I’ve joined AirBnB to offer up the guest room as sleeping space, and in my profile there I listed the five most interesting things I’ve seen while travelling in the past few years.
Here they are, with pictures, in no particular order:
The School of the Air in Alice Springs
The Australian outback is gigantic, and many children live on ranches far away from civilization. To provide education to children in the outback, the School of the Air was launched in the 1950′s. Back then it relied on radio transmission, but nowadays the kids can talk to their teacher via webcam.
Mount Everest (Tibet)
Rongbuk monastery is the highest in the world, at the foot of Mount Everest in Tibet. It’s several hours from the nearest small village, completely isolated. There’s a hotel next door with no running water. The little girl in the photo lives at the hotel, where her parents work. She wore her winter jacket indoors all day because it was so cold. It was August.
The La Brea Tar Pits in L.A.
The LACMA museum is in one of the nicest parts of L.A. – quite close to Rodeo Drive, and a short bus trip from UCLA. But it’s built directly on top of a paleontological site, and the La Brea Tar Pits are directly next door. These pits are a source of all kinds of prehistoric animal bones, because animals and their predators would get stuck in the tar. A few years ago, LACMA expanded their underground parking garage, and found a mammoth. I saw the tusks before the news broke about half a year later.
Monkey Temple in Kathmandu
There are temples for various religions on every street corner of Kathmanadu, but Swayambunath is the most interesting. It’s on top of a steep hill, with gorgeous views of the whole city, and it’s home to a large colony of monkeys!
Earth Ships near Taos, New Mexico
Earth Ships are houses that are entirely off-grid, using solar power and recycling rain water. Even more interesting, they’re made of garbage! The main structure of the walls is made of tires and cans, packed with mud.
A defence of pop culture…
As I was assembling the list of interesting places, I realized something that’s also interesting: I knew of four of the five places through pop culture. Only the monkey temple was something I discovered while travelling. The others were all places I knew and either deliberately visited because of that, or was looking forward to seeing in person. I knew the School of the Air from watching the TV show “Skippy” as a child; I first learned about Mount Everest from a “Suske en Wiske” comic book and the monastery from Michael Palin’s travel stories; the Tar Pits are a setting in the film “My Girl”; and most people who know Earth Ships have seen the documentary “Garbage Warrior”. Only 1.5 of these are proper informative media – all the others are kids entertainment, not even explicitly meant to teach!
Hoping they’ll lose Pinterest
This post also appeared on my science blog. If you read between the lines, it also explains both why I first decided I didn’t want a personal blog anymore, and recently revived it again.
The people who introduced me to blogging were not scientists or academics. They were online friends I’d met through playing games. A few of them set up their first blogs in 2001, and I thought it looked fun, so I started one as well. It was on an archaic blogging platform that doesn’t exist anymore. B2? Greymatter? Whichever came first. It was more a diary than anything else, and the only people reading it were my friends.
When I first started thinking about expanding my blog to cover science, there weren’t many other science blogs. I’d been clicking around to see what was out there, and I remember seeing the blog that was later revealed to have been the science blog of the woman who moonlighted as a prostitute and who blogged about that elsewhere under the Belle du Jour pseudonym. There were really only about five science blogs back then. It was ages ago. The web was young.
Now I manage a professional science blog, where researchers sign up for a WordPress account and blog about their work. Scientists have taken up blogging as an almost natural thing, and I don’t mind that at all. Of course they would. It’s a medium. You can use it for anything you want. Pictures of cats. Science. It makes sense.
The people who introduced me to Twitter were not scientists. They were my techie friends in Toronto, who I knew via blogger meetups. “What is Twitter?” I asked in a pub one night, and my friend said “It’s like Facebook, if it only had status updates.”
Now I manage two Twitter accounts for work. They’re followed by Twitter accounts from other scientific publishers. I don’t mind that at all. It’s a good way of keeping in touch. Twitter has become its own medium. You can tweet about anything you want. Sandwiches. Science. It makes sense.
I joined Facebook so I could see a friend’s photos that she uploaded there. She’s not a scientist.
Now I manage a Facebook page for work. I link to the posts and job ads that scientists have posted on our blog. Scientific societies ‘like’ my status updates – or at least the people managing their page do. I don’t mind that at all. Almost everyone has a Facebook page now, and subscribing to professional updates is a convenient way for them to see all the news they need to know in one place. Family news. Science news. It makes sense.
But sometimes, certain internet-minded scientists, who so fervently jumped on blogging half a decade after it first started, go a teensy bit overboard in their praising of an online tool.
I heard about FriendFeed via science bloggers. None of my other friends ever used it.
I heard about Google Wave at a science blogging conference. None of my other friends ever used it or even heard of it.
I heard about Google Plus via science bloggers. A few of my other friends created a profile, but immediately abandoned it – like everyone else.
The people who introduced me to Pinterest were not scientists, admittedly, but this time it only took weeks, not years, for the first science/web-people to jump on the bandwagon. They were really excited about it. Probably the most excited I have ever seen a group of mostly men be about a website of mostly pictures of dresses. And the dreaded questions were asked: “How can we use this for science?”
You can’t, okay! Just leave it!
Not EVERYTHING on the internet has to be twisted and molded into some sort of vehicle for science communication. If it’s a good fit for such communication, like blogging or Twitter, it will happen. But if you try to force your professional research interests onto something that is so purposely modeled after scrapbooks and inspirational pinboards and NOT after anything remotely resembling the way you normally distribute or find scientific information, you are only going to be annoyed and disappointed. Disappointed with the way it functions. Disappointed with the restrictions it imposes.
Why do I care? I didn’t care that FriendFeed or Google Wave or Google+ never worked out, but as soon as I now see the same group of people that thought those tools were the next big thing get completely disproportionately excited about an online product, I fear that it will succumb to the same fate. And I do rather like scrapbooks and inspirational pinboards.
Academics may have invented the web, but not everything that’s on the web has to do with academics. Nobody is going to judge you if you just want to use a product for fun, so please stop trying to turn everything you like into work.
My only consolation is Instagram – a safe haven of food and pets. Until the first person sepia-filters their lab notes and considers it as a medium for research dissemination, that is.
My "inspiration" Pinterest board
Instagrams from Chicago trip
Because I really liked some of these:
(Too bad this one’s so small, but I have the original photo, too.)
Pinterrupted fun
I joined Pinterest to look at some fun things as distraction, but lately it’s just the next thing to succumb to forced professionalization. All kinds of science people joined to use it for science communication, and now there are articles everywhere on how to use leverage it for work the workplace.
Just leave fun things alone.
I feel like a kid who just realized their favourite playground games were “educational” all along.
I guess real life pin boards can also be used either for pretty things or as notice boards for work. Just don’t expect me to put work stuff on my inspirational pin boards.
Badges
As I mentioned, I’m learning to code with Codeyear. With every completed lesson or assignment, you get a badge on your profile page, and wow, that is addictive…
I wanted to get more badges, and considered signing up for Foursquare, where you get a badge for checking in to physical locations. Now I’ve never wanted to join Foursquare, because I don’t really want people to know where I am all the time. I see people using it via Twitter, and get updated whenever they’re at the supermarket. Who cares?
Maria told me that marketers really love Foursquare, and I can understand it from a marketing perspective, but still didn’t see any benefits to me.
In Cambridge, Foursquare is especially pointless. There are effectively no more than 20 places where people regularly check in, and they’re almost all pubs. There is simply nothing here. Everyone already knows where everyone is at any given time, because it’s a tiny village. And all Foursquare adds to that is a few people who broadcast this online.
For example, right now I’m in my living room, and I can see that a girl called Katya is presently at the gym behind my house. I don’t know her, but she’s broadcasting to anyone within range that she’s there. Also, she is the only person checked in anywhere at all within half a kilometer of me. What’s the point?
But I can only see this because I did sign up for Foursquare this week. Why? City Badges.
City Badges are a relatively new feature of Foursquare that I can totally get behind. For a selection of cities around the world (mostly within the US), locals have recommended particular places, and if you go to five of those places, you get a badge for that city. It started in Chicago, and a few cities have since been added, including London and Tokyo. Plus, New York also has some local badges that you only get in New York. Now it just so happens that this year I’m going to Chicago, Tokyo, and New York – and I’m regularly in London. I want those badges!
A few days ago I tried out Foursquare in London. I pulled up the screen to show what was nearby, and there were locations and people everywhere! I couldn’t find Platform 9 3/4 (one of the sites that gets you the Foursquare “London Calling” badge). It gets moved around all the time with the construction at the station, but a recent comment on the Foursquare page for the site said that it was now between platform 8 and 9.
Now that is useful. It’s like a live guidebook, written collectively, and always up to date. I finally saw the benefit of Foursquare.
Don’t be afraid of me checking into supermarkets. I’m trying it out a bit now that it’s new, but I intend to only go for the badges. Next week I’ll be in Chicago, and I’m going to try to get either the Chicago Blues Badge or the Windy City Badge. The eligible check-ins are spread across the city, so it’s going to be hard. London will be much easier. I ticked off two locations when I was there on Wednesday night, and will easily get three more over the next few months. Tokyo includes many locations I know we’ll go anyway, like Shibuya crossing and the Ghibli Museum, so that should be easy, too.
The only hard part is figuring out how to check in abroad. I never use data roaming, but may have to try switching it on and off when I’m in Chicago. It can’t possibly cost more than what I had to spend on a twenty minute phone call to Canada last month.
Summer plans
A few trips planned for this Spring/Summer. Mostly for work, but tagging on a few days of vacation to a business trip to Japan.
After flipping through the guide book I already want to do and see more than will fit in my few days off.
What I’ve been up to
Quiet here? That’s because I tend to take on too many projects and never actually get a chance to share them. Here’s a quick snapshot of what I did in the past three months or so:
My 2012 resolution was to create something each week. We’re seven weeks in, and still going strong.
Week 1 creation - Owl
I finished the BBC introductory Spanish course “Mi Vida Loca“. (It’s free and fun!) I can understand very basic Spanish now. I just felt like learning something.
Continuing the theme of learning new languages, I’m also doing Codeyear, which involves learning Javascript. This past weekend, I made my very first programme, which translates short bit of DNA to protein. Again, just because I felt like learning something new.
A while ago I created a Tumblr that automatically imports Tweets and Flickr photos tagged with YLSNED, for You Learn Something New Every Day. I keep forgetting to tag things myself, but once in a while, a stranger will use the YLSNED tag and I’m reminded via RSS feed that the page exists. Whoops!
In the weeks leading up to Christmas I had the most unoriginal idea ever: a science advent calendar. There were nearly as many science advent calendars online as there were days to count down. Mine was the only one that was both science AND Christmas-themed, though!
I have a Pinterest, which I’m not so good at using yet. I get that the idea is “clip the pretty things you see”, but I get too obsessed with details, and then go looking for a particular thing I once saw online, and spend too much time searching the whole rest of the internet rather than just passively browsing Pinterest. Although I must say it was a pretty useful site when I needed to figure out how to draw a cupcake. (That’s my “pictures of cupcakes” board to the left.)
I’ve also joined This Is My Jam. If you’re a fan of mixtapes or of sharing music videos on Facebook, you’ll like it too. It’s in beta now, and open to anyone, but I was there before it was cool. 
I’ve given a few talks about science and music over Christmas break, in London and Amersfoort (Holland), and am starting to get more organised with ideas for that project.
But my main current side project is SciBarCamb, which is happening again this year. That’s going to keep me busy until April.
And that is why I haven’t had time to update this site.
The return of the buttons
Everything old is new again. I recently found some of the flask buttons I sold on this site a few years ago, and put them up on Etsy! There are only a few of these, and I’m not planning on making any more, so do buy them if you like them.
New shelving
I tried to count how many blogs I’ve had over the past ten years, but I lost count at nine.
This is not a blog. Not really. It’s just the front page of my relaunched site, which contains links to all the other things I have going on. Think of the website as shelving for the many virtual binders of projects I’ve started, and sometimes even finished. The best part of buying new shelving is that there’s always some space left: a new, empty, shelf to fill with binders for projects you don’t even know exist yet.
That’s what this is. Not a blog, but a new shelf. And I have no obligation to anyone to fill the shelf at any particular rate or with anything in particular. It’s just nice to have some space.
Updating things
Site updates. This is going to be a portal to the three million things I have going on everywhere else. Need to find some time to update it. Meanwhile, if you need me, eva [at] easternblot.net does the trick.
