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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?