August 2005 Archives

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Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Science (or, should Rhian write a book?)

I want to write about science. Well, I don’t really, I’m dragging my heavy arms to the keyboard, I have surfed every website I can think of, I have even done the washing up. It’s not that I don’t like science. I find some aspects of it fascinating in small doses. It’s just so big. I don’t know where to begin. Or end.

There is no beginning or end, just a story spiralling ever inwards and outwards, over itself and through the gaps in the middle. People know lots but no-one is ever sure of anything. That’s the whole beautiful premise of science. But equally, in our society, it’s somehow seen as fact, as Truth, as having the Answers. And the answers are held within, they’re out there for the finding.

I visited a primary school a while ago to talk about Antarctica and was introduced as an explorer. It made me smile, but this was the way the teacher had managed to fit me into the national curriculum; explorers were the topic of the week. Initially we decided that I kind of was an explorer, yes, since I was going to Antarctica and that was an exciting place that not many folk went to. But as the classroom chat developed, and the kids asked more questions about my work, we learnt that I truly was an explorer and that one way of being an explorer today was to be a scientist. (I would argue that any academic, or independent thinker is an explorer by the same premise but that discussion wasn’t entirely relevant to the 6 year-olds in front of me.) Anyway, it suddenly made it feel exciting, and relevant. The discovery of things we don’t yet know, the pushing back of knowledge boundaries. Exploring unchartered territory. And then I felt very underqualified and returned to the safer topic of what we did with our poo.

Going to the Antarctic as a scientist was another a very humbling experience. Until then, I had done my thing, taken courses, read books, splashed around in a lab happily confident that nobody really cared about what I was doing and that in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t very important. To me it was life-changing and misery-making, but that’s the nature of a Ph.D. The rest of the world didn’t bother with details, they were content as long as I jumped through and over the various hoops and hurdles necessary to qualify. And then I got this job with BAS.

I’d like to say that the work suddenly became important and relevant because it was important and relevant. Because it was crucial to our understanding of climate change. Because it was cutting edge and would ultimately save the world. These things might well be true and have certainly been argued convincingly (well, maybe not the world-saving bit) which is why we had the funding in the first place. For me, however, the scariest bit was the faith my colleagues on the ice seemed to have in the value of our work. Sometimes it was justifiably skeptical faith (‘bloody beakers’ was not an uncommon phrase to have directed at us) but the entire infrastructure nominally existed to make science programmes possible. On some level, therefore, everyone justified their existence by the science that happened there. And again justifiably, they wanted to know what they were going to all this hard work for. Builders, plumbers, electricians.. everyone but scientists really, would ask me for bite –sized explanations of the point of our lab. And seeing as we’re government-funded, that’s not an unreasonable demand.

So why do I shy away from talking about it? Why didn’t it crop up the whole time on this website while I was down there? Even strangers sent me emails asking for a description of the science I was doing!

Well, firstly, it was my job and it was hard work and often not much fun and at the bottom bottom level of field science that we were working at it seemed to take all my energy just to keep kit running, let alone explain and understand its greater purpose. I knew I had known it once and been convinced then and that was enough. At the time, it was my job to get the numbers and someone else’s to do something with them. I didn’t have the energy or interest to do any more.

Secondly, it’s incredibly daunting to speak authoritatively about anything scientific because I’d probably get it wrong, or not entirely right. I’d far rather rant about something I know nothing about (politics, capitalism, the relative merits of golf) than about something I am meant to have studied in depth but actually have just realized how much there is to know and how little I know. I have known bits at times, generally the night before an exam, but I have a memory like a sieve and get myself in a terrible muddle when trying to piece the jigsaw back together. Plus, people ask questions that I quite simply don’t know the answer to. Is using chip fat a good idea as a new fuel for cars? Is nuclear fuel bad? Are the objectives set in Kyoto achievable? What’s the truth about climate change? Are your results good news or bad?! They’re good questions and I’m getting better at answering them, realizing that educated banter is an acceptable response, but my information source is often exactly the same as that used by the questioner. So often I just wish that one of the wise people I look up to was there to produce the Right Answer. Or at least make us believe there is one.

Anyway, Science at Halley is extremely important. Not only for itself, as itself and for what it sets out to do, but also for the psychological peace of its inhabitants. Most of the guys I wintered with might not agree with me on this but it did on some level keep the base going, keep us going, give us the tiniest hint of a sense of purpose. Without the greater umbrella of our work, I would have struggled hard to justify the imprint we were leaving on the continent. In fact, I did often struggle with our existence there and came up with a variety of bluffs to keep me happy. Sometimes I saw myself as a park warden, other times convinced myself that the science we did had the potential to be really helpful, more often than not, I settled on the thinking that if we weren’t there then someone else might be and they could easily be exploiting the land even more than we were. And anyway, isn’t the whole Antarctic presence thing just political?

Since getting back I have been approached to consider turning my web diaries into a book. Initially I didn’t really see the point. They’re on the web after all and were never meant to be anything other than a way of keeping in touch with my friends and family as well as recording memories for myself. As a collection of stories, they might have been fun to read at the time but I still don’t know exactly what the allure was to people I have never met. Why did you read and why would you read? Or what would you read? As they currently stand, they lack something. They lack a lot and are incredibly lopsided. Most obviously, they don’t tell anyone else’s story and they barely mention the daily work we did.

I can’t change the bias that they are my experience and mine only. And I can’t and won’t tell someone else’s story or pretend that anyone had the same year that I did who was there at the same time. Some people hated it. Some people were not moved either way. For many, I have no idea what they thought. We weren’t on summer camp, we didn’t sit around and discuss out deepest philosophies on a regular basis. We won’t become one strong cohesive group in the future, one for all and all for one. But we had a good year. We had a great year. Or rather, I had a great year. And I’m thankful to every winterer, and summerer, who made it so good.

So I’m a bit stuck. It has been suggested that what I could perhaps add, and which might provide some glue between the diaries, is some background, some science. There are a number of grand arguments for this: maybe I could inspire young people to become scientists or help shake the stereotype of my profession, maybe people reading the entries might inadvertently learn something about climate change and remember to turn a light bulb off, once, after reading that one chapter.. maybe maybe maybe… but I don’t think that’s why you read this far or why you’d buy the book. Or is it? So instead of chasing my tail I’ve decided to come clean and ask you straight, those of you who have read this far, why did you and what else would you like to see added? Or, and be honest now, have they had their time and place and should they be gently left to the multifaceted archive that is the internet.

Posted by Rhian at 20:17 EST | Comments (3)

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

When we become what we formerly scorned

I had this very conversation just yesterday, when my friend Ephrat came over at lunchtime with a tailcoat she'd embroidered for my upcoming wedding. But today Lindsay has nailed it with a bile-filled stream-of-consciousness rant which I sympathise with 100%.

I take some solace in the fact that the vast majority of the things that Lindsay is railing at don't apply to me. But I don't kid myself that she wouldn't include me in that group anyway. Over the past year I've proposed marriage, gone apartment-hunting, and actually bought a new place on Avenue B and 3rd Street. Before long I'll be set up with a master bath and a spare bedroom and a barbecue in the back yard. This Is Not Punk Rock.

When I moved to New York, I had the time of my life. I partied all night, I had platinum-blonde hair, I wore ridiculously outrageous clothes which had made it to Century 21 because no right-minded male would ever buy them. I shared a basement duplex with a transexual party promoter and too many cats, I subsisted mainly on $1.50 slices of pizza, and I spent significant amounts of time comparing prices on Levi's 501s so that I didn't spend an extra $4 unneccessarily.

The company I worked for didn't pay us website people very well, which meant we couldn't afford to go to the coffee shop in the lobby every day. We therefore went out and bought our own coffee machine instead. Which had a habit of overloading the power system and thereby shutting down all the computers in the office whenever we turned it on, which was kinda funny.

Over time, things changed. Even as my disposable income rose, my desire to go out and party all night waned. The process was accelerated when I changed jobs: the new one entailed getting up very early every morning, which meant that come Friday I'd normally be passed out on my bed by 7pm.

You can look at what I was writing in mid-2001 and already it's clear that I've become a privileged yuppie, albeit one who hates himself for being that. Ephrat told me yesterday that a self-aware boring yuppie who knows he's a boring yuppie is better than an oblivious boring yuppie who, in Lindsay's terms, "starts believing a person can be interesting just because they're famous or rich".

Meanwhile, Ephrat herself – a woman who has dedicated her life to making the world a better place, and who values her beliefs much more than any job – even Ephrat is occasionally tormented with worry about her New York City lifestyle and whether it's not a little hypocritical. Which means there's really no hope for me.

But I've been this way for a while, now. My decisions to become a property-owning married man are maybe not as momentous as they seem, insofar as in many ways they only ratified my pre-existing condition. I've been living in this same apartment for well over 7 years now, firstly with a succession of roommates, but then the last one moved out and Michelle moved in. At that point we had an entire two-bedroom apartment to ourselves: we had attained a comfortable dinky lifestyle which, once achieved, is very difficult to give up.

I do envy my younger self, and his ability to have a great time without the need for comfort and luxury. I envy people like Ephrat, or Lindsay, or my sister, who are still in that place today. I feel a bit like David Byrne, who got the question right many years ago:

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-well...how did I get here?
...
And you may tell yourself
My god!...what have I done?

The easy answer, of course, is also the difficult one. It's "well, I've grown up". It's something I never really wanted to do – something, in fact, I promised myself I wouldn't do. I never liked grown-ups, I never liked their smug security and their indulgent attitude towards the likes of me.

And there are some people who are very good at not growing up. Four years ago, one such person gave a rather self-satisfied speech at the rehearsal dinner of a friend of mine who was getting married: "Congratulations," he essentially said, "on growing up even as I never managed to". I jumped to my friend's defense, and gave a speech of my own. No, I said, my friend wasn't a boring grown-up. He might have a posh job and a beautiful wife, but he was still the same guy who only a couple of years previously was living in a St Mark's tenement with the bath in the kitchen and the toilet down the hall.

Well, I was wrong. My friend had become a grown-up, much as I refused to believe it, and now I'm becoming one too. Or rather, I've been one for a while, and now I'm admitting it. "Let's not become what we've always hated just yet," says Lindsay. "Or is it too much to ask - ever?" Maybe, Lindsay, it is too much to ask. I wish you luck in your endeavour, but ultimately it's not a binary thing: we all fall somewhere on the spectrum, and a Manhattan lifestyle in a model-infested building with elevators and security guards and a large-format photograph of a Chinese river in the lobby is not particularly Punk Rock either.

I've long believed that the secret to happiness is not getting what you want, so much as being happy with what you've got. (Don't worry: that's about as Deepak Chopra as I ever get.) That's why I'm not ambitious. Other people can chase their dreams; I'm happy as I am. Or that's the theory, anyway. In practice, if there isn't a disconnect in one direction, there's a disconnect in the other: what if you don't want more, but in fact you want less? What if you have a bizarre love-hate relationship with your disposable income? On the one hand, I love having the freedom to wander down to the local coffee shop for a capuccino and a salami sandwich whenever the fancy takes me. But on the other hand I feel that I don't really deserve or need that freedom, and I'm perfectly capable of looking after myself without it.

I certainly have no interest in returning to my lifestyle of eight years ago: I've discovered the wonders of monogamy, for one thing. And in any case I'm probably getting a bit old for that kind of thing. So maybe I should just be happy that I was happy then and am happy now.

The way I see it, one always cuts off possibilities over time: it's part of what growing older is all about. Youth is about exploring those possibilities, choosing some and spurning others. When we spurn possibilities in our youth, we don't notice it so much, because there are so many left. But eventually you reach a point where you find yourself with that beautiful house and that beautful wife and you ask yourself how you got there. And it was never a considered decision, it was just a concatenation of natural choices. It's like the present debate over intelligent design: just because something looks premeditated, doesn't mean it is. And just because you didn't always want to end up here, doesn't mean that here isn't actually a pretty good place to end up.

Bohemianism, for lack of a better term, is a lifestyle and a dream: it's a way of living, and a desire to keep on living that way forever. Hugh Macleod's cartoon today is one of his classics: one of the ones he explicates on this page. Here's how he describes it:

Spring '98. I was at a bar, it was late, I was kinda tipsy.
Suddenly I realized that my life hadn't changed much in the last decade since leaving college. Work, bars, cartoons, random conversations of a big-city nature, second-hand bookshops and art films, the occasional bout of random or regular sex to tide things over etc etc.
It wasn't as interesting as it used to be. But I hadn't moved on, really. And I had no idea where to go next.
Welcome to New York.

For Hugh, the bohemian dream had faded, but the lifestyle remained. For me, it's the other way around: the dream remains, but the lifestyle is now long in my past. I think I'm better off this way round.

Posted by Felix at 17:36 EST | Comments (10)

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Barney Calame, the toothless ombudsman

The top brass at the New York Times must be ecstatically happy about their new ombudsman. Far from making use of his privileged position to speak truth to power, Byron (Barney) Calame seems to think that his job is to defend New York Times stories to the paper's readers. Insofar as he does anything at all, that is: Calame has published precious little in his first three months on the job.

Last year I noticed that Daniel Okrent, the first public editor, pretty much gave up on his web journal after a while. His replacement, Calame, made his first web journal posting on May 24, and has only put up two substantive entries of his own since then. Both are milquetoast in tone, and the most recent one, on August 5, is atrocious.

Calame here puts his $0.02 into the debate over a controversial "Modern Love" column from mid-July, in which freelance journalist Helaine Olen fires her nanny after reading her blog. The nanny responded, quite convincingly, on that very blog – but Calame refuses to link to that response. Instead, he simply prints an email from Bart Calendar of Brooklyn, and thenceforth essentially addresses his entry to Mr Calendar and people like him, rather than to the really aggrieved party – the nanny/blogger in question.

The first thing worth noting is that Calame's entry fails the first rule of transparency. Calame prints Calendar's email, and the response from Trip Gabriel of the New York Times, but nowhere links to the nanny's own refutation: we get the impression that we're eavesdropping on an internal conversation without really knowing what the substantive allegations are.

Secondly, Calame's considered conclusion, after weighing all the evidence, is that... "first-person columns by outside contributors put a special burden on the editors at The Times". He also adds that "the process followed by the editors demonstrated as much care about fairness, privacy and accuracy as was possible." (My emphasis.)

In other words, Calame completely sidesteps the central question – whether the column was, actually, fair and accurate, and if not, whether the New York Times should have published it. Instead, he reatreats into process, and decides that the unnamed Sunday Styles editor in charge of the piece should not be blamed for any problems with the column.

But what about the author? After all, the New York Times published her. But it seems that since she's a freelancer and not a staffer, Calame is not interested in asking whether she violated any tenets of fairness and accuracy. This is just plain stupid: readers of the New York Times should not be expected to know whether a certain column is penned by a staff member or a freelancer, and the public editor should treat both types of writer equally.

In fact, it's pretty clear that both Olen and her editor screwed up on this piece. There's even a glaring factual error in what is essentially the column's nut graf:

Looking at archived entries one afternoon, I read her reactions to an argument my husband and I had when she was in the house. "I heard a couple fighting within the confines of couples therapy-speak," she wrote. "I wanted to say, smack him, bite her."
It went on like that for three ghastly pages.

Three pages? Wow, that's a really long blog entry attacking her employers. No wonder the nanny was fired, right?

Wrong. In fact, the entry is only 362 words long – compared to the 1,700 words of Olen's column. If the nanny's entry was three pages, then Olen's piece is over 14 "ghastly pages" long.

And what's more, the entry isn't really about Olen at all – it's basically a reworking of themes from Sylvia Plath, presented in a manner reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson or Shelley Jackson. Olen totally distorted the nature of the blog, and her editor, who also read the blog, was complicit in that.

When it comes to journalistic storms in teacups, everybody has a different opinion, and I don't fault Calame for coming down in a different place than I do when it comes to this particular column. I do, however, fault Calame for consistently weaselly behaviour. His failure to address the question of whether Olen's column was fair and accurate is symptomatic: he has not yet criticised the Times in any strong terms.

On June 29, he faulted the newspaper for not fully disclosing its ties to Bruce Ratner, but called it "an unusual lapse," and made sure to point out that "Mr. Ratner's project with The Times was mentioned almost every time he had a substantive role in an article." On May 24, he said that the Times might have reported on the Downing Street Memo earlier than it did, but that ultimately what it did was understandable and was "better than the readers of most other newspapers got".

As for his printed column, which gets many more readers than the web journal, so far he's made it into print four times. In the first he simply introduced himself and blathered on about how he intended to do his job. In the second, he defended a Times article about the CIA. In the third, he devoted an entire column to the extremely recondite question of how to caption photos and illustrations. And in the fourth, he cleared up negative conceptions of the Times which were raised by an earlier correction.

Thus far, then, both online and offline, Calame has had not a single substantive criticism to make about the reporting in the New York Times. I simply can't believe that any reader of the Times – let alone one who's paid to look for errors and mistakes – could possibly be as blasé about the newspaper's weak points as Calame appears to be.

There was no Calame column today: despite the fact that he's meant to appear every other week, we've now gone three weeks without his byline appearing in the paper. But I can tell you what probably would have appeared if there had been a column:

"Some readers have complained about Story X. Here's one such complaint. I put that complaint to the editor in charge of Story X, and she said something which I'm going to quote at length. You see? It's perfectly understandable how Story X made it into the newspaper. So those of you who ascribe nefarious motives to the Times are wrong. Love, Barney."

What a wuss.

Posted by Felix at 15:31 EST | Comments (1)

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