Good Morning Starshine, The Earth Says Hello

Castle In The Sky (1986) Grave of the Fireflies (1988) My Neighbor Totoro (1988) Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) Only Yesterday (1991) Porco Rosso (1992) Pom Poko (1994) Whisper of the Heart (1995) Princess Mononoke (1997) My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) Spirited Away (2001) The Cat Returns (2002) Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) Tales from Earthsea (2006) Ponyo On A Cliff From The Sea (2008) The Secret World of Arrietty/The Borrower Arrietty (2010) From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

If any of the links stop working, please let me know so I can fix it.

It does. It’s important that we change now. We should have done it before. 

And I don’t know what changes need to be made but I do feel like science communications and outreach has a few really glaring problems.

1. We mostly talk to children. That’s fine. They are the future. But they aren’t the now and when we don’t get their parents engaged to, we’re asking them to clean up a mess when they’re old enough. And when I say children, I really mean children. I don’t know the last time I was at an outreach event that focused on high schoolers or was made for a high school audience. 

2. We’re mostly talking to people who will already be fairly well educated. That’s fine to. But we’re missing people who either have little interest in actively investing in education and people who don’t have access to it. We’re mostly getting contact with people who are already in school. 

3. We are talking to people who already agree. We are preaching to the choir. That makes sense – they are who shows up. I don’t know how to talk to people who already think I’m wrong or a waste of tax payer dollars but I would love to find out. Negin Farsad might have some tips, though.

4. We exclude people. We do. We often implicitly exclude religious groups. We often implicitly exclude people who don’t have a higher education. My mother, even, was nervous about having dinner with my undergraduate advisor because, “[she doesn’t] have a doctorate, [she doesn’t] know how to talk to somebody that smart.” I don’t know how to stop that impression but I would love to. 

5. Maybe, too many of us are career scientists. That’s fantastic – we have a job we are passionate about. But…then it is a little easy to write off our excitement. I’m not always that impressed by how cool math is when a mathematician gets excited about it. But if my barista got excited about a proof – wow, that must be a really cool proof, right!?

6. We don’t always have the communication skills. This is obvious because the seminars I go to are not as exciting to me as a TEDTalk, even if the subject matters to me more. We need to hone those skills. For me, I’m hoping to take improv classes. Write more. Try different things. But we need to include professional communicators or theater departments or artists in our efforts.

Heard some important information on Twitter today, and thought I’d post it here for anyone who may not have heard it. This is actually a thing, devised by human rights organisation called Karma Nirvana.

so there was a fucking eruption yall

about 20 minutes ago a huge spout broke out on the road

@ anyone living in leilani estates in pahoa hawaii please be safe and get outta there

edit: there is now an aerial shot and holy shit its way bigger that i thought

PLEASE evacuate if possible.

If you haven’t seen the news articles or channels yet, the Big Island’s volcano Kilauea erupted and is now causing earthquakes and fissures in the southern side of the island.

For more information, google is your friend, but also here is how to donate to the Red Cross and if you live on the other side of the island or in any way get the opportunity in the area to donate to the shelters currently housing the evacuees, they need pillows and towels the most and cannot accept clothing items or non-canned/shelf stable foods.