say things like, hey, so did you watch the game last night? And also, did you know that American Robbins find worms using only their sense of sight? But not everyone accepted this as fact. In the 90s, a couple of scientists, Robert Montgomery and

Patrick Weatherford, were feeling skeptical. And that's good because, as I mentioned earlier, skepticism is a key component of the scientific process. Here's what Montgomery and Weatherford had to say. quote, our own field observations of robin's foraging suggested to us that they might also use other sensory modes while searching for earthworms. When they cocked their head, they appear to be listening, and we have watched robins successfully foraging on lawns where the grass was long enough to make earthworms difficult to see. We also watched a captive robin catch earthworms buried in soil where we could detect no visual cues that would reveal an earthworm's location. end quote. So these two scientists had taken the first step in the scientific method to make observations. Then they took the next step by wondering what the deal is, really, with how robins detect worms. They wondered if maybe robins are like Australian magpies, using hearing to find worms, or some other sense, or a combination of senses.

Montgomery and Weatherford went ahead and did some science. of their own and got their work published in 1997 in the journal Animal Behavior. The title of their paper is How Robbins Find Worms. The revolutionary discoveries made by Montgomery and Weatherford took the world by storm, and they went on to win the Nobel Prize in Ornithology in 1998. Except that, sadly, no such prize exists. Maybe someday. Nevertheless, we'll return to this American Robin example in the segment

ahead. Okay, so you've made some kind of observation, and now the gears in your brain have been turning. You've been wondering and thinking and coming up with questions. For the next step, it's time to get creative. You need to come up with one or several possible explanations for what it was that you observed. These explanations are what we call hypotheses. You might have just one hypothesis, one idea you have for what might explain the observation, or you might have several. A hypothesis is an educated guess about what explains an observation. Let's say you're walking along and you see a northern cardinal that isn't red. This one's plumage is shockingly different. It's completely white from head to tail.

And that is an interesting observation. You can come up with all sorts of hypotheses about how this came to be. Maybe the cardinal turned white because of its diet, like it hasn't been eating anything with carotenoid pigments, right? That's one hypothesis. Or perhaps this bird has a genetic mutation that prevents any pigments from being deposited in its feathers. Another hypothesis.

Maybe this white cardinal slipped and fell into a bucket of bleach. Bam! Hypothesis. Yet another possibility is that what you observed was actually the vengeful ghost of a northern cardinal. Its blanched immortal soul, trapped in purgatory, doomed to wander the world without rest or peace. Okay, so yeah, that could be a hypothesis, I suppose. But not a good one, because ghosts fall within the realm of superstition or pseudoscience. Sorry, but real science ain't got no time for no ghosts. In general terms, a good, solid hypothesis, needs to meet the criteria of being both testable and falsifiable.

There has to be a practical way to gather real-world evidence about it, to collect data. That's what it means for a hypothesis to be testable. And if no experiment or observation could ever prove that the hypothesis is wrong, then that hypothesis is no bueno. It sucks, because it isn't falsifiable, meaning you can't demonstrate that it is false. For example, let's say I observe a common ostrich in the wilds of Africa.

I look at it and I say, you know, I have a hypothesis about that ostrich right there. I think that bird secretly dreams of being a world-class bowling champion someday. If only it had arms and a bowling alley to practice in. But how could I possibly test that as a hypothesis? We have no way to collect data about the secret aspirations of a bird. And how could I prove that hypothesis wrong? Even if the ostrich could speak English and it said to me,

No, sir, I do not dream of being a bowling champion. Still, it could be lying, right? We'll never know. So my hypothesis in this case is not falsifiable. Anyway, let's assume you have come up with one or more good hypotheses. each good hypothesis will lead to predictions, such as if hypothesis one is true, then X will happen. Predictions are often phrased as if-then statements. For example, if the hypothesis is true that the cardinal is white because it's missing carotenoid pigments in its diet, then supplementing its diet with carotenoid-rich seeds should restore the bird's vibrant red color,

when it grows some new feathers, that is. That would be the prediction. A testable hypothesis is one with predictions that you can measure in some way or observe. Now, when you read a scientific paper, the introduction, that section is where the authors tell you about their observations, and their questions and the hypotheses they've come up with, and sometimes their predictions as well. Or the predictions might be offered in the next section, the materials and methods. In the introduction section of the How Robbins Find Worms Paper by Montgomery and Weatherford, the researchers follow up their observations, which we heard earlier, with their hypotheses.

Quote, thus it seemed to us that auditory, olfactory, or vibrotactyl cues might be used in addition to visual cues when localizing prey. Our objective in this study was to test experimentally the ability of captive Robbins to use each of these sensory modalities when hunting for worms. End quote. Now notice they don't say explicitly, our hypothesis is blah, blah, blah. In fact, the authors don't use the word hypothesis

even once in that paper. But that's okay. As long as we the readers can understand what it is their testing or trying to verify, the hypothesis can be inferred. Here's where we are so far. observation leads to wondering, which leads to formulating questions. We turn those questions into testable, falsifiable hypotheses, and finally we figure out what the

predictions of our hypotheses are. From there, we move on to the next steps in the scientific method. Exciting! Now it's time to design your study. This is a critical step. You have to decide on the best way to answer your burning research question. the best way to test your hypothesis. There are many types of study design to choose from.

You can narrow down the options by looking at a bunch of published studies in your field that addressed hypotheses similar to your own. Then you might take one of these study designs and tweak it to better suit your unique research situation. Broadly speaking, study design falls into two categories, experimental studies and observational studies. In an experimental study, you set up a controlled environment, like a laboratory, garden, or aviary, where you deliberately change one factor, one variable, to observe its direct effect.

In an observational study, you observe and record events as they naturally happen when conditions can't be artificially controlled in a lab or other setting. You gather data from complex, real-world systems. Whether you conduct an experimental study or an observational study will depend on the nature of your hypothesis and its predictions. Usually, it's pretty obvious which is best for your specific situation. But if it isn't obvious, you might want to chat with other scientists and bounce your ideas around with them. As a vital part of your study design, you have to decide on the kinds of data you'll be collecting. And closely related to data collection is the choice of which analytical methods,

you're going to use. As in what kind of statistical analyses are you planning to run? Many analyses can only work with specific kinds of data. So there's this kind of recursive back and forth in your study design, where you're considering different analytical approaches and different kinds of data you might collect. Each of these things depends on the other. Here's a little example. Take the classical statistical tool, the T test. A T test has one set, has one specific job. It compares the averages of two groups to see if they are meaningfully different. You can do a T-test on paper, I suppose, if you want to kick it old school, but most of us would use a computer. The T-test only works when you feed it a very specific kind of paired data.

First, there need to be two distinct categories, like Group A versus Group B. For example, urban birds versus rural birds, male birds versus females. birds, good birds versus bad birds, etc. Second, the data you collect from individuals in these two groups has to be a continuous measurable number, something you can measure on a scale, like body mass, bill length, flight speed, things like that. The T-test looks at two things at the same time, the difference between the two group averages and the amount of scatter or variation within each group. If the gap between the groups is large and the internal scatter is small, the test tells you, yes, this difference is real. For example, the test tells you that the two groups of birds have significantly different bill lengths.

However, if there's a lot of scatter and overlap in the data points, the T test will tell you, no, these two groups are not significantly different. Whatever difference you might think exists, well, that difference could easily just be random noise in that case. So back to study design. We have experimental studies and observational studies, right? I suppose the ideal way to test your ideas, your hypotheses, is by designing an experiment. Because an experiment allows you to control for many of the variables that you're not interested in. An experiment allows you to sort of filter out the noise, to see what's really going on. But it's not always practical or possible or ethical to use the experiment. approach. In those cases, you'll have to settle for an observational study. But observational studies are still super great for answering many kinds of research questions. So I don't want you to think that I'm belittling observational studies. I mean, most of my own research back in the day falls into that category. Now let's return to the worms to our 1997 study about the American Robin. We're now reading the Materials and Methods section of that paper. It explains how the researchers set up

their study design, including the type of data they collected, and the analysis methods they used. Perhaps the most important materials are the birds and the worms. Step one, go out and get yourself some robins and scoop up some worms. The birds were caught in the wild and kept individually in spacious outdoor cages, aviaries. There were four robins in the study. And don't worry, they were set free after the experiments were over. Just like I was set free after I got abducted by aliens that one time. To get their worms, the researchers actually used store-bought mealworms. They tested their captive robins using wooden trays filled with sterilized, baked topsoil.

Meal worms were buried under the soil surface in the tray, and the soil was then smoothed flat and dampened so that no surface marks or movement could reveal the prey's location. Each tray was marked in a grid pattern so that the soil surface was divided into a bunch of little grid squares. The researchers videotaped each trial, scoring a successful hit only when a robin's very first beak strike landed directly on the exact grid square where the worm was hidden. And remember that the question here is, do American Robbins use other senses besides sight to find worms. So the researchers used a systematic process of elimination to isolate each of the

bird's four potential hunting senses. Smell, touch slash vibration, sight, and hearing. Each sense was associated with its own hypothesis and its own modification of the study design. For smell, live and dead mealworms were buried to test for olfactory cues. To test if rockers, Robbins detected prey through touch, through vibrations in their feet, the food tray was physically suspended from a wall so that it didn't touch the platform where the birds stood, so that the birds couldn't feel the worms moving. For sight, mealworms were buried beneath a sheet of cardboard topped with soil to block any visual indication of surface motion. And for hearing, white noise was played from a speaker buried directly in the soil to block any auditory cues.

And you know, talking about white noise machines, I have one that I use at night to help me sleep. Because if I didn't use a white noise machine, I might hear all the worms, wriggling and scraping around. Gross, not my idea of a restful night. But anyway, that was the experimental setup for our robins and worms. The researchers had independent experimental setups for smell, touch, sight, and hearing. In general, once you, the scientist, have run your experiments or made your observations of critters or whatever in the wild, once you've got some cold, hard data, then it's time to analyze it. You feed your data through whatever statistical analytic tools you choose up front, you do that on a computer, and the results get spat out on the other side. Your analyses are done, and congratulations, you've got results. and if one is reading a scientific paper, those results will be shown in the

results section. This is where we find all the cool grass, charts, and summary tables in a paper. If you are the scientist conducting the study, at this stage you just need to organize the results and make sense of them. And here is where you hopefully got some answers to your original questions. If everything went according to plan, you now know whether to accept or reject your hypothesis, or hypotheses. If your study was designed well, the data you paired with specific statistical tools will give you the unequivocal answers you sought. Next, you make conclusions based on your results.

Your ideas are either supported, need to be revised, or maybe even thrown out entirely. Let's look at our American Robin example. I'm not going to go into the statistical test. test used in that study, but here are the results. For smell, Robbins consistently located live mealworms but performed no better than random chance with dead ones. So that tells us something other than smell is involved, because if smell was important, the birds should have been able to find the dead worms as well. For touch-slash-vibration, the robins located the mealworms with high accuracy even when they couldn't feel any movements. So the sense of touch doesn't appear to be

important either. How about for sight? Even without any visual cues, the birds continued to locate the prey successfully, so sight isn't essential. And lastly, for hearing, when their hearing was obscured with loud white noise, Robbins made far fewer foraging attempts, and they suffered a major drop in success. And so there you go. The conclusion then is that American robins can locate worms in the soil through hearing alone. The same can't be said for smell, touch, or sight. If a worm is burrowing around underground, out of sight, a robin can still hear it and locate it. One other thing the researchers did was they verified their results by using audio equipment to record the faint, high-frequency rustling sounds produced by mealworms underground.

They confirmed that these sounds fall within the normal songbird hearing ranges. And in a final experiment, the researchers buried live earthworms. Earthworms, not mealworms, and verified that no visual surface cues revealed the worm's locations. The robins were just as good at locating earthworms as they were at locating mealworms. This experiment was a nice addition because it confirmed that robins, can locate their natural prey hidden under soil as effectively as mealworms, which are not the natural prey of robins. Okay, the final step in your scientific study,

and the final part of a scientific paper, is to present a discussion of the results. This is where you get to interpret what you found. Rather than simply listing a bunch of numbers or observations, your discussion, with a capital D, should answer the fundamental questions, what do your results actually mean? Why do they matter? And how do they fit into our broader understanding of the field or the world? The discussion is also where you can offer alternative

explanations or talk about some of the nuances of your results. In our American Robin example, the researchers used the discussion section of their paper to consider the head tilting or head-cocking behavior of Robbins in light of the experimental results. Remember that head cocking is when a foraging robin runs a few steps, pauses, and tilts its head to one side for up to a few seconds before lunging at the ground to grab prey. The experiments revealed that hearing is an important sense to hunting robins, right? So it would make sense to just say that surely the head cocking behavior is the robin listening for worms and then just leave it at that. But Montgomery and Weatherford, being good scientists, actually offer an alternative explanation. They suggest that although head cocking might make it look like the bird is listening,

it, quote, may actually result from visual searching for movement before the bird finally strikes. End quote. So maybe the headcocking thing is the bird turning to reposition one of its eyes to get a better look and search for prey, zero in on something that it heard. And now I want to read you another longer quote from the discussion section at the end of this Robin paper. The authors wrote, quote, Our experiments have focused on different sensory modalities,

one at a time, but it is possible that birds use more than one modality when localizing food. For example, different sensory modalities may be used simultaneously or in a hierarchy where the use of one cue interferes with or supersedes the use of others. Robins, for example, seem to use auditory cues when locating earthworms and other prey buried in the soil,

but certainly use visual cues when these are available. Since visual cues are likely to be more accurate for localizing prey, we expect that robins use such cues in preference to auditory cues when their prey is visible. More complicated experiments will be required to elucidate the hierarchy and interaction of sensory modalities used by these birds. End quote. And that's a classic way to wrap up your study and your paper.

You point out the questions that remain unanswered. Maybe some of those questions are new. No one ever thought to ask them before because they arise directly from your results. And then you end your paper by saying, Further research is needed. I think there's a law or something that says everybody has to end every paper that way.

This simple study with American Robbins is cool, because if you just watched American Robbins casually out in nature, you would probably assume they find their prey by sight, sight only, and that would be reasonable. But through this well-designed, controlled experiment, the scientific method allowed us to learn the truth about Robbins, or at least to get one step closer to the truth. even though I've been walking you through the scientific method as a seemingly rigid, linear recipe, follow steps one, two, three, observe, wonder, hypothesize, study design, etc. That's not the full picture, because the vast majority of ornithologists and other scientists do not work in isolation. They aren't like the mad scientist working alone in a secret lab in a castle on a remote island. Instead, modern science is a flexible, iterative, interconnected process. It involves continuous communication and collaboration among colleagues.

So, progress in science is actually a very communal activity. Scientists help each other with ideas and advice, and they share data and materials and so on. And very importantly, scientists provide each other with quality control. They check each other's work. Remember that empirical skepticism is at the heart of science. Before research is published, independent experts in the field review a study's experimental methods, statistical analyses, and its logic to catch errors and verify that the conclusions are actually supported by the evidence. This is the process called peer review. When you submit a manuscript of your study to a scientific journal, your paper gets scrutinized and critiqued by several reviewers, several of your peers.

And the process of peer review continues even after publication. Other researchers might attempt to replicate your findings to see if they get the same results. This allows the scientific community to self-correct when errors occur. And errors do occur. This is how scientific knowledge is built, gradually through a continuous cycle of refinement. In the example of the American Robbins, remember that there was a study in 1965 that arrived at the conclusion that Robbins use only sight to find worms. But 30 years later, Montgomery and Weatherford came along with some skepticism and their own

observations. They did more experiments. They refined and updated our understanding. of how American Robbins find their meals. Good science doesn't claim to deliver some absolute permanent truth. Instead, it gives us explanations that are continually updated as new evidence is found. Anyone anywhere can run the exact same experiment to confirm or dispute the findings. By requiring independent verification and peer review, the scientific method acts as a universal filter. It filters or weeds out personal biases, wishful thinking, and flawed assumptions. We live in an amazing time when it comes to scientific knowledge. I hope you have a sense of that

and that you feel as grateful as I do. I mean, at our fingertips, literally with our smartphones, we have access to an astonishingly deep understanding of how our universe works, from the cosmic scale to the impossibly small, across the fields of physics, chemistry, geology, biology, you name it. For example, there's been an explosion of scientific discoveries about birds in the last 20 years or so, because of advances in genetics, tracking technology, brain imaging, machine learning, citizen science, and more. So yeah, thanks, scientific method! And beyond understanding birds and nature and allowing us to come up with, shiny new technology, the scientific method also gives us a helpful mindset for everyday life.

It teaches us the value of paying attention, being curious, asking questions, looking for reliable evidence before accepting bold claims, and staying open to changing our minds when new evidence proves us wrong. I hope this was an interesting and helpful episode for you. It's a little different from most of my episodes. But I've been wanting to make this one for a long time. So there you go. Science!

I offer my deep gratitude and thanks to all my wonderful supporters on Patreon. This podcast continues to exist, and it reaches thousands of people around the world because of you. In just a few days, the podcast will celebrate its six-year anniversary, which is pretty crazy to me. I wouldn't have been able to get here without my Patreon supporters. So a big welcome to my newest supporters. Naomi Grobstein, Mark Leggett, Steve van der Veen, and Barrett.

Thank you all so much for joining my Patreon community. And sorry if I mispronounced your name. If supporting my work here on the podcast is of interest to you, please go check out my Patreon page at patreon.com slash science of birds. You can also connect with me through email if you have something you'd like to share, but comment about science or maybe about some spooky and encounters you've had with bird ghosts? I mean, Halloween is just around the corner. In any case, my email address is Ivan at Scienceofbirds.com.

This is episode 138. You can check out the show notes for the episode on the Science of Birds website, Scienceofbirds.com. And if you're looking for a new shirt or two, don't forget to check out my online store over at birdmerch.com. I'm working on some new bird merch designs, and I hope to get those out in the next month or so. As always, I'm Ivan Philipson, and true fact about me, ever since I was in my early 20s, I've been drawn to what one might call the retro future. By that I mean the way many people in the 50s, 60s, and even 70s pictured what the future was going to be like.

One of the dominant views back then was that the future was something hopeful. There was a lot of optimism that technology would make life better for most of us and solve a lot of our problems. Think Star Trek or the Jetsons cartoon. I really love Star Trek. But don't get me wrong, I do like dark visions of the future too, at least in fiction. I love post-apocalyptic stories, cyberpunk and dystopian stuff. But I've always had a special place in my heart for the retro future, especially as it was

imagined in the 60s and 70s. That spilled over into my interest in mid-century modern design. I've always been interested in that aesthetic, from home decor, to just about any design that overlaps with the space age vibe. The place I live now has a few little touches of that, not over the top, but just enough to make me happy. When I was a teenager in the early 90s, I went to Epcot Center, one of the Disney parks in Florida.

I loved it because it already felt pretty outdated. A lot of the attractions had a very retro feel, and I thought they were fantastic. They were nostalgic for me. And they gave me that weirdly optimistic vision of the future, even though by the 90s it was already kind of dated. That was the charm. Anyway, that's a fact about me.

I love the retro future, and I dig mid-century modern design. Until next time, cheers.