Welcome to the Blog

I get really excited about the nerdiest things.  Most of my friends just roll their eyes, and accept it as one of my quirks.  For example, a while back when I had a canker sore, I was looking up treatments for them.  One of the treatments I found was the use of dental lasers.  I spent the next hour looking for more information on the lasers than "the painless laser energy penetrates the lesion in order to heal the canker sore." I wanted to know about the laser.  What wavelength (color) was it?  How powerful was it?  How is the laser healing the canker sore?  I think I ended that particular search by reading through the user manual for one.  Anyone who has spent any amount of time with a toddler has likely experienced a seemingly never ending stream of questions as they explore the world around them.  People like me never lose that trait, and some of them go on to be scientists.

One reason I love science is because it can provide a lot of the answers to questions that start with "how?" Once you know just a few of the basics of science, you can start to apply them to things around you, and get a better idea of what's going on. The more you know, the more it starts the creep into your thinking, and color the way you see the world.

Most of the people I know outside of my colleagues are not scientists. Most of them roll their eyes at me anytime I get upset about the too liberal (or maybe it's not liberal enough) use of the word "organic."  But I also get to be the person people ask questions to when they want to know how something works, which is both satisfying and nerve wracking.  I take the responsibility to help people understand science seriously, because I don't want to be the cause of them believing Lies (I capitalized it on purpose, because there are Lies, which are completely untrue, and lies, which we tell novices to help them build a foundation in a topic).

The idea for this blog came from that sense of responsibility to help my friends understand science. I remember a conversation I had with an adviser when I was an undergraduate.  There was a professor at the school who was extremely intelligent, but was not very effective at explaining concepts.  My adviser commented that they should have a class where the professor taught concepts, then my adviser translated them so that everyone in the class could understand.  This idea stuck with me.

 I want take awesome things about science that are hard to understand, and write them up in a way that all my friends can read it and get excited.  I'm still solidifying my plan for the blog.  I think I'll write some posts that talk about what I do in my science career (the things I'm excited about at the time).  I think I'll end up writing some posts that read like Science 090 lessons, posts dedicated to a core concept that I can then use in a later post. If I come across an article that makes some outrageous claim based on a "scientific paper," I'll find the paper, read it, and translate it into normal language.  I also think it would be cool to learn about how things work (like phones, or microwave ovens, or airplane wings) and write them up in a way that makes sense. We'll see how that goes though.  There are already quite a few resources out there for that.  But if you have an idea for me, feel free to leave a comment, or contact me and let me know what your thought is.  While this is something fun for me to do, and a chance to learn myself, the reason I'm making this blog is for you.