Potpourri CLVII

Good evening to clean house--my domicile, the inbox, etc.--so let's proceed.

From Jim: a little sarcasm on Amazon.com.

From Father Dan: the beer commercial as art.

From Lin, a story that will raise a lot of noise if it comes to pass: House Republicans are looking to eliminate the law that makes any child born here automatically a citizen, thereby giving its parents a legitimate claim to American social services and the like even if they came here illegally. This will probably be denounced by saying, "Republicans have a vested interest in keeping certain people out of the country!" Okay, that's one argument. But what's the vested interest of those who say it's okay for people to enter the country illegally? My ancestors didn't.

Here are some items I found in my internet "travels":
--A ponderable double standard: Julian Assange planned to sue the Guardian for (wait for it)…leaking information.
--A topic that gets batted around my office occasionally: "open-source" space mission design. My argument against this remains that even if you could design a launch vehicle or spacecraft online collaboratively using "the wisdom (or stupidity) of crowds," you still need a large, centralized factory to build the friggin' things. Boeing is learning the hard truth of trying to subcontract out a lot of piece-parts worldwide on its 787 Dreamliner, which is that if you depend on someone overseas, politics and economics make it inevitable that some other nation could hold your production process hostage. Anyhow, good luck to the open-source guys. They also might run into ITAR issues and the like if someone creates a widget related to guidance or propulsion.
--Table manners, Indiana Jones style.
--Anger management, Star Trek style.
--How to become a millionaire in three years. (Caveat, reader: no promises on this.)
--Why iPad is not a "Kindle killer."
--A steampunk Mr. Potato Head? Why not?
--And while we're at it, how about some steampunk Star Trek photographs?
--The U.S. Navy has a new gun in testing, and you really don't want to get hit by this one.
--This takes awhile, but I found some of it pretty good: actor/comedian Stephen Fry on things he wished he'd learned when he was 18.
--During the last blizzard to hit New York City, there were some allegations of purposeful work slowdowns by unions on things like trash removal.
--Here's a nutty aesthetic: making pictures of Muppets with human eyes. Gotta ask: why?
--From SciCheer video maker Randy Olson, a thought-provoking blog on how environmentalism and, indeed, most of science has "gone Hollywood." I would submit that NASA is one of the few organizations that has not gone Hollywood. If it had, we'd have a lot more money and media excitement...aside from the occasional scandals.
--Here's a new way to track the popularity of ideas across time: the memeogram.
--A couple of videos on the original concept and actual making of my favorite theme park, Epcot: here and here.
--A little light reading on the CIA and hypnotism.
--Robot solves Rubik’s Cube in ~15 seconds

--Shaquille O’Neal conducts the Boston Pops. Again, why?
--What makes music sad? It's not as simple as you think.
--Paul Kennedy says the U.S. is losing its dominance, but that’s normal, expected, and okay.
--Now this is useful: how an Etch-A-Sketch works.
--The Isle of Tune. Just check it out. Really.
--An extended essay on the state of the State of California by Victor Davis Hanson. Not for the faint of heart.

China is cutting the amount of “rare earth elements” it exports to the U.S. needed for high-tech products. In a more rational economy, we would be stockpiling these types of materials. This also would be an excellent opportunity for American entrepreneurs to develop techniques that do not require said elements. Regardless of wishful thinking about the assumed benefits of one world economy or the (claimed) gentling effects of trade on rival nation-states, we must remember Lord Palmerston’s dictum that nations “have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.”


A pilot was suspended, harassed, and disarmed for pointing out flaws in TSA’s security.


A Greek Antikythera device, as built out of Legos. No, really.
Obviously it's been quite awhile since I cleared out my archives. Nevertheless, this depiction of a "digital Christmas" amused me.

From the Down Under Defense Expert (DUDE):

• A new site helping users get a grip on the micro- and macroscopic views of the universe. (Hint: this won't help.)
• A new word-of-the-day site.

Speaking of the DUDE, he's made a good case for me to fly down to his hemisphere for holiday rather than blow a ton of money in some pricey place stateside. If his wife and he are willing to put up with me for a week and cart me around everywhere, I just might end up paying for not much more than an airplane ticket and miscellaneous expenses. Worth considering. There are some pretty places Down Yonder.
 
This is why I say that I have a photogenic memory: I remember things told to me by cute people.

I was going to write all sorts of profound things in response to this article, but I'm getting lazy in my old age. It does offer an interesting perspective on what happens to a culture when it cannot tell the difference between illusion and reality, though. The reading I leave to you.
 

From Melissa: another news story on how Aspartame is going to kill me eventually. Fine. But I really, really like Diet Dr. Pepper, and I haven't found a beverage that is comparable in the taste/low-calorie/non-allergenic zone yet.

From Michelle: a little late for the season, but why not a gingerbread Serenity?

From Gwen: "What Control has become, or what I like to call Big Brother."

And I suppose that will do for now. Archives and loose items now cleared back to mid-December. My apologies for allowing the potpourri to get stale.

Book Review: Don't Be SUCH a Scientist!

Full Disclosure: I met Randy Olson during my Science Cheerleader event in Washington, DC and consider him, if not a friend, at least a friendly acquaintance with a shared appreciation for SciCheer and engaging means of talking to the public about science and technology.

Having gotten that out of the way, I'll now talk about Randy's book, Don't Be SUCH a Scientist! which I read in less than a day. It's what a book club member I knew once called "a cracking good read." But then Randy's book is directed at people trying to communicate science to the public, which more or less includes me, so of course he had my attention.



As I said, Randy produced the Science Cheerleader video from the Science & Engineering Festival, and it's a fun piece of work (now over 37,000 viewers as of this writing). Randy himself turns out to have had quite an interesting career path: an oceanographic scientist and professor, he shifted careers at age 38 to enroll in film school at USC, which is not an easy transition, as he illustrates throughout this book. In fact, he opens the book with a scene from an acting class from USC, where a rather abusive acting prof was yelling at him from always being cerebral ("You think too much! You mother f***ing think too much!"), which he notes is one of the first failings of scientists trying to communicate with the public.

The other sins he accuses scientists of include "Don't Be So Literal-Minded," "Don't Be Such a Poor Storyteller," and "Don't Be So Unlikeable," which represent the first four parts of the book. And if you consider that a spoiler alert so egregious that you feel you don't now need to read the rest of the book, brother (or sister), buy the book, pull up a chair, and prepare to be educated and entertained. What makes Randy's arguments telling and selling is that he has been on both ends of things: he has been a scientist and he is now in the business of telling stories on film. He provides concrete, wince-inducing examples of blatantly bad communication. What makes the writing less like a lecture and more like a standup routine is that a lot of the time he turns the magnifying glass on himself and points out where he has exhibited the very behaviors he is now trying to stop. Nothing teaches like experience.

As an English major among rocket scientists, I like to think that I'm immune from some of the pomposity or literal-mindedness of the science-minded, but alas, no. Spend enough time around scientists or engineers, and you will end up thinking, writing, or even speaking like them. One piece of advice in the book I'd heard before, though I cannot remember where, is when Randy talks about reaching not just the head in communications, but also the heart (emotions), gut (humor, intuition), and gonads (sex appeal). It's very easy to write good, logical arguments for space flight or this or that vehicle configuration, but sometimes a little more is required. I notice this when a piece of writing that people at work (rocket scientists, remember) think is great but my non-space friends or family members "just don't get." I've left out some of that emotional stuff that grabs a larger audience. I notice this tendency most when I generate content for our mutual friend Darlene the Science Cheerleader. I can do intellectual/logical very well, and depending on the person or subject, I can reach down and touch the heart or make people laugh. But I'm not very sharp on creating "sexy" on the page. The Science Cheerleaders do that, and I'm duly grateful. Perhaps that's why Randy and I both respond to Dar's Science Cheerleader concept--she's got a message that covers all the bases.

I didn't agree with everything Randy wrote. He dislikes the defensive, control-the-interview approach many scientists take toward the media. This happens to be the approach I learned at a media training course offered through NASA. The logic is simple, really: while scientists have a story to tell, so do members of the professional media. The scientists want their stories told and try to keep the discussion focused on those messages. Reporters don't just want a story, they want a story that will grab ratings. And if that means asking off-topic questions that get a headline-grabbing quotation from an eminent scientist or cause said eminent scientist to get angry and have a flash of temper on camera, so be it. That is a good reason of why scientists are distrustful of new media or the "gotcha" mainstream press. That said, there are ways of telling a good story and giving the interviewer an engaging interviewer without getting hauled into the Administrator's office the next day for comments made in the heat of the moment.

One of the chapter headings reads, "Choose: Accurate but Not Popular or Popular but Not Accurate." In this instance, he was discussing the differences in public reaction between a fact-based HBO documentary on global warming and Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," which won both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize. The documentary disappeared from public awareness despite having noted scientific flaws and inaccuracies. The point, in Randy's mind and in that of many of the scientists who noted the faults but endorsed the film anyway, is that "the message is too important!" To which I would say, rather impolitely, BS. If the outcomes of a scientifically inaccurate piece of propaganda (the one word Randy doesn't use in his book) result in bad law or harmful policies, then a so-called documentary has crossed the line from inaccurate to fraud or blatant harm. To his credit, the very first sentence after this heading is "I will never, ever endorse the idea of striving for anything less than 100 percent accuracy in the making of any film realted to real issues in the world of science." However I'm not certain he completely resolves the matter of public "engagement" (propaganda) vs. informing the public about a scientific issue.

Don't Be Such a Scientist challenges scientific communicators with the simple fact that the facts no longer "speak for themselves," if they ever did. Film, video, or new media are good ways to engage or enrage the public, but not particularly good at educating them--a point Randy makes several times in the book. However, before the education can happen, there must come the motivation; and those motivations must come from the head, heart, gut, and groin or the education will never happen. The public will tune out, as they have for many years now.

I recommend this book for scientific communicators of all stripes, from those generating the content or doing the science to technical communicators like me, who are not scientists but nevertheless must communicate technical information to an often-uninformed public. Don't Be Such a Scientist is a good companion book for followers of ScienceCheerleader.com, ScienceforCitizens.net, and ECAST. Professional scientists need to communicate their discoveries and ideas clearly and compellingly. The public needs to be interested enough in science to get educated about it or even do it. After the engagement and education, it is possible to have informed debates about the scientific and technical issues of the day, resulting in good decisions being made. And ideally, that's the whole point of the exercise.