Josh Witten

ScienceOnline: More than a conference

The Finch & Pea would not exist as you know it today if it were not for ScienceOnline. Mike and I liked the pub idea, but also realized that a pub with only two people in it – no matter how interesting. clever, and handsome, was a pretty lousy watering hole. The enthusiasm for our approach to science communication I experienced at ScienceOnline2012 led to the decision to bring on more “staff” at The Finch & Pea and 60% of those additions are folks we only met because of ScienceOnline.

Science Online has not only been a positive force for The Finch & Pea, but for the development of online science communication as a whole. At the Science Writers 2012 conference, the Science Online community clearly represented a cadre of youthful (not necessarily young) and dynamic future leaders for science communication.

Now, they are asking for help to expand that community (not to subsidize the conference): Continue reading “ScienceOnline: More than a conference”

Blast Off!

Finish this sentence, “10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…”

Did you say, “Blast Off!” My wife and I both do. But, I suspect that our children won’t, because they will not grow up in an era heavily influenced by space shuttle launches.

I am an advocate for space exploration, but not necessarily manned space exploration. Still, this made me a little sad or nostalgic or it just made me feel old.

*If you start the countdown at 3, I invariably whisper “Contact” at the end.

Heidi says…

Our own, well leased from Nature Afield, Heidi Smith was interviewed by the lovely and affable Tyler Dukes for The Charlotte Observer. She says wonderful things about frogs, salamanders, and other amphibians, but not me. Oh, well:

People think of frogs as really simple organisms…But…They’re just really beautiful. And salamanders as well because they’re kind of secretive and we don’t always see them, but they’re really underappreciated. – Heidi Smith

She will also be defending her dissertation against the multi-headed chaos dragon of her thesis committee on 22 January.

You can follow Heidi on Twitter at @HeidiKayDeidi and Tyler at @mtdukes.

Dirty Minds: Your love life is supposed to be complicated

Kayt Sukel’s Dirty Minds is a book about neuroscience that has questions, not answers. That alone should be enough reason for you to pick it up. Sukel’s agenda is not to tell her reader how the human mind works. It is to convince her reader that our minds are complicated messes – they are dirty, in the cleanest sense of the term¹. Our mind is the result of a rat’s nest of neurons bathed in a complex soup of hormones interacting with our environment. The point is not that our dirty minds have been solved, but that they are so damned interesting.

If you need another reason, a lot of the book is about sex². Really, it is about research into the neurological basis of love. It covers relationships, parenting, even a wee bit of religion, and sex; but, when you say “and sex”, you might as well say “it’s about sex”. Continue reading “Dirty Minds: Your love life is supposed to be complicated”