On Freedom

This week!
On Saturday night I watched Braveheart for the first time.
On Tuesday morning Chris Field gave a talk on climate change impacts and adaptation that shifted my discontent from weariness to action.
On Thursday night I sat in a cold auditorium, belly full of kofta, listening to two badass lady revolutionaries' stories of Syria's transformation from paranoid oppression to hopeful against all odds. On Friday morning I read this piece on Guantanamo Bay.
On Friday afternoon, I left work early, eye-glazed exhausted and greasily exuberant.

On my way home I had a chance coffee with my friend Shara and her friend Claire. Claire does research on a controversial subject, one that has conspiracy theorists sending death threats to her advisor. Coincidentally I've been working on an audio piece about this subject, using an interview with this advisor. Before I realized that she might take it quite personally, I told her our take on the subject in the audio piece was a pretty decisive thumbs down. She told us that she's written an op-ed about her research that Big Deal People have encouraged her to publish in the Times, but she's hesitated. Her future job might be at stake, or maybe she doesn't want her name publicly available to be targeted by the crazies.

My labmate Aitzol, raised in the Basque country, also went to the Syria teach-in on Thursday night. I told him that hearing their stories (and thinking of Braveheart) had made me acutely grateful for my personal freedom. He told me that speaker Sana Khatib in particular had a look in her eyes that he hadn't seen in a long time. The look of full conviction for a cause, of strength, of knowing what it is to really live. To him (I think), this was freedom. Feeling that you have freedom is simply a reflection of your proximity to the power centers in your society, he told me. The farther you are, the more oppressed, the less free you feel. Having freedom is something else entirely.

This summer Shara and I went to see a talk by Lonely Planet cofounder Tony Wheeler. It was about his travels in non-tourist destinations: Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Afghanistan. And so on. I thought it would be awesome, but it was so far from it. I grew giddy on the bike ride back as we tore apart his talk, and realized how good it felt, viscerally, to know exactly where I stood on something. I felt the same way in June in Boston after Harvard professor John Johnson made a powerful case for affirmative action to our little crowd of science communicators.

I am just writing to say that it is exciting to notice that new ideas can change the way you move through the world. This is not profound, but it is exactly where I am right now. 

On Feedback

Hello, humans.

This feeling.
Photo taken by Aleks in 2010, the day we drove across Qatar and watched the sun set over the water.

I went to a panel grandly, intriguingly, titled "Science Storytelling and The Paradox of Suspense" yesterday hosted by mediaX at Stanford. Still hazy on MediaX, and most of the suspense featured was related to the fact that no one ended up talking about suspense . . . However. It featured a Hollywood screenwriter, Scott Z. Brown, who wrote The Bourne Ultimatum and produced An Inconvenient Truth, and came up with the got milk? campaign. These three facts about him excited me more than I would have expected, which is to say: a lot.

I wanted to ask him: "How do you solicit feedback on your work? How do you know that it worked?" I didn't get to, but I did do the crowd-round-the-speaker after the talk until he was whisked away, and overheard him talk about the challenges in getting people to care about long-term risks. People are better wired to respond to short-term risks (stepping out of the way of a car) and much less worried about long-term risks (the jelly donut, the changing climate . . . all of these his examples).

I listened to everyone else's questions and thought about how the questions you ask can reveal so much about you -- your ego, your neuroses. To the tie-dye hair biology-disillusioned grad student wondering "Do you think that science communcation and science should be separate careers, taught distinctly to those who can excel at one or the other?" I thought -- why would this guy know the answer to this question?

But now I see that my question is a little mirror into my ego and worries too. I want my work to change people's minds, change their actions, and for that to incrementally change the world. But I want more than that -- I want to know that these changes are happening, to get feedback, motivation to carry on the charge. The pursuit of long-term rewards is as challenging as the avoidance of long-term risks.

This probably leads to other whirly bits of my subconscious worries, like: have I slipped more deeply into Realism than Idealism in the last five years? How does ignorance, willful or not, play into decision-making? But that is for another time and place.

Meanwhile, here are other places that I am optimistically planning to write more these days. Won't you hold me accountable, dear Internet?

morgen schmorgen

black tea + cinnamon = tastes like chocolate!

(In classic graduate student fashion, I got lazy and hungry at my desk and poured a Quaker Oats Cinnamon Spice instant oatmeal packet into the remainder of my cold cup of tea to make this discovery)

I'm reading COOKED by Michael Pollan and learning many food tidbits (and getting excited about making fermented things to cultivate my gut microbiome). The relevant tidbit here is that we can perceive scents through both our noses and our mouths. The latter is called "retronasal olfaction", as in, I am retronasally olfacting chocolate odors in my cold wet breakfast.

It was summertime in Palo Alto this weekend. Sun tea on the porch all afternoon Saturday and lemons from the front yard. (They're prettier to look at than to eat, sadly).

Then Sunday morning farmer's market for fresh bread and radishes (plus pickling vegetables), for California breakfast with coffee made in my Christmas present Moccapot from Mom and Dad and served in my springtime present of tiny handmade cups from Vanessa.