Ramblemuse Touch Points

I’ve been quiet on this blog lately, but not dormant. The end of May, I was off to the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop. This allowed me to learn from the faculty and presenters with a great diversity of backgrounds and experience, including NY Times, Scientific American, Knight Media, and freelance work. It was a major step in my own occurring transition into a greater focus on writing. The workshop also provided a great opportunity to network and play with some great people.

At the same time, I gleaned that there’s as much apprehension among media writers as there is among my current group of long-term flat-funded scientists. Among the latter, the attrition and wear-and-tear has been slow and inevitable; apart from the observed melting from global warming, like the unstoppable advance of a glacial ice sheet. The changes in journalism are far more punctuated. Journalism is losing its old business paradigm of newspaper publishing. Many newspapers are shedding large segments of their dedicated staff as they lose ad dollars to the Internet. The quandary is that much of what’s on the Internet is secondary material — links to and discussion about material from the traditional media. At times, blogs have caught and reemphasized material that was largely ignored by media commentators. The question still remains, however, of future sources of funding and staff to put people out into the field to ferret out the news.

Part of my attention has also been focused on several web site redesigns, including my base design and my recipes section. We’ve added several new recipes as well as doing the redesign. I’ve also brought back up a couple of technical articles from the massage domain. The first is on concepts of range of motion. The second, which still needs some fixing of links, is on the persistent lactic acid myth.