I’m going to rest now.

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.

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.

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.

These were my Sunday sessions:

1. Blogging 102: How to make your blog better
2. How to search scientific literature

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:

1. Nature Network
2. Lablogatórios
3. Scienceblogs.com
4. ResearchBlogging.org

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.

On Saturday, I attended these ScienceOnline’09 sessions:

1. You are a science blogger but you want to publish a pop-sci book?
2. Transitions: Changing your online persona as your real life changes
3. Rhetoric of science: Print vs. web
4. Alternative careers: How to become a journal editor
5. Blog carnivals: Why you should participate
6. 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.”

ScienceOnline’09 is now over and I’m back in the warm Central Valley. I’d hoped to post a blog entry or two a day during the unconference, but the free time never materialized. My focus got commandeered by the discussions, demos and good ol’ fashion conversations with people. Many people. I have a jacket pocket stuffed with names, blogs and email addresses to sort through, so it may take a few days before I get a hold of some of you.

I met Talia Page over at TalkingScience.org, and she posted an overview of the unconference. I finally met Bora, one of the organizers, and he’s gathered a number of overviews.

If the sheer inspiration and motivation wasn’t enough, I got a lot of ideas that I want to develop for this blog. I’ll elaborate on this more in future posts.

I thank Kevin again for first letting me know about the conference. It was more than worth my while. I look forward to Science Online ‘10. See you next year!

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.

Here I am, heading to North Carolina to spend a few days at the ScienceOnline’09 conference. I’m on a layover at McCarran Airport in tacky Las Vegas before heading off to Raleigh-Durham.

I got on my flight without enough sleep, so I spent most of it resting with eyes closed. At some pointed I opened my eyes to peak at the Great Basin desert out the window, 30,000 ft below. During my last year as a UC Davis student, I learned about the Great Basin from a geology class for non-majors. I loved the geology class, but it is amazing to see it the Great Basin from above with my own eyes.

The desert is made up of north-south running rows of parallel mountain ranges with wide valleys running between them. It is really hard to tell from the ground that the mountains and valleys are forming this pattern. This arrangement is known as a basin and range, formed by the fact that Nevada has been expanding in the east-west direction for millions of years. Like spreading pizza dough, the crust in the Great Basin is extremely thin, and the cracks and gaps created by the spread is what creates the regular pattern of mountains.