Jordan Meets the Animal Kingdom

My favorite beers from the Great American Beer Festival

2011-10-05T21:07:00.001-06:00

The Great American Beer Festival on Saturday was a blur. A delicious, beery, happy, blur. (See photo.) But! I did manage to scribble down my favorite beers in my beer diary (yes, I have one). The notes are probably not that useful ("yum! tasty! I want to drink it forever!" -- you get the idea...), but something about each of these beers made me fall in love. Oh, and I'm shamelessly biased toward Oregon beers, sour beers, and Belgian-style beers.

The buttons read: "I <3 Oregon beers" and "Oregon gives me wood" (from the Laurelwood Brewery in Portland)

Ching Ching by Bend Brewing, Bend, Oregon
Style: Sour with hibiscus and pomegranate
Notes: Pinky/orange color...simply amazing!
ABV: 9.5% (watch out)

Flemish Kiss by The Commons Brewery, Portland, Oregon
Style: "Bread" ale/pale ale
Notes: Slightly sour (just a hint!), lemony, fresh
ABV: 5.7%

The Stoic by Deschutes, Bend, Oregon
Style: Belgian quadruppel
Notes: Smells like a sour but finishes like a sweet Trappist
ABV: 11% (monastic strength)

Urkontinent by Dogfish Head, Milton, Delaware
Style: Belgian dubbel
Notes: Smells like coffee; brewed with rooibos tea
ABV: 8%

Red and White by Dogfish Head, Milton, Delaware
Style: Belgian wit
Notes: Sour and light, wine-y (aged in Pinot Noir barrels), really drinkable
ABV:10%

Abbey's Ale by Seven Brides, Silverton, Oregon
Style: Belgian quadruppel
Notes: A sour quad! Super drinkable, not puckering -- my favorite of the night! I had seconds (and I wasn't the only one...)
ABV: ??

Cockeye Cooper by Uinta, Salt Lake City, Utah
Style: ??
Notes: Light, cherry. Strong flavor but really unique. Delicious.
ABV: 11%

Diamond Kings by Brugge Brasserie, Indianapolis, IN
Style: Belgian quadruppel
Notes: Ages in Cabernet barrels -- tastes heavenly!
ABV: ??

Also of note...
Everything crazy and experimental by Short's, all the tart and tangy fruit beers by Rocky Mountain Brewing in Colorado Springs (think New Glarus' Raspberry Tart, but better), and Laughing Dog's Anubis imperial coffee porter.

How the Knight-Mozilla Hackfest in Berlin changed the way I think about programming

2011-10-05T20:28:00.001-06:00

#Hacktoberfest left me feeling mushier than this plate of potatoes and mystery green goo. I want to give a group hug to the world! (Image credit: Flickr user russeljsmith shared with a Creative Commons license)

At least week’s hackfest, I saw so many people celebrating the simple act of creating something that actually worked. It’s a marvel. But the coolest part about this -- and bear with me as I get all mushy here -- was how the act of making something brought people together.

People are makers. We can’t help it. But why? Why do people write, bake, program or paint?

Here's my best guess: Our minds are lonely places where our thoughts languish. Until, that is, we can turn them into essays, pies, code, pictures -- something another human being can interact with. Making -- whatever it is you make -- is a way of connecting.

Once we know how to make something, we understand it better. We understand the person who made it better. And we understand ourselves better. By learning new ways to make things, we expand what we are able to imagine. The world of possibilities explodes.

Let me defer to my favorite episode of Radiolab to explain. Words. Go listen to it. Right now. Please.

For those of you disregarding my advice...shame on you! But here’s a quick summary: Words aren’t just words -- they are ideas. Before we have the words for a concept, we don’t have the ability to understand it. This has been shown with spatial concepts, time, empathy, all kinds of things. Our ability to think is inseparably bound to language.

What does this have to do with programming? At last week’s hackfest, I realized that programming is the same as writing. Or rather, I was able to map the programming process -- which, previously, I'd found daunting and unwelcoming -- onto a process of making that I find intuitive: writing.

Writing is thinking. And so is programming.

Language expands our capacity to understand and interact with the world as beings who can write and speak. And new skills -- for example, programming -- expands our capacity to understand and interact with the world as beings who can make and create. Last week, by getting better acquainted with some of the basic building blocks of a program -- code, logic, how different elements interact -- I was able to imagine possibilities that I couldn’t before.

And that’s why I want to learn more. Now I’m hooked.

I’m inspired to continue to expand my skills as a programmer -- which is really just expanding my skills as a thinker and a maker. So what are my next steps?

I’ve been working through Nathan Yau’s new book, Visualize This. I’m about halfway through, and my feet are appropriately wet with some Python, JavaScript and R. I want to keep going. Then go further.
I started an intro to computer science class from MIT’s open courseware. I really enjoyed the first problem set. A lot a lot. But then I stopped. So I’m going to finish it.
I want to apply what I’m learning through real projects. For me, that probably means data visualization.

Any other suggestions?

I’m amazed the diverse backgrounds of the #hacktoberfest participants. As Nicola mentioned in her blog, many people who are verifiable coding ninjas don’t have any formal background in CS or don’t work as programmers. So, it’d be interesting to, as a way of motivating others to take the plunge, collect stories about how people got into programming.

Here comes the audience participation part:

How did you first learn to code?
What was the first piece of code you wrote that you were really, truly proud of?

Maybe if more people heard those stories from seasoned (and enthusiastic) programmers, they might understand why it's a skill everyone can benefit from learning.

Keeping the MoJo Flowing: Blog posts I want to write about #hacktoberfest

2011-10-01T15:58:00.002-06:00

While I was flying home from Berlin (through a very circuitous route: Berlin --> Warsaw --> London Heathrow --> Denver --> Boulder), I had nearly 24-hours of offline, device-free time to process some of the idea-explosion that happened in my head at the Berlin #hacktoberfest. I'm back in Colorado now, doing Colorado things like getting an introduction to canyoneering and going to the Great American Beer Festival. But while I still have #hacktoberfest Berlin goodness flooding my brain, here are some discussions I want to continue:

What does it mean to have a "mosh pit of the minds?" Creative innovation happens when you mash disparate people, ideas and fields together and watch the sparks fly. What are some other mind-moshes we could try (technology + gastronomy, journalism + adventure sports)?
The two functions of data visualization. Data visualization can be used to explore large and unwieldy datasets for patterns and meaning. They can also be used to communicate information quickly and simply. Are the tools that you need for exploratory and communicatory data visualization the same, or are they distinct?
Building the best "tool box." At #hacktoberfest, I kept hearing the concept of a tool box (for journalists, for developers, for storytellers, for data visualization creators) being discussed. (Note: I prefer "bag of tricks" to tool box, because it includes the tools and the skills you need to use them.) What are the different "tool boxes" we should be making, and how can we make them in an open, extensible way?
Instead of creating a "GitHub for storytelling," what if we just started using GitHub as a reporting tool? I want to do a test case where, as I'm reporting and writing a story, I put all of my materials (notes, audio recordings of interviews, pictures, etc.) up on a GitHub repository. After the story is done (or during, if it isn't a sensitive story), make the repository public. Insta-open-reporters'-notebook!
What is a story to you? In Berlin, we talked over and over about the importance of stories. Data visualizations are meaningless if they don't tell a story. Information needs context and narrative. But what exactly are we talking about when we talk about stories? I'd like to crowd-source this by putting a call out on Twitter asking people to answer the question: "What is a story?" in 140 characters. Then it would be fun to make some visualizations of the responses.

I hope to turn each of these into a blog post in the near future. I have lots of ideas (seven more, at the moment) that I'll add to the list when I get a chance, but first -- to Denver, to drink delicious craft beers!

#MozNewsLab Proposal: The Infinite Story

2011-08-08T17:32:00.002-06:00

The Infinite Story is a tool for opening up reporters’ notebooks and encouraging others to re-mix, mash-up, and extend news stories. Kind of like GitHub, but for storytelling.

MoJo Pitch: The Infinite Story from Jordan Wirfs-Brock on Vimeo.

BUSINESS BRIEF

The Problem
The news-cycle is dominated by an antiquated artifact: the article. Stories are imprisoned within this format. A story is a living, breathing entity that exists within a thriving idea-rich community. An article is a bounded, disposable snapshot of an unbounded story.

The Solution
The Infinite Story frees stories from the constraints of the article by hosting news on in a collaborative storytelling and engagement platform. It’s unique because it doesn’t treat writing and reading as two separate acts, but as elements of a single, iterative storytelling process.

Why would newsrooms use it?
To move forward in the digital age, newsrooms must collaborate - with fellow journalists, other newsrooms, and engaged readers. The Infinite Story helps journalists do their jobs while simultaneously fostering sticky engagement with a community of readers.

Who will benefit?
The Infinite Story is a tool for both readers and writers of the news. The storytelling process isn’t “report, write, publish, repeat” - it’s information gathering, synthesizing and sharing in a continuous loop. By opening up this process, The Infinite Story benefits news-makers and news-readers.

Competitors + existing tools/platforms
Tools for storytelling and information sharing exist, such as wikis, Wordpress, SharePoint, Dropbox, Buzzdata, DocumentCloud, Floss Manuals, Booki and Storify. Content management systems are designed to facilitate collaborative storytelling. There are opportunities for leveraging these tools, instead of competing with them, through feeds and APIs.

What will distinguish The Infinite Story, and be the key to its success, will be its ability to engage a community of open and collaborative storytellers.

DESIGN DOCUMENT

How does it work?
The Infinite Story has three components:

1. An open digital reporter’s notebook
Professional and citizen journalists can upload reporting materials - notes, audio interviews, video, photos, data files, links, documents, contact information. It helps reporters visually organize and tag information during the reporting and writing process, helps co-authors share materials on collaborative projects, and helps readers see how a story was created by getting a deep, behind the scenes view.

2. A visual story builder
Reporters can drag and drop elements from their notebook to construct a narrative and write around it, the same way Storify lets you write around tweets. Many writers use some kind of visual structure - for example, notecards with quotes/themes/scenes they can move around. This is a digital version of that process.

3. A community for social reading mirroring the functionality of GitHub
Readers can share a story or contribute primary sources of information. Highly engaged readers can “fork” the story by cloning the raw materials into a new projects they can extend by adding their own reporting and writing. The original author can track the life of the story - who’s sharing, adding, or forking.

Explore a prototype of The Infinite Story created around a real article + raw materials. [Caveat: I’m neither programmer nor designer. This is a *very rough* mock-up.]

When you are viewing a story, you can see a story view or a notebook view. This is the story view.

This is the notebook view.

Once you've forked a story, you see a "dashboard" view that includes a notebook and a story builder.

How could this leverage newsroom infrastructure?
Articles published in traditional online formats could link to The Infinite Story. The traditional article doesn’t need to disappear: It’s the window through which readers access the back-channels. The Infinite Story will create modular, exportable content. Writers composing articles can feed that content back into a newsroom’s CMS.

How would it be integrated into newsroom operations?
Many journalists I’ve spoken with expressed the need for a tool to organize their materials, both for their own personal writing process and for collaborative projects where they need to share materials. Because The Infinite Story integrates the writing and reading processes, reporters can use it at all stages storytelling. If they are using it to organize their reporting notes and raw materials, no additional effort is needed to share those with readers.

How would this be built collaboratively?
In the prototyping process, I incorporated story notes and media from a working journalist to guide the project design. This should be done on a broad scale with reporters, editors, newsroom developers, and news readers. The Infinite Story will be developed using an iterative process centered on user experience. The design process should recognize that writers become readers and readers become writers.

Challenges
The biggest challenges surrounding The Infinite Story are behavioral, not technological. Although reporters’ notes are designed to be open and transparent, there are reasons newsrooms might object to sharing them:

1. Sharing notes and interview recordings might compromise a story.
It could violate the trust or safety of a source. Or make it harder to continue reporting on the story by clamping up other sources. In some cases, competition might be a legitimate concern for limiting transparency.

2. Reporters’ notes are often cryptic and hard for anyone other than the author to read.
Reporters need to write things quickly, and don’t always have time to type up notes or transcribe interviews.

Issues related to (1) can be addressed with fully controllable permissions and access controls. Notes could be shared internally during newsgathering and writing, then publicly after the story goes live.

Issues related to (2) can be addressed by integrating tools journalists already use to do their work. The Infinite Story should free up time, not consume it. For example, if journalists are already using Flickr or Dropbox, pictures and files from those accounts should be fed directly into The Infinite Story.

Questions
How is this different from a wiki or CMS?
An essential part of journalism is taking complex information and turning it into a clear, coherent narrative. The Infinite Story values the integrity of narratives by allowing stories to be cloned/forked. A single story can give rise to many narratives. Each one should be respected.

Do people really want to mash-up stories?
There’s only one way to find out: Give people the tools to do it and see what happens. Story mash-ups present new opportunities for user engagement.

Reading list time!

2011-08-03T22:28:00.000-06:00

Here are some things that have inspired my thought process for #MozNewsLab (many suggested by fellow labbers):

"Open Source Data Journalism - Happening now at BuzzData," by David Eaves
Video: JP Rangaswami on The Nature of Platforms (@ dgree.org)
"Quick thoughts on journalism and version control," by Greg Linch
"BCNI Philly: GitHub for News," by David Bachhuber
Video: PyCon 2010: Writing Books using Python and Open Source Software, by Wesley Chun
"The New Structure of Stories: A Reading List," by Johnathan Stray
"Why We Need the News Environment to be Chaotic," by Clay Shirky
"Why Stories Matter: The art and craft of social change," by Marshall Ganz

Use Cases for The Infinite Story

2011-08-03T21:50:00.001-06:00

Participating in the #MozNewsLab is an amazing resource. It gives us an opportunity to open up our ideas - and our process - to scrutiny in the best possible way.

Here's some feedback I got from one Pippin Lee on my second blog assignment:

If you have time, here's a fairly quick, but interesting challenge that may help you focus any ideas you have...The goal: to give your product/idea a specific use case (don't be afraid of the edge-case subject either!). Here's an example. You can easily do this for all ends of the spectrum, but you'll begin to see how you are able to get deeper into understanding how and what you idea/product will face.

The goal: Define, "What is your point of view?"
The formula: [USER] needs [VERB] because [INSIGHT]

Here's what I came up with as use cases for my project [click to biggerize!]:

And here's a text version:

A team of journalists collaborating on a story needs to share, catalog and organize files and information because writing a story together requires melding of the minds on a tight deadline.
A writer working on a long or complex story needs to digitally organize reporting materials to track themes, insights and connections because she is working on many stories at once and wants to be able to dive back in to her thought process right where she left off.
An interested reader needs to connect to raw materials and resources because she wants to go deeper after reading a story and has questions that aren’t answered fully in the published story.
A newsreader-turned-newsmaker needs to access to reporting materials and deep background information because she wants to reinterpret them in the context of her own community by writing an expanded story on the same theme.

Are these the right use cases? What other ones can you suggest? As always, I'd love any thoughts/feedback.

Baking a Journalism Cake...Together

2011-08-01T08:50:00.000-06:00

When Mohamed Nanabhay said this, he was talking about creating an environment for readers of news. But I think the same principle can and should be applied to and creating an environment for journalists and gatherers, tellers and sharers of news.

Simultaneous serendipity and purposefulness is the heart of any creative process. This is especially true for collaborations. Collaborations are so powerful - that is, when they don't succumb to hazards - because:

The sum truly can be bigger than the parts. (This is where purposefulness comes in.)
News ideas proliferate when disparate elements (people, ideas, circumstances, experiences) collide. Unexpected juxtaposition fuels creativity. More people, more new ideas.

Here’s the really exciting part: These features of the creative process happen whether collaborations are in-person or online.

This was my serendipitous Sunday.

My project - The Infinite Story, GitHub for Storytelling, whatever you want to call it - revolves around collaboration. It’s about freeing the journalism process from things that bind stories to one person or one team or one publication, ending stories' lives when that person or team or publication moves on to the next project.

So how do technology skills come into play? In a great (spontaneous and directed) Twitter-sation with @ChrisLKeller and @knowtheory last week, we discussed the collaborative processes and tools that teams of journalists use.

We realized: In journalism, in order to share the storytelling process, you have to share the news gathering process. You can’t bake a cake if you don’t have he ingredients. (You might still be able to frost a cake, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Image by EpicGraphic

In my experience with collaborative investigative journalism, we've used a muddled system of Google Docs to aggregate reporting materials. It wasn’t a “new” technology for anyone on the reporting team. But logging and sharing all of our reporting material in it was new.

Adopting a new technology-based newsroom tool isn't necessarily a question of technical capacity, but a question of time and workflow.

If a tool is useful, usable and desirable, newsrooms will take the time to incorporate it into their workflow. If it's not, they won't. Infinitely more important than how technical you have to be to learn it is whether it enhances journalistic processes (does it reinforce the good habits, eliminate the bad ones).

So that is how I hope to address varying technical capacity. Yes, I want to make a tool that's as easy to use as possible (I'm thinking of a visual organization for story materials, plus a visual way to share/fork them), but ultimately the tool must enhances the newsroom flow:

Another project sketch...does visual = easy to use?

If adopting a new technology - and adapting your process to it - takes so much time that it doesn’t afford room for spontaneous discovery (and the targeted exploration of those discoveries), than it does more harm than good. But if it frees up time for spontaneous discovery, it's an invaluable addition.

My First Storify! Iteration and Journalism: A #MozNewsLab Discussion

2011-07-29T16:55:00.001-06:00

Re-telling the narrative of a discussion is quite a challenge. Storify makes it a little bit easier.

Chewing on the #MozNewsLab Project Ideas

2011-07-27T18:20:00.001-06:00

Reading the (50, when I last checked) 256-character descriptions of the projects the #MozNewsLab participants are working on was...
intimidating
    inspirational
          thought-provoking
       reassuring
                daunting
      invigorating
               fun

One of the best things about reading them was how many connections and correlations there were between the ideas. So naturally, being the pattern-finding human that I am, as I read them I started describing them, tagging the, putting them into types.

This isn't a perfect system. Many of them overlap. And that's the best part.

The three strongest themes I saw were: content curation, social reading and beyond the article:

Content curation - These ideas wrestle with questions of how we take a mess of information (whether it comes from news outlets, citizens, social media, any source, really) and turn it into a digestible flow. Examples: Manual Pinto, Charlie Pinder, Regnard Raquedan
Social reading - These ideas try to make the reading of news more conversational. Or, to put it another way, more like how we actually talk/share/think about information with each other. Examples: Andy Jennings, Lucas Cioffi, Katie Zhu
Beyond the article - The article as we know it is an artifact of the 20th century. These ideas try to take a "story" and turn it into the living, breathing, organic thing that it truly is. Examples: Engin Erdogan, Corbin Smith, Sedef Gavaz (also...me!)

There were about 25 themes I saw, including: adding context, annotation, data, visualization, mapping networks, reporting tools and semantic news. I put all the theme tags on a Google spreadsheet so you can view them (and change them, update them, do as you will).

This isn't a perfect way to organize these ideas...it's just a start. Next, I want to create a mindmap to visualize how all the different ideas and themes overlap and intersect. That's probably too ambitious for the time I have at the moment but...maybe one of the other #MozNewsLab participants will do it! (Ah, the perks of working with such a motivated group.)

#MozNewsLab is news/video/web/data/social/story

2011-07-27T17:42:00.002-06:00

Yeah, world clouds are over-rated. But I still like them. Here's one created from the text of the 256-character project descriptions submitted by Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab participants. (Word cloud made using Many Eyes.)

Update: Here's a black-on-white version, and a grey background version, at @phillipadsmith's request. ;)

256 characters is actually a lot...

2011-07-25T15:11:00.001-06:00

...for describing an idea. Here's my Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab project in 256 characters.

Project: “GitHub for storytelling.”
Goals: Foster open-source principles in journalism. Extend life-cycles of stories beyond their publish dates.
Key features: An open reporter’s notebook, version control, collaborative authorship tools and story-forking.

Now all I need is a pretty picture and I'll be good to go.

Breaking down barriers and opening up reporters' notes

2011-07-25T09:30:00.002-06:00

One of the many insightful things John Resig said during his lecture on the attitude and philosophy that has made jQuery successful was: You must remove the barriers between your users and your product. Make it as easy as possible for them to get in and stay in, starting with your very first contact.

Part of this has to do with making the technology work as smoothly as possible, but perhaps an even bigger part has to do with the way that technology is presented and the community engagement elements surrounding it.

In week 1, I realized that the biggest challenges surrounding my idea -- which is a tool for opening up reporters’ notebooks and encouraging others to re-mix, re-mash, and extend the stories that come out of them -- will be around behavioral processes, not technology.

So this week, I’m going to apply John Resig’s advice to last week’s and do some thinking about what some of the behavior barriers might be to using a GitHub for storytelling.

In reality, even though reporters’ notes are designed to be open and transparent (how else are we supposed to be able to trust a journalist as a primary source of information?) there are dozens of reasons reporters might object to sharing them. Some have to do with egos. Some have to do with laziness. But two “categories” are legit:

1. In some cases, sharing notes and interview recordings might compromise a story.

This could be because it would violate the trust or safety of a source. Or make it harder to continue reporting on the story because other sources clamp up.

Then there’s the pesky issue of competition. Publications don’t want to get scooped.

2. Reporters’ notes are often cryptic and hard for anyone other than the author to read.

Have you seen a reporters’ notes? They look like some sort of Proto-Indo European line form language, not English. By necessity, they need to write things quickly, and don’t always have time to type up notes or transcribe interviews.

Issues related to (1) aren’t something that could -- or should -- be addressed for my idea. Issues related to (2) can and should be.

So how do we make that happen?

Make new tools fit into the way journalists are already doing their work -- figure out what tools and processes they are already using to do reporting and integrate those as seamlessly as possible
If a tool can make it easier for journalists to take and share notes, then it would be a real home run.

Figuring exactly HOW to do that is the hard part. Ideas?

What is the equivalent of documentation for journalism?

2011-07-25T07:31:00.002-06:00

[Ed. note, 7/25/2011: I thought this was going to be my official blog assignment for week 2 of #MozNewsLab, but then I wrote a new one and changed my mind. My official post is here. Sorry for the confusion!]

The value in smashing together two fields -- like ballet and football or journalism and software -- goes beyond the products created through unexpected fusion. The most lasting result is the change in perspective that occurs through removing industry-related blinders.

So during John Resig’s lecture, I concentrated on figuring out how each nugget he shared (and there were a lot) translates into journalism. If jQuery wasn’t a JavaScript library, but a magazine or a newspaper, what would John Resig have said?

My favorite four ideas:

jQuery uses community input to make decisions about future strategy and direction.
They make deliberate efforts to keep users after they’ve shipped products (a major time for people to forget about jQuery and move on).
They treat their users as a resource. The best users become contributors.
jQuery is successful is because it has the best documentation.

What would bizarro-newspaper-editor-John-Resig have said?

We base our editorial decisions on reader input: What stories do they want? What do they want the newspaper to look like?
We work to keep readers after they’ve read a story. (This is especially important with readers who get to stories through Facebook or Twitter. We focus on keep them here, and bringing them back, after they’ve gobbled up social media-fed links.)
We give our most engaged readers -- the ones making the best comments and giving us the best tips -- opportunities to be contributors.
Well, this one has a story...

I asked, “What is the equivalent of documentation for journalism?” on Twitter and got great feedback:

From @SaleemKhan,

“I can't think of a direct journalism analogue to code documentation, but the closest might be story notes.”
“Process journalism partly addresses it but isn't always ideal. News has legal/privacy issues coding does not.”

From @epilepticrabbit,

“Journalists keep records of sources and what they say, right? so documentation = these records. Maybe?”

From @k88hudson,

“Most efforts very low tech though. We're trying to experiment with a wiki for contributors this year”
“Internal documentation is necessary for student papers, because there is so little continuity (people graduating, etc)”

Two ideas emerged:

Documentation on the organization level -- how a publication works.
Documentation on the story level -- how it goes from idea to story. The reporting/newsgathering notes are the meat.

How does this fit in to my project? I want to create a tool that lets people, a) expose their reporting process, and b) extend the life-cycle of stories beyond their publishing date through re-mixing and re-mashing.

This isn’t possible without “story documentation.”

In fact, the problem I am trying to solve could be boiled down to:

Create a tool that makes it easy for reporters to clearly and simply share their “story documentation” (i.e. story notes and process).

Once we have that, the re-mixing and re-mashing can follow.

As I make my idea more concrete by moving into the prototyping phase, this will be my guide

The evolution of my Knight-Mozilla learning lab idea

2011-07-18T08:59:00.000-06:00

Ideas have strange and interesting lives.

My idea has ultimately been boiled down to a single goal/statement -- Make information-based storytelling (aka journalism, the kind that happens in newsrooms) more collaborative.

To reach that goal, we have to encourage openness and transparency in the journalism process. So how can I do that without practicing openness and transparency in my idea development process? Um, I can't.

So, here's a rough outline of my idea process thus far, which I hope to update throughout the learning lab.

1. MoJo Challenge Submission - The Infinite Story

2. I work with data storytelling every day, and that produces tons of ideas. Ideas like...

A GitHub for data projects -- what if you could take datasets that people have already worked on, cleaned, queried, manipulated, etc., and build off of that work? Data work is a huge task. It could be made more collaborative.
Tools for data storytelling -- things that take the awesome data viz resources out there (Many Eyes, Tableau, visual.ly, etc.) and add content and storytelling elements. What if you could annotate data visualizations? Tie in social media feeds? Write a story around a data viz?

3. I've read a lot about collaboration. I'm obsessed with it. Enthralled. Projects like FLOSS Manuals get me really excited. How can we bring things like book sprints and collaborative authorship tools to traditional newsrooms?

4. One lesson I learned -- over and over and over -- as a journalism student is that only 10% of the reporting you do on any given story makes it to the "final" version. How can we tap the other 90%? How can we extend and nurture the lives of stories?

And all that led me to GitHub for storytelling. I don't know what it is. I don't know what it will look like. But I know I want to try it.

Prototyping the PROCESS: What would a GitHub for storytelling look like?

2011-07-18T07:06:00.006-06:00

Aza Raskin’s lecture helped me realize that I need to prototype a behavioral process, not a technology. I’ll get there, promise. But first, some context around my project idea:

What excites me most about the Knight-Mozilla learning lab? The opportunity to foster the open source software community’s collaborative ethic in the journalism world.

This led me to a formative question: What would a GitHub for news -- a web-based tool for truly social information-based storytelling -- look like?

Next step? Doodling and brainstorming. Here’s how journalists traditionally create news stories:

That diagram is kind of a lie. Really, it looks more like this:

But what if it could look more like this:

It's journalism -- with forking! This diagram is messy. Downright ugly. But the point is: Stories aren’t discrete entities with a beginning, middle and end of life. That structure is an artifact of the 20th century news industry. (The marvelous Clay Shirky has some recent thoughts on this. Read them. Now.) Just like the post-artifact book Craig Mod proposes, I’d like to see a post-artifact news story.

Print narrowed our definition of news: The web can open it back up.

What web tools could support this updated workflow? For starters, a digital open reporter’s notebook for organizing information (notes, interviews, multimedia). Add to that:

community
forking
version control
privacy control
tracking of forked stories

and...

HOLD UP!

My brainstorming came to a halt, right here. (See the skid marks?) And it’s Aza Raskin’s fault: The barrier to change in a system often isn’t technology -- it’s culture and behavior.

I stopped sketching features of a software tool and started thinking about behavior and culture. Are newsrooms ready (although perhaps readiness is a luxury) for collaborative storytelling?

My first reaction was newsrooms won’t be open to a GitHub for storytelling. A lingering sense of proprietary culture and competition pervades much of the industry. As Shirky notes, this has to change.

In the new news ecosystem, it's collaborate or die.

The good news: journalism is inherently collaborative. The bad news: newrooms are 30% smaller today than in 2000. As the pool of “in-house” collaborators diminishes, newsrooms have two options:

Look outside for collaborators (journalists are doing this by integrating social media, made smoother by tools like Storify)
Get better at collaborating with the resources they have left

Collaboration can be improved.

To get there, I need to prototype the process not the product. How?

Look at successful journalism collaborations (great collaborations exist within the investigative news community, like ProPublica and other members of the Investigative News Network). What are they doing right? What could they do better?
Look at open reporter’s notebook projects. Or build one.
Start testing the workflow -- What would forking a news story look and feel like? Is it intuitive?

Then, and only then, can I start sketching software. (Hopefully, this will keep me from turning into a Swiss Army knife.) I have tons of work to do...better get started!

Sinister 7: The Good Kind of Evil

2011-07-10T18:27:00.003-06:00

I'm blogging from the road here (literally: just south of Great Falls, Montana on I-15). Full update soon. But first...we won! Girls Heart Rockets was the fastest all-female team at the Sinister 7 trail relay, finishing the 148 km course in 15 hours and 53 minutes!

[Update, 7/11/11, 1:30 pm: Tien-Tien and I made it back to Boulder on Monday morning -- no deer-splattering! I'll add some annotations to these pics, and more soon...the resolution seems to be weird because I uplodaded them from my phone, so I might post better versions, too.]

At the pre-race meeting, a stuffed bear looms ominously over the team in rad matching track suits. (Want!)

Obligatory "before" picture, taken under the Sinister 7 start/finish

My favorite piece of race shwag: Sporknife! Knorkoon!

There was a cougar there, too...

Crowsnest Mtn. in the early morning light before the race start. The jaggedy thing to the right is the Seven Sisters, which I ran over on Leg 5.

Sinister 7 Imminent

2011-07-06T22:36:00.000-06:00

Sinister 7 is bearing down on me. Or rather, the snippets of information about the race that have floated through the interwebs are bearing down on me. On the eve of my departure for Canada's Crowsnest Pass (which I keep mentally pronouncing, "Crown-set Pass"), here are some of my favorite quotes from the official race materials and the discussion on the facebook page:

From the racer info packet:

There are definitely bears and cougars in the area. If there is reported activity around the course prior to, or during the race, we may modify the course. We cannot predict random animal activity so please stay alert. Take note of the information pamphlets, which will be included in your race package, on what to do if you approach a bear or cougar on the trail. We may dress up in bear suits to “motivate” runners; please do not pepper spray bears if they are wearing Sinister 7 t-shirts and running shoes.

We strongly recommend that you be prepared to drink from streams or rivulets if you need water when higher up in the mountains. The water in the area is generally very clean, and besides, illnesses like Beaver Fever take about two weeks to manifest symptoms so you should be fine for the duration of the race!

[Note: As someone who has experienced Beaver Fever, I can confirm.]

From the race director's update e-mail:

Snow Report

Two weeks of consistently warm weather has brought down a lot of snow and most of the course is now clear. This means a few different things. First, the streams and creeks are running high so some of you will be getting wet feet, especially on the longer stages. Don't worry though - it only helps your toenails fall off that much faster.

A lot of the trails are now quite muddy but we hope a week of sun will help that. Not that we care about the runners; we're just worried about trail damage!

There will still be snow on leg 5, guaranteed. So that does make the race directors feel a bit better - you are not getting off scot free.

From the facebook page:

[Leg 5] is worse than you can imagine. I did it completely in the dark (actually had daylight for the first bit but no light on the climb). Took me forever. But I am slow. It was horrible. So wet. It was like hiking up a waterfall at time...s. It was so wet. There maybe creek crossings but I never noticed any as the whole friggin trail was wet. A couple guys passed me running without poles (It think last year a couple fast teams got lost so ended up behind me) those guys were flying, have no idea how they could do it. The decent is brutal in the dark. When I did it is was misty, no moon, I had glasses on, I could barely see the frigin ground. Took longer to go down then to go up. It was hell. Poles saved me from certain fractures and sprains and incredibly helpful on the steep climbs and even more necessary on the decent. PLEASE NOTE THIS there is an aid station somewhere on this trail, one aid station, last year they had sweet nothing except for water, not a gel, not a granola bar, not a peanut.

See you on the other side!

A proper mixed drink

2011-07-06T17:53:00.001-06:00

The Violet Hour, Chicago

Atop Bard Peak

2011-07-06T17:51:00.001-06:00

This picture is from one of two 13ers I hiked on Sunday. Whose vertebra is that?

The bean

2011-07-06T17:49:00.001-06:00

I gave an Ignite-style presentation, and I liked it!

2011-06-15T12:38:00.000-06:00

Last month, at the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (a collection of people who do cool things with data at the hyper-local level) meeting in Detroit, I gave an Ignite-style presentation.

I was nervous.

I procrastinated.

I declined showing anyone my slides.

Or letting anyone watch me practice.

I perspired. A lot.

And when presentation time came...

I had so much fun!

But, after the post-presentation high wore off, I got shy about showing the video of my talk to people. Enough! Here it is. Fast-forward to 44:00 in the video to watch:

You can also download my slides [ppt] (some of the formatting is off because I created them on a Mac).

Preparing for my ignite experience was painful in the way that it's always painful for me to sit down and start writing a story. And it's painful for the same reason -- giving a presentation in this style, just like refining your ideas into a 500-word article, forces you to identify the big ideas and cut away the chaff. I think it's an experience everyone should try. It doesn't have to be at a large, city-wide Ignite event. Why not grab a few friends and give Ignite presentations in someone's living room? You may not get the rush of speaking in front of a crowd, but the beer would be cheaper and closer at hand...

Jordan's Polar Plunge

2011-06-08T10:27:00.000-06:00

A friend (and loyal follower of this blog, woot!) just alerted me to something great. Every time he searches for my blog, this pops up:

JORDAN'S POLAR PLUNGE

It's a polar plunge. It's in Plymouth, Mass. It benefits a hospital. And it's very, very real.

I feel compelled to participate in this event, but I'll have to wait until March 2012 -- just nine short months! Anyone want to join me?

Playing with my new toy

2011-05-18T22:02:00.002-06:00

Put A Bird On It (so meta!)

2011-03-06T18:13:00.000-07:00

The "Put A Bird On It" sketch from Portlandia is one of my favs. So you can imagine how excited I was when my dad modded my blog and sent me the link. Now it's art!

"We crave stories – all cultures do – but we also crave facts"

2011-03-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

I'm in love with Gerry Marzorati's 2009 speech on long-form magazine writing.

"What brought long-form magazine writing into being in America was, I would argue, the essentially empirical and pragmatic nature of our culture – its distaste for, and distrust of, abstraction and ideology. Ours is a huge land and one of constant change. It is a fluid nation where class divisions are never static – which has made it a tough place to write as Balzac and Zola wrote. We crave stories – all cultures do – but we also crave facts. Lots of facts. And facts are more compelling, easier to digest, when arranged narratively."

Yup.

(Re)learning to Program

2011-02-01T13:33:00.000-07:00

Warning: Mild to moderate nerdery ahead. Proceed with caution.

I am officially unemployed for six more days. What to do with my time? Some people might watch a lot of daytime TV. (I maxed out on Hulu last week.) Some might exercise excessively. (It's currently -6F outside, and I've already destroyed my legs.) Or, some might teach themselves to program in Python!

Here's the relevant backstory: Both of my parents are software engineers/computer scientists/humongous nerds. As a result, I shunned anything related to programming for the first 20-odd years of my life. I took two programming courses in college, but...

back then I thought problem sets were lame and gross
one of the classes was in Ada - a gross, unwieldy language
the other was a class assumed I already knew Java when I didn't, which was kinda gross and unfortunate,

...so I didn't really get much out of them. (Yes, I find this shameful and sad. If I were in college right now I would learn so much more than I did at the time. Bygones...)

As it turns out, I really like programming. It's fun and stimulating and not boring at all! Really! Had I gotten over my familial aversion to programming earlier, I might have actually majored in EE/CS and maybe, just maybe, I would have liked it and I wouldn't have rejected a technical career.

Let's turn this into a silver lining, shall we? I truly think that looking at technology and science from a humanist perspective is where I am supposed to be. (Let's face it: I'm fascinated by programmers and technologists and their ilk.) Had I studied CS and liked it, it might have taken me a lot longer to come to that conclusion.

Or maybe I'm just equivocating.

Anyway, the point is, I feel like I really should learn how to program things in a way that is intuitive and natural. How else am I going to be a programmer-journalist? So I'm taking a class through MIT OpenCourseWare (basically the most amazing resource ever - if you haven't seen it yet go look at it right now...did you do it yet?): 6.00 - Introduction to Computer Science and Programming.

I'm a total noob and I love it.

The first problem set is safely under my belt. And guess what? Not only was I excited to do it, I was excited to write the programs and then write them again more efficiently. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to. So weird. (My dad suggested I simultaneously do them in JavaScript...we'll see about that.)

I must be getting old because I want to do homework for fun. Also, I laugh at all the jokes in the lectures (especially the painfully cheesy ones) when the undergrads remain silent...how embarrassing!

Here's the printout from one of the first programs I wrote. Cool, huh? It shows you that as n gets big, the product of the primes that are less than n approach e^n. The bigger n gets, the closer the product of the primes gets to e^n. Neat!

So I might post some updates on my progress here. This will probably be boring to everyone but me. Consider yourself warned...

Redding Marathon Race Report

2011-01-31T10:46:00.004-07:00

Quick Stats:

Redding Marathon website Full results Official race photos

Date: Sunday, January 16, 2011
Time: 3:37:32
Pace: 8:19/mile
Place: overall 25/178; female 4/88 (?); age group 2/15
Pre-marathon meal: Spaghetti with an olive oil anchovy sauce (sounds kinda gross but it was delicious)
Post-marathon beer: Black Butte Porter, Deschutes Brewery

Pictures: View my photo album on Picasa

The view of the Shasta Dam from the start - it's huge!

Summary: I ran this race as a “training run” for the 50K trail run (my first ever) I’m doing next month (Psycho Wyco Trail Run in Kansas, on Feb. 12 -- wish me luck!). I didn’t decide until about a week before that I was for sure going to do it. I was hoping to find someone to run one leg of the three-leg relay with me, but couldn’t. That said, my goals were a) take it easy, b) have fun. I accomplished both of those...sort of. My first 5K was basically race pace (ouch), because it was downhill (oops). For me, having fun meant going as hard as I could on the downhills, which I love love love, so it was worth the tired quads later on. I think of it as kind of an unconventional 10K speed workout followed by a 20 mile long run.

The Redding Marathon is the most beautiful course I’ve ever run...really really! (And I’m lucky enough to have run several gorgeous marathons.) It starts on Shasta Lake (yes, reservoirs are man-made, but they truly can be stunning - both the lake and the dam were huge and awesome), runs over the Shasta Dam, then down into the Sacramento River Valley. There were mountains on all sides. I was never bored because I was staring at the beauty of the valley the whole time. Almost entire course is on a rails-to-trails bike path, which was flat and smooth. The first five miles are downhill, with the first three being extreme downhill (read: you will go way too fast if you don’t consciously focus on slowing your pace). There are some nasty hills (at least, they felt nasty by that point) around miles 15-17, which (thankfully) give way to a nice downhill mile that was much appreciated at that point in the race. The course ends by crossing the Sundial Bridge and taking you into a riverside park.

The spectators and other runners in the field were sparse, so I was running alone for almost the entire time. Most of the people around me were relay runners, which can be a bit disheartening when you are struggling and they are on fresh legs. The course loops back on itself for the last few miles, so some of the slower runners on the course gave me some targets to focus on. There is this horrible out and back in mile 26: Just when you are in sight of the Sundial Bridge, they make you turn around and do a quarter-mile on gravel. I am sure the race organizers didn’t realize what a cruel trick that wa when they were designing the course, though. :)

We got lucky with perfect weather: It was in the low 50s, cloudy for most of the race and sunny for the last six miles. Oh, and the post race food was awesome. Sweet potato chili and pie = just what I needed!

Prologue, part 1: Before I even got to Redding, I spent nearly two weeks driving up and down the Pacific coast. My friend Sarah, as astronomy PhD student, and I drove from Berkeley to Vancouver, BC, and back stopping in the Redwoods, Portland and Seattle. On our road trip, we listened to countless episodes of This American Life, drove along cliffs and rocky coastlines, camped next to what was most likely a pile of bear scat, drank gloriously sour beer, ate peanut butter and jelly french fries at one of Portland’s late-night food trucks, went running along beaches and through coastal bogs in Vancouver, got snowed on, attended an astronomy conference in Seattle (Sarah as a student; me as a member of the press corps), watched the Ducks barely lose the BCS championship, drank away the sorrow of the loss, got snowed on again, watched some spontaneous glass blowing, enjoyed the work of Pablo Picasso, and played (not enough!) Kinect Dance Central. Phew! It was totally worth having most of my high-altitude advantage wear off before the race.

Prologue, part 2: We stayed in Redding, Calif., on Friday and Saturday nights, in the budget Stardust Motel (~$40/night for three people). The accommodations were almost as glamorous as the name. Our first night, we were welcomed by dumpster divers in the motel parking lot. I was fascinated by their activities, and camped out by the window intermittently peeping out at them through the blinds. On Saturday, we picked up my race-number and then headed out for a hike in - wait for it - Whiskeytown! Well, it was actually the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, which was free because it was MLK weekend...bonus! The area used to be a mining community, and we drove through a ghost town on the way. The actual settlement of Whiskeytown is now at the bottom of a lake (well, reservoir). We did a loop up to Brandy Creek Falls, which was gorgeous.

That night, we had dinner at an Italian restaurant that had so many identical waiters running around it felt like we were in a musical and they were about to break into a song and dance number. We returned to the cozy Stardust Motel, watched The Neverending Story. (From this movie I relearned two key lessons that would help me the next day during my marathon: You can’t let yourself be overcome by the sadness; if you are positive, a luck dragon will find you. Ok, I lied. Neither of these lessons turned out to be helpful, and the movie doesn’t really hold up when you watch it as an adult. But it did help me get to sleep.)

Race start: I was really just blown away with how pretty the race start was. We were surrounded by mountains, overlooking a lake...it was perfect. I took a couple of pictures with my phone (which don’t do the scenery justice at all) before handing in my gear bag and warming up. The start was calm and casual, no timing chips, no gun. It felt like a fun-run 5K, which helped me relax. However, I wasn’t relaxed enough to not go out too fast (like I always do).

The downhill: My first mile was about 6:50 (oh noes!), then the second mile flattened out a bit as we went over the dam (maybe 7:00-ish), then the third mile was my fastest, a 6:40. I knew I was going way fast, but it was fun, gorgeous, I felt good, and I didn’t care because at that point it felt amazing. As the grade smoothed out, I ran 7:30s for a while. (Note: I slowed down to an average of about 8:45s for the last 16 miles. Not the most even marathon I’ve run, to say the least.) For the first few miles, there were some other runners around me (mostly relay runners), which was nice. I was wearing my Canadian Death Race shirt (btw, I love that shirt), and another runner asked me about it. (Sidenote: I got a massage after the race, and I left perfect sweaty impression of the CDR logo on the massage table. It was kind of amazingly gross.)

The course went through a railroad tunnel, which was a lot dark and a little spooky and a yurtload of awesome.

Then it got flat and reality set in: Did I mention before that the course was ridiculously pretty? From miles 10 to 15 I just kind of settled in and relaxed. The first relay runners finished at I think 10.9 miles, so running through the exchange was fun. It was the first time I really saw any spectators. Sarah walked back along the course from the exchange to meet me and run with me for a mile - very much appreciated! She has a knee injury, so the fact that she ran with me means a lot.

I tried to eat calories early and often in this race, to prepare myself for all the eating I’ll need to be doing in next month’s 50K. Well, that plan worked well, but it was foiled by the fact that water stations were sparse. It felt like they were every 5 miles or so, although in reality they were probably closer together than that. Nonetheless, even in the cloudy, cool weather I felt like I wasn’t able to get enough water. Sarah ran with me again at mile 14.5 or so (I think?) and brought me a bottle of water, which was really great. She left me right as I started to climb those vicious hills.

And up and up...: The hills covered about two miles, rolled a bit, but mostly just climbed and climbed. This was the loneliest part of the course for me. I couldn’t see any runners in front of me, so it was hard to motivate. The course did remain gorgeous, though, winding around the sides of the hills as it went up. One I reached the top, I had a much-needed downhill mile to an aid station (also much needed...seriously, where was the water on this course? I was running next to a river the whole time, which probably just made me extra thirsty).

And then I kind of zoned out: I don’t remember the last eight or so miles of the course. This is where it looped back on itself and the sun came out (yay!). The only other runners I saw were either relayers (who were passing me), or slower runners still on their first loop. It would have been nice to have some people going my pace I could try to catch. But, alas, such is the nature of a small marathon. Sarah ran with me a third time during this last bit, and I really really needed the company. The course crossed the Sacramento River four times over three different bridges (if I’m counting right...), which was kind of rad. The final two miles were through a heavily used park, so there were little kids on bikes with training wheels and skateboarders to dodge - not exactly what I was in the mood for, at that point, but at least it was a little less lonely.

The finish: In the final mile, I could see the Sundial Bridge up ahead. Salvation! But, as I mentioned before, right when I got to the base of it they made me take this quarter-mile gravel loop. I actually said to the people directing traffic, “Are you serious? That’s so evil!” They just kind of laughed at me. The one good thing about the loop was that I could see that there were a few groups of women a couple of minutes behind me. There was no way I was going to let them catch me at the end, so that gave me the extra motivation I needed to finish.

I came in at 3:37:32 - pretty good for a “training run” (although it was slower than the 20-miler I did when I was home in Portland over the holidays...oh well). Sarah and our friend Libby (who was along for the last few days of the road trip) met me at the finish line with a beer - Black Butte Porter, yummy even when slightly warm!

The aftermath: My recovery from the marathon went very smoothly (I was able to do a 90 min. run in the snow by Thursday), until I decided to do a really hard mountain run the next Saturday. It was great fun, until I realized that it probably set my recovery back by at least a week. [Lesson: Running a marathon a month before a 50K is probably ok, but you have to give yourself time to recover. Doing an icy eight mile trail run that has nearly 3,000 ft. of climbing does not constitute recovery. Doh!]

Where does astronomy news come from?

2011-01-12T16:56:00.001-07:00

How does science turn into news? Maybe, like me, you wonder about this a lot. Maybe you don't. The truth is, before I went to journalism school, I didn't really think about things like how news gets to be news, or why some things are considered news and others aren't. Now I think about these questions constantly.

The process of some thing - an event, a person, a scientific journal article - turning into news is simultaneously arbitrary and systematic. Some things are obviously newsworthy: They just have that "thing," you know it when you see it, etc. Most breaking news would fall in this category. Burning buildings are kinda hard to ignore. But most things are more ambiguous.

There are lots of players in the game of news-making at AAS: reporters, editors, press officers and scientists are the main ones.

Here is roughly how things work here at the AAS meeting. There is a press office at the conference. It's right next door to a room where press conferences take place, on a separate floor from the rest of the AAS meeting. There is also a "quiet room" journalists can reserve to do broadcast (TV, radio, podcast) interviews. The press area is basically disconnected from the sessions, plenary talks, and exhibit halls full of posters. In fact, you could just hang out in the press office and the press conference room and you wouldn't even realize that there are thousands upon thousands of astronomers upstairs giving talks and standing by posters and drinking coffee and shmoozing. I'm guessing most journalists venture upstairs at some point, though. I bet the best ones have astronomer buddies they hang out with.

When I checked in and got my press credentials, I got a conference program (just like all the conference attendees get) that lists all the talks and posters - there are hundreds of those.* In addition, I got a "press kit." This is basically just a printed out schedule of press conferences and talks/posters that the AAS press office (they have their own public information people) thinks journalists might find interesting.

The press office is a room with three king-size-bed shaped tabled lined up. The tables are covered with white tablecloths. On top of the tables are bowls of hard-candies, bottles of water, conference programs, notepads, surge-protectors and ethernet cables. When I walked into the press office at 9:45 on Monday morning, 15 minutes before the first press conference started, the room was packed. There was barely an open seat at the big white table. Everyone was sitting at their computers, mostly Apples.

I feel really awkward in the press office because there are people here from TIME magazine, MSNBC, the New York Times, National Geographic News, Science News, Scientific American and other big-deal publications.

The press office has a table with coffee in the back. It also has a coat-rack. The schedule of press conferences and all of the press-releases that have come out are pegged to the back wall. Each registered member of the press has a mailbox where we get hard-copies of the press releases as they come out.

I guess I should tell you a little bit about press-releases. I signed up for an AAS press e-mail list right before the conference. Because I am on that list, I get 5 to 10 press releases every day from various organizations like NASA and big research universities. Those organizations send them to AAS's press officer who forwards them on to us. Some press releases come with an embargo. This means that, although I can read them as soon as I get them, I can't write about anything in them until a specified date and time - often the embargo date will be an imminent press conference or when an accepted paper will go up on a journal's website. For some announcements, we don't actually receive the press release until during the press conference. I found this a bit weird, but maybe this is just the way things work.

What is the difference between a press-release an popular media article on a scientific finding? Not really that much. Press-releases are written by public information officers at universities and research centers, whereas popular media articles are written by professional "independent" journalists. A lot of former journalists have no gotten jobs as public information officers, though, so the distinction is kinda fuzzy. (I might piss off a lot of people by saying that, though.)

Is there really much difference between the abstract at the front of the journal article, the press-release, and the article that ends up in a mainstream media outlet? There might not be much of a difference in content, but that as you go through that progression from academic journal to press release to mainstream press, things get funneled down. For all the things that get published in scientific journals, only some of them get press releases. And for all the press releases science journalists get, only some of those actually end up as mainstream articles.

Anyway, back to what is actually happening here at the AAS meeting.

Press conferences are weirdly fascinating. There are three each day of the AAS meeting and they are staggered (i.e., one at 10 am, one at 12:45 pm, one at 2:30 pm). It seems like they are set up like concerts, where there is a line-up of scientists whose announcements go chronologically in order from the "opening act" to the "big deal." Each scientist speaks for roughly 10 minutes. Sometimes, there are also people who are there just to comment on whatever was announced and drop memorable quotes.

Most of the scientists in the press conferences are really good about giving context to their findings. They do a great job of saying "this is why you should care" and "this is how we figured this out." Some of them also are clearly focusing on story-telling and are good at presenting a narrative arc, a compelling image/metaphor or a memorable quote. This makes things a little bit for exciting for someone like me who has almost no knowledge of astronomy. Many of these talks are jargon-toned-down versions of talks and posters happening in the "real conference" upstairs.

At the end of all the presentations, the floor is opened to questions. First, people int he room get to ask questions, then people who are watching a live feed of the conference online. Generally, it is the same three or four people who ask questions at every press conference. And generally, they sit in the front of the room. After about 10 minutes of questions, the scientists stick around and journalists can go up and talk to them one-on-one.

And that's about it. But not all news comes from press officers, press-releases and press conferences. Compared to a lot of other types of journalism, covering a conference like the AAS meeting feels like being spoon-fed processed food. Only the food is news. It's kind of a weird feeling. But maybe other conferences operate differently - honestly, I have no idea.

The most interesting stories, I think, come from journalists who stumble across things and make their own connections and find interesting scientists to talk to. This AAS meeting is probably a really good place to do that, especially since the astronomers I know who are here say that it's really not all about the talks or the posters, it's about astronomers getting to hang out with each other and party and network and whatnot.

*This conference is HUGE. It has several thousand attendees. Each day there are hundreds of talks, and a lot of them are going on simultaneously. There is a giant exhibition hall filled with posters, and the posters change each day. It is a general conference, so for ALL types of astronomy which includes dozens of sub-fields, everything from cosmology (origins of the universe) to astronomy education.

Psyche!

2011-01-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

Image Credit: NASA/ESA/ASU/J. Hester

I went to a press conference at the AAS meeting this morning. I thought it was going to be boring, and honestly, I only went because I felt like I should be making better use of my press pass. But then it turned out to be really rad - a great example of how science actually happens (as opposed to the cartoon version) and how tenuous knowledge actually is.

The subject of the press conference was "Not-So-Standard Candles." Before 10 am this morning, I didn't know what a standard candle was, let alone a non-standard one. (Ok, this isn't strictly true: Sarah tried to explain to me what a standard candle was a few days ago, but I didn't listen very closely. Sorry, Sarah!) But what a candle is isn't so important as the purpose it serves. It's something astronomers use to measure how far away things are: a cosmic yardstick.

If astronomers know how intense something is, they can tell how far away it is. Astronomers use "standard candles" - classes of stars called cepheids - to calibrate their instruments. They use cepheids not because those stars have intensities that are reliable and unvarying, but because their intensities vary in a predictable way.

Or, at least, that's what everyone thought. At this morning's press conference,

Massimo Marengo of Iowa State described a star, identified as a standard candle, that is losing mass due to a strong solar wind. Basically, it's a standard candle that is shrinking over time.
Scott Engle of Villanova described a standard candle, identified in 1926 as a cepheid, that just stopped being one all of a sudden. Over the past 80 years, it stopped varying in that useful predictable way.
Marco Tavani of the University of Rome and Colleen Wilson-Hodge of NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center spoke about the way the Crab Nebula - a standard candle so commonly used it has a unit of measurement, the milli-Crab, named after it - fluctuates in not-so-standard short-term and long-term ways. It has short-term gamma-ray flares, and since 2008 it has decreased in intensity 7% which, as Wilson-Hodge put it in nice metaphoric terms, is like "X-ray astronomy's 'meter stick' is shorter by 7 centimeters." For more, check out the NASA press release. (They also have a really slick video.)

There's an impulse, when we hear news like this, to exclaim that nothing is certain, everything science has ever done is in question, etc., etc. Science is all a lie! But the ground is not figuratively falling out from beneath our feet. Sarah explained to me that astronomy works with such huge scales, from the very small to the very large, so that an in-joke is that if something is within an order of magnitude of what you expect it to be, then it's accurate. A 7% disparity, she said, is actually really tiny. So it's not like this will make a huge difference in terms of things people are measuring.

What's interesting about this morning's announcement is that astronomers found this disparity - flickering candles - as they were trying to calibrate and use their standard instruments. And they kept getting "weird" results, and at first they thought, "Uh oh, we're doing something wrong here." So they explored that "weird" result, and are now finding interesting things.

This is something you've probably heard before, but it's something that you can never hear too many times: Science is never finished or definitive. And that's ok. That's not some problem with science or the scientific process. It's actually the strength of the scientific process.

There have been a lot of interesting articles recently that examine the way science actually happens - see Jonah Lehrer's New Yorker piece from a few weeks ago and Benedict Carey's piece from the New York Times yesterday on the use of statistics. I love this type of analysis and self-reflexiveness, and I hope we'll only see more. It's important to realize that examinations and explorations of the scientific process aren't attacks on science. They are just the opposite.

Art museums are dangerous places

2011-01-12T12:15:00.002-07:00

Yesterday I went to the Picasso exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum. The exhibit disappears (well, migrates, I presume) after Monday, so everyone is going crazy this week trying to get some last minute art viewing.

Picasso is one of my favorite painters (granted, I have limited knowledge of art and art history), so it's a moot point that I enjoyed the exhibit. But, instead of writing at length about the awesome paintings, drawings and sculptures I saw, there are some anthropological oddities I want to share.

I arrived at SAM around 11 and found a massive line snaking through the lobby and around the corner. You know how sometimes when there are wild weather patterns or huge traffic jams and strangers are stuck in awkward situations together and form a kind of impromptu camaraderie? Well it was sort of like that. We built a fire in a trash can and told ghost stories and elected a leader who we then mutinied against. Ok, that last part didn't happen. After nearly an hour - and one tense incident where a man in line yelled at an elderly woman for cutting in line, when really she was just trying to connect with her friend - I made it to the front of the line.

Lots of museums have started using audio tours. You've probably seen them: Some sort of box you hang around your neck with headphones attached that's loaded with pre-recorded information and analysis. This exhibit used those, only they look like cellphones. You hold them up to your hear, just like you are listening to a phone. It's a pretty cool design, because it avoids sharing ear-wax with the thousands of other people who have used the audio device before you. But it is also inadvertently hilarious because everyone in the packed exhibit halls (and they were Tokyo-subway-at-rush-hour packed) looks like they are talking on the phone. I would have taken a picture - because it really was hilarious! - but photography was not allowed.

The guards/bouncers in the exhibit were on point. One of them came up to me and told me I had to wear my messenger bag at my side instead of at my back to avoid bumping things/people. (Weird, I know.) He also spotted a water bottle poking out of my bag and warned me that if tried to drink it I'd be very, very sorry. I actually had forgotten I even had water with me, so I really wasn't planning on it. I promise. Later, as I was taking notes on one of the pieces, a different bouncer came up to me and said pens aren't allowed in the exhibit halls. Oh no! But wait, it's ok. He handed me a golf pencil and said that every guard has loads of them in case I wear this one out.

I was very impressed that, with the streams of people, the museum-bouncers were so good at honing in on my "suspicious behavior." What exactly did they fear might happen? Here are some doomsday scenarios that came to mind:

A small child (for an exhibit so blatantly about sex, there sure were a lot of kids there - witness a Picasso quote on the wall: "Art is never chaste") bumps into my bag, causing me to stumble, trip on a bench, launch the water bottle out of my bag so that it explodes and splashes all over a painting.
I get really, really annoyed with the herds of cell-phone-device shufflers and decide to take my frustration out on a painting with my pen.

Feel free to come up with your own permutations of these situations. Lucky, nothing of the sort happened. But be careful, folks, museums are dangerous places.

Oh, I couldn't take photos of the Picasso exhibit, but I did take a photo of the exploding/flying car installation in the SAM lobby:

How do we talk about planets that rock?

2011-01-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder about where journalists get the pithy and cleverish (and often cliche) images and metaphors they use to explain new scientific discoveries? Well, I do. And because I'm not really here working - and I don't have to worry about being clear or informative or thorough or pithy or cleverish - I can let my mind wander to cynical questions like this. Sorry, sorry, sorry for those of you that disapprove of cynicism.

This morning, as I attended the first press conference of the week, Exoplanets and their Host Stars, I realized that sometimes scientists try really hard to plant them.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, there were some truly cool things announced at the press conference about exoplanets, or planets that are outside of our solar system:

Edward Guinan of Villanova announced that big planets orbiting super close to stars can actually give away some of their angular momentum to the star, causing old stars to rotate faster than scientists previously thought they did. (This one is taking a while for me to wrap my head around.)
Adam Kowalski of University of Washington has found that small stars (much smaller than the sun) in places where astronomers are looking for exoplanets can actually make really big, intense flares. That doesn't look good for the possibility of life on potential exoplanets there.
(Hint, hint) This is the big discovery that we are all supposed to get excited about: Natalie Batalha of San Jose State announced that NASA's Kepler mission - which is looking for Earth-like exoplanets - has found it's first "unquestionably rocky planet." (There are other planets out there that are "questionably rocky," it seems.) (Here's the press release.)

I enjoyed the press conference because each speaker focused on the scientific process underlying each discovery. They talked about the problems they were trying to solve and the logic behind what kind of data they collected and some of the weird/confusing things they found along the way. It's something I wish showed up more in popular science stories: Don't just tell us what the we now knows (or, now think we know), but tell us why and how we got to that knowledge. So, good job on that one, scientists!

I am sure other science writers out there will describe the science for you better than I can, so back to what I enjoy most: analyzing the narrative/communication techniques of the press conference and the images that will serve to represent these findings in popular media.

During Batalha's presentation, she called the rocky planet, Kepler-10b, "our Vulcan." This is an extended metaphor that harks back to one of the first telescopes designed specifically to search for exoplanets. It was named, yup, Vulcan. The namesake comes from a planet that early astronomers thought might be between Mercury and the sun. Turns out, Vulcan didn't exist - not in our solar system, at least. But if it did, it might look a lot like Kepler-10b, which is 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun. This makes Kepler-10b very hot (2500 degrees F, so almost as hot as some of the colder stars), near the melting point of iron.

The other narrative imagery Batalha used to inspire us about Kepler-10b was to focus on the fact that its star is 560 light years away. That means that when we look at Kepler-10b's star today, we are observing light from the year 1450. During 1450, Europeans were beginning to attempt to cross the Pacific Ocean and were on the brink of discovering the new world. And searching for planets with the Kepler mission is our 21st century exploration. A Euro-centric metaphor, sure, but it makes a nice story.

After the three speakers finished their presentations, Geoffrey Marcy from Berkeley, an "indepdenent commentator" and exoplanet big-wig, shared his reactions. As far as I could tell, the reason he was there was so that people could use a pre-packaged "other source" in their stories. (I already apologized for my cynicism...why do I feel I need to keep apologizing?) Anyway, he basically told us that the discovery of Kepler-10b is really awesome and important (just in case we didn't realize that). He told us that we need to remember Kepler-10b, because it will end up in all the astronomy text books (I felt that was a bit condescending...), and then, here it comes...

He called Kepler-10b a "planetary missing link." And this, my friends, is where I cringed.

Missing link is one of the biggest, baddest, most persistent science cliches. Bigger and badder, even, than "key to understanding" or "holy grail." The Knight Science Journalism Tracker derided science writers for leaping on the missing link train in anthropology, but the metaphor has an amazing ability to cross into completely non-related fields.

So, people like to make fun of science journalists (and rightly so) for relying heavily on cliches and tired metaphors. Science journalists even like to make fun of themselves for it.

But, I just wanted point out that although journalists are guilty of being too lazy to find new (and probably more appropriate ways) to describe things, so are scientists. True, it's worse if a journalist falls back on a tired cliche, because it is a journalist's JOB to communicate. But, this may explain where some of it comes from. Journalists are taught to use the voices of their sources - instead of their own voice - as much as possible.

Anyway, I'll stop before this turns into an outright tirade - because it's not. Maybe I'll do a follow up post where I go back and count the number of cliches I used here...after all, pointing out that something is cliche is maybe the second-biggest cliche of all time. I am just poking around at some of the reasons accurate, interesting communication can be so hard.

AAS 217: How did I end up here?

2011-01-10T12:47:00.000-07:00

Hello from the 217th meeting* of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington. What am I doing here? Well...

I finished up my coursework for my master's in journalism at CU a few weeks ago (phew!), and as I embarked on the bumpy search for work, I decided I might as well blend my metaphorical trip with a real one. My friend Sarah, a graduate student in astronomy at Berkeley, asked me to be her co-pilot on a road trip. And where do graduate students in astronomy go for vacation? Why, the AAS meeting, of course!

I lied. That's not strictly true. We aren't just attending the AAS meeting. We've already spent a night under the stars (and mist) in California's redwoods, had an accidental pit-stop at a Christian coffee shop in Coos Bay, Oregon, tasted some deliciously sour beer in Portland, and skipped rocks on the beach in Vancouver, B.C. By the end of the trip one of us (I'll let you guess which one) may even run a marathon.

So while I'm in Seattle and under-employed, I decided I might as well do a little astronomy blogging.

Disclaimer the first: I know very little about astronomy.

Disclaimer the second: "Very little" is actually an overstatement.

Disclaimer the third: I also know very little about how journalists operate at science conferences like this. Is the action even at the press conferences or poster sessions or invited talks? Or is it elsewhere? My gut feeling would be that the action is at whichever bar the most awesome scientists go to at the end of the day…but what do I know?

Disclaimer the fourth: Disclaimers are totally lame! I am just going to dive in...

*Am I the only one who hears that this is the 217th meeting of the AAS and wonders what the first, second, third and on and on meetings were like? Was it three guys sitting in a pub playing darts and talking about the size of their telescopes? I really hope so. I'll try to find out and let you know.

My mom on Nixon (hint - she was never a fan)

2010-10-28T13:31:00.001-06:00

So I recently interviewed my mom about Richard Nixon and Watergate for my media history class. It was fun and interested and I really want to share it with you. The full transcript is below...how am I going to pick out the best parts? There are just so many! I learned so much more about the Nixon era through this interview than I did in my high school history class (even though I had a fabulous teacher). This makes me want to launch some large scale oral history project...we'll see...

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Jordan: Can you describe where and when you first heard about Nixon’s resignation?

Rebecca: Yeah, I was, it was a summer where I was traveling in Europe. And I had earned enough money as a forest service lookout to pay for college and have enough money to go travel on the cheap in Europe. And so I was traveling around. And at the time that I heard about Nixon’s resignation, it was a lot of, I was reading the International Herald Tribune, which was the only English thing I could find. And I found it all over Europe. But I was reading the Herald Tribune and they were talking about the legal challenges and the impeachment threat and stuff. But I hadn’t been reading it for a couple of days. And I happened to be in Paris, and I was checking into an inexpensive hotel where I was staying. And the person who checked me in said to me, “Oh, I’m so sorry about your president.” And I thought maybe he’d been shot or something. So I wasn’t really sure what was going on. So I said, “Oh, you mean Richard Nixon?” And she said yes. Sp I said, “Oh, what happened?” And she said he resigned. So this French woman who was checking me into the hotel told me. So then of course I go out and try to get a paper. This was way before, you know, there was any sort of internet access.

And it was kind of funny because when she told me this, because I was not a supporter of Nixon in any way or shape whatsoever -- in fact, most of the people in Europe really hated his policies in the war, didn’t like the cover-up, you know they were just very -- at that time there was a lot of anti-American political sentiment. But in France, they really liked Nixon for whatever reason. I don’t really know why.

Jordan: That’s kind of strange that the French liked Nixon.

Rebecca: Well, there’s a connection between the French and Vietnam. The French people occupied – occupied is probably too strong a word – Vietnam was actually governed with French influence before the U.S. people came in. And so I tend to think that the, uh, in fact, when people were kin of fleeing Vietnam, fleeing South Vietnam, they would come back to Paris or to France as well as coming to the U.S. or whatever to escape the war. And I don’t believe it was a French colony, but there was French governmental influence. French was one of the languages that was an official language of Vietnam. Some of the very educated people in Vietnam or diplomatic types spoke French. French was a language that was spoken there. So my suspicion, and I don’t really know this for a fact, is that the French admired our policies in Vietnam. Because we kind of maybe took over from what their efforts were. But that’s just speculation on my part, and I should maybe know my history better. But there was this French influence in Vietnam, and I think that connection through Nixon, you know, he didn’t start the war, but he kind of went through a bitter end through this, and had some respect for him in the French people’s eyes. That’s just my theory. I’m sure you could check out some of that stuff. But yeah, France is the only country in Europe that was welcoming, Nixon lovers, and they really loved our president.

Jordan: I guess you were talking about your experience of what it was like to go out and get that newspaper and find out what had happened. Do you have any more things to add about that?

Rebecca: Although it wasn’t inexpensive, it was a very, you know when I was traveling, it was the case that you could always find the International Herald Tribune if you were going through larger cities or in train stations or whatever.

And so as a way of keeping in touch, not just U.S. politics, although that was heavily dominant at the time in the International Herald Tribune, it was a good way of reading and finding about what was really going on. I mean, if you are traveling, as I was traveling through Europe, I went through England, through France. I was in Italy. I was in Switzerland. I was in Scandinavian countries, Germany, whatever. It was hard to figure out what was going on as I did that. And so being interested, being connected to what was going on in the world that was the way to do it.

So I was, you know, on my poor student Eurail Pass, traveling on the cheap flying to Europe on one of the cheap airlines. I was getting there and living in youth hostels and whatnot, and I would go out and make sure I could afford getting the paper a lot of the time, but not every day. But you know, several days a week.

Jordan: And what was your reaction when you actually read the story that described Nixon’s resignation? What kind of feelings did you have?

Rebecca: Actually, relief. I personally was happy: Happy relief. I was glad that it had happened. The U.S. was just in a dog fight politically up to that time. Impeachment, I mean, the impeachment proceedings were looming, right. People were threatening that they would drag this out. We were just so sick and tired of this. I tend to think that the U.S., you know, it was just sort of bogging down any other stuff that could go on. There was an inertia of any other thing that needed to be done legislatively or politically, and the whole of Washington was just kind of in this tizzy. And after a while, and it had been going on for months, where all of his advisors and top aids and whatever were getting tried, and going through all these testimonies and stuff and they were getting thrown in jail or whatever. And we just knew that, oh man, it’s just going on and on. You know, it was just like a mess. So in some sense, the fact that he resigned was like, “Oh, great.”

Now on the other hand, when Ford pardoned him, you kind of went, “Oh, I guess that was part of the deal.” So in some sense, rather than to keep the nation festering along with this – because I think impeachment trials would have taken months and months, if not a year or two – that it was just a way to get it over. So it was, relief was what I felt, actually, and happy, too. I already said that.

Jordan: So you felt relief when the resignation announcement came out. But what did you feel during the months and years leading up to that, from the time the Watergate scandal broke up through the whole cover up process? What was the progression of feelings that you went through?

Rebecca: Well, so Nixon was first elected in ‘68, so you can start then. And in actual fact, I never was a Nixon supporter, although my grandmother was. And I remember the Vietnam War was really a centerpiece of all that was going on. And there were riots when the Democrats were holding their national convention. And there was a lot of unrest and civil disobedience of people about my age, you know, doing protest marches. But there was also on the other side violence. You know the police would club people and whatever.

So it was a time where – and I was in the younger category of people – if you were at all a politically liberal person, there was usually a very sharp division between the values of the young, who were just so fed up with that kind of stuff going on, and the older people, like I’d say my parents’ age or my grandmother’s age. And so, there was a big division. And in some sense, we got to vote when we were 18, which was a big deal. And it was the case that we were very passionate about what we wanted, but Nixon got elected anyway. And it was very depressing.

But then when you hear what he did along the way, getting to that, running the war, some of those things that happened, and all the deals with Mitchell and Haldeman, and all his lieutenants – you know, it was just really slimy, vindictive, just a really controlling government. In modern times it reminds me of the way Dick Cheney operated. As you are going through all this stuff that was unfolding, and as we lose the war, and as we pull out, and still stuff is going on and on with his whole staff, going on and on, it became very, very, very depressing, as far as we want a change, I want a change, but damn, the guy got re-elected again. It was like, ok... you know.

I remember, actually, and I don’t mean to be jumping around in time, but I also remember the feeling that after the war was over, and during the last years of the war, while Nixon was there, I was a student, freshman, sophomore at the University of Oregon. And occasionally I would go out and go to a protest. And those were kind of scary times because there were police, and they did club students, and students did crazy things. It was a scary times because you felt you were being watched, monitored, if you were doing this kind of activity at all. But when the war was over, we were happy. And there was this memorial march. The last sort of, like a, like you have a retro band. We had a march to protest the war, but it was to kind of celebrate that the war was over. And I remember that people carried coffins, and there was all this stuff going on in Eugene. It felt so great to do that. So it was kind of like a transition time. You know, it’s like, ah the war is over. Finally this happened.

Now Nixon didn’t get us into the war. But the fact of the way he managed the war, and lost it, and they did things in a covert way with going over to Cambodia, and doing all kinds of things under the covers. Again there are echoes, I thought, when Iraq happened, and things were going on that you knew were set up, and political scheming was going on, and cover ups. And that same sort of thing happened there.

It was a time where, as being a young person, the first time yet to vote, never voted for a winning president, you know, until Carter came along. But the guy you vote for loses. Nixon is there, he’s just this evil archetype, and things get worse and worse and worse. You just feel really bad to be an American. So when I was traveling in Europe this is actually interesting, I knew some Americans that were traveling too. I had a backpack, traveled around, met up with my brother. My mom came over and spent a couple weeks with us too and we traveled with her.

I actually knew some Americans, because we would stay at youth hostels or whatever, who would sew the Canadian flag on their backpack so they wouldn’t get harangued for being American. I mean, I didn’t put an American flag on my bag, or a Canadian flag. But I thought, they were so unhappy at being targeted as being an American because they were really embarrassed by our country and by Nixon’s politics and smarmy badness that they would sew Canadian flags on their backpacks.

Jordan: You know, hearing you talk about this, the same thing happened to me. When you said Carter is the first president you voted for that won. I just realized that Obama is the first president I voted for who won. And when I traveled [after college], Americans would wear Canadian pins, because of Bush. So it came full circle.

Rebecca: Oh my goodness. [laughs]

Jordan: So there are some parallels there for sure.

Rebecca: Well, Bush is a pretty evil dude to be following. There are parallels there, and I hadn’t really thought about it. But it doesn’t matter whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. I think that there’s evil and good on all sides. Don’t get me wrong there. But, it was, there are some really striking parallels. Nixon was definitely not like a Bush; he was not a picked guy to win. He was an outsider who was an aggressive, very much mistrustful, nasty dude, who played nasty to win. And he lost the first time through. He lost to Kennedy. He lost. But the guy didn’t want to give up. Unfortunately, you know. So he was not someone I ever liked, ever, ever. He was just sort of the antithesis. But it went on and on. I mean, on and on and on.

You know, His VP resigned. He gets in obviously, a political, someone to placate with Ford. And the deal was cut. So it was a time in U.S. history that was just not a good time.

And so, you know, you can understand the relief at his resignation, ending up with that. But in some sense, this has always sharpened my belief in the fact that governmental transparency is very difficult. And I’m not a cynic about government, per se, in the U.S. But I tend to think that the average dude that gets to be a political leader has had to make a lot of compromises and do a lot of things that he does not – he, I say he because they’re all men – and cannot reveal to the U.S. public. And there’s a lot of that going on.

So, you know, my first growing up, if you will, was with Nixon. So even though I like certain political guys, you always say, “Oh, they’re just doing this.” From Clinton, to the Bushes, whatever, they’re just, so I’ve had this sort of hardened, cynical yet hopeful thing whenever I see a new candidate that I think might be outsider or different. I get my hope, my hope rises again. But it’s usually not sustained.

Jordan: You actually just addressed one of the questions I had, which was: Did the Watergate scandal and the aftermath of it change your views on government in general? Are there any other ways, beyond this cynicism you just described, that it did change your views on government?

Rebecca: Well, I guess everyone starts out at a certain young age and you are naive. And then you get wisdom of the world, more or less. I guess when I was younger, and this has to do with this, I used to think things were in black and white. You know, it was easy to come down on one side or the other of a political issue. And I tend to think that over time, I’ve seen through age and wisdom that there are many different shades of solutions to various political problems. But what I see people who are politicians doing, this hasn’t led me to cynicism so much, as to realizing that they don’t really explore nuances. It’s that they have to come down under a certain position in order to contrast themselves with someone else. So they are always painting this is their position, and this is that guy’s, which is bad because. They are always doing that kind of contrast. I thought the way Nixon planned, what’s his name, McGovern, was nasty. But I guess when I see that, I say, “Oh, this is just the politics.” And instead of being cynical, I realize that the message has to stay on target and contrast.

So it’s never like, I agree with him and here’s one more thing I would do. It’s always: Here’s what my position is and that guy’s bad. And when you see that, you realize that there’s a political campaigning kind of mode that they operate in – and they probably behind the scenes are more nuanced than that. So my experience with Nixon, and how he was talking about how all Democrats are bad, and young people who didn’t support the were, you know, the moral equivalents of terrorists, he was setting a position in order to contrast himself with every other politician. And I go, oh, that’s just the way they operate. So I don’t take anybody’s shaping of any political statement in contrast with their opposition as being what they really believe anymore.

To give you an example of that, I remember when Al Gore was talking about, with the Bushes, about what they would do with the deficit or the surplus money. That was such a ridiculous conversation with how they were distinguishing what one of them would do versus the other, when the surplus really went away. They spent a lot of talking points differentiating themselves from their opponent, when it really didn’t matter. So in some sense, you have to look over the set of the landscape of what someone in politics says to find how well it aligns with your values. You can’t just take the debates or sharp discrimination points as who they are. And you realize that they are not, even though they have these strong positions, once they get into office, they’ll do whatever they can do stay there.

So that is, that definitely shaped my...I think that if I had grown up ten years earlier, been ten years older, probably I wouldn’t have been quite so cynical. Because at that time you would have been rolling out of the great Eisenhower era into the Kennedy idealistic era. And it might have really shaped my whole beliefs differently if I moved in that ten year time frame, versus the first time voting was when Nixon was running the second time for office. I might be much more happier and naive now. I don’t know.

Jordan: Do you remember any specific conversations you had with people about Nixon that were particularly striking or memorable?

Rebecca: I think when I was having conversations about Nixon, I was largely talking to people who were like me. So again, and this is college time, when he was running for political office when I was in high school, you know the first time that he ran, I kind of avoided conversations with my parents because they had different views than I did. And it was very polarizing, the war and also Nixon was very polarizing age wise.

So I’m not sure that I remember any poignant conversations -- most of the time I was running in circles with people who were in the same mental space as I was as far as politics was concerned.

Jordan: But you were aware that your parents felt differently about Nixon than you did?

Rebecca: Oh yeah, sure.

Jordan: And you guys never got into any arguments or anything?

I tried to avoid them with my parents, about politics. Other things, yeah. But politics, we didn’t have that healthy debate. And it was because, well, another kind of trivia fact is that my mom was a Democrat and my dad was a Republican. So they tended to not get into conversations either. [laughs] So they were a house divided anyway. You know, I remember my mom being really excited about the fact that Angela Davis – and you may or may not know who she was, but she was this black professor at Berkeley or something – when she was making political statements in the ‘60s or maybe it was the ‘70s. And the Presbyterian church of which she was a very active member, and where she was endorsing Angela Davis’s statement about, you know, whatever it was she was talking about, ending the war or whatever, and my dad kind of getting into a really, “Oh my goodness.” I don’t think he boycotted going to church, but it was just like, that was a time when the Presbyterian church, which was thought of as being a fairly conservative church – you know, not fundamentalist, but conservative – made political statements. And that was like, “Oh wow.” So my mom was behind it, but my dad was definitely much more of Republican-leaning, conservative type of guy. So the disagreements, we didn’t really argue about politics. There might have been times when I tried to bait my grandmother about things just to see how mad she would get. But I don’t really remember any conversations.

Except for the ‘68 election, when we were all at her house. Somehow, or she was visiting us, I’m not really sure. And she was jumping up and down, again this was not for Nixon, but against the young rebels there. She was all for the police who were clubbing the protestors who were protesting the war, saying “Get ‘em! Get ‘em!” And I was so mad. I got disgusted by that and I got very angry. I was like, “How can you say that?” But, yeah, I don’t think I had any intelligent discussions at that time.

Jordan: How did you feel when Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon?

Rebecca: Well, again I was kind of a little cynical. Like, oh, so that’s how he gets to be president. This deal must have been set up. And so, in some sense, that little thought clicked on. But I also realized that, oh, ok, I’m so tired of Nixon, maybe he’ll just go away. And he did. And that was great. I don’t think Ford was an evil dude. He was just part of some political machine. I don’t think he was particularly inept, either. I just think he was, that was a difficult time.

Jordan: What were your impressions of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein? Were they heroes to you? Were you interested in who they were? Did you care?

Rebecca: Well, you knew who they were. I mean, I knew who they were. I’m not sure I was particularly interested in the intrigue of the story-breaking that they did. They were public figures, which in some sense was unusual for reporters to be public figures unless you have these icons like Walter Cronkite telling us the news or something. But it was mildly intriguing how all this intrigue was ratted out and discovered, and all this, you know, stuff going on. They were intelligent guys who had their sources and worked them. It was not a big deal. I think that had I known, I don’t know really…they were definitely heroes. Thank goodness someone did this and figured out all the connections and kept persisting on it. But I’m not sure that I attributed any special thing other than that these guys were on to something and they did a good job. There was so much cover up and stuff going on, that any sort of good investigator who found someone who was disgusted and found a crack could get in. And they were the guys who did that.

But there was so much cover up stuff. I mean, Rosemary Woods sitting on a tape and erasing it for 18 minutes. There was just blatant crap going on. And, knowing more now than I did then about the Washington scene, it’s very clear to me that investigate reporting, keeping a semblance of honesty or transparency in what’s going on, is absolutely vital. So they were just kind of good guys. I think we don’t have as many good guys as we used to.

Jordan: For me, my understanding of Watergate is based on history books, and what I’ve read. So the thing I have the most trouble grasping is how it was this prolonged event that just kept going on, all these things that were revealed, all these players, things like that. So I was wondering if you could talk about what it was like to have that unfold in front of you?

Rebecca: Well, there were these endless proceedings going on. Subpoenas, and tapes. Oh and then they got the tapes, and then the transcribing of the tapes. And then the fact that Nixon swore a lot and was very paranoid became evident. And then the fact that Haldeman and Ehrlichman, you know, the guys who were the goons and all these lesser players who did all this…it was like surreal. It was like the Godfather, you know. Don Corleone and all his lieutenants and all these other bumbling dudes doing amazing things that just kept unfolding and unfolding and unfolding. And it just kept getting deeper and wider into his whole government down to the fact that, oh yeah, the secretary erased a tape at the critical time.

And the fact that this guy, at the time it was not common, no other president, I believe… He set this up because he was a paranoid dude, right, to tape everything to see what was going on. You figure out that he’s also been ordering FBI searches or investigations on people in other political parties. I mean there was this widespread investigative, you know, congressional stuff kept going on and on and on, it was just like, “Oh my god.” It was just terrible. It was just bad. And I can imagine another time earlier that would have been like that was when the McCarthy hearings were going on. When people got very upset that he was doing this witch-hunt in the senate, trying to figure out who was a communist. But it went on and on until it finally came down that McCarthy was a whack job. But, I did not know, similarly, this went on and on for a long time and you go, “When is it going to end? How is it going to end? Ahhhh!” Who is going to talk next and what are they going to say? What are they going to do? And all these people were talking the fall, and you knew it would get to Nixon eventually. But it just kept getting protracted, and all these other guys were taking the hits. I mean, you know, to the attorney general, I mean George Mitchell. I mean, good god, it wasn’t just his advisors or chief of staff. It was this whole cast of people they hired to do things, and bumbling dudes and strange weird people.

It was just pretty incredible. And it was just, you know, nearly unbelievable. So you get your nightly news, or some of the hearings were on TV, so if you wanted to watch some of them, but they didn’t have the news channels, so it was on the regular three channels that you have. It just went on and on. It was pretty appalling and widespread. And it was pretty unbelievable.

You get this sense that the government was just kind of unraveling and doing wacky things in a paranoid way, and then covering it up. And, I think since that time, politicians have learned how to cover-up better, you know. I’m sure stuff has gone on forever, but the fact that the guy was an idiot recording stuff on tape that could be subpoenaed should come it come to that, which it did…

It’s interesting. So they subpoenaed the tapes, for example, and then they had to transcribe the tapes. So there were weeks where, it’s kind of amazing, they were trying to figure out who said what was on the tapes. So you didn’t know what was on the tapes when they released the contents of the tapes. So it unfolded over time. Whereas I think with today’s technology, for goodness sakes, you might have transcribed things a lot faster. But maybe it was just dragging down because they wanted to get exactly who said what when, whatever.

But it just, yeah it was drama of an unbelievable kind. I have not seen any drama since then that was so unbelievable. I guess the only thing I’ve seen politically since then that was unfolding and you knew it was just going to happen was the set up to the Iraq War. You just knew it was going to happen. It was inevitable. It was just in the cards that we were going to invade Iraq. And I didn’t like that either. Here, we didn’t know when it was going to end. There, you didn’t know when it was going to start. But you could see it fall out like that. It was pretty bizarre. I don’t know another time where government stopped when all this stuff was going on. I mean, yeah, there was Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, but that was not as important as all the corruption stuff, in my mind. It was just something that they tried to nail him on. But it was not like this.

So you’re making me slightly unhappy remembering all this NIxon stuff.

Jordan: And why is that?

Rebecca: Oh gee, it was a bad time. It’s sort of sad to think about all the struggle our country went through because of that man. I think he created this lasting polarization between young and old [people], created a lot of factions. Those were the good old days when we could protest. Oh well.

Jordan: Did you have a sense at the time of what you personal political identity was, and did it change at all during this period?

Rebecca: Well, I never was a Nixon fan. And I always have been someone who as, I guess I would say, liberal leanings. But I still believe in government. I’m not an anarchist or anything like that. So over this tumultuous time, it probably mollified my belief in my political leanings. And it didn’t really turn me into a political activist. I wasn’t a chomping-at-the-bit protester. I did my share of protests. But yeah, I think it probably just solidified my beliefs. I want to separate Nixon from the Vietnam War, which was already going on. So I don’t think he was the cause of the war. He was the cause of the, oh, I guess I would say some of the covert operations in the war. It probably sensitized me at the time, and I’m still sensitized to the fact that on-the-ground operations in war are not good things, and lots of stuff can go on that our government tries to shield us from. So whenever I, all the stories about Iraq and Iran, the cover-ups that they are trying to tell us and that they are revealing now, are things that I’m going oh yeah, of course, our government’s involved. So that’s my cynical side, and it became sensitized because of the way Nixon handled those things in the war.

I never have liked war, but I realized in my awareness of that kind of behavior in the government, the government military complex in the U.S. has been very attuned since then.

Jordan: This question may reflect some of my naivety about the history. News came out that Watergate happened, and that people had stolen documents from the DNC, but how soon after that did people start to speculate that Nixon was involved or was behind it?

Rebecca: Um, I’m not so sure that it was ever perceived as being that far away from Republican power. I think that was pretty immediately obvious. From things that came out, you know, that these guys were paid, some of those facts came out pretty early in that unfolding of the story. And I guess the question was: How far did it go up the chain? So you didn’t really quite know. But once you started getting, you now, people who were aides to Nixon involved, or the attorney general involved, then you realized who – I think he was involved in some of the funding – anyway, once you get that, you kind of said, I was pretty suspicious then. But I don’t think -- it wasn’t clear at the beginning. But it was clear that Republican power rather than just some fringe thing that was involved.

Jordan: Did you and Dad ever later end up talking about Nixon?

Rebecca: I have no idea. I can’t recreate that history. I know that we talked about what we did in terms of the war, and our political stuff. And I knew that he was not a voter, and that he hadn’t voted. He has since become a registered voter, but only recently in his life. But I also knew that he was involved in protesting when he was in high school for the war. And he was definitely not a Nixon fan, and that he was not a Republican but was an independent. So, in some sense, he participated in going to whatever the Vortex, which is the thing that Tom McCall organized, all the people away from protesting the war away from doing that, during the political year. He went to that. And he protested even when he was in high school because he lived in Portland, which was a bigger town. They had war protests at that time. So when he was still in high school, he graduated in 1980, I knew obviously he was protesting the war and obviously Nixon politics were involved in that.

Myself, I didn’t start protesting or doing anything like that until I went to college. I had to go to a big town to do that kind of war protesting and things. So I kind of knew that about him.

So he was, again, a person caught up in, younger versus older, against the war. He wasn’t what I would consider a real political activist, nor was I. But kind, of you go along and go to the protests, yeah.

Jordan: How did the Watergate scandal affect local politics, if it did at all?

Rebecca: I’m not sure. I really don’t know. That’s an interesting question. I think that, I really don’t know. I’m not sure it did.

We had a very rogue senator at the time of the Vietnam War: Senator Wayne Morris. He was a very radical, Democratic-leaning senator. And so Oregon was always known as being kind of out there as far as not going with the war machine or whatever. I can’t even remember who the other senator was, but there were two, right. So, our identity, and Tom McCall was a Republican, as governor of the state. But he was liked. I liked him. He was a good guy. He was someone who was environmentally conscious and was able to arrange things like this Vortex thing so that the protests wouldn’t happen. And I tend to think in Oregon, I tend to think that Oregon was local politics – I’m not sure I was aware of politics going on in Eugene – I tend to think our state was somewhat perceived as not being so polarized with Republican versus Democrat, so much as having progressive opinions on both sides. So it was kind of an interesting contrast, because at that time, the political leaders in Oregon were standing up for what they believed in, and making things, you know not compromising their ideals. Like Wayne Morris, even though he might not have been popular with other Democrats, he held his ground on certain things. And McCall was, you know, a popular guy; it wasn’t a polarizing Republican versus democrat thing. It was just a progressive, well-liked person who could handle the city, could handle regional as well as rural issues. Oregon politics was sort of an oasis in the storm of bad stuff going on in Washington, D.C. I was kind of proud to be an Oregonian at that point in time.

I mean, I still am, but it was really quite different than it is now. Yeah, there were no, I guess right now, in Oregon politics, just comparing and contrasting it, we’ve had mediocrity in government for a long time. I mean, like senators, congressional stuff, you haven’t had any real leader-types. And in the time of Nixon and whatever, we had leaders. And they weren’t, Wayne Morris didn’t rally Democrats around him, but he was known as a guy who held to his ideals. That’s kind of, um, it was kind of a good time, then, for our politics because we did innovative things. We kind of got into the mode of being contrary to big money, big politics. So you don’t see many military government establishments in Oregon. There’s a reason for that. They were all built in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and we have politicians that didn’t cave into that kind of stuff.

Jordan: That’s interesting.

Rebecca: Except for we do have the Umatilla Depot. They are cleaning out different gasses, different kinds of poisonous gasses still. But that was out in the middle of the desert, right.

Jordan: Did they build weapons out there? What did they do in Umatilla?

Rebecca: Various nerve gasses and things.

Jordan: So it was a facility for…

Rebecca: For storing. I’m not sure if they made it there, or if they just stored it.

Jordan: Is that the place in Eastern Oregon where you drive by and there are all these humps, these mounds?

Rebecca: Yes. Yup yup, the Umatilla Depot. But we don’t have airforce bases, or army bases here.

Jordan: As you start to learn more about politics, you realize more and more that’s how things are done. People say, “Ok, we’ll support this initiative if you’ll hire contractors from our home state.”

Rebecca: Whatever it is, there’s all kinds of deal cutting, yes.

Jordan: Is there anything, any other thoughts or recollections that you want to share? I’d love to hear them.

Rebecca: Just one thought. You know, Nixon is this incredibly paranoid dude. He’s not exactly a good-looking dude. He’s always sweating and anxious, or whatever, and it’s in contrast to the women in his life. And that was something that I was just very aware of. Pat Nixon was this stalwart supporter. She always had her smile on. And then they had Tricia, and whatever his other daughter’s name was, and they were all the pretty, compliant, Republican women types. And at that time I remember thinking, because I’m a scruffy university student, that they were so different than I was, and from the values that I had. It just seemed a very stark contrast: the political, suppliant, supportive, brain dead female. How could this man have such women around him? I don’t quite get it, you know. But you see that in other politicians, too. I just remember that. Because that was a time in my life, where I was a member of the National Organization for Women, and read news magazines, and was very aware of women’s rights issues and things like that. And to then have the poltical wife and daughters, it was something that I was aware of, and it was another thing that I just didn’t like.

It’s sort of like, what did Pat Nixon really think? We’ll never know. On the other hand, when you are in the political bubble, you have to have these supporters around you. It’s a very artificial thing anyway. But political wives are kind of scary features. It was just, the archetype of Pat Nixon, clutching her little purse, being so supportive of Richard as he was sweating and being obviously uncomfortable through all this stuff going on. It’s pretty weird.

Jordan: Are there any other images that come to mind when you think about Watergate or Nixon that are kind of burned into your brain?

Rebecca: It’s Nixon, not Watergate, but his debates with Kennedy, even though I was a kid and I was very young, are burned into my brain. Kennedy was this bright, articulate person, and Nixon was this sweaty, nervous, furtive guy. And so the national debates, I think he lost in ‘60 because of the national debates. And I remember we watched them on TV. And whether I am remembering them at the time, or whether I’ve seen them since, that image of him standing next to somebody who is articulate and not furtive and anxious and whatever – he didn’t show up well at all. That’s actually pretty vivid. You can see images of him when he’s talking about the war, or what things were going to be done. He never defended himself during Watergate, he just would have his other guys do it. But when he would get on there, you would never trust him. He had the nickname Tricky Dick, and it wasn’t for nothing.

He just didn’t appear to be comfortable with anything he was saying. So you felt a sense of dishonesty with him. At least I always did. You never trusted what came out of his mouth. And there are very few people that I have that visceral reaction to. The only other one in all of political time, even though I didn’t like the first George Bush, was the second George Bush. I have the same visceral reaction to him; I don’t trust this guy. So not that there’s any comparison between the two, but Nixon did not have political grammars that made him appear comfortable or relaxed with anything he was saying, ever. And so that kind of image of him – he never seemed confident.

Cherry Picking

2010-10-07T11:54:00.000-06:00

For my creative non-fiction assignment this week, I have to craft an essay from a series of quotes. Juxtaposing a passage of prose with a quote -- a line from a poem or a particularly insightful aphorism -- isn't new. What's novel about this assignment is that the quotes come first; not the prose.

The quotes are supposed to come from one of the texts we've been reading in the class, The Next American Essay, edited by John D'Agata. (If there are any essay lovers out there, I highly recommend it.)
I have to cull this list down to four. But of course I ended up with way more than four, so I thought I would share the whole bunch here:

“Fact: The fleabite isn’t a bite. It’s a piercing and siphoning up.” -- Albert Goldbarth, “Delft”

“What if the wings feel like a tight fitting harness, what if they cramp and constrict.” -- Susan Mitchell, “Notes Toward a History of Scaffolding”

“Out of the plunge perfected, flight pushed up as a necessity.” -- Susan Mitchell, “Notes Toward a History of Scaffolding”

“Everything oily has a name.” -- Fabio Morabito, “Oil”

“It is already late when you wake up inside a question.” -- Anne Carson, “Kinds of Water”

“They’re like a group of one-legged men watching a good dancer.” -- Dennis Silk, “The Marionette Theater”

“There is a race of people with backward feet.”
“In India crabs turn to stone the minute they are exposed to air.”
“In India the wise men can produce and quell great winds. For this reason they eat in secret.” -- Eliot Weinberger, “The Dream of India”

“It had nothing to do with anything.” -- Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse”

“I watched the landscape innocently, like a fool, like a diver in the rapture of the deep who plays on the bottom while his air runs out.” -- Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse”

“It was a painting of the sort which you do not intend to look at, and which, alas, you never forget. Some tasteless fate presses it upon you; it becomes part of the complex junk you carry with you wherever you go.” -- Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse”

“I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but what it was like to open the door to a stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife.” -- Joan Didion, “The While Album”

“It’s not love that the past needs in order to survive, it’s an absence of choices.” -- Susan Sontag, “Unguided Tour”

“To forget the crow completely, as some have tried to do, would be like trying to understand the one who stayed without talking to the one who left.” -- Barry Lopez, “The Raven”

“Sometimes the dead are buried in the air.” -- Susan Mitchell, “Notes Toward a History of Scaffolding”

“All those things for which we have no words are lost.” -- Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse”

Not that I need to be starting new projects, but...

2010-09-01T22:03:00.002-06:00

Beer and Cookies

(Which turns out to be a pretty common name and idea. But that's not gonna stop us. We're journalists, after all...)

If you are sick of me talking/writing/obsessing about baking, you might wanna skip this one

2010-08-30T18:46:00.008-06:00

"Essay" comes from a word meaning "try." I learned this last week. How I made it through my whole life without being aware of this fact is a real boggler...

This semester I'm taking a Creative Nonfiction class in the English Department at CU. If you know me, you know that writing may be the one thing I enjoy more than running or reading or eating or baking. If you know me really well, you may know that I haven't been doing a lot of writing lately. Not a good thing.

The class has been great so far. Our instructor gives us wacky, kind of off the wall assignments that get the juices and the ideas flowing really well. It's like being in a life drawing class with series of really interesting naked models (fat ones, old ones, etc.). Only those naked people are actually me and the things and events and ideas that interest me. (Ok, maybe that analogy was a bit stretched...)

Workshopping -- it's scary and uncomfortable and I bet all the MFA kids in my class are used to it and so to them it's no big thing -- makes me repeat to myself I'm such a phony toooool. But that doesn't matter, because although that mantra is still stuck in my head, when I got home from class I just wanted to work on my essay some more.

To try.

And that's exactly what I need right now.

My first try was a bit of a failure, but that's ok. Because I found a concept I want to pursue. On my own. For no reason other than I want to keep trying.

I am absolutely obsessed with "Baking Illustrated." Crazily, compulsively, fanatically, psychotically...obsessed.

The book is orange, like my favorite teapot. Like my favorite backpack. Like my favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

It has a whisk on the front, topped with a dainty blob of cream. My favorite T-shirt also has a lone whisk, but it took me over a year to realize why that image was burned into my brain.

I could read Baking Illustrated forever, cover to cover, over and over. I want to return to it nightly, revisiting favorite passages, pouring over their meaning, reciting them aloud like scripture. I share it with friends and strangers, like an evangelist.

My obsession stems not from the book's culinary insights -- which are deliciously effective, no doubt -- but from its methodology. Each section -- biscuits, cookies, pizza dough, quick breads -- starts with an elaborate description of a platonic ideal. The tasters, writers and editors have a perfect biscuit, a perfect cookie, a perfect piece of pizza dough in mind.

Is it based on bites stolen, here and there, from their memories? Some childhood nibble, smoothed over and embellished by time?

Have they ever ever tasted the perfect biscuit, or is it just an idea?

I don't know the answers to those questions -- I guess I should be a good little journalist and call up America's Test Kitchen and ask -- but I do know that they pursue that platonic ideal with meticulous empiricism. In the Test Kitchen, they try ever conceivable combination of ingredients, every ratio, every method of mixing, baking, cooling, eating...

And they end up with something that -- maybe? -- comes close to that impossible, origin-less ideal.

It's so judge-y. But it's judge-y because it's right.

What if we lived our whole lives like that? Is there some way a job interview should be? A vacation? A kiss? Even if we knew how it was supposed to be, how would we go about pursuing it through trial and error? We can't, obviously...but what if we did?

That is the basis for my essay, my first try. As I said before, I didn't get there. But I am going to try again. So, comments would be much appreciated. I know you are here because you'll like, whether my writing sucks or not.

New York Cheesecake

“An orchestration of different textures and an exercise in flavor restraint, New York cheesecake is a tall, bronze-skinned, and dense affair. At the core, it is cool, thick, smooth, satiny, and creamy; radiating outward, the texture goes gradually from velvety to suede-like, until finally becoming cake-like and fine pored at the edges. The flavor is simple and pure and minimalist, sweet and tangy, and rich to boot. New York cheesecake should not be citrusy, vanilla-scented, fluffy, mousse-like, leaden, gummy, chewy, or starchy. It should not be so dry as to make you gag, and it definitely should not bake up with a fault as large as the San Andreas (we’re talking New York, after all).” —from Baking Illustrated, by the editors of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine, page 389

I can’t remember the exact reason for the confrontation, but I can remember the words it started with, “Miss Wirfs-Brock, can I speak with you for a moment?”

Miss Wirfs-Brock. The name had never been used, not like that, until two weeks earlier. At new teacher orientation on my first full day in South Korea, the interim principal informed me of the school dress code.

“That means this,” he tapped his eyebrow, “has to come out, Miss Wirfs-Brock.”

He was from Minnesota and his favorite phrases were “indefatigable” and “chain of command.”

“The students have no idea that I have this,” he said, rolling up his sleeve to reveal an aggressive tattoo – a Buddhist symbol the size of a quarter-pounder with cheese.

The principal was the only person left at school who still called me Miss Wirfs-Brock. The teachers unanimously decided “Ms.” was less anachronistic. My students truncated it to “Ms. W-B.” (Pronounced Mzz-dub-bee.)

I can’t remember exactly how I made it out of the empty, unlit computer lab, but I can remember the color of the double-doors the principal blocked with his physical presence: pale teal. Not quite like a robin’s egg, but like a cracked shell that’s been bleaching in the sun.

After it ended – however it did – I couldn’t hear “Miss Wirfs-Brock," my own name, without tensing my shoulders, arms and hands.

Thiruvananthapuram, major hub of India’s space industry, was called by the Anglicized name Trivandrum until it was officially changed back in 1991.

An orchestration of different emotions and an exercise in physical restraint, an argument is a spontaneous, unpredictable, and visceral affair. At the core, it is molten, hard, pressurized, and palpitating; radiating outward, the tenor goes gradually from boiling to simmering, and can become chilled and ice-like at the edges. The physical responses should be simple and pure, such as flushing, shaking, sweating, with muscle tension to boot. An argument should not be sweet, fragrant, affectionate, or pastoral. It definitely should not be so prolonged as to cause permanent damage (we’re talking emotions, after all).

“Every taster considered a mere dusting of crumbs on the bottom of the cheesecake insufficient. We wanted a crust with more presence.” —page 390

When I was growing up, my favorite place in the world was Hancock Field Station, a summer camp in the semi-arid high desert east of the Cascades. Closest town: Fossil, Oregon. ZIP code: 97830. How much presence does a 16-year-old have if, standing next to the fire pit on her first day as a camp counselor at her favorite place in the world, she faints under a juniper tree?

“...Two pounds (four bars) of cream cheese was not tall enough. We threw in another half pound—the springform pan reached maximum capacity, but the cheesecake stood tall and looked right.” —page 390

Until the age of twenty-one I knew, with absolute certainty, each time my feet took me one step further than I had ever run before: A 15K race overlooking the Columbia River Gorge. A half-marathon in Boston I showed up late for. A full marathon in Portland, Oregon, where I listened to the breathing of the runners around me – heavier and more labored than my own – and decided I needed to run faster.

Between 1784 and 1956, the British Royal Navy named no fewer than eight ships the HMS Indefatigable.

“Though the all-cream-cheese cheesecake tasted undeniably like cream cheese, the texture was gluey and pasty, akin to mortar….Sour cream, with a tartness of its own, supplemented the tangy quality of the cream cheese, but an overabundance made the cheesecake taste sour and acidic.” —page 390

One afternoon, as my fingers aimlessly wandered across the pages and spines of library books, I saw a spider in the stacks. She was in the biology section – appropriately, or not – and she scaled the crevice between two hardbacks, committing neither to one nor the other before disappearing. I didn’t think about her again until a trip to the Pawnee National Grasslands nearly two years later, a day I played with the severed rattle of a snake and tasted the best fish tacos.

“Honey, there's a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick,” Woody Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, says in Annie Hall.

This spider was the size of a space shuttle.

She was black, her back was mottled with yellow streaks like highway paving run amok. Her web spanned a hole in the ground large enough for human child or a fully-grown badger. A friend plucked a grasshopper from the prairie – so many jumped around us they sounded like rain – and tossed it into the spider’s web. She remained still for a second, maybe two, then skirted over, sank her fangs into the grasshopper, and spun it round and round and round, wrapping it with webbing. Then she left the neatly packaged meal and returned to the other side of the web to wait. At that moment I envied her.

I had a pre-school teacher who patrolled the playground chasing spiders off their webs. She’d coat the vacant homes with red spray paint and press them onto white sheets of paper, creating the perfect platonic ideal of a spider web – except that the spiders could no longer use them.

“…we do caution against taking the cheesecake beyond an internal temperature of 160 degrees. The few that we did were hideously and hopelessly cracked. Uptight though it may seem, an instant-read thermometer inserted into the cake is the most reliable means of judging the doneness of the cheesecake.” —page 391

Baking is a series of integrated physical and chemical reactions. So is running. You can focus on one element – the amount of baking soda, the smoothness of the batter, the electrolyte levels, the arm-swing – and perfect it in isolation. Even with all that experimentation, can you ever be sure what effect it has on the cake? Or the race?

Baking and running are notoriously more difficult at altitudes exceeding 5,000 feet. But the first step to high altitude baking is to try the recipe unaltered. It could still work. Perfectly.

“THE IMPORTANCE OF CHILLING CHEESECAKE: If the cheesecake is not thoroughly chilled, it will not hold its shape when sliced.” —page 394

When I baked my first New York cheesecake, I had no vanilla extract. I didn’t have a springform pan or an instant read thermometer. I accidentally used more than four times the amount of sour cream called for by the recipe. I marred the pure, minimalist flavor by pressing chunks of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups into the surface with the underside of a plate.

Normally I bake alone, but this first cheesecake I baked with friends. We couldn’t wait the recommended five hours before tasting it, and cut into it while it was still warm and unsettled. The surface was perfect, smooth and golden, with no unsightly cracks. The flavor was perfect, too, not bland, or sour, or overshadowed by the added candy. But the texture, density and mouth feel weren’t perfect until next day, after it had a chance to sit – unaided by my hands, chilling, out of sight.

BONUS FUN FACT: The picture is the real-deal cheesecake from the essay. Zing.

Para-dig-em

2010-08-30T18:43:00.002-06:00

Devious idea of the day (brought to you in part by my friend Saideep):

Go to my Science, Technology and Society class tomorrow -- in which we will be discussing Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" -- and speak extensively about paradigms. Only I won't say "para-dime," I'll say "para-dig-em."

Would someone eventually (or right away) correct me? Or would they sit there squirming? Or would they not even notice?

If my life were a movie, I would try it. But alas, it's not. Para-dime it is.

2010-08-23T13:06:00.002-06:00

"I wish I could say I gulp pure courage as I run, like those brave little girls you read about in stories, the ones who partner up with detective cats."

-- Karen Russel, from "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" in St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Nostalgia Blows

2010-08-22T20:17:00.002-06:00

Today I started reading through my old blog posts (the latest in a series of horrible ideas I've been having lately...) and it was like spying on someone else's life. I re-remembered all these oddball things that have completely vanished from my memory. At first I thought, Oh, cool, I am glad I did stuff like draw phallic-looking space shuttles on my first day as a teacher and run up Mt. Wachussett by myself.

Then I started to panic.

Oh bananas, I have to write down everything that happens to me -- good, bad, humiliating, surreal, and most important, hilarious -- because otherwise it will go on a walkabout and never come back. Of course that's an impossible task, but I can definitely do better than I'm doing now.

So yeah, sorry sorry, self-nullifying blog posts are worse than finding a worm in your apple (it FINALLY happened to me, after not believing that it really ever would -- see, this is the kind of stuff I need to remember!), but I just thought I'd let you guys know... And tell you that I'm going to make an effort to bounce back to my previous level of semi-awesomeness.

Why I love to bake

2010-08-17T11:51:00.005-06:00

Some of you may have noticed that I have been twittering a lot about my baking aspirations (and, less frequently, achievements). You may have rolled your eyes. You may have thought, “We get it, Jordan, you bake stuff.” Well, there is more to it than that.

There are many reasons baking floats my boat (I have an obsession with sweet things; I like playing with technology; I lack the ability to cook actual meals), but there is one reason to rule them all...

When I am feeling poor and irresponsible and like I will never be a real grown-up, baking makes me feel like I am battling an evil army of orcs and I am WINNING.

It starts like this: I am procrastinating some very important task, like choosing a master’s project topic or paying bills or responding to important e-mails or applying for a job. Then an idea pops into my brain:

Scones!
Cupcakes!
Cobbler!
Chocolate-covered cherries!
Frosting!

Once said combination of sugar, butter and delicious gets into my head, it runs around wreaking havoc on my productivity. At this point, there is only one way to gain control of the confection-poltergeist that has taken up residence in my brain. I must bake it and defeat it. (Oh and eat it.) Then, and only then, will I be able to do the grown-up things I need to do.

When I bake, I feel like I am a superhero with powers to defeat foes like the Baking-at-altitude-is-hard Troll! The Cakes-always-turn-out-ugly Monster! The You-do-not-own-proper-kitchen-implements Goblin!

These are challenges I can tackle. But then I rip off their masks and uncover their real identities and -- no way! -- underneath the Baking-at-altitude-is-hard Troll is the underlying problem that I live in Boulder and thus will never get a real grown-up job. (Cakes-always-turn-out-ugly Monster doesn’t have an alter-ago. He is just mean.) And the You-do-not-own-proper-kitchen-implements Goblin has a hideous real face of financial debt and a career choice that guarantees I will be poor forever.

But that’s ok, because as long as my real-life problems have their baking villain masks on I can slay them like a pro. And whereas before I started to bake, I felt like my only talents were getting drunk and embarrassing myself, and watching too many Degrassi episodes, and reading comics, now I feel like I can conquer some of my grown-up person responsibilities (even if really all I have done is bake something that will only make people fat and happy).

Here is an illustration of the process:

Beer Review: Green Dragon/OBC Bière de Garde, KING GHIDORAH

2010-05-24T14:32:00.002-06:00

When I took my first sip of Green Dragon's King Ghidorah, on Saturday at Rogue's Brewer's Memorial Ale Fest, I had no idea its namesake was a three-headed flying beast who is Godzilla's bitterest enemy. I'm not sure who Green Dragon's version of the monster - a Bière de Garde, or French/Belgian style of beer similar to a Saison farmhouse ale - was intended to attack, because my nose, tongue, and belly loved it. Maybe this means I belong on the side of evil, and if that's the price of enjoying King Ghidorah, I'm totally fine with it. This beer was so good, if King Ghidorah is one of the bad guys, screw the good guys. This beer was tangy, fruity, fragrant, intense, complex, quizzical, and old-timey yet futuristic. I wanted to drink it while reading handwritten letters scanned into an iPad sitting on a vaguely mildewed bale of hay surrounded LEDs, candlelight, and the sounds of Titus Andronicus.

Unfortunately, King Ghidorah is destined to fade into a dreamy memory like the mythical creature it's named after. I will probably never drink this beer again, unless I track it down next time I'm in Portland. But all is not lost! I looked up Green Dragon - some Portland peeps had heard of this pub-turned-brewery - and though they don't yet have a real website*, they do have an elusive facebook page. There, I found information from the King Ghidorah release party (which already happened, dang), which included these tidbits:

"We formulated and brewed this with Brad Winter of the Oregon Brew Crew; it is quite unique and we took the unknown path. The majority was fermented and aged in a used Rogue Dead Guy whiskey barrel then blended with a portion fermented in stainless to smooth the whiskey and oak contribution - 87% barrel and 13% stainless. Within find hints of oak, vanilla, apricots, clove, cinnamon and whiskey with firm mouthfeel and subtle lingering flavors.

King Ghidorah
Bière de Garde
OG 20P ABV ~9.2% IBU 25 Color ~10 SRM
PCTBB Yeast / Wyeast 3726 Farmhouse Ale"

So the breadcrumbs have been dispersed. Maybe one day, once I've cut my homebrew chops, I'll be able to recreate it (or some equally progressive and otherworldly** Bière de Garde).

*Green Dragon folks, if all the beers you make are as good as King Ghidorah, I will so build a rad website for you - the only compensation I would require is enough beer to get me through the build process.

**The real (and by real I mean fictional) King Ghidorah is actually a dragon-like alien. Awesome!

P.S. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of it -- they wouldn't have turned out very well anyway because the Brewer's Memorial cups were plastic and opaque. Anyway, it was a slightly cloudy orangish/amberish color with a good head.

Image is from Flickr user bweisner shared with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license

Early European Exploration of the Lower Colorado River

2010-05-10T14:47:00.003-06:00

This semester, I honed by map-making, graphics, and web design skills (err, hone may not be the exact right word...) by building a website from scratch:

Early European Exploration of the Lower Colorado River

Here's a glimpse:

Now go explore the rest!

(And then report back with all your criticism -- which should be extensive.)

Friskies won't get out of my brain, and I like it!

2010-05-10T12:38:00.003-06:00

I have a new obsession:

You think I'm crazy? Well, I do too. The first time I saw this commercial, I had a thoroughly "WTF?!" reaction. "This crap is ridiculous!" I told myself. But then I realized this is exactly what is going on in my cat's mind every time I open a can of food* for him. (*The fact that he is a Fancy Feast snob who wouldn't touch Friskies is irrelevant.)

Yes, cartoon turkeys, cows and flying fish dance, frolick and glide through his brain. (At least, he sure acts like it.)

I can't get the song out of my head. And you know what, I really don't care because I love it so much! Friskies, what have you done to me?

Here is the transcript (confession - I am transcribing it because it gives me an excuse to watch the commercial one more time):

What if one little pop could open a world of wonder?
So sensory. So satisfying.
The discover never seems to stop.
A journey to delicious and beyond.
Exciting your cat day and night with endless enchantment.
It's the magic Friskies makes happen every day, in so many ways.
Friskies: Feed the senses.

Update: Seth Stevenson at Slate covered this commercial in "Advertising Deconstructed":

I asked Friskies marketing director Susan Schlueter to explain. What followed was a fascinating glimpse into the world of feline feeding rituals. (Perhaps you knew this stuff already. As I lack a cat, or any experience tending cats, it was new to me.) Apparently, dry food is left out all day for cats to nosh on. Kitty will take a few desultory nibbles, but then go back to chasing dust motes or clawing at upholstery—leaving the remainder of the desiccated food in the bowl for later. By contrast, wet food is a once- or maybe twice-a-day treat. When that can of wet food peels open, kitty hops up onto the countertop and eagerly slurps until she reaches the final drop of yummy slop.

"Feeding wet," as Schlueter calls it, can for some owners be a highly ritualized and intimate pet interaction. The pop of the can primes kitty for excitement. The scents that escape set feline nostrils aflutter. This is a time for cats and owners to bond over a heap of moist, processed meat. And, according to Schlueter, many owners like to imagine what their cats are feeling and thinking during these moments of culinary ecstasy. This trippy ad, which is for wet food, is meant to capture the altered consciousness of the cat—the sensually heightened bliss it derives from chewing on a pile of damp Friskies.

So so true. The marketing team at Friskies knows me and my cat so well.

Accepting Rejection: My On-Again-Off-Again Relationship with Science and Journalism (Part 1)

2010-04-12T22:08:00.003-06:00

"Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out." -- Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget*

Last Tuesday, at 1:27 pm, I got rejected from a summer science communication internship. Three hours and 12 minutes later I got rejected from another. (The first was in the Eastern time zone, the second Pacific, so really they were within 12 minutes.) Both were from federal agencies, and both gave ostensibly the same reason: they decided to go with someone who had more of a science background in each respective field (ecology, atmospheric chemistry).

Granted I was tired, and getting rejected serves to sour an already foul mood, but this had more of a puckering effect than usual. Let’s assume that each job was truthful in their reasons for rejection (and this wasn’t the workplace version of “I think we'd be better off as friends” or "Well, he/she has a great personality..."). It raises a critical question for my career aspirations: does someone need to be an expert in a field to write about it?

I just read an excerpt from John McPhee's profile of Bill Bradley. It was amazing. Instead of describing its amazingness (I'm no John McPhee...yet), here's one of my favorite passages:

Last summer, the floor of the Princeton gym was being resurfaced, so Bradley had to put in several practice sessions at the Lawrenceville School. His first afternoon at Lawrenceville, he began by shooting fourteen-foot jump shots from the right side. He got off to a bad start, and he kept missing them. Six in a row hit the back rim of the basket and bounced out. He stopped, looked discomfited, and seemed to be making an adjustment in his mind. Then he went up for another jump shot from the same spot and hit it cleanly. Four more shots went in without a miss, and then he paused and said, "You want to know something? That basket is about an inch and a half low." Some weeks later I went back to Lawrenceville with a steel tape, borrowed a stepladder, and measured the height of the basket. It was nine feet ten and seven-eights inches above the floor, or one and one-eight inches too low. [From The John McPhee Reader, page 7]

What I love about this passage is that you don't have to know much about basketball to know what McPhee is trying to tell you about how Bradley approaches the game. You don't have to know anything, actually. But if you do know a lot about basketball, it is still fascinating.

Would you rather have had McPhee write it – someone who is knowledgeable about the sport, but hasn’t devoted his entire life and career to it – or say, a basketball coach, who may have more expertise in the game but isn’t as great a writer or journalist? I think it’s obvious what my answer would be. What do you think?

And why, exactly, is McPhee the right choice?

McPhee can always go ask the top basketball coaches what they think of Bradley’s style of play, his understanding of the sport, his contributions to the game (which he did). But could a basketball expert ask someone to help him write? Going past that, McPhee's art doesn't just come from his skills as a writer: It comes from his skills as an observer and a thinker.

My whole life I’ve felt I’m too much of a scientist to be a writer or too much of a writer to be a scientist. So what does a misfit like me do? Outwardly, I came back to school to write about science and the environment. But I really came to construct thoughtful narratives with beautiful storytelling. I came because of writer-thinker-observers like John McPhee, Elizabeth Kolbert, Robert Sullivan and Jonah Lehrer. I came because I believe that storytellers – journalists, writers, reporters, whatever you want to call them – do an invaluable service for the world. They listen to noise, sift through the cacophony, and pump out coherence. They take in chaos and turn out meaning. By doing that they aren't just translating facts from one medium to another: They are creating something new.

You could argue that scientists do the same thing: The chaos is the universe at large, the meaning is our (empirically proven) body of knowledge. But they go about it very differently. Scientists design a question, a hypothesis and, often, a manufactured test to cull meaning from chaos. Journalists aren't taught a rigid methodology. They set out a wide net, collecting everything they can, and then organically (holistically?) – often without a conscious process – turn that information into a story. They add some sort of hierarchy to the information, assign it value and meaning and context. The process is not as proscribed, but also it is not as narrow. I’m not going to say one is better than the other, but these different approaches yield different results. And the world needs both of them.

Federal agencies that rhyme with eepeeyay and enpeeyes only need the former, apparently. :) Just joshing! I still have a whole lotta love, despite my dark and dirty moments of rejection.

*27 pages into Jaron Lanier's book, I have to confess that I don't know what he's talking about half the time, but I do know that I like it. This is part one in a series I've been working on in my brain and in my scribbles and in my ENVS5100 weekly one-pagers about science and culture and other woo-woo-goodness. At first I felt bad about taking too much time to mull over all these thoughts jousting in my head, but Lanier has given me an excuse to keep mulling for a while, in the name of a rebellion against the prevailing internet singularity (or something).

This post brought to you by: Ska Brewing Co.'s masterpiece, Modus Hoperandi; the Conference on World Affairs; John McPhee and Bill Bradley; my science and technology policy class, ENVS5100.

Geoengineering madness! (And I do mean madness...)

2010-03-30T09:48:00.008-06:00

Geoengineering makes me think of two scenarios: arch-villain plots (now I will block out the sun...muwhahaha!!) and well-meaning scientists too focused on finding a solution to the world's problems to recognize their own hubris.

Well, yesterday's panel on geoengineering -- sponsored by the University of Colorado's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and populated with local rockstars Bill Travis, Lisa Dilling, Max Boykoff, Rachel Hauser, Ben Hale, and Roger Pielke, Jr. -- gave me a new image: academics grappling with the sticky issue of semantics as a proxy for grappling with the even stickier issue of geoengineering itself.

The technology for geoengineering -- or the less scary earth systems engineering or climate intervention -- is still in its infancy. And, as you'd expect, the policy approaches to how we might deal with it are even less developed.That made for a really great panel, as the audience got to see the panelists views shape and evolve as they responded to questions. I'll give a quick and dirty rundown of the panelists' main points (later!), but first...

Observing this event made me think about all the ways I could possibly write about this. And that in turn led me on a a trip through my educational history (seriously, you can jump to the end for the bullet points if you want).

In my OES days of excessive liberal arts thinking...
Hmm, but what are the main assumptions the panelists are making here?

Global warming is actually occurring
Science and technology and empiricism are sound methods for uncovering knowledge
We are all sitting in this room at this moment, listening to this talk

What happens if I undermine those assumptions? Why are we even talking about geoengineering when we have no proof that anything exists outside of our own minds? Ahhhhhhhhhhh! I'm going to the desert to have a spiritual journey.

In my MIT days of engineering overload...
How can we accurately characterize the views of the panelists to the nearest order of magnitude? I think four out of the six panelists are against global warming, so that's basically the same as saying that they all agree geoengineering is a bad idea. If that's the case, why are they still talking?

In my senior year of college, when I was taking my nature writing class really seriously...
But what does the discourse on geoengineering tell us about the human condition? Maybe I'll go find a stream, build a tiny dam, observe what happens, then come back and stare at a blank wall and write about it.

In my days as a high school teacher...There has to be a teaching moment in here...but what is it? I know! I could use geoengineering to teach my seniors about the laws of thermodynamics. And then we could watch a movie. Maybe The Core.

In my first year as a journalism student...
But what's the most important nugget of information? Before technologists and policy experts can tackle geoengineering, they first have to decide what it is. No, too boring. CU policy experts pan geoengineering? No, too simplified. Lisa Dilling had a good quote about a volcano that I can probably use...

In my second year as a journalism student, riddled with disillusionment, looking to comics for storytelling inspiration (I've been reading a lot of Scott McCloud and Will Eisner lately, which has been enlightening, but hasn't improved my skills at cartooning or humor)...

But none of those is quite right. Instead, I'll just barf some of my notes onto you. Enjoy!

Lisa Dilling:

She attended last week's Asilomar Conference on geoengineering, where the conference organizers kept trying to draw parallels between geoengineering today and recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s. Dilling wasn't buying the comparison.
At the conference, she listened to lost of debates that distinguished geoengineering research from geoengineering deployment. Dilling wasn't buying that either: you can't have research without discussing its applications.
No one knows what to call geoengineering, and what to include under its umbrella. Does planting trees count?

Max Boykoff:

He also attended the Asilomar Conference, and was also bothered by the historical comparisons with recombinant DNA.
Boykoff was concerned about the representation at the conference -- it was conspicuously lacking members of the "global south."
He felt, "at times we were bordering on some delusions of grandeur about what can be done."
He gave a panel on media representations of geoengineering: basically, there aren't any yet because it's completely missing from public consciousness.

Rachel Hauser:

She attended Asilomar, and stayed for a special session on cloud whitening. It sounds so friendly, doesn't it?
She observed that engineers and climate scientists have trouble communicating with each other.
The "quick" time scales that geoengineering proponents love to flaunt are really on the order of decades.
There are no really gung-ho geoengineers out there -- even those with vested interests are wary of the moral and technical issues involved.

Ben Hale (indie environmental philosopher!):

He tackled the ethics of remediation, which is in effect turning back the clock on the environmental wrongdoings we've already done.
He outlined four criteria for a successful geoengineering project, based on the work of Dale Jamieson of NYU:

It has to be technically feasible
The consequences must be predictable
The outcomes must produce desirable (i.e., better than present) social and economic states
It must not seriously violate any ethical standards

Well, to date at least, no geoengineering solutions meet all four...

Roger Pielke, Jr.:

He starts to feel uneasy whenever a community -- like geoengineers -- start to self-regulat and self-govern. For example, the conference was sponsored by a group who has a stake in a geoengineering start-up. That's a big red flag.
He thinks geoengineering is a "slippery term" -- it should include things like solar radiation moderation (i.e., artificially creating the effects of a volcano with particles), but not carbon dioxide removal.
He also thinks, "geoengineering is a horribly bad idea." We just aren't good at undertaking large scale experiments on ecosystems. Behold: Australia's introduction of the cane toad.
Pielke cited three criteria for when technological fixes (i.e., vaccines, glasses) work, based on work by Daniel Sarewitz:

There must be a clear cause and effect relationship between the technological intervention and the desired outcome
The consequences must be able to be unambiguously assessed
The technological solution must build on a pre-existing technological core

Geoegineering fails all three...bing bang boom!

Bill Travis:

He wonders why are are framing geoengineering as a purely emergency measure. Maybe it's not?
He's also interested in whether the possibility of geoengineering might distract people from other solutions (mitigation, adaptation, social behavior modification, etc.).
How do we know what an emergency looks like? Can we see it coming, or only tell once it's here?

For further reading, check out:

Jim Rendon's series of dispatches from the Asilomar Conference in Mother Jones

[Image from Flickr user flydime shared with a Creative Commons Attribution License]

A cat, a tooth, a dream...anxiety!

2009-11-02T19:56:00.005-07:00

This morning I had a nightmare. My cat Murphy had crawls into my bag (obviously, because he stows away and comes with me undetected all the time...duh). So there we both are, in a coffee shop. Nothing weird about that, right?

The coffee shop patrons start cooing over Murphy -- who wouldn't? One of them notices something is not right: Murphy's bottom front tooth (do cats even have a tooth there?) is about to fall out. And it is green and slimy and rotting and putrid.

[Backstory: This totally preventable catastrophe is my fault. When I took Murphy to the vet six weeks ago I found out that he needs $400 worth of dental work. Right, I don't have that kind of money. So I did what I do best: I put if off.]

Ok, returning to the dream... A frantic search for the vet's phone number ensues. I can't find it. When I do find it, they don't answer. Time is ticking. All of a sudden it is 10 a.m. (or is it 11 a.m.? In my dream I forgot daylight savings...just like in real life) and I am late for class. And Murphy is trying to escape. And his TEETH ARE FALLING OUT!

...and I wake up.

Phew. So normally analyzing dreams is a futile yet totally unavoidable process. It's the grand goal of us instinctively pattern-seeking humans -- tease some sense out of a mess of images.Valiant efforts have been made (Freud, Jung, and, as Wikipedia tells me, a slew of neurologists) to explain dreams but, like trying to train a chicken, it's mostly futile.

Until, of course, Jordan Wirfs-Brock hits the scene. Ok, not quite. My dream made me realize something, but that something wasn't about the nature of dreams. It was about the nature of pets. Pets and people. People and pets.

Anxiety dreams are crazy common, and teeth falling out is a frequent target. I've had that dream countless times (and damn, it's frightening), but this is the first time I projected that anxiety on an external actor: my cat.

In my dream, along with the teeth falling out thing, I was nervous about:

making it to class on time

money

fitting everything in to my schedule

the BURDEN of carrying things around with me

Hmmm, funny, these are all things that were tugging at the corners of intricately woven quilt of worries this morning. I had set my alarm early to go and search for my lost USB data drive which held, yes, "important assignments". Gah.

So here's the revelation. Maybe one of the reasons we have pets (besides the companionship and the fuzziness and the adorableness) is so we can push the anxiety of our people problems on to our pets.

There is generally little emotional wiggle-waggling involved in this process. Does Fido or Mittens need something? OK, it's done...no need to worry about whether your dog emotionally and intellectually fulfills you, or whether you are living up to your full potential when you are helping your cat. It's a different, more manageable, less ambiguous kind of anxiety. This is, I maintain, distinct from another reason we have pets: the desire for unconditional acceptance.

If you, like me, most likely were a Baby 19 and have a form of anxiety disorder somewhere between mild and severe, having a pet lets you channel that anxiety in a way that at least feels productive. Is it exploitation of the animal kingdom? Probably. Is it merely a distraction from dealing with those real people problems I mentioned? Maybe. Am I ever going to stop having anxiety dreams about Murphy that are really about me? Definitely not!

P.S. Also, I just really love typing the word "anxiety." It is so strange.

Worfs-Brock

2009-10-11T22:08:00.002-06:00

My name has been misspelled in fabulously inventive, seemingly infinite ways:

Wirss-Brock
Wirstbrook
Brock-Wirfs (yes, really!)
...

But never until today had I been a Worfs-Brock.

Today...it happened twice! Fancy that! I actually found it endearing, and it warmed my heart a little bit when it was very cold outside.

Other things that warmed my heart recently:

The baristas at the library coffee shop talking about their hobby, library stalking. Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. They trail someone around the library for 15 minutes or too and see how long they can do it before the stalkee notices.
Journalists squiggly dancing to Balkan music at the Society of Environmental Journalists Conference.
A man with mismatched socks going through airport security.
Seeing not one, but TWO legitimate flat-top hairdos this weekend.
The phrase "glow-in-the-dark great!"
This passage: "Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece -- millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work." Ian McEwan, Saturday, page 3

Have a glow-in-the-dark great night. I know I will, most literally.

First day of class blues

2009-08-24T17:07:00.003-06:00

As if the first day of classes wasn't already depressing enough (just kidding...I really do love being a student), I just found out my car needs a new power steering pump.

The damage? I'm too devastated to recreate the quote here, but let's just say it's brought to you by the letter "G".

Who needs some cheering up? I do, I do! How about some stories about the food industry. Oh wait...this will only drive my spirits even further into the ground.

Except that Nicholas Kristof has a cute anecdote about a chicken who thought it was a goose (an example of the soul that industrial food has lost).

And except that in TIME's expose of industrial food, they have this to say:

A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits — and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades — that's hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren't the enemy — and they deserve real help. We've transformed the essential human profession — growing food — into an industry like any other. "We're hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm," says Hahn Niman. "We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it's enjoyable work."

They also have pretty photos:

So, things aren't that bleak. I'm going to go home, drink a beer and finish reading a Japanese crime novel about prostitutes, glass ceilings and social strata. Life is pretty good, actually...

Novelists get sober: the best thing in the world for some, the worst for others

2009-08-14T07:58:00.003-06:00

Check out this article by Tom Schone on how writers fare when they sober up.

Minimalists tend to do better than maximalists. Flinty and workmanlike seem to win the day. (Elmore Leonard said that attending AA meetings had made him a “better listener”.) It is the self-proclaimed geniuses who suffer. Writers of long sentences seem to do worse than the writers of short ones—Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s endless clauses being the epitome of the drunken style. Comparing yourself to Tolstoy is a bad sign. (If it has to be a Russian, Chekhov is a much better bet.) Americans do much better than Brits (a recent biography of Kingsley Amis lists drinking under “Activities and Interests”). Americans from the north seem to do better than Americans from the South. Prose-writers fare better than poets. If you are an American poet from the South, you might as well walk into a bar right now. And don’t, whatever you do, write a novel about recovery.

Come one, somebody's got to have written a similar article about great journalists.

(Thanks to Yiyan for the tip!)

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 08/12/2009

2009-08-12T17:30:00.001-06:00

Does closing roads cut delays? | csmonitor.com
Interesting. Because of the "price of anarchy" when it comes to individual drivers trying to minimize their personal travel time, closing roads along a route can actually make everything more efficient during rush hour.

See...expanding roads isn't necessarily the solution!
tags: CSM, traffic, group behavior, congestion, driving, cars, urban planning

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 08/03/2009

2009-08-03T17:30:00.001-06:00

The truth about grit - The Boston Globe
"Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit."
tags: no_tag
- Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit.
Shouts & Murmurs: A Guide To Summer Sun Protection : The New Yorker
The perfect thing to read on a Monday morning while nursing my crispy neck and serious racoon-face after a long weekend of burning -- I mean beach camping.
tags: new yorker, zev borrow, humor, SPF
- SPF 100—This is to SPF 99 and below as excellent heroin is to Capri Sun juice boxes.
- SPF 175—Ever wanted to have unprotected sex with a prostitute in Haiti? Don’t answer. Doesn’t matter. The point is with SPF 175 that’s now an option.
Dan Morgan -- Farm-State Democrats Are on the Rise in Congress - washingtonpost.com
tags: washington post, agriculture, politics, farming, democrats, food safety, FDA, EPA

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/30/2009

2009-07-30T17:30:00.001-06:00

Marathons and Memory : The Frontal Cortex
At The Frontal Cortex Jonah Lehrer has a post on marathon running and memory. Stress, like the stress from running for 4 hours, is known to disrupt memory -- but all memory isn't disrupted equally. The study found that after a marathon, runners had reduced "explicit" memory (ability to remember specific words, facts, numbers, etc.) but improved "implicit" memory (the ability to remember actions, motions, processes, etc.).

Fascinating! As someone who has run -- oh, is it 5? -- marathons I definitely felt a deterioration in my cognitive abilities as the races progressed. My ability to do simple math (like calculating mile splits) withered away. But it wasn't because I couldn't add anymore -- I could do that just fine. It was always because I couldn't remember what my watch said one mile earlier. That's a distinctly "explicit" memory function.
tags: memory, cognition, marathon, running, stress, jonah lehrer

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/29/2009

2009-07-29T17:30:00.001-06:00

Re-Engineering the Earth - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)
tags: no_tag
- Dyson’s early geo-engineering vision addressed a central, and still daunting, problem: neither sulfur-aerosol injection nor an armada of cloud whiteners nor an array of space-shades would do much to reduce carbon-dioxide levels. As long as carbon emissions remain constant, the atmosphere will fill with more and more greenhouse gases. Blocking the sun does nothing to stop the buildup. It is not even like fighting obesity with liposuction: it’s like fighting obesity with a corset, and a diet of lard and doughnuts. Should the corset ever come off, the flab would burst out as if the corset had never been there at all. For this reason, nearly every climate scientist who spoke with me unhesitatingly advocated cutting carbon emissions over geo-engineering.
- Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, thinks we ought to test the technology gradually. He suggests that we imagine the suite of geo-engineering projects like a knob that we can turn. “You can turn it gently or violently. The more gently it gets turned, the less disruptive the changes will be. Environmentally, the least risky thing to do is to slowly scale up small field experiments,” he says. “But politically that’s the riskiest thing to do.”

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Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/23/2009

2009-07-23T17:30:00.001-06:00

Unlocking the Mysteries of The Artistic Mind | Psychology Today
Jonah Lehrer on how art heightens natural stiumlus-response. He uses this Picasso quote: "Art is the lie that reveals the truth." -- or, as neuroscience shows, art isn't a complete lie, but a deliberate exageration.
tags: jonah lehrer, picasso, neuroscience, art, abstraction, symbols, hyperbole, peak-shift effect, herring gull, ramachandran, neuroaesthetics
- Through careful distortion, he found a way to intensify reality. As Picasso put it, "Art is the lie that reveals the truth."
- What's surprising is that such distortions often make it easier for us to decipher what we're looking at, particularly when they're executed by a master. Studies show we're able to recognize visual parodies of people—like a cartoon portrait of Richard Nixon—faster than an actual photograph. The fusiform gyrus, an area of the brain involved in facial recognition, responds more eagerly to caricatures than to real faces, since the cartoons emphasize the very features that we use to distinguish one face from another. In other words, the abstractions are like a peak-shift effect, turning the work of art or the political cartoon into a "super-stimulus."
- the job of an artist is to take mundane forms of reality—whether a facial expression or a bowl of fruit—and make those forms irresistible to the human brain.

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Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/22/2009

2009-07-22T17:30:00.001-06:00

Mind Hacks: Vision shift glasses alter time perception
Whoa! Wearing prism glasses that shift vision to the left "shrinks" time, while wearing prism glasses that shift vision to the right "expands" time. I'm intrigued by the linguistic implications of this, since so many of our time/space/numeric perceptions are based on our language.
tags: mind hacks, perception, time, space, vision, neuroscience, linguistics, prism glasses
Scoring/Criteria | Smarter Cities
(Ed. note: Gah! I wrote this already, then Diigo deleted it! Or I did by accident...)My pre-stated theme for the summer was "data visualization" -- although it kind of got pushed aside by the completely unrelated theme "fictiontion writing" -- so instead of commenting on the methodology behind NRDC's new "smarter cities" ranking, I'm going to comment on how they presented their data.Things I loved: the division of cities by size and the ease of moving between those groups; the division of the data by category/scoring criteria; the control the user has over the list (i.e., clicking on a category like "green spaces" and re-ranking the table); the use of size-graded circles to indicate scoring; the mouse-over titles combined with simple icons to display each category; the orange and teal color scheme (of course!)Things that I think could be improved: instead of just naming a category when you mouse over it, it would have been nice to have an easy link or pop up description of what that category means (instead of a hidden link at the bottom of the table); the sizes of the circles are discrete (small, medium or large) not actually reflective of the numberical score, and that's not indicated very clearly; the "city profiles" should list the scores in each category; although city profiles have maps, there is no map on the front page -- this would have been nice for looking at metro areas (i.e., Portland is in the large city category, Beaverton is in the small city category -- you have no way of knowing that those two cities are both ranked high and geographically adjacent unless you do some clicking)Also, this has nothing to do with data visualization, but isn't the preference for the term "smarter cities" over "smart cities" reminiscent of the recent shift in sex-ed-speak from "safe sex" to "safer sex"? Just saying ...
tags: NRDC, urban planning, smart growth, smarter cities, rankings, data visualization

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Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/21/2009

2009-07-21T17:30:00.001-06:00

SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § MATHEMATICIANS: An Outer View of the Inner World
Audio slide show of mathematicians describing their craft -- which, as many of them note, has as much in common with creative arts than with hard sciences.
tags: math, SEED, science, art, abstract thinking, visualization, slideshow, audio
Joel Makower: Two Steps Forward: GreenXchange: Sustainable Innovation Meets the Creative Commons
Although Joel Makower's writing could, as always, use some serious editing, there's some good info here about GreenXchange. It's a meeting of two of my favorite ideas: open source and sustainable design!
tags: GreenXchange, creative commons, nike, open source, joel makower, best buy, sustainability, design
- A small group of companies spearheaded by Nike have partnered with the nonprofit Creative Commons to try to change that. Their novel initiative, called GreenXchange, aims to allow companies to share intellectual property for green product design, packaging, manufacturing, and other uses. If it succeeds, this budding coalition could accelerate innovation across companies and sectors. At minimum, it stands to rewrite the rules about how companies share.
Meatloaf : The New Yorker
Poem by Donald Hall ...
"In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,

where I last clambered in middle age,

while I sit in my idle body

in the car, in the cool parking lot,

revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,

counting nine syllables on fingers

discolored by old age and felt pens,

my stanzas like ballplayers sent down

to Triple A, too slow for the bigs."
tags: poetry, donald hall, new yorker, baseball
- In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,
  where I last clambered in middle age,
  while I sit in my idle body
  in the car, in the cool parking lot,
  revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,
  counting nine syllables on fingers
  discolored by old age and felt pens,
  my stanzas like ballplayers sent down
  to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.
- In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,
  where I last clambered in middle age,
  while I sit in my idle body
  in the car, in the cool parking lot,
  revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,
  counting nine syllables on fingers
  discolored by old age and felt pens,
  my stanzas like ballplayers sent down
  to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.
- In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,
  where I last clambered in middle age,
  while I sit in my idle body
  in the car, in the cool parking lot,
  revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,
  counting nine syllables on fingers
  discolored by old age and felt pens,
  my stanzas like ballplayers sent down
  to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.
The Neuroscience of McGriddles : The Frontal Cortex
This blog post from Jonah Lehrer is an ode -- or anti-ode, as in this case they amount to the same thing -- to the McGriddle and the greasy, fatty, energy-filled satisfaction it brings mankind. He quotes Elizabeth Kolbert's recent round-up in the New Yorker of obesity books and research (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/20/090720crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all which I read yesterday...) and adds in a Duke study. The money quote: "Let's imagine, for instance, that some genius invented a reduced calorie bacon product that tasted exactly like bacon, except it had 50 percent fewer calories. It would obviously be a great day for civilization. But this research suggests that such a pseudo-bacon product, even though it tasted identical to real bacon, would actually give us much less pleasure. Why? Because it made us less fat. Because energy is inherently delicious. Because we are programmed to enjoy calories."
tags: jonah lehrer, obesity, fat, calories, dopamine, elizabeth kolbert, mcgriddle, psychology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/20/2009

2009-07-20T17:30:00.003-06:00

(Note 7/21/09: Oops, didn't realize Diigo was going to stick these "highlights" into my blog. Anyways...they are my favorite parts of my favorite writer's "fat" article. Oh, and a bonus quote from Ian Frazier's "Shouts and Murmurs.")

Why are Americans fat? : The New Yorker
tags: no_tag
- Undeniably, the fat—the authors of “The Reader” are adamant advocates for the “f” word—are subject to prejudice and even cruelty. A 2008 report by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, at Yale, noted that teachers consistently hold lower expectations of overweight children
- To claim that some people are just meant to be fat is not quite the same as arguing that some people are just meant to be poor, but it comes uncomfortably close.
- it’s those living just above the poverty level who appear to be gaining weight most rapidly.
- in the new world order, it is possible to be overweight and malnourished at the same time
- Collecting the maximum number of calories with the least amount of effort is, after all, the dream of every creature, including those too primitive to dream.
Why are Americans fat? : The New Yorker
tags: no_tag
- The movement known variously as “size acceptance,” “fat acceptance,” “fat liberation,” and “fat power” has been around for more than four decades; in 1967, at a “fat-in” staged in Central Park, participants vilified Twiggy, burned diet books, and handed out candy. More recently, fat studies has emerged as a field of scholarly inquiry; four years ago, the Popular Culture Association/American Cultural Association added a fat-studies component to its national conferences, and in 2006 Smith College hosted a three-day seminar titled “Fat and the Academy.”
XXXL : The New Yorker
tags: no_tag
- Today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States, making them “the number one food consumed in the American diet.”
- Kessler spends a lot of time meeting with (often anonymous) consultants who describe how they are trying to fashion products that offer what’s become known in the food industry as “eatertainment.” Fat, sugar, and salt turn out to be the crucial elements in this quest: different “eatertaining” items mix these ingredients in different but invariably highly caloric combinations. A food scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to create “a lot of fun in your mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld “three different cheese notes” with lots of salt and oil. Another product-development expert talks about how she is trying to “unlock the code of craveability,” and a third about the effort to “cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish.”
Shouts & Murmurs: The Temperature of Hell: A Colloquium : The New Yorker
tags: no_tag
- So when you look at your kids asleep in their beds after you return to your homes this evening, I want you to ask yourselves, “What kind of Hell am I leaving for them, and for my grandchildren?”

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Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/17/2009

2009-07-17T17:30:00.002-06:00

The New Ambassadors of Science § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
Evan Lerner's even-headed week in review contemplates the intersection of science and faith: what (if anything) does it mean that the future head of the NIH, Francis Collins, is deeply religious?
tags: seed, evan lerner, francis collins, NIH, BigLogos, Obama, unscientific america, science, faith, religion, policy, space-x, NASA
At Wal-Mart, Labels to Reflect Green Intent - NYTimes.com
Wal-mart is going after the holy grail (Edit 7/21/09: Wired's science cliche # 1! Sorry...) of green: a universal sustainability index. I'm pulling for them, truly. They've started by boiling all of sustainability down to these fiften questions (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/07/16/business/WalmartSlide.pdf)
tags: nytimes, walmart, sustainability, products, consumer information, green
- “Nobody else could pull this off,” said Michelle Harvey at Environmental Defense Fund, one of the groups involved in the creation of the index.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

2009-07-15T12:38:00.002-06:00

Tuesday night was my third (and penultimate) summer writing class. My instructor, and the class, has a stealthy way of understating themselves. I somehow came out with so much -- and I'm not sure how.

Last week's book was The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre. It wasn't my favorite book ever, but not being a spy person (I haven't even seen a James Bond movie all the way through), I can confidently say it's my favorite spy book. So far, that is...

After receiving probably one of the best comments ever (that my writing reminded everyone of Raymond Chandler), I'm going to be reading a few more spy books. For next week's class, we're reading Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. I also have a personal assignment to read (at some point) James M. Cain's Double Indemnity.

But...I ramble. Here's what you really want, a glimpse at my stab at fiction. I finally have a direction and a plot in mind (astonishing!), and more important a project that I can't wait to work on, but for now I'll just give you this. The set-up is that Greg is on an airplane:

Finally, Greg’s eyes rested on the woman next to him in the aisle seat. Greg guessed that she was 66, maybe a young 67, judging from her orange hair, orthopedic sandals and too-small Club Med Turks and Caicos T-shirt. She had two glossy bottles of sickly sweet liquid enamel. It was a cheesy brand like “Slick and Hard” or “Wet and Fine.” She took the bottle between her glistening left thumb and index finger and gave it two hard violent shakes like she was snapping the neck of a fatally wounded animal. With a taxidermist’s precision, she applied a third coat, giving each nail exactly two and a half strokes. Then she placed all ten fuchsia fingertips flat on her tray-table, leaned forward and blew.

Greg is a fraud investigator, on his way to Las Vegas for the National Conference of Fraud Examiners. (Like a good journalist, I lifted this delicious detail from reality. As Jim Sheeler would say, "Reality is too good...you couldn't make this stuff up!") There, he'll end up on a case that he's completely ill-prepared for. I'll let you know how it develops...

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/14/2009

2009-07-14T17:30:00.001-06:00

On Hand for Space History, as Superpowers Spar - NYTimes.com
Beautiful reflection on what Apollo means -- and what it means to be a journalist covering it -- from John Noble Wilford, reporter from the New York Times who wrote the original moon-landing story. It actually made me cry. Really.
tags: nytimes, apollo, moon landing, john noble wilford, neil armstrong, NASA, space race, 40th anniversary, lunar, apollo11, apollo8

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/13/2009

2009-07-13T17:30:00.001-06:00

Book Review - 'You Are Here - Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon but Get Lost in the Mall,' by Collin Ellard - Review - NYTimes.com
I want to go there.
tags: collin ellard, book, book review, jonah lehrer, nytimes, navigation, evolution, you are here, science writing, biology, space, urban design
- He describes, for instance, the research of Rüdiger Wehner, a Swiss scientist who glued tiny stilts made of pig hair to the limbs of desert ants. Because the insects with longer legs consistently overshot the nest and got lost, Wehner demonstrated that ants have an internal odometer: they carefully count their steps when searching for food.

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Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/10/2009

2009-07-10T17:30:00.001-06:00

Photo: Armadillo-like Crocodile Fossil Found in Brazil
Pre-armadillo alligator! Rad! It's the perfect balance between cute and scary.
tags: armadillo, alligator, national geographic, archaeology, fossil, evolution

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Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/09/2009

2009-07-09T17:30:00.001-06:00

‘Unscientific America’: A Review | RealClimate
A review of "Unscientific America" on Real Climate: "As they point out, we ‘eat our own’, when it comes to colleagues engaged in public outreach and science popularization. Case in point: Carl Sagan–a hero to many of us who value science outreach. One of the darker episodes in modern U.S. science history was the blocking by Sagan’s fellow scientists of his entry into the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Evidently, a majority of his colleagues resented his having become a household name–something they presumably considered unbecoming for a scientist. What sort of message does it send when the most effective science communicator in modern history was shunned by his colleagues for his efforts? Certainly not a good one."
tags: real climate, unscientific american, chris mooney, sheril kirshenbaum, war on science, science, culture, science literacy
TheStar.com | GTA | Green bins: A wasted effort?
The Toronto Star uncovers that its city's composting program "is a sham." Haven't you always wondered about that whenever you've recycled? Waste managers could just put it all in the same pile without anyone ever knowing...
tags: trash, garbage, waste management, compost, toronto, toronto star, moira welsh
Matt Nisbet responds to Pew survey of scientists & the public: Framing Science
There are a lot of interesting things that came out of this Pew survey, but this jumped out at me:
"When asked to evaluate various professions, roughly 70% of Americans answer that scientists "contribute a lot" to society compared to 38% for journalists, 23% for lawyers, 40% for clergy, and 21% for business executives. Only members of the military (84%) and teachers (77%) rate higher in public admiration and esteem."
Wow, right? Didn't mention the stats for doctors, that'd be interesting to include.
tags: nisbett, framing science, pew, pew research center, science, media, public, survey

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

On Running and Writing

2009-07-08T10:50:00.002-06:00

So this summer I'm taking a writing class, Inspired by Literature, through the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Last week, we read Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin. Inspired by his counter-intuitive yet completely insightful descriptions and themes of exile and strangeness, I wrote this inkling of an essay (building on one paragraph that I had written before). Perhaps I'll expand it at some point. I really want to explore the idea of that, to run or write seriously, you can't simply do it in moderation -- even if that requires flirting with insanity.

Three years ago I lived in Gwangju, South Korea. More precisely, I lived between a slaughterhouse, a sawmill and an expressway, on the fifth floor of an apartment building with walls like soot-coated cardboard. The first time it rained – no, monsooned, they said – thick black sludge seeped through the roof, slithered down the stove and submerged the not quite custard colored linoleum kitchen floor.

Every night I left that apartment and ran. I ran past a charred brick bus stop. I ran past a dog, with a bark that sounded like rust, standing guard on a rooftop. Then I dropped into a series of rice fields. It was always colder there, and quiet. Once in the rice fields, I disappeared. There, under a brown or orange or olive sky, I was no more or less strange than anything or anyone else. The first night, as I tentatively high-stepped through a dark tunnel that underscored the expressway, I remember thinking that soon the location of each pothole would be instinctively mapped in my brain. After several weeks, I felt completely comfortable. I understood my surroundings. My confidence in my environment was a rare blessing for a foreigner living in Korea, but it was gone the instant I climbed the last dirt slope into the floodlit street.

Of course, I ran during the daytime, too. But the dark, and everything I saw or couldn’t see in it, felt safer. One night, the stalks of the rice plants, waist high the day before, were shorn at the ankles. A few nights later, the rice stubble was smoldering. Still, the glowing embers and cellulosic smoke felt more manageable than the throngs of uniformed school children who would giggle, shout and follow me, or the old men who would silently stare.

Running makes every place seem more familiar. Taking in strange streets and woods and crowds at seven miles an hour instead of three doesn’t make me any less lost. But when I run, getting lost is an imperative, not an accident. In Bangkok, I ran loops around a steaming hotel parking lot near the airport. In Ohio, I ran through lazy canyons. Sweat squelched between my toes and the air was like a full, dripping sponge. In Detroit, I sprinted across busy streets and through smudged glass walkways. In Hong Kong, I found myself alone, surrounded by thousands of people, running a marathon. In Big Sur, I pounded up sticky fire roads that caked my shoes in mud. Pounding back down, mud chunks the size of hockey pucks and quarters flew off my heels. In Washington, D.C., I failed to startle clusters of grazing deer with the sound of my feet. And I failed to evoke a smile, wave, or even nod from passing runners.

I never know, on any given day, quite how running will feel. Sometimes, despite all the right training, nutrition and sleep, my legs move like a spoon awkwardly clutched in a round, too-small fist, not delicately balanced between finger and thumb. And other times, despite all the wrong sickness, or partying, or lack of training, I run like bubbles easily escaping to the top of a tall glass of Brut. Even when I run in the places I call home, I can feel at odds with myself.

Running isn’t a zen-like state where I lose my mind, but a lucid state where I can finally find it. As I run, I often write. While my feet hit gravel or pavement or dirt, words bounce around my head, uninvited yet welcome, though they rarely touch a page. The last thing I want to do when I get home, dripping and exhausted, is sit down and type. So, instead, I read what two of my favorite author runners, Haruki Murakami and Robert Sullivan, have written about these curious sports. They know, too, that tying a pair of running shoes and smiting a blank screen is half the battle, though not the hard half. Like writing, running something that is perhaps healthy in moderation, but no doubt pathological in immersion. But there’s not a writer, or a runner, who would stop because of that.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/06/2009

2009-07-06T17:30:00.001-06:00

Notes on Science Writing | Brandon Keim | Earthlab Notes
Brandon Keim, freelance science writer, answers the question, "how do you handle the pressures of the job and what motivates you to get up in the morning?"
tags: brandon keim, wired, science journalism, freelancing, motivation, writing
On cheerleaders and watchdogs - the role of science journalism : Not Exactly Rocket Science
I hope I ultimately become the type of science writer that Young describes:
"To sum up, we have two possible ways of acting as a watchdog - uncovering the hidden stories behind scientific discoveries, and casting a critical eye on those discoveries either visibly through the actual text or invisibly through the process of selecting what to cover."
But I also think I have a (possibly idealistic and flawed) dream of science writing that actually inclues some, well, science. I hope to combine data analysis of my own with story-telling ... is that futile? Or just off-limits for science journalists? If that's the case, then maybe I need to steer more towards investigative journalism, at least in name. And can journalism be both investigative and narrative? I sure hope so... Oh well, I've made kind of a habit of not fitting into intellectual boxes, so I'll just plan on making a career out of doing just that.
tags: ed young, science journalism, media, watchdog
Ruins of the Second Gilded Age - The New York Times > Magazine > Slide Show > Slide 1 of 13
These photographs are amazing -- but what I find most interesting abou this series is how much it depends on context. If you didn't know the back-story of the credit/mortgage/real estate/economy crisis, you might think these were simple construction projects caught in progress, on their way to completion, as opposed to stunted buildings frozen forever in a state of never-ending gestation.
tags: nytimes, edgar martins, housing, real estate, photography, construction

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/01/2009

2009-07-01T17:30:00.001-06:00

Judge Rules for Salinger in Copyright Suit - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com
Seriously? I really can't see how this could be considered copyright infringement. If it is, then any reference or illusion to any fictional character could be considered copyright infringement as well. And...hasn't the Swedish author's lawyer heard of fair use?
tags: jd salinger, copyright, catcher in the rye, nytimes, fair use

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 06/30/2009

2009-06-30T17:27:00.001-06:00

It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado - NYTimes.com
The Times covers water rights in Colorado -- with a distinctly "old Western water laws are so quaint and kooky!" attitude. I wonder what Justice Greg Hobbs (best guest speaker ever!) would have to say about that. They don't fully capture the way westerners treat water with an air of the divine.
tags: water, water rights, colorado, nytimes, rain, rainwater, grey water
Science journalism: Supplanting the old media? : Nature News
I finally started digging into Nature's special issue on the future of science journalism. The most interesting passage thus far (and the one that also rings most true to me, as a former-would-be-scientist/current-aspiring-journalist/lifetime-reader-of-science):

"But there is a problem: the online world, both in its bloggier reaches and elsewhere, is polarized; people go to places they feel comfortable. Many of the people that Timmer originally hoped to reach when writing about intelligent design and the Dover trial probably go elsewhere for their news, he says, because 'it's easy for somebody to pick their news sources based on their politics, and get that version of scientific issues'. Dykstra worries that in a more fragmented media world, 'environmental news will be available to environmentalists and science news will be available to scientists. Few beyond that will pay attention.'

"Others worry about the less questioning approach that comes with a stress on communication rather than journalism. 'Science is like any other enterprise,' says Blum. 'It's human, it's flawed, it's filled with politics and ego. You need journalists, theoretically, to check those kinds of things,' she says. In the United States, at least, the newspaper, the traditional home of investigations and critical reporting, is on its way out, says Hotz. 'What we need is to invent new sources of independently certified fact.'"
tags: science, journalism, nature, media, blogging, geoff brumfiel
The Future of Science Journalism | MIT World
Wow, something I actually REALLY care about came in this edition of the MIT alumni newsletter! I swear I will watch this video of a conference at MIT on the future of science journalism ... as soon as I finish the first season of The O.C. (It is summer, after all!)
tags: journalism, science, media, MIT, andrew revkin

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Amen.

2009-06-29T20:02:00.001-06:00

From Nature's special issue on the fate of science journalism:

In an 1894 edition of Nature, [H.G.] Wells wrote of the need to employ what today is called narrative non-fiction: "The fundamental principles of construction that underlie such stories as Poe's 'Murders in the Rue Morgue', or Conan Doyle's 'Sherlock Holmes' series, are precisely those that should guide a scientific writer." (See Nature 50, 300–301; 1894.)

[Science journalism: Too close for comfort]

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 06/29/2009

2009-06-29T17:28:00.001-06:00

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker
Malcom Gladwell's review of Chris Anderson's book, "Free" mentioned in a link I diigo'ed last week.Gladwell takes issue with Anderson's agrument -- and seems to really have fun dissecting it:"If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for 'non-monetary rewards.' Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who 'prefer to buy their music online' carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. 'Information wants to be free,' Anderson tells us, 'in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.' But information can’t actually want anything, can it? "And later, I can feel Gladwell getting giddy and all riled up:"For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that 'crap is in the eye of the beholder.') But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the 'abundance thinking' that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds."
tags: new yorker, chris anderson, wired, books, free, digital, media, communication, malcolm gladwell

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.