The AAAS journalism awards reception is always a good show. This year’s party was at the Art Institute of Chicago. The highlight was a temporary exhibition on Edvard Munch. You know him – he did the Scream. He was Norwegian, and generally remembered as nutso. He did have problems with anxiety and misery and whatnot, but the exhibit argues that he was a lot more complicated and interesting than the caricature of the suffering artist. They put Munch’s art in the context of contemporaries, from Norway and beyond.
Friend and fellow science writer Erik asked, astutely, if we’d be looking at Munch’s art if it weren’t for the Scream being so famous. I think a curator at a major art museum probably wouldn’t have been allowed to mount a big Munch exhibit if it weren’t for the Scream. Without the Scream, he might not have been famous enough to get tagged with a stereotype. But I still think he was pretty great and worth devoting an exhibit to.
I think the later work won Erik over, too – the first few rooms were less Munch-y, as he messed around with Impressionism and other stuff that didn’t really suit him. It reminded me of something I read recently about genius being the ability to be most like yourself. I really like Munch after he settled down and started making Munch-like art. His earlier stuff – eh.
Check out the Art Institute’s website for the exhibit. These are some of my favorites. Makes me want to go back to Oslo and see the Munch Museum again!
Someone said hi! She used my name! I had no idea who she was! Fortunately, I saw her again later before she saw me, read her nametag, and realized I’d just met her last night. So, it was a recent memory. It just hadn’t gotten encoded yet. Or something. I’m so bad at this people thing. Wear your nametags, everybody.
Friday was a good news day at the AAAS conference, with the fisheries scientists putting on a happy face. Today was bad news day for climate change. Chris Field, a very smart guy who I worked for briefly in 2002, announced that carbon dioxide emissions have increased way faster than they figured at the time of the last big climate assessment. “We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we considered in climate models,” he said at a press conference this morning.
Here’s a Washington Post article about it. (Kari Lydersen was at the same press conference and got a different version of that quote. Hm. She’s probably right, but I’m sticking with the version in my notebook. Maybe he said it differently in his science talk.)
Then this afternoon I went to a session called “The Disappearing Arctic Sea Ice,” so I knew I was in for a good time. Jean-Claude Gascard summarized all the data. Guess what: There’s less ice. He had graph after graph showing that there’s less ice every year, and it’s thinner than it used to be, too. He’s from the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. His very nice French accent didn’t make the news sound any better.
The talk after his, by Paul Wassman of the University of Tromsø (yay Norway), was even more depressing. He was talking about how the Arctic may have reached a point of no return with warming. Someone asked if that’s it, if people have lost the battle. “Yes, it looks not good,” he said.
Maybe next year the climate people will follow the example of the fisheries people and start telling us good news about carbon.
The big featured speaker this year at AAAS was Al Gore. He spoke Friday night. Don’t tell my mom – ok, she reads this blog – but I didn’t make it to his talk. I didn’t even try. I was at another event until a little after six - his talk started at 6:30 – and people who rushed straight over from my event to the talk barely made it into the overflow room. I said I’d make up for it by finally getting around to netflixing An Inconvenient Truth, but then someone pointed out that it’s totally out of date now. Oops. (Sorry, mom.)
The thing I was at before Gore’s talk was my orientation to be a mentor to a student who wants to go into science writing. It didn’t occur to me that I’m experienced enough to be a mentor, but they asked me to do it, so here I am: mentoring. I guess I have been doing this for almost seven years now. Yikes.
Hey, lookit, I blogged. I mean, somewhere other than here. It’s over at ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of Science magazine. The topic: fisheries. Not *all* of the world’s fish are completely doomed. Fisheries scientists have decided that if everyone in the world thinks that all the fish news is totally bad, nobody is ever going to want to do anything about it. (Hey, they’re doomed – let’s just kill ‘em all and have the world’s biggest fish fry.) So they’re embarking on a campaign to tell the good news stories.
You could tell this was kind of a struggle sometimes. I went to part of the scientific session (the blog post was written after the press conference) and Greenpeace guy John Hocevar said, “I’ve been trying to stick to good news but I can’t quite do it.” He hung in there for a while, but then he got to tuna: “Truthfully, the tuna news is mostly bad.” Oh well. He still wrung some good news out of it. And there really are fish success stories.
I mean, really. This is how I’m supposed to be navigating this hotel:
…What? So there are apparently four levels. I think they’re all subterranean (it’s a little unclear how the topography works here). I am almost certain they are stacked on top of each other. So, *I* would think a clever naming scheme might be to assign them numbers. Perhaps in order. I’d take either order – top to bottom or bottom to top. ‘Cause, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t learn any sequences that went “blue, green, gold, purple.”
Waaaait a second. I swear I’ve gone to sessions on a bronze level somewhere, too. But that’s not on the sign! What is with this hotel?
So, I’m at AAAS. It’s the big science writer party of the year. Uh, I mean, it’s the big general science conference of the year, and many science writers go to the conference so they can write up news, find story ideas, and…go to big parties with open bars. I’m particularly looking forward to this evening’s Marine Mixer, which generally features brilliant marine scientists and excellent wines.
Here’s a thought of the day about conferences: Wear your nametags, people. Wear them high. Wear them with pride. Wear them turned the right direction. A nametag is not only the ticket that gets you into sessions. It is also an aid to the poor sad memory-impaired people who totally know you but just can’t place you right now and are enthusiastically greeting you without the slightest clue of who you might be. Uh, not that I know anyone like that.
(Me. It was me.)
I’m writing a series of quizzes for Discovery’s Science Channel. Here’s the latest batch. They’re about the elements – earth, fire, all that stuff – but also test your knowledge on important topics like madrigal composers of the English Renaissance.
While putting together the materials for this website, I’ve been googling myself a lot. Searching for my name and a keyword turns out to be the easiest way to find stuff I’ve written. It also finds lots of other things, like the Facebook page of a Helen Field in Australia. The best thing I’ve turned up today? This book review from the Times of London, which leads with the fact that someone once proposed the “Helen” as a standard unit for beauty. Sounds good to me! (I was kind of hoping he’d go on about how awesome I am, but the rest of the piece is about pain.)
