Blue Collar Scientist

In a few days, I’ll be at the Campbell Creek Science Center to talk about exoplanets - planets orbiting stars other than our sun. The talk is at 7:00 PM on March 13.

I’ll be covering several topics:

• how they are detectable - this will involve my semi-famous “swinging of the ball” demonstration, which has inspired awe (and fear) in audiences all over the country
• why we’ve found a lot of big, short-period planets, and not as many smaller or long period ones
• how we find them - what kind of telescopes and instruments are used
• who is finding them - including some amateur astronomers who have made these discoveries
• how they form - complete with really cool movies of computer simulations
• why there is almost certainly life somewhere other than Earth

There will also be some discussion of an upcoming meeting of science geeks, skeptics, Pharyngula fans, and high-profile Alaska science bloggers. You can pick up an invitation at the event. So come on out and join us!

The BCS will be interviewed for a television news-magazine show on Monday, or possibly Tuesday. The topic will be evolution, which is outside my field of expertise¹, but that never stopped me from shooting off my mouth before. Fortunately I’m at least quite well-read on the topic and am known in the market it will be airing as a science educator/popularizer type person.

Since I know a little about what is coming down the pike, I’m preparing for it. I’ve worked up some talking points, because I know TV is brutal about keeping the word count down and the clarity as high as possible. I’ve been practicing in front of a camera to work on looking at least vaguely competent and likable. I’ll have some time to do a couple of mock interviews with others posing as hostile interviewers². I lack any media training, but that doesn’t mean I have to go in without any clue.

If any readers happen to have any advice to offer, please shoot me an e-mail or comment here. Hopefully I can get a copy of the interview and post it after it is all over, and we can all do a post-mortem.

1. I’ve noticed there is very little demand on television for experts on the application of simplified heuristics approximating Hamiltonian paths as applied to astronomical search order algorithms that are optimized to instrument-imposed overhead limitations. But I can’t imagine why. [↩]
2. Or at least “hard hitting” ones, although if this journalist actually takes a swing at me I’d be quite surprised. [↩]

In a few minutes, I’m leaving for TAM 5.5. I’ll hop a flight from Jacksonville, Florida (where I’m currently visiting) to Ft. Lauderdale and return to Jax on Monday. If everything goes well - meaning if the hotel internet is working right - I should be able to post an update each day from the conference. If not - see you Monday!

The CCSO talk seemed to be a success. I’m never quite sure how a brand-new, never-before-delivered presentation will go. I’ve had a few stinkers, but hopefully as I’ve done more and more I’ve adopted a set of practices that tend to mitigate that. Whatever the case - the talk seemed to go well. There were a lot of people in attendance, and a bunch of people came up to talk to me afterwards, and nobody seemed to fall asleep.

The strategy that I’ve been adopting for the last year and a half, of spending less time explaining what we know and a lot of time explaining how we know it, seems to be paying off. People are responding to that change in my presentations and are very positive about it. A lot of Thursday night’s talk had to do with the cosmic distance scale and how it expanded as the size of the solar system was determined, and then stellar parallax was first measured, and then as the Cepheid period-luminosity relationship was discovered, and then as the redshift-distance relationship was discovered.  Knowing how all this knowledge was developed seems to have been a lot more meaningful to the audience than learning that the distances are really really huge.

Approaching the subject this way also allowed me to put a human face on things, and talk a bit about the people who made or advanced these discoveries. And slipping Henrietta Swan Leavitt into a presentation is always worth doing - people really respond when they find out a woman in a skilled but marginal university job made one of the most significant scientific discoveries ever.

My first public appearance of 2008 will be at the Campbell Creek Science Center tonight (Thursday, January 10) at 7:00 PM.

I’ll be giving a talk on the history of how we discovered the universe. This one is going to be a pretty top-down lecture, not my favorite kind, but the material is interesting (to me and my modest group of fans, at least), and I promise you will learn how we learned the things we know about the universe. I won’t be blowing things up and there will be very little audience participation. :-( Subtitled “we are not special, but we are pretty cool,” it will be a survey of the most significant discoveries and models of the universe through western history, and how they were made.

I really love the venue at Campbell Creek. They have a great room with good acoustics, they treat me way better than most of the other venues I work, and each time I go I get a blue coffee mug. I’m looking forward to collecting my seventh tonight - hope they’re still giving them out!