Today I'm thankful for: the Baltimore science cafe series

Today (and every day) I'm thankful for Project Bridge (http://www.projbridge.com)'s Baltimore science café series.

A science café is an opportunity for a scientist to talk about their work with the community in an informal setting.  We scientists frequently bemoan the sorry state of scientific literacy in this country, yet at the same time, too many of us think it's beneath us to talk to non-scientists, so we really are a not insignificant part of the problem.

Science cafés aim to change that.  They bring the scientist out of the lab and into the community.  They provide an opportunity for people to learn about the science going on in their own cities.  They help bridge gaps between scientists and non-scientists.  Everyone is better off when neighbors talk to each other.

Baltimore has its own science café series, and I am thankful.

text of a letter I sent to the Baltimore Sun

Dear Baltimore Sun,

Doug Atwell of the Fells Point bar Rye scoffs at chemists ("A new class of cocktails", Feb 29), but perhaps if he knew more about chemistry he would be a better mixologist.

He would then know, for example, that the cooling power of ice cubes comes primarily from the phase transition of melting from solid to liquid, so while it is true that ice cubes with larger surface area chill a drink faster, it is precisely because they are also diluting the drink faster.

High-quality, natural ingredients are no less governed by the laws of chemistry than brightly-colored, synthetic ones are.  Chemistry is not scary, boring, or unnatural; it's a very useful way of understanding how the world works.

letter to the Baltimore Sun: Grand Prix police priorities

Here's the text of a letter I sent to the Baltimore Sun:

***

Dear Baltimore Sun,

On Saturday, I crossed over the Grand Prix track via the skywalk between the Pratt Street Pavilion and the Gallery.  Racecars were driving on the track, so I lingered for a moment to see what it was my tax dollars had bought.  But only for a moment, because then three police officers ordered me to move along.  Now, I know that it wasn’t for crowd control (there were only three other civilians on the bridge besides me, so there was no congestion crossing the bridge) or safety purposes (I have seen far more people congregated on this very bridge during parades down Pratt Street without risking the bridge’s collapse), so I could only conclude that they were there on behalf of the race organizers, who presumably believe that in addition to buying the right to use the people’s roads, they had also bought the right to observe the race from any other point in space, public or private.

I was delighted.  I could only conclude that there were no homicides left to clear, no citizens in the Northeastern District waiting for cops to respond to calls, and no teenagers dealing drugs on West Baltimore corners, if three of Baltimore’s finest could afford to spend their time hassling taxpayers for standing on public property.  Surely Mayor Rawlings-Blake had therefore scrapped her plan to hire 300 more police officers, and the money saved could instead be put toward repairing our crumbling schools and reopening our shuttered rec centers and city pools to keep our children off the streets and out of trouble.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I opened Monday’s Baltimore Sun to learn that, in fact, there had been no fewer than six shootings in the city during the course of the Grand Prix, one of them fatal.

Turns out it was just another case of our city’s administration's putting the interests of developers ahead of those of its own citizens.  I cannot help but wonder that we might do more to convince people to come visit and spend money in our city if we focused our limited police resources on reducing crime in our city neighborhoods rather than letting the Grand Prix organizers use them as taxpayer-provided hired muscle on deserted skywalks downtown.

***

In conclusion: I survived the Grand Prix, but I'll be glad to have an excuse to be out of town come next Labor Day.

Baltimore mayor election 2011: educational backgrounds

Because I'm a snob, here are the CVs of the mayoral candidates for Baltimore's upcoming Democratic primary, to the best of my knowledge (sources are generally from the campaign web sites), in alphabetical order:

Frank Conaway:
BA, Morgan State College (now Morgan State University) (1960)

Jody Landers:
BS (business administration), Morgan State University

Catherine Pugh:
BS (business administration), Morgan State University
MBA, Morgan State University

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake:
BA (political science), Oberlin College (1992)
JD, University of Maryland School of Law (1995)

Otis Rolley:
BA (political science and Africana studies), Rutgers College (1996)
MCP (Master in City Planning), MIT (1998)

Wilton Wilson:
bachelor's, Johns Hopkins University
master's, Bowie State University


(Whatever point I might have been trying to make is now completely out of my mind as I am still reeling from the revelation that Frank Conaway apparently doesn't have a web site.)