I want to be a better writer, and following the advice that I was given, by almost everyone I asked, I need to write more.
It is not that I have never written anything: for my work and my studies I have produced various memos, reports, and even papers (well I was about to publish one, but I expect myself to write a couple more before the end of the PhD), but they tend not to be the kind of thing anyone would go near beyond for professional reasons. I started and abandoned several blogs in the past. Started because writing is a fine hobby, and it is always nice to pretend that someone actually cares about what you are up to enough to read about it. Abandoned due to the general lack of events in my life, and specifically how I come to realise that just writing pointlessly about nothing is a little boring.
Last December, I went to a rather big physical science conference, mainly on the earth sciences, in San Francisco (AGU). Just to clarify here, my expertise in the earth science is rather limited ("What is a rock anyway?"), my PhD is on rock behaviours, but so far I've been managing without knowing any geology. Most of the sessions were rather involved: I found that unless you have at least a postgraduate level of understanding of the certain topic presented, you won't get much out of it. Determined to make the most out of the conference as possible, I find myself gravitated towards many of the panel and workshop sessions with topics I would at least have a chance to understand: science and communications.
I remembered that I was rather inspired by many of those talks, I can't remember the specifics (I have made many notes, but the device I made those notes on decided to eat all my notes from between the months of December and February) I did remember about that one talk on battling climate skeptics, about how global warming has become a political issue, how if you're a republican or religious you are more likely to have climate skeptic view, and how the whole room, and the science community in general, is full of lefties and atheists.
