Pamela and Nate Lanxon of CNET

Earlier this week I had the amazing chance to spend some time over at CNET’s UK facilities in London. Nate Lanxon, one of their writers a co-host of the Crave Podcast, had previously written a really good review that mentioned Astronomy Cast, and as a result he and I got to emailing, and he even invited me to be in this week’s podcast (squee!)

So, just for some context, I don’t buy electronics without consulting CNET. I have randomly listened to their podcasts and watched their videos. I am all around in awe that they have grown to be one of the internet success stories.

Visiting their facilities was amazing. They are just what you might imagine an creative young internet country should look like. Everything was completely open with people working on rows of cluttered tabled that had toys, papers, and technology scattered everywhere. It was decorated in some crazy combination of Toy Store and ultra-modern. Underneath a metal and glass stair well was a bin a brightly colored plastic balls deep enough to drown in. The exposed metal beams were stenciled in division names and the walls were decorated with brightly colored light boxes. Their studios were nicely set up and completely friendly. Not as posh as the WBUR stations in Boston, but they were comfy and everything worked in a hype and friendly “This Is New Media” kind of way.

Anyway, it was wonderful Check it out here.

British Museam Great Court

So, I have to admit to being a bad person today. I snuck away from working for several hours to explore the British Museum. It was an amazing sun filled day and light streamed in from the sky lights, bringing the outside in to illuminate 1000s of artifacts gathered from around the globe.

One of my favorite pieces of sculpture is at the British Museum, and after getting lost among roomfuls of historic coins, I got to take in what is advertised as the Horse of Selene. I used to have a magnificent horse named Quantum Leap. He died a number of years ago, and there is something in this statue that reminds me of his fight. It is perhaps a foolish thing to compare my own old warm blood to a steed of the Gods, but if Zeus or Apollo are offended, they are welcome to strike me down.

After drinking my fill of the horse of Selene, I took a few, um, hours to wander the world, exploring the artifacts of Africa, Asia, and all the ancient Mediterranean. As I walked from one dead society’s relics to another’s I couldn’t help but think how sad it would now be to visit the sites where these statues once stood.

I love history. I’m not an expert at any of it, and I tend to be poor at remembering details of dates and battles. That said, I love reading about culture, philosophies, and the significance of architecture (and I admit to periodically binge reading archeoastronomy texts). I’ve always dreamed of taking either a biking tour or equestrian tour through the various ruins of Greece, Italy, and/or Turkey.

As I walked among the collections of ancient art and religion I couldn’t help but think about these dreams and think how frustrating it would be to be in Greece (or Italy, or Turkey) staring up at a marble facade that some European antiquarian had carefully stripped of all the interesting bits to put them on display in London. How sad to be there, in that moment, thinking “Well at least I saw the rest last time I was in the UK.”

The thing is, I will, in this fantasy future, be able to say, “Well, I saw them.” There are generations of children growing up in the land of origins for these pieces of art who will never get to experience the full beauty and detail of their heritage.

I know the return of looted, purchased, and otherwise purloined goods is something many governments take very seriously. But you can’t really make a foreign museum return something. Especially when returning these works to their points of origin would subject them to pollution and potential human destruction (war, graffiti, harm from road vibrations, etc)

As I walked, I grew more and more disturbed by this stolen culture. But then something caught my eye. One of the removed roman pillars had a picture beside it explaining that all the original pillars, all shaped like beautiful women, had been removed from the original temple, but in their place now stood a series of replicas. These replacement pillars could happily stand up against pollution and other forms of decay as the sacrifical lambs of the archeological world.

On the flip side, in the Japanese collection were a series of replicas of historic pieces that aren’t allowed out of Japan. These carefully constructed reproductions allow me to taste the art Of Japan from the heart of London, giving me a reason to someday hopefully see some of the original pieces in person.

Admittedly, there are those who would say another word for replica is forgery. But, if we are finding ways to perserve originals and guaruntee access to as large a population as possible, isn’t this a good thing?

I came away from the Museam a fan of replication. I think I’d someday be satisfied to sit on a hillside in Greece (or Italy, or Turkey) and stare on a modem marble replica of a temple of Athena knowing the original was safe inside some museum somewhere.

My life, put simply, is lived as much through digital communications as it is through face to face interactions. Some days the virtual interactions are even the more important ones.

This simple truth is something that one of last night’s speakers made me think very hard about.

Thanks to a few emails from Chris, I was able to attend the Monday evening keynote for the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford conference. This session included talks by Philip Rosedale (Linden Labs), Baroness Susan Greenfield (Neuroscientist and Fullerian Professor of Physiology), and Elon Musk (Space X). All three addresses were wonderful, hitting different emotional cords as they plucked at the strings of potential virtual futures; of walking on Mars, and of how we think and how we learn. I have to admit (although you likely already know this), I have already drank the kool-aide of Second Life and I am strongly in favor of commercial manned space flight. The talk that offered me the most new content and new ideas was Baroness Greenfield’s talk on neuroscience.

She started by asking the question: What is it that makes human consciousness separate from machine thought, and she postulated that as we evolve into the future, man and machine may merge. She asked, “But what would we do with super human vision and enhanced strength?” Taking on aspects other then our own may not be good. That, however, is a question we don’t need to answer today. What is more presently relevant is the question of what is human interaction via the web – an enhancement we experience through new media – doing to the human mind and how we build relationships.

Consider Facebook. At the time of this writing I have 680 friends. The vast majority are other astronomers and astronomy enthusiasts who I’ve met professionally and through Astronomy Cast. There is also a largish chunk of people who I knew in high school or who I was friends with in college. Mixed in are a small handful of people who I am close friends with in “real life” (this group includes a few folks I see maybe once a year. All these people, within the construct of Facebook, are my friends. All of them can socially share ideas, invitations, photos, and comments back and forth. All these people have the potential to touch my life daily in the way an acquaintance I run into in line at the coffee shop can touch my life, but this isn’t to say they are all my dear friends.

And, due to the ease with which social networks grow, one has to wonder if our social network interactions are changing the nature of our more traditional interactions.

Looking at my own laptop, I know that my inboxes of emails from my work, blog, and Facebook accounts all have the ability to take over every waking moment of my life. I honestly am interested in knowing what happened to some of my old friends refound through Facebook. I honestly want to help the amateurs who contact me find new ways to get involved in astronomy. All these interactions with all these acquaintances, all of which are facilitated by the internet, are changing how I interact. Sometimes a letter gets replaced with links and “Let me know if these help you?” rather then my own thoughtful reactions. I find myself more willing to flash off small thoughts, random “Let me share” sound bites of my life to friends rather then to sit and have rich written correspondence like I used to have a few years ago with distant friends. Somehow I’ve learned to comfortably fit my life into 140 characters or less.

The human mind is a plastic thing, flexible, trainable, malleable. We each adapt in different ways to outside stimuli and the communications styles we use (as input and output) the most often.

For me, I like to hope that should I find someone interested in taking up long distance letter writing in this world of SMS and Skype, I will still have the skills needed to converse in that fondly remembered form of communications. In someways, I guess, the community dialogue of blogging has for me filled that communications niche.  We each can react and interact in long drawn out dialogues of interconnecting links. It is an open letter we write when we blog.

But perhaps through our openness we are also isolating ourselves. There are things I would once have shared in letters to friends that I would never dare blog. Look at Phil and the pseudonyms he uses for even his dog.

Beyond just letter writing, though, how are we being changed?

Baroness Greensfield, in her talk, asked us to consider the rapid fire world of today’s youth and the way in which human interactions are getting distilled in some cases to a punch and a quest after death. Here is where I admit I’m not an online (or even not online) computer gamer. I used to do D&D back in the day, but that was a detailed face to face interactions. Looking at my friends who play World of Warcraft, I see a certain mix of people transforming their spare time into nothing more then a quest for more more more status/gold/weapons/magic. At the same time I also see people who build close relationships with their gaming partners, getting to know them and trust them as work out puzzles, go into battle, and sometimes just stand and share and gossip. I’m not sure how this is different from life and the shallow pursuit of wealth waged side by side with the earnest pursuit of a life well lived.

In presenting a montage of rapid fire clips from online games, Baroness Greenfield asked us to consider what is happening to attention spans. She showed us an increase in the rate at which prescriptions for attention deficit drugs are being given out. She asked us to go with her and draw the conclusion that our rapid fire world of instant communications is leading us to become an attention deficit society hedonistically seeking instant gratification, as we live in the now with over indulgence of food, internet, and other things not safe for this blog. I’m not sure what to believe – I want to see statistics and cause and effect sociology research. Sadly, they only gave her 20 minutes.

She left us with the question, is the internet making us less empathetic as we confine our interactions to what she claims are less rich forms of content input. She argued that in moving away from reading books and to instead becoming a people of the “Screen” (where screen is a computer or television screen) we are losing our empathy and attention span.

I hate to disagree with a Baroness on a subject I can claim no professional training in, but I have to say that I’m going to agree with Linden Lab’s Philip Rosedale: as much as the internet has changed how (and with how many people) I communicate, it has in many cases caused me to lose myself into complicated tasks – designing interfaces, finding things in Second Life, writing blog posts, reading and commenting on (but not often enough) others’ blog posts, tweeting, skyping, and so much more. My attention span sometimes seems longer then the number hours I should be awake, and I find myself often captivated by the new puzzles of new technologies.

And my heart strings – my ability to feel empathy for others – my emotions are triggered through the rich writings that I can find on any of probably a million different places. Baroness Greensfield kept invoking the name of Jane Austin. Sometimes though, isn’t a random person writing on something they are personally passionate about just as powerful in their capacity to evoke emotions as Austin was in her novels?

And sometimes, as we skype across the miles, as my voice is carried from my computer to the computer of any one of several people who are dear to me, aren’t I able to share the emotionally meaningful moments that are necessary to build and maintain real friendships? I can look around the globe and map the people who matter, many of whom I see but rarely, but skype lets our friendships – our emotional connections – stay solid across the miles.

The human mind is a plastic thing. We do need to be careful of how we use the internet to replace our real world interactions. Somethings can’t be replaced – we all need that occasional 4am face-to-face conversation. But… But the internet is allowing us to live richer lives where our ability to find and interact with others is enhanced in ways that (once we learn to deal with the thru put of too many emails) really will be for the best.

That said, I want to end this on a cautionary note. Baroness Greenfield’s concern that we are learning to seek instant gratification I think is a real one. We are becoming too accustomed to instant gratification. Communications is instant. Food is instant. Purchases are overnight delivered, and relationships (according the the “wisdom” of Friends and Sex in the City) are founded on the three date rule. We are rushing through life without ever getting lost on the journey and enjoying the side paths. Sometimes the most interesting parts come during the breaks and intermissions.

In the musical Into the Woods, there is a line we all need to remember (sung by Little Red Riding Hood): “The prettier the flower, the farther from the path…” Sometimes we need to remember the fastest journey isn’t always the best. Sometimes we benefit from deviations down side roads and from getting our feet wet walking through the grass.

Use the internet to enrich, but remember to sometimes take the road less clicked.

Last Thursday I flew from St Louis to London where I spent a couple days recovering from jetlag somewhere that I (almost) speak the language, and then yesterday I flew on to Munich where I am now working with other International Year of Astronomy folks to build the Portal to the Universe.

While getting to London was more of an adventure then intended (my luggage was lost again), the too few hours I got to spend in the UK were wonderful. On Saturday I took a train out to the east side of England (Audley End) to meet some of the wonderful folks behind Galaxy Zoo, including Steven Bamford, whose journal articles on galaxy morphologies and galaxies in cluster environments I’ve been gleaning inspiration from for over a year. Sunday was another day of happy meetings involving trains and train stations. I was able to finally meet Astronomy Blog writer Stuart Lowe for the first time, as well as seeing Chris Lintott. The three of us met at St Pancreas / King’s Cross train station – I love public transit, and luckily so do they. We met, drank coffee, and then found some lunch as we discussed new media, astronomy, and just how different British English and American English really are.

For instance “pants.” After my luggage was lost (yes, again) I was promised by British Airways that I would get all my things, but probably 24 hours after I actually needed them. This led to me shopping. There is an amazingly cheap store called Primark that offered me almost everything I needed. Almost. As this store caters primarily to teenage girls (judging from the swarm of skinny 14 year olds that were flirting with mirrors), I was very lucky to find anything that fit (for better or worse, I am not shaped like a teenager). My luck ran out just shy of finding a pair of what I would call pants and what a Brit would call trousers. This probably wouldn’t have been a problem accept that “pants” in British English means underware, whereas the type of pants I referred to would have made up the publicly viewable lower half of Ms. Clinton’s ubiquitous pants suits. (I really need to find out what Brit’s call pants suits). Thus, my struggle to fund “pants” led folks to believe I was on a quest to find panties. You can see where this might lead…

But I survived and I think I’m going to try and start writing down all the random new words I keep encountering.

But London and the trains and train stations that allowed me to meet cool people are temporarily behind me (although I’ll be back and will meet any of you up for it at Mabel’s Tavern on Sunday November 23 from 2-5pm. With me will be Galaxy Zoo’s Chris Lintott). Instead of confusing British vocab words I’m now dealing with even more confusing German. It has been a good day and my two years of High School German have sufficed to allow me to kinda-sorta interact with shops and restaurants. Everyone at ESO / ESA (they share a building) speaks English at some level, so once I’m to work I’m fine, and I’ve been enjoying the adventure outside of that safe science center. It is good to know that knowledge sometimes sticks (and I actually looked up my old german teacher in Westford and emailed him a note of thanks).

I’ll put up pictures tomorrow (I forgot my camera today).

Working at ESO is fun. Space exploration is in the air and the walls are lined with pictures of space and of the ground-based and space-based instrumentation that allows us to explore the universe’s most distant corners. The group of people working on IYA are under the guidance of Lars Lindberg Christensen and Pedro Russo. Between them and their staff, well – this is where all the IYA magic is happening. I’m not sure how many of the international cornerstones are coming out of the offices here, but I know Mariana Barrosa, Lars Holm Nielsen, and Rachel Shida are all playing roles along with staffs of graphical artists and programmers too numerous to list but all deserving respect for the cool and global projects they are making a reality. Lars Holm Nielsen is one of the main programmers making Portal to the Universe, the IYA international website, and many other websites function, and he’s been patiant with me working on Portal to the Universe as I stumble jetlagged through our python and java code. (Thank God the coffee at ESO/ESA is free!) Hopefully in the next couple weeks we’re going to have something really great to show you.

For now though, I find that I sadly need to get some sleep. And just in case you haven’t heard me say it before, Go Register Your Organization, Your Astronomy Business / Department / Facility, Your Astronomy Blog / Podcast / Vodcast / Image of the Day Feed for Portal to the Universe! Go do it today!

Pictures coming …

And just a reminder – GO REGISTER FOR PORTAL TO THE UNIVERSE pretty pretty please. Please?

I hope I’ll see you in London!