This is a letter to the editor I published at the Daily Advance. Posted here for posterity, since they have no online archive:

A recent letter criticizing the Currituck Board of Commissioners’ decision to relax zoning restrictions on tattoo parlors serves as yet another reminder of how quaintly behind the times we are here in northeastern North Carolina. This parochialism and xenophobia is sort of cute and endearing in its naivety; however, it is also detrimental to our area’s youth, who must grow up with such intolerance.

The letter writer suggests that tattoo parlors are sexual in nature because people can have their privates pierced and tattooed. If this is a reason to zone them differently, then we must similarly zone clothing stores for selling thongs, theaters for showing R-rated movies, and convenience stores for selling condoms. Perhaps we should establish a red-light district to shelter the puritanical members of our community from impure thoughts?

The letter writer affirms that people have the right to tattoos and piercings, but wants it hidden away in the community where no one can see them. This implies an attitude that people who have tattoos and piercings comprise some sort of counter-culture that threatens community values. I am college-educated, professional, and a contributing member of the community. I also have my tongue pierced and more than 30 hours of tattoo ink on my body. My body art is not a dramatic lifestyle choice, but merely reflects my sense of style, which includes a fine appreciation for eccentric artwork like many other members of my generation.

We are not abnormal, we are Generation X.

“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”


     – Neil Armstrong

Planetes

The space age began in the 1950s with the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1, which was followed by a Space Race that lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without milateristic competition between our countries, all we had left was our curiosity to propel us to the stars. Apparently curiosity wasn’t as motivating a factor as fear, and NASA has seen increasing cuts in funding since the 1990s.

So the Space Age is now overshadowed by an Information Age, and some believe we are now too focused on looking inward instead of outward at the stars, but we do continue to explore space with unmanned probes, an International Space Station, and over 500 Functional Satelites. We are also looking for ways to get the market to jumpstart another space-race with competitions like Ansari X Prize.

So the human race’s advance into space continues at a steady pace; however, our enthusiasm for space exploration has waned. Gone is the hopeful idealism of human beings living among the stars that was once embodied in TV shows like Star Trek, which promoted a utopian vision of humanity’s future. Today’s futurist visions of human beings in space are much darker and pessimistic as we see in shows like Battlestar Gallactica and Firefly. We see this pessimism in a minority of voices who are opposed to space exploration:

While I don’t dispute that space exploration has resulted in some advances in science and technology, the resources invested should be used at home. Let’s fix the problems on Earth first before we invest billions of dollars into solving problems in space. Imagine if that money were to be channeled into finding cures for cancer or AIDS, or finding solutions for world hunger. Let’s fix Earth first before we conquer space.

For these reasons, a series like Planetes (Ancient GreeK for “Wanderers”) is so refreshing. The show follows a team working in the Space Debris Section of a corporate space station in 2075. The department was created for public relations after an errant bolt collided with and depressurized a passenger space craft, killing many people on board. Nicknamed “Half Section” because the company only gives them half the funding promised, the team rendevous with orbiting space junk to either collect it or nudge it to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

The Space Review has called Planetes “probably the most broad, detailed, and realistic televised vision of a near-term spacefaring future that has aired anywhere.” And we can see this in the way the show mirrors modern concerns. After people got over the military implications of China shooting down one of its old weather satelites with a missile, scientists were able to come out and complain about the very real threat all of the space debris the test had generated and presented future space travelers.

As the show correctly theorizes, the destruction of a large space station would produce an incredible amount of space debris, which would destroy other satelites, creating a chain reaction until so much debris surrounded Earth the space program would never recover. The more I learn about the subject, the more I realize that one could argue that we don’t need to worry about meeting warlike alien races in space, because such a race would fill its planetary orbit with so much debris that they would never be able to leave their planet.

Let’s not be that race.

Planetes

We are introduced to near-future space life by following Ai Tanabe as she joins Half Section. When she meets Hachimaki, her coworker, she can’t stop laughing about the fact that he is wearing diapers the same way people couldn’t get over the fact that astronaut Lisa Nowak wore diapers in her 900-mile drive to possibly kidnap a rival lover. Tanabe’s seemingly naive idealism is contrasted with Hachi’s apparent cynicism. I say “seemingly” and “apparent” because none of these characters are so simple.

Great characters, the human element of this story, is what makes Planetes so engaging. Upon first introductions to the Debris Section team, we meet a motley crew of apparent rejects. Through the episodes, however, we learn about the reasons behind each character’s idiosynchracies and come to understand them within the socioeconomic and political context of this futurist vision.

Planetes politics revolve around the International Treaty Organization (INTO). Major world-powers are never named, only refered to as First-World countries, because the story is tackling political problems that we are experiencing today without assigning blame. In Planetes’ future, the switch from oil as a fuel source has meant the complete collapse of countries who were major oil exporters. Citizens from Third-World countries have very little representation in space, and their attempts to break into the market are dismissed by established companies. On Earth, more people are dying of starvation and war than ever before, but the First-World has no part in it beyond delivering aid and peace-keeping troops. Planetes wisely takes no stand on any of these developments except to convey that the world is a complicated place with complicated problems, which humans will always try to tackle as best we can and it will always be so.

With these familiar issues, space travel brings new problems and opportunities. People who make their living in space die from all the problems that lifestyle brings such as brittle bones and cancer. People born in space can never visit Earth unless science figures out a way for their bodies to survive the increased gravity. A terrorist organization, the Space Defense Front, perpetually threatens to shut down space flight in their cause to bring attention back to the problems on Earth.

Still, the show manages to strike a very positive tone. Despite government and corporate corruption, space-related illnesses, terrorism, and the host of other problems the characters encounter, they manage to keep human life in space hopeful through their strong ethics, which are rooted in their humanistic idealism. Where other storytellers would focus on the pessimistic characteristics of this future and the detrimental effects they would have on the characters, Makoto Yukimura’s characters are too strong in their personalities and their ethics to let their environment drag them down.

The show successfully accomplished what no other series has managed to achieve since Star Trek left the airwaves. Despite the corruption and injustice the characters face in space, their virtuous perseverance, ethical standards, and vision allow them to overcome their challenges. The series provides an inspiring view of space travel. One that I hope will inspire others to start thinking about “out there” once again.

Port Discover Science Center

Science in my first life. The Port Discover Science Center located in downtown Elizabeth City provides me with my most rewarding philanthropic exersizes and volunteer activities.

The center runs on a shoe-strig budget of a little over $50k a year. With that it must rent a space in a downtown location, pay for electric and DSL service, and a Science Education Specialist.

Port Discover is the brainchild of LuAnne Pendergraft, who has a fantastic background in grant-writing and museum studies. Her husband, Don Pendergraft, is the Exhibit Design Chief at the Museum of the Albemarle, Elizabeth City’s largest landmark.

Early on in building Port Discover, Luanne stressed the point that this is a science center not museum, emphasizing the importance of hand-on activities, interactions, and engagement. Science is an ongoing process of exploration and discovery. The center needed to be a playground, not an exhibit.

Dr. Pringle with Aquarium Displays

LuAnne geared the center’s exhibits toward the local community. This meant focusing on the local environment, marine and marshland, and aviation, because of the Coast Guard airbase which employs most people in the area.

Dr. Pringle, a Marine Biology Professor from ECSU, donated and maintains two aquariums from his department. One is filled with sea anemones, starfish, and other salt-water animals. The other is filled with local unusual plant life, which is equally fascinating. Nothing captures the imagination like a venus fly trap.

Billy Younger, Professor of Astronomy at the College of the Albemarle, brought in an old satelite dish, which he painted the stars and constellations on in their positions in the night sky as they were on the center’s opening date. The dome creates an interesting acoustical effect when you stand under it and speak as well.

I recently learned that Billy has been putting on a one-man science show, which includes laying down on a bed of nails and having someone break a cinderblock on his chest with a sledgehammer. He also freezes a rose in liquid nitrogen and shatters it to gasp of amazement from his young audiences.

Museum Designer Morgan Kenny helped to give the center that official look and feel. He also put together a wooden bit of architecture to hang over the center’s administrative area based on the Golden Mean.

Another benefactor donated an entire cabinet of sea shells, an incredible collection. So it’s like having a real life Cabinet of Curiosities to play with.

Bernoulli Blower

I volunteered to construct the Bernoulli Blower, which demonstrates the principle of lift using a jetstream of air and objects to “levitate” in its current.

My advice to anyone wanting to build a bernoulli blower: Don’t buy an army surplus fan or a high velocity fan or a ventilation fan. Save yourself a whole lot of grief and buy the cheapest electrical leafblower you can find.

After finding a suitable blower, the next most difficult step was building a kid-proof wooden box to house the thing in. A simple safety cone allows redirecting the airstream and mutes the sound slightly. Foam insulation glued inside the box also helps to dampen the noise, and holes drilled around the base allow air to flow into the box.

We’ve been having trouble with the light-dimmer switch I set up to let kids play with variable blower speeds. The leafblower requires far more electricity than the dimmer-switch can handle (go figure, it’s made for lamp-lights), and we’ve been burning through one dimmer-switch every two months on average. One solution I’m looking forward to, a volunteer intends to donate a veriac transformer for the display, which will not only let the kids play with differen wind settings, but see how much electricity is being channeled through the blower as well. Nifty!

Flight Simulator

What’s the easiest way to increase the number of displays in a limited space? One word: Computers!!! Google Earth, Re-mission, and other science softwares. Not to mention the World Wide Web is brimming with cool flash games like Pandemic and Climate Challenge and Mouse Party.

Microsoft Flight Simulator “A Century of Flight” provided a great interactive display. A control stick, television, and computer tucked away in a cabinet make for a fairly low-maintenance display. A volunteer from the Elizabeth City Rotary club built the display, which totally rocks. The display would have fallen forward to crush some poor child if I had built it.

I was able to set up the simulator to fly out of the Elizabeth City Coast Guard base, allowing children to fly over the city, which isn’t rendered in detail, but there are enough landmarks to make it interesting.

My sister, Rachelle, designed the website, which looks fantastic and is generously maintained by Tamera Phillips of Blufish Design Studio.

Microscopes Rule All

A digital projector and theater surround-sound system I set up in the space don’t get the use I’d hoped they would, but that has a lot to do with the cramped quarters. A larger space, with lots of seating could take advantage of this entertainment center and the small library of DVD documentaries I’ve provided for it.

Then there are the dreams I’ve got for the space if only I had the money and time. I would love to get ten-plus laptops with wifi and have virtual field trips to science displays in second Life. Maybe someday when I’ve got $10k to part with.

Luanne has put an amazing amount of effort into Port Discover’s success, and it has definately paid off. Whenever I’m in the Center to maintain the computers, I see waves of children coming in to play with the various exhibits. Thanks to Mrs. Pendergraft, I think it’s fair to say, the small town of Elizabeth City has more Science Culture than many real cities.

Professor Ozymandias Spark

Science benefits from working on an open source model. Peer review, publication and dessemination of experimental results, public education, access to higher education, all of these contribute to a large number of people with the tools and resources to help them contribute productively to our collective body of knowledge.

Peers on the World Wide Web includes anyone with internet access. The open access articles the Public Library of Science publishes online disseminate more quickly than articles published in the traditional journals. Colaborative database projects like the emerging Encyclopedia of Life and combining databases of genome data allow scientists to cross-polinate ideas and develop new chimeric memes.

Playgrounds for Minds

Science relies increasingly on computers. The field of Computational Biology has made burgeoning contributions to our understanding of genetics. Distributed computing projects not only take advantage of the world’s idle computer processing time, but bring everyday people into the realm of scientific experimentation and allow them to make meaningful contributions as well. Peer review journals only publish successful findings, but by publishing the results of unsuccessful experiments, Scientists can see what experiments have already failed and avoid wasting time.

Playgrounds for Minds

In the virtual world of Second Life, Sandboxes are a popular method of collaboration. These locations allow users to construct whatever they want and then leave their experiment for others to play with or start over. Presently sandboxes are mostly being used for architecture and similar designs, but the potential for science applications are unbounded.

NOAA has replicated its exhibits in many different SL locations. The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has exhibits at the SL Science Center, ISM, and COLABs, plugging their TRUTHS satellite model for tracking atmospheric change.

The Game of Life

It’s interesting to think of the dynamics of museum exhibits in SL. Because they are virtual, the same exhibit can exist in several museums at once, they don’t have to tour. It reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s observations on ideas, that we can share our ideas and our act of sharing them doesn’t lessen our knowing them.

Cyberspace is a true markeplace of ideas, a meme replication factory and testing ground for new ideas. Since science is a communal body of empirically-derived knowledge, it makes sense that it should take full advantage of the mass-communication and mass-feedback out here for scientifcally minded peers, but, primarily, it needs to be used to bring new minds into the science fold.

Buffon Shooter 3-D Demonstration of Buffon’s Needle

Which brings me to the issue of the Internet’s accessibility. With science blogs, documentaries on video sites, science podcasts, and kids sites communicating science at a wide variety of levels and methods. Individual audience members can plug into the science exponent that most groks with their personal learning style.

With $100 laptops (now $175) potentially bringing affordable Internet access to children all over the world, the number of peers will grow expotentially. With improved graphical user interfaces, streaming audio and video, literacy no longer need be a requirement for enjoying the beauty of scientific ideas, or for contributing them. With the emergence of Second Life, lack of proximity to a museum no longer prevents students from taking field trips in virtual reality.

All of these advances, bringing amateurs (like myself) into the fold, also evoke contributions from novel perspectives, and ultimately benefit the whole.

All but one of the images accompanying this article were taken at Elon University’s Second Life display.

Changed the word “desseminate” to “disseminate” on the advice of Kristina Raisinbran, grammar and syntax expert.

Dr. Moran has essentially written one big justification for intellectual laziness in his post “Lessons from Science Communication Training,” where he rationalizes and credentializes away any social responsibility scientists have to educate and persuade the public.

I can understand the political naivety I’m reading in this article; after all, natural scientists are notoriously out of touch with the social sciences, like Politics, which most of them don’t consider real science anyway. We can take the highly egocentric, feel-good stance that scientists have explained things well because we understand it ourselves, and make that the end of story, as Dr. Moran does, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are pathetically ineffective at winning the culture war.

Now, I don’t want to be accused of claiming that all scientists are excellent communicators but as far as I can tell they don’t do such a bad job. After all, communicating is extremely important in science whether it be writing a scientific paper or lecturing to undergraduates. It’s not at all clear to me that we scientists are doing such a bad job of communicating science.

Okay, here’s where my humanities background comes in useful. Moran is saying that scientists communicate well because they communicate well with other scientists and people who want to be scientists. This is like saying 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry did a great job of communicating because Democrats understood his nuanced opinions and they genuinely liked him. This doesn’t change the fact that he didn’t get elected; and, therefore, was not really as a good communicator as he should have been.

It’s really very simple. Stem Cell research doesn’t get Federal funding because scientists working with stem cells haven’t communicated the issue successfully so that people know the difference between a viable fetus attached to a uterine wall and cluster of undifferentiated cells preserved in liquid nitrogen. Most people reject evolutionary theory, because Richard Dawkins and all the other brilliant evolutionary theorists have failed to persuade them. If we were really communicating science to the best of our abilities, then we would be winning the war of ideas.

We aren’t winning the war of ideas, and therefore we are losers. We can shrug our shoulders and say, “Oh well, I guess science is just too good for most people,” but that doesn’t change the fact that we are still losers. Everyone please take your thumb and forefinger and make an “L” symbol on your forehead. Now let’s go ponder ourselves in a mirror.

The issue is the fixation of some people on the idea that scientists need special training in order to communicate to the general public.

That’s probably because they do need such training. Scientists aren’t even very good at communicating with each other. Old Dominion University had to start requiring a writing aptitude test before students working in the sciences could graduate because scientists were so pathetically awful at writing (Two ODU Professors are my source on this). You would be surprised at the number of students who have to either struggle through this requirement or forsake getting their degree altogether.

Whenever we write, we need to consider our audience. This is something we learned Freshman year in Creative Writing 101, and something pompous brainiacs never seem to grasp. It may feel good to think you know something that only other experts know and can communicate, but the end result is that you scare the average mind away to huddle around the comfort of their radio or TV, where Rush Dimbulb assures them that it isn’t anything wrong with them, it’s the scientists, who are just a bunch of elitist academic nimrods who are still upset over all the wedgies they got in high school.

Framing science has to do with making science appealing to others, to make it inclusive. It’s about making more people want to be scientists and bringing more minds into the fold. Yes, there are some fantastic science writers, and we love to read them, but their books sales are dwarfed by anti-science pundits like Ann Coulter, who wrote in one of her many best-selling books:

Professors are the most cosseted, pussified, subsidized group of people in the U.S. workforce. They have concocted a system to preemptively protect themselves for not doing their jobs, known as “tenure.” They make a lot of money, have health plans that would make New York City municipal workers’ jaws drop, and work — at most — fifteen hours a week. (from the book “Godless: The Church of Liberalism)

If you’re comfortable with having most of the world consider you “pussified,” then please give no further thought to how you frame your arguments. If your hunky-dory with Ann Skeletor mocking evolutionary theory virtually unchallenged, then please go back to your books, research, and students. Maybe you could stick your fingers in your ears, close your eyes, and go “La! La! La! La! La! La! La!” when you walk around outside just to be safe too.

What makes a good science writer? It’s not having a Doctorate in a single field. Carl Sagan is one of the greatest, most persuasive science writer’s who ever lived, but much of his exposition dealt with science outside of his personal realm of expertise, Astronomy. Richard Dawkins is a fine science writer, but he preaches to the masses. He is utterly unconvincing for people who don’t already believe in science and evolution. Every non-scientist I have given a Dawkins book, has given it back to me unread saying “That guy is a prick.”

Natalie Angier’s recent book, The Cannon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, frames science in terms of everyday average human experiences, putting the natural sciences in contexts the 99% of the world who doesn’t work in a lab or classroom can appreciate and make an emotional connection to. Angier is a journalist, a self-described “Science Debutant,” and Dr. Moran disapproves of the journalistic approach to communicating science that professionals like Angier utilize:

I’m not sure that scientists should be taking lessons on how to communicate to the general public from a group that doesn’t seem to be very good at it. I think that press relations offices are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I can’t help but wonder what are Dr. Moran’s criteria for successful public communications? I see newspapers selling everywhere, journalists filling their pages with text. I see journalists filling the radio and television mediums with their reports. Scientists are few and far between in these mediums. I don’t see people gathering around the water-cooler on Monday mornings to discuss the latest articles in the journal Nature.

Journalists are demonstrably and undisputedly superior at communicating with the public than scientists, and it’s silly and dishonest to excuse your poor communication skills by rationalizing that it’s everyone else who’s too stupid to understand you.

Clearly the goal here is not to focus on good science communication—it’s how to spin good science to conform to what the newspapers want to print. We know what that is. Shave your head, commit a crime, exaggerate your claims. Is this really what we want our graduate students to learn?

One word to characterize this bit of logical fallacy: HYPERBOLE. If we start down this slippery-slope of “framing science” then we’ll all be throwing chairs at one another and cross-dressing on the Jerry Springer show! (BTW, that should be “We know what that is: Shave your head…” (Just a tip from an English Major))

The children!!! Won’t somebody please think of the children???

I call shenanigans. This is pure poppycock, balderdash, nonsense, and flimflammery. When Alfred Kinsey researched human sexual relations, he had to teach his surveyors to use the slang terms for genitals and sexual acts vice their medical terms, which intimidated people (according to the movie “Kinsey“). Scientific Culture didn’t collapse from scientists using crude slang. Quite the contrary, it benefited from it, and brought more people into the world of scientific ideas (by selling them scientific research laden with sex).

The group that needs lessons here is the reporters, not the scientists. That ain’t gonna happen but it’s no reason for us to lower ourselves to their standards.

Here I believe a great big sticker with the word “elitist” gets slapped firmly onto Dr. Moran’s forehead. Science communicators shouldn’t “lower ourselves to their standards,” standards that journalists must adhere to because they are communicating to audiences of average intelligence. In other words, Dr. Moran doesn’t think we should be modifying how we communicate science so that average people (ie. the most people) can understand it. Instead he advocates making Journalists be as incommunicably erudite as the scientific experts.

Instead of a headline that reads, “Walking Upright May Have Started in Trees,” maybe it should instead read “Researchers Hypothesize Erect Gait in Primate Morphology Originated in Dendrological Environments.” Gee, that’ll sell a lot of newspapers and advertising (and yes, I know “Dendrological” isn’t a word, but I couldn’t find a sufficiently obtuse substitute for “Trees.” Sometimes science must bend to the needs of a punchline.).

It’s easy for someone with tenure at a University to insulate themselves from political reality, while blue-collar scientists working in the field are losing their funding, non-scientists are being appointed to federal positions, and EPA libraries are closed for political reasons. You have the freedom to shirk your social responsibility to your fields, rationalizing that you’ve done your best, but don’t criticize the rest of us for continuing to fight.

Maybe the academics could climb down from their ivory towers for a few minutes and realize there’s a world outside their exclusive club of credentialism. If you think learning to communicate your subject to the 99-something-odd-percent of the populace who doesn’t work in your field is bringing yourselves down to their level, then please do stay impotent in your laboratories and classrooms. Just stay out of the way of the rest of us who are working to gain mindshare for scientific thinking in our entire society.

Anyone who has read The Selfish Gene is aware of the importance of memes in humanity’s evolutionary fitness. Politics is the science of exploiting human cognitive schemas to ensure certain memes take root in our social mindshare (Yes, I know that sentence was erudite, but it was to persuade the scientists. Bite me.). Any scientist who thinks politics isn’t their business is a scientist who undervalues the importance of teaching science to the masses.

I volunteer at a children’s science center that tries to make science fun for young minds. You guys remember fun right? Fun is good. People like fun. Fun is a way to frame science so that people don’t think we’re just a bunch of aloof eggheads.

Scientists who refuse to communicate science in plainer, more charismatic language remind me of my Computer Science peers who were outraged when computers and the Internet opened up to everyone. “These people don’t know anything about computers,” one friend prophetically griped, “They’re going to clutter up the whole Internet!”

It was a true statement, non-computer people did overtake the World Wide Web and junk it all up, but it ended up being a good thing. It ushered in the Information Age. Maybe by bringing Science down to a level everyone can appreciate, we might usher in a honest-to-goodness “Age of Science?”

06/01/2007 8:00 PM EST: Changed the title of this post from “Dr. Laurence A. Moran is a Poopy Pants” to “Dr. Laurence A. Moran’s Exclusive Scientists Club.” As my initial sense of outrage at his post fades, I’ll probably renege on some of my more inflamatory statements rashly made here. : )

06/10/2007: Changed the title back to “Dr. Laurence A. Moran is a Poopy Pants,” because that’s a cooler title, even if he really isn’t a poopy pants.