Investing Your Humanity

"There's something about investing your humanity, your eccentricity, your exuberance in the things you do. Why do people watch tightrope walkers? Not to see them get to the other side. Its because they might fall. Not everything you do is going to be successful, but that's part of the allure. It's also what makes the work valuable: that you're really present and invested in what you're doing."- Louis Rossetto, Wired Editor and cofounder.

Last month, Wired Magazine celebrated its first twenty years with a special edition of the magazine. Rossetto closed the article with the above quote and it really struck a chord with me, not because I want to start a magazine but because I understand his passion. Originally I started this blog as a part of a fellowship requirement. But since completing that project, this has taken on a life of its own. I never knew that a somewhat mature ecosystem of different chemistry blogs existed, not just as a part of the major publishers but coming from research groups, PhD students and interested hobbyists alike.
I got onto Twitter for the same reason. and in addition to using it to keep up with the latest literature, @CrimsonAlkemist has become a vehicle to interact with other professionals on a social level- presenting cool quirky things and sometimes lamenting about #phdlife. The cool thing about all this is that in addition to creating a non-traditional networking system, I have been able to create something on my own to be proud of. Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter said once in an interview,

"By simply announcing himself as a genius on his business card, Wile E. Coyote epitomized the spirit of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. When you're starting a company, you sometimes have nothing more than an idea. You have to begin somewhere so you declare yourself an entrepreneur just like Wile E. declared himself a genius. then you make a business card and give yourself the title 'Founder and CEO'."
Biz went on to create Genius Labs (which was later acquired by Google), and then Twitter.

I find that science isn't so different. We, as inquisitive minds, invest a little part of ourselves in each question we ask and are fulfilled by each question we answer. Experiments and observations, hypotheses and data. Even the failure of a reaction is an act of creation- albeit a minor one. To continue asking different questions until you find the right one is no short act of will. It's valuable. To me, that's what makes my work in the lab and on this blog alluring.

So to my readers I ask, how did you find your passion? How did you come to blogging about chemistry, about science? What about Twitter's ecosystem keeps you hunting down little tidbits of information to share with people you may or may not have met (yet)?

+Joseph Meany

Science and open policy

People complain about how science needs to be more open. I just realized I'm thankful for how open science is today, especially compared with the days of early science and alchemy where findings were encoded in such a form that only those specifically trained were able to unravel their meaning. Since science has progressed to a more standardized form, however, this leaves researchers of historical texts with a large job of decoding the past. With so much information available online, it is important that we are able to communicate thoroughly and openly- but most importantly- truthfully.


"This has always been a problem, however, because the texts that [the alchemists] have left us are very secretive. They're often very metaphorical they're often in a kind of code; and they're filled with all sorts of extravagant imagery- often very beautiful wood cuts but forbidding in the sense of...what does it all mean?"

This comes from Professor Larry Principe of Johns Hopkins University. He works as a science historian trying to decode many of the historical alchemy texts and the American Chemical Society recently put out a video overviewing some of his work. He explains that his main hurdles are decoding these metaphors and symbols, to repeat reactions done by "the ancients" using their methods and glassware to see what it is they actually made.

J.R. Partington, in his book, "A Short History of Chemisty" outlines that many texts from ~1200-1500 are "largely unintelligible" alluding to the secretive nature of this pseudoscience during the time, a contrasting discussion to his earlier elaboration on the treatises written by the Ancient Greeks, Arabs, and Egyptians. Shamefully, as well, "the later history of alchemy is often that of fraud."


While peer review is not perfect in its mission to vet what is "good science" and "bad science," I firmly support the system in place today opposing the search for the philosopher's stone of yesteryear. In the discussion of how to improve science communication we need to not forget- some control is better than none.

http://gizmodo.com/meet-the-man-who-decodes-the-ancient-secrets-of-alchemy-633187520

 http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2013/111/7/c/alchemy_woodcut_duos_caputis_melior_quam_unus_est_by_dashinvaine-d62i1y6.jpg