I'm always remembering you at civil twilight

I survived El Paso. The meeting was very interesting, and I certainly learned a lot. I think I might feel even more useless in the project now, though. Understanding glacial erosion just seems so incredibly daunting, and I'm not even sure where to begin to classify things. SE/SCentral Alaska is such a complicated region, and everyone is working on different time scales, that I definitely can't see how many things will be resolved.

We also got to see the preliminary documentary about the region. I'm featured a little more than I would prefer to be and have such stunning quotes as

"...if the glaciers are carving down really fast."

"My work is one piece of a larger project. So, it's definitely a very complicated puzzle but all the pieces do fit together."

I think I actually used the phrase, "rivers of ice," which is just amusing.

On the note of this documentary and outreach projects in general, I had a rather interesting discussion with one of my advisors. He comes from a European school of thought that science should just be funded for science's sake and not for any necessary benefit. I feel, and this is my socialist side, that any publicly funded science projects (NSF, NIH, etc) should have some form of outreach or communication to the public. I don't necessarily think they should have a direct societal impact, as many big impacts need a lot of pure research behind them, but there should certainly be some communication. He said that that communication is the job of the journalist, and that might be true, although a middleman can certainly skew and distort easier, but it's the job of the scientist to communicate to the journalist ultimately, which is still a form of outreach and still takes time out of the precious research. And the documentary, while a bit time consuming, has a really good purpose. I was a bit to surprised to hear his view on outreach and also on the current stress on diversity in science, as these are both things that I think are vitally important. I certainly don't think all scientists should have to speak directly to the public, as some of them are great researchers but horrible at anything else. But I do think that the public should be aware of the science that is being funded by them. I mean, most people probably won't care, but it might also help in the creation of new scientists.

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On a different note, I really want this wine. It looks totally awesome, probably one of my favorite older cycling poster prints. Plus, I like Syrahs.