Slide: David Ng from Georgia Strait ad (circa 1997). link
Well, this is pretty cool. Thanks to the fine folks at Boing Boing, I’ve got a two week stint here where I get to write and share things that I happen to find interesting. As well, (and this is the important bit), I’m really going to relish the opportunity to interact and learn from the Boing Boing community itself.
Anyway, to put things in context, I’m involved in an education laboratory in Vancouver, where most of my activities are guided by a simple idea – that the “scientific method” is, frankly, awesome.
Seriously, it’s one of those things that tends to not make the headline, because media generally gets caught up in the data (cancer cure found!) However, the method is really quite beautiful and in my opinion needs to be talked about more. After all, it’s a pretty remarkable way of thinking that allows us to make reasonable sense of what we see around us. And as a consequence, it’s played a central role in a wide myriad of things and events that we think of as being impactful, twee, wonderful, and/or frightening.
In fact, it provides an important context to how our society works, and really now, it’s kind of like a culture unto itself – science culture.
However, it’s not always easy to talk about such things. You’re probably not going to see many personal ads like the one above, because, by and large, the general public doesn’t tend to think that way. It doesn’t necessarily see science as culture – it sees it as the phone with the video conferencing, that pill for this occasion, or that conversation you had last night that was incredibly boring. Which is a shame, since there are also many folks out there, including likely a good chunk of you readers, who think that science culture is pretty key these days. There’s certainly a lot of important things going on, where having a good handle of the science (maybe not all the technical bits, but at least the scientific method part) is what one might call being socially responsible.
In this light, I’m also going to use this two week opportunity to talk about biodiversity. This is because I’m currently doing a sabbatical at London’s Natural History Museum, which is as iconic as an institution can get on all things biodiversical (not a real word, but shouldn’t it be?)
Also, 2010 happens to be the UN declared “International Year of Biodiversity,” an honor which is a rather complicated consequence of a bunch of suits meeting way back in 1992 at what is often colloquially called the “Rio Earth Summit.” Unfortunately, “complicated consequences” and “bunch of suits” doesn’t tend to make for easy reading. Which is a shame, because 2010 is a very key year for biodiversity stewardship. You see, in just a few weeks in Nagoya, Japan, there is going to be a similar set of complicated consequences involving similar suit-attired people who will make decisions on how the geopolitical world will view biodiversity for the next couple decades.
All to say that: (1) there was a reasonable chance that you weren’t aware of any of this Nagoya stuff; and/or (2) you’re bored already.
And with that, let me just state that these challenging topics are the ones I want to focus on. Hope you see some merit in them. Maybe even lend a hand?