It’s been AGES, yes, ages with all capitals, I haven’t come here. And I don’t have a good reason.

I’ve been to the science bloggers conference, and it was great, and I met lots of interesting people, and I was all excited about posting more, and I told everybody I was definitely going to blog more half baked ideas so I wouldn’t have an excuse not to write.

And I didn’t!

And now I decided to post a video because I thought it was funny and that’s all for today. It may mean I’m back. Or not. But I want you NN people to know I like you.

The video is called An Engineer’s Guide to Cats and it is a bit slow in the beginning, but it get better towards the end.

It’s a weird experience to get into a room with many people I know, but whose faces I’ve never seen! After the initial moments in which I had no idea who I should talk to, it was great. Good dinner, and now off to bed because today things starts early.

I found out that I can twitter the conference using my cellphone tomorrow (all those crappy SMS changes didn’t affect this function. In fact, it’s the only function still working). But I won’t be able to receive any post on the phone so I’ll have to wait until I came back to do a search and see what people was talking about the place I was. That’s an anti climax, but anyway, I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

Yes, it’s been an awfully long time since I disappeared from here. I don’t have a good reason for that, it just happened. I promise I won’t promise to be regular from now on. But I promise I’ll try.

Some time ago I posted about science videos, how they could be used, who would like to watch them, and so on. Very good comments were posted and the discussion that followed was very useful (thank you guys).

Since then I’ve been trying to learn how to use the camera and the editing softwares, and now I’d like to post a video I produced a couple of weeks ago, about an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. As it is still going on, I think that could be interesting.

Opinions and ideas of how to improve my videomaking or science-telling (does this expression exist?) skills are more than welcome!

London Skeletons – Youtube video

Yesterday, I was in front of the TV while my husband was watching a war film. He slept, I didn’t, and I found myself watching a documentary about a school for teenage mums. Barely teenage, I should say, because the girls were 13 (meaning that some of them were not even in their teens when became pregnant)

Well, nothing new. But I felt that the documentary corroborates something that I have always said – that these girls don’t get pregnant by accident or lack of information. They simply do it because they have no reason not to.

Their mothers got pregnant in the teens too. Their friends have kids already. It’s a whole ecosystem that leads them to that direction.

It is hard wired in a lot of girls’ brains to want to have kids. Blame hormones, instincts, whatever, but when I was 18 I badly wanted to have a baby.

BUT I had good reasons not to: I wanted to finish university, I wanted to find a guy who could raise my kid with me, I wanted to work, to travel. And I didn’t want that kind of responsibility at that time.

So I postponed the plan of becoming a mother.

But IF I had no plans of going to college, no role models of people in long relationships raising kids together, if my friends had already had babies, and if I was working in a McJob knowing that McJobs would be my life, WHY the hell would I postpone this urge to be a mother? I wouldn’t.

And does it all have to do with science? It has a lot to do with education.

How can someone convince these girls to wait a bit more and study? Is it possible to have an influence that is stronger than the environment they live in?

Shouldn’t policy makers offer them something in exchange for the motherhood experience? What could that be?

If people offer other possibilities, a professional career, a more comfortable life and such, couldn’t it be understood as a negative judgement of their mothers, extended family and friends?

Does it all make any sense for you? In the end, this blog post ended up being more of a rambling. But I wanted to know how people feel about that, and if maybe my ideas are just nonsense.

How can internet videos be used in science communication and science journalism?

I come from a time when the only way to have a video presented to the public was to convince a TV executive to broadcast your project (and pray not to be given the 4am time slot) or to invite friends to your house and play whatever you’ve produced on the VCR.

Being from that time, I worked on TV for a few years and then decided to be a print journalist, a term that doesn’t make a lot of sense today as most of my stories are published in websites and never printed.

But being a “words journalist” today makes no sense any more. If I’m writing a story for a website, what prevents me from using pictures, audio or video, when it is for the benefit of the story?

(In fact, nothing prevents me, that’s why I’m planning to change that)

And what is people doing in that direction? I’ve looked at New Scientist, BBC and Reuters websites. Apart from these, who else is using videos on science journalism? Or science communication?

What do you think about these initiatives? Do you click on the videos, or you think it’s just hype and focus on the text and pictures?

First of all, thanks for the great comments about twitter. Very clarifying.

Now, the updates:

1 – I’m starting to think that the most important use for twitter is not news, networking, or annoying followers with useless messages. I suspect it was created with one goal in mind: report earthquakes.

2 – Remember when I said that my generation is getting old earlier than we should? Ditto. Yesterday I went to the doctor with a serious pain in my foot, and he suspects it might be gout.

Gout! I’m a woman, 29 years old, I don’t eat processed foods and don’t drink too much. We still have to wait for the result of the blood test, but this is a strong possibility.

I feel old and unhealthy now.

PS: My MSc graduation is today, so if you see someone limping on the stage of the Albert Hall today, yes, that’s me. And my very old sick foot.

This will be a quick post. Everybody is talking about twitter so much that I wanted to ask if any one around here twits, and if you people think it can be useful for science, science news, strengthening the science community or anything like that.

There is an article today in the Guardian about that – useful for those who have no clue what it is all about. (and for those who use it, there are lots of nice apps in the end of the story).

I have been twittering for some months now (twitter.com/baxt) – not about science but about the life, the universe and everything.

It can be useful for news, as long as you follow the right people (not as easy as you might think). But it allowed me, for example, to know about an earthquake in Sao Paulo, Brazil, even before it was on the news.

There is no question that our parents and grandparents (depending on your age) are living longer and longer. But I have serious doubts about all that talk that the world will be populated by old people in, say, 50 years.

Sometimes I feel my generation will not live as long as the previous ones (for you to understand what generations I’m talking about, I’m 29 years old).

My parents, who are around 53 today, were lean, active and healthy until their mid forties. Far leaner and more active than I am now.

My friends started getting fat and bald, with high blood pressure and dangerous cholesterol levels by the end of their twenties. My parents in law, on the other hand, are close to 70 now, and they started putting on weight much later than us.

My mother had three kids and continued to be thin and strong for years after that. I have to pay attention to what I eat and to my back aches today – and I haven’t had a single kid yet!

In other words, my generation looks (and feels) today the same way our parents look and feel – today!

We are precociously old even before getting old. I don’t even want to think of what will happen when we get really old (I mean, if we do).

This is Baby Thelma , a circus fat lady famous on the fiftes (or forties, I’m not sure). Only 60 years ago people would go to a show and pay the ticket to see her. Today we see people like her on the street all the time.

After a long winter (shorter than a real winter), I’m back here. I must admit I have been having some issues with the concept of “science” and specially “science communication,” and sometimes if put me off writing. This is not new, but I’ll try to explain it this time.

I once read a best seller book called Freakonomics , which most of you may have already heard of. It uses the economic mindset and economic theories to study and understand non-economic topics, like the trends in naming children, frauds in sumo championships and the behaviour of real state agents.

It was written by an economist and a journalist, who I suppose was the responsible for making the text really fluid and easy to understand. It’s not a life-changing book, but I found it interesting.

Well, that’s how I feel about science. We should approach things scientifically – anything. Instead of just focusing on Physics, Biology, Mathematics and so on.

For example: just the other day I had a huge discussion with a friend about families, and how much should family interfere in people’s lives. I believe that the extreme of too much interference is preferable to the other extreme – no interference at all, you die alone and you will be found when the body begins to smell and the neighbours notice.

She was adamant that there is no reason to think in extremes, although her family history is on the non-interference extreme. My experience, in the contrary, is of being raised by a stereotypical Jewish mother (although we are not Jewish, as long as I know), and I don’t think it’s that bad.

Interestingly, I’ve never met any other son/daughter of similar mothers saying that this is terrible. But those who have distant mothers usually say that having an overprotective mother is the worst, most damaging thing in the world.

And no, I don’t believe in balance. I think all societies tend to exaggerate in a way: too much interference or no interference.

Well, the thing is that I got so mad with all that friend said that I decided to try and analyse the situation scientifically, instead of just focusing on how I feel about that.

I don’t know very well how to do it,but I would really appreciate comments on that. Does anyone share my feelings? Any idea on how to approach the topic scientifically?

PS: Here’s a Slate magazine slideshow about Jewish Mothers.

I think you will be reading a few posters here about TED for the next weeks, at least until I get tired of that (and then take a rest and start watching thousands of talks again, getting tired again, and… well, you got the picture).

This talk by Dave Eggers is amazing. It is not about science, but education. More specifically, English education and writing, but the general idea fits any other subject.

[“science is a method, not a subject.” (Cath wrote that as a comment to a post sowhere, and I couldn’t agree more.)I will repeat that as a mantra, from now on. But I digress.]

It all started when a group of writers and people working with the English language in general decided to dedicate a bit of their time to help schoolchildren with their homework, clarify doubts about English and so on.

And they rented a small building for that. But it was a commercial building, so according to the law they had to sell something in there, the landlord told.

That’s where the story goes from “good” to “genius.”

(hm, forget I said that. I don’t want to influence your judgement.)

They decided to open a shop with pirate supplies. “For the working buccaneer”. Parrots food, glass eyeballs, wooden legs and so on. In the back of the shop, computers, desks, books and the usual stuff you would expect (826 Valencia is the name of the place)

The store eventually started doing so well that it now makes money enough to cover the rent and some other expenses. Similar initiatives appeared in the US. A store with articles for superheroes (Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.). A seven-eleven for time travellers (didn’t find the site, but the products are here ) . All with homework going on in the back, together with partnerships with local schools and involvement with the teachers.

And that’s it. I really hope someone opens something like that here in London. Help kids write and build their confidence, learn with them, try new flying capes, buy secret identity kits, fill my cupboard with Barbarian repellent? I would love that.

This is the website of the initiative . It explains the other things going on besides the useless ephemera, like the books the children write,events and so on.