Blue Collar Scientist

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. [↩]