It’s been a busy two weeks, then I had to battle a fever for a few days, but I finally uploaded my ScienceOnline’09 photos onto Flickr.
I’m going to rest now.
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Tags: ScienceOnline'09
It seems that one cliché in photography is the golden leaf on a wooden surface. At least, I’ve seen enough of them that it appears to be cliché, and my good writing teachers have taught me to avoid them.
As you can see above, I’m shaming my teachers. This is from Old Town when I was on a photo outing with Carrie about a month ago. It’s the only place in Sacramento where you’ll find modern day mailboxes encased in wooden decor as to not clash with the mid-19th century buildings and the SUVs parked in front of them.
In my defense, the shadow caught my eye first. I felt that it created a nice and mysterious contrast by running across the leaf. My further defense is that the photo on the right is actually the first one I took of the leaf; it’s not nearly as interesting with the wooden lines running so vertical. I took the second photo above but canted and tighter framed, which is much more striking. Regardless, I think the real seller is the shadow and the ambiguous feeling it suggests.
Tags: leaf, Old Town, warm, wooden surface
ScienceOnline’09 gave me a lot of inspiration and ideas, even if they’re vague. I originally started this blog to talk about science and photography as mutually exclusive topics, but what does it mean if I wanted to do science photography?
I want to avoid doing much wildlife photography on this blog—I love wildlife photography but there’s already a lot of that on the Internet. What about the other sciences? How do I visually approach physics and chemistry with a lens? How do I take photos that is creatively interesting and can demonstrate, say, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium or the Coriolis effect?
There are some photographers with highly specialized and spiffy work, such as Ted Kinsman, but their equipment is well beyond my means. I’ll have to sit long and hard about the direction for this site.
Tags: ScienceOnline'09
ScienceOnline’09 was hosted at the Sigma Xi Center in the Triangle, which housed the Hall of Honor in one of its wings. The hall is comprised of three stacks of polish panels facing large windows, honoring Sigma Xi members who have won the Nobel Prize. Albert Einstein is on there, as well as Luis Alvarez, Barbara McClintock and Al Gore.
The shiny slabs are an irresistible piece of decor—people at the unconference kept staring at it, looking for familiar names, asking questions and taking photos it. It is rather intimating, too, not from standing below the giant slabs of impressive names, but I felt that I should have recognized more of the Nobel laureates. Regardless, it was a great historical segue at the unconference.
Tags: Nobel Prize, ScienceOnline'09
Here is the ScienceOnline’09 Flickr pool and the scio09 Flicker tag.
The curse of the photographer is the hours I have to spend sitting in front of a computer to sort and adjust all my photos. I’m a little picky, so I am sorry that I won’t have all my photos ready for a few days. I will add them to the Flickr pool for everyone’s convienence.
Tags: ScienceOnline'09
These were my Sunday sessions:
In discussing design and color theory in “Blogging 102,” I suggested that everyone check out Adobe’s free Kuler service. You can select from many pre-designed color schemes, or create your own. Simply select one color and, depending on your options, Kuler will create a number of other colors to complement it.
These were the demos I watched:
Due to some AV trouble, April’s SciVee.tv demo got nudged back so that I had to leave before I could watch her’s.
The “How to search scientific literature” discussion had even more AV trouble. The moderators couldn’t get the projector working, and at one point they accidentally activated the motorized blinds to cover up the windows. If there’s AV trouble and the blinds get switched, then the controls are just really badly designed; no excuses. If I ever designed a conference room, the most important thing I would stress is user interface, user interface, user interface! Nothing else about the conference room will work because I don’t know how to design conference rooms, but at least the AV user interface will be intuitive, easy to use and beautiful.
I had a brief discussion with someone on Friday evening on how science and technical writing is like designing user interfaces. In both cases, you have to known your audience, how they think, react, respond and understand. In my technical writing classes I spend a lot of time writing down the list of words that my intended audience will and will not understand. I’ve even sent out surveys to my friends to test if my ideas are sound. It’s not as easy I as I’m making it out to be, but it’s fun to do.
Lets not forget that Sunday lunch an amazing platter of Mediterranean food. I want the food again for 2010.
Tags: audience, ScienceOnline'09
On Saturday, I attended these ScienceOnline’09 sessions:
- You are a science blogger but you want to publish a pop-sci book?
- Transitions: Changing your online persona as your real life changes
- Rhetoric of science: Print vs. web
- Alternative careers: How to become a journal editor
- Blog carnivals: Why you should participate
- How to become a (paid) science journalist: Advice for bloggers
Do you smell a pattern, especially with #1, #3, #4 and #6?
In “How to become a science journalist,” Tom Levenson and Rebecca Skloot mentioned how blogging does not necessarily improve writing skills (thank goodness for community college writing courses). They particularly stressed one topic for writers: structure, structure, structure. Essentially, it’s how the writing is broken down and organized, since strictly chronological is necessarily the most interesting, and the inverted pyramid is dependable but can be a little bland.
Writing structure is hard, but it is important; that was the take home message if I really wanted to condense it down to so few words. The structure controls the flow of information as not to overwhelm the audience. It paces it, keeps the information interesting and lets storytelling narratives to be woven in.
Levenson and Skloot also vindicated one of my favorite strategies for learning structure: watch movies and study their plot structure.
When I think about structure, I sometimes think about the This American Life episode “81 Words.” In it, reporter Alix Spiegel uses a simple but brilliant structure to bookend her story on how the American Psychiatric Association stopped defining homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. She starts off talking about how her closeted grandfather was the APA president-elect, then launches into a complex but largely chronological story involving dozens of people (her grandfather is scarcely mentioned) before concluding it by going back to the story about her grandfather.
This bookending structure is common, but how Spiegel uses it in her story is rather brilliant. It starts with the story on one person before jumping off of it as a springboard into the true meat of the story. It anchors the story early on with a recognizable figure (a family member) that listeners can quickly grasp, but then it completely avoids sensationalizing that person as a lone hero. Overemphasizing a single person—and overlooking team players—is a problem I sometimes see in science writing, or any nonfiction writing with complex narratives, so I was immensely overjoyed the first time I heard “81 Words.”
This evening I heard Rebecca Skloot (above) read from her upcoming book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks about the HeLa cell culture line and the woman that they were derived from. Skloot is a science journalist who as contributed to the New York Times Magazine and RadioLab, among many others.
Human cells have a natural limit on how often they can divide before they die (Hayflick limit). Cancer cells have mutations that overcome this limit, granting them “immortality” since each cell can potentially go through an unlimited number of reproductions that most healthy cells cannot approach. This happened to the cervical cancer cells in Henrietta Lacks in 1951. A biopsy was taken from her and, without her knowledge or consent, her cancer cells became the first line of immortal human cells ever grown in lab culture. Tragically, Henrietta Lacks herself died from her cancer months after she was diagnosed.
Her unwitting contribution to science lead to a vast number of advances and discoveries. Her cells were used to develop the first polio vaccine. Her cells allowed scientist to find the link between cancer and the human papillomavirus (HPV). Dozens in the audience raised their hands when Skloot asked if they used HeLa cells in their research.
I have heard of HeLa cells before, but I have heard little about Henrietta Lacks, so I was absorbed by the reading.
I asked a question during the Q&A after the talk, and Skloot’s answer really drove home a core point in science writing. I asked her how she was able to warm up to the Lacks family after they refused her interviews for a year and a half. She tried several ways, but one of them was that she explained to the Lacks family the science behind Henrietta’s cells; no one had slowed down to understand their confusion and helped them apprehend what it really meant.
I hope to buy a copy of Skloot’s book when it is published in about a year.
Photography
I don’t take very many portraits, but for some reason I decided that I wanted to take one of Rebecca Skloot. After her talk, I approached her and complimented on how much I enjoyed her reading and talk, and then asked if I could take a her portrait. She courteously obliged, and I gave her one quick instruction (take a step back) before I snapped away. I wish I remembered to bring my flash with me to fill in some shadow detail, but I still liked how the portrait turned out.
Tags: biology, ethics, Hayflick limit, HeLa, Henrietta Lacks, ScienceOnline'09
A few weeks ago I found a water boatman paddling in the apartment swimming pool. They’re aquatic insects (family Corixidae for anyone who’s counting) with long hind-legs that they use to propel themselves through water like oars on a boat—hence their name. I was resting in the pool when I felt it tugging on my leg.
I haven’t seen these guys in a while, so I sco0ped it up with my hands and scurried back to my apartment. I dumped it into a cup of water and showed it to one of my roommates, and then put the cup aside and planned to show it off to some other friends later that night—Aaron in particular since he’s getting into natural history.
Did I mention that it was a hot day in Davis? When the evening arrived I checked the cup and noticed that it was quite warm, and the water boatman was quite dead. Maybe swimming in the chlorine pool got to him, but I think the warm water had burst my enthusiasm.
Lesson #1 when doing a show and tell with live critters, make sure you keep them alive.
I was in the pool again today and I found three aquatic insects. Okay, the first one wasn’t really aquatic, but it was incidentally aquatic because the bee fell into the pool. The other two were a water boatman and a backswimmer.
Backswimmers (family Notonectidae) are similar to water boatman in that they have long hind-legs they use as oars. Unlike the water boatman, they swim with their backs upside down and they are also larger. They also bite and I’ve been bitten by one, so I only followed it around the pool for a while. There’s no need for me to experience that, again.
A water boatman grabbed my eye shortly after I quit stalking the backswimmer. I scooped it into my hand again but this time, into a much larger container. It’s greater volume-to-surface area ratio, so the water won’t warm up quickly this time around:
Water boatman, top view (Corixidae)
Water boatman (Corixidae)
The first image is a top view (backside) of the water boatman, taken with a Pentax DA 16-45mm lens as is, it can focus fairly close (no true macro, heavily cropped). The second image was taken using a 50mm lens at the end of a 55mm extension tube to get around 1:1 (little cropping). Contrast is really bad since I’m shooting through the plastic jug I’m keeping him in. You can really see its hind-legs and compound eyes.
And yes, that is a wine cork I placed in there as a substrate.
I’m going to see if I can call Aaron over here to check it out, but either way I’m going to let him go.
Next weekend, I’m hoping to find a giant water bug in the pool (family Belostomatidae).
Tags: aquatic insects, corixidae, notonectidae
I’ll start with the pictures from Berkeley from a month ago. I’m a disappointed in how the focus somehow got centered on the mast and not on the sign, which was what I wanted. Maybe I shifted forward a little after the focus locked, I was using a narrow depth-of-field and standing on a docked boat.
I wanted the full attention on the sign, which I found not just the language amusing but I love how it’s crooked, too.
Tags: Photography, sailing
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