YIR

This is the time of year when people work on reviewing the previous year and thinking ahead to the next. I've been on the road, though, and haven't given it a lot of thought.

I'm happy with the amount of writing I did, both here, in my paper journal, and other outlets, but I'd like to do more and put more polish on the pieces I put out for public consumption.

I'd like to write more music, and especially more music with lyrics.

Towards the end of the year I decided that President Obama failed to live up not only to the pre-election expectations that generated so much buzz, but even failed to accomplish the minimal change of direction I'd believed he was capable of and likely to accomplish.

I didn't work at all this year. I managed to do a picture-a-day project through June but fizzled out for the rest of the year.

I read a great deal, and spent a lot of my reading time updating and expanding my knowledge and awareness of Islam. With the spike in Islamophobia generated by the teabaggers and conservative GOP politics, I felt it my duty as a citizen to be substantively informed. Even moreso, I felt it was an area of my religious autodidactism that needed attention. Not surprisingly, learning about what Muslims believe and practice shed considerable light on other traditions I already knew something about.

Really my primary goal for this coming year is to be 10% less lazy and inert, about my writing, my photography, and my music.

Holiday Drinkin'

Just a quick note here for the recipe for the new traditional holiday party punch, Cunningham's London Fog:

1/2 gallon vanilla ice cream 2 cups bourbon 2 cups cold coffee
Put all ingredients in a punchbowl, mix halfheartedly, and pour.

If you happen to run out before the party ends, in a pinch you can pour the coffee straight from the coffee maker into the ice cream and bourbon. It helps melt faster, too.

Lots more holiday drinking recipes from The Portland Mercury's article The Drunken Host.

Skygazing

Tonight is the peak for the 2010 Geminids meteor shower. If you have clear skies where you are, look towards the northeast any time overnight. The moon will set around midnight, and if you happen to be up before dawn tomorrow, you'll have even better viewing with a darker sky, but you'll want to look more westward.

Intelligent Life On Earth?

On Monday a NASA press release promised a news conference to talk about "an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life". The wording of the release made a lot of news outlets run stories speculating about actually finding life on another planet. Officially, the news was supposed to be embargoed until the 11 a.m. PST Thursday press conference, but The Sun, in the UK, broke the embargo early on Wednesday with a story titled NASA researchers find life in poisonous arsenic lake in USA. This lake is Mono Lake, in California, near Yosemite National Park, and the finding about arsenate-reducing bacteria is what the press conference is supposed to be about.

Hooray for overhyping. NASA used to do really cool stuff that was naturally exciting, even to laypeople. Now they are involved in what the masses thing of as boring. Although very important basic research, the PR folks feel the need to hype it up to get the Idiocracy excited. It helps keep the funding and grants flowing, at least. Even sober and conservative news outlets like The Times of London just want to get to the "good stuff" -- is there life on other planets?

I don't personally think this this kind of work is boring, but public interest in science is falling. I really don't support over-dramatizing things to get interest from the Idiocracy, because such interest has a limited attention span and only reinforces the dysfunctional relationship between the media, the public, and researchers.

If journalists were educated the way ABC News Science Editor Jules Bergman was, we'd have meaningful communications of science concepts to the public, but because the standards are so much lower now, every story has the gee-whiz angle hyped, often with egregious errors in fact. This sort of dynamic does nothing to educate laypeople, and for the NASA PR office to play into it serves to bury stories of real advancements among junk like the whole "missile launch" video business.

The punch line? This isn't even really new stuff. This August 2008 article from Chemistry World titled Arsenic-loving bacteria rewrite photosynthesis rules, says pretty much what the Sun article said, although more technically.  Maybe the findings to be announced have some important but technical detail that the mainstream non-scientific press hasn't picked up on, but NASA's PR machine is still in error for pushing the ET angle so prominently.