You wander the beaches of Chile, enjoying the sunshine and the soothing sea breeze. You poke around tide pools, smiling at smoothed pebbles and surreal nudibranches.
#YouFindARock. It’s gritty with startling hot pink nodules.
📷 Benito Rosende
Something is off about this rock, but you’re uncertain what’s twinging your instincts.
>
You poke the lump with a stick.
It squishes.
Um. Is this a rock?
>
You carefully watch as you poke it with a stick again.
It squirts seawater at you.
This is not a rock. You found a...blob? A blob that is very good at disguising itself as sandstone.
>
You pluck up the squishy, squirting not-rock and gently toss it into deeper water. You lick your fingers curiously as you back away, marveling at the bitter-soapy flavour of high vanadium concentrations.
“Ahh, Pyura chilensi?” a passing local enquires. “Very delicious.”
You make a note of the creature’s name, uncertain if you can bring yourself to order kin of your temporary friend for an afternoon snack.
You congratulate yourself on your caution, affirming once again that diving in tongue-first is a hazardous attitude
I’m reading a lot of well-intentioned articles that make it clear how many scicomm peeps have no idea disaster risk reduction is a deep field with a lot of research into effective communication.
ProTip: Using fear & shame as motivation backfires when applied to public health.
I can’t write this article (or even thread!) right now as I’m under medical orders to drop my stress levels (ahahahahasob), but...
If you’re writing well-intentioned pieces trying to influence pandemic behaviour, please take some cues from disaster sociology research. It exists!
Fundamental premise:
Vanishingly few people make active choices they believe will endanger themselves or the people they love.
If they’re making “bad” choices, it’s a fundamentally different risk perception. Until you understand how & why, your argument will miss its audience.
Even if you don’t pay much attention to ground-based astronomy, you know this telescope from pop culture & movies. It’s somewhere special. nature.com/articles/d4158…
This article from just before the closing announcement is fantastic for the context of why Arecibo is so unique: space.com/arecibo-observ…
I just...
I know we’ve got a lot going on, especially with the mass casualty event scheduled shortly after US Thanksgiving.
But take some time to read the Arecibo tributes as they come out. They won’t be cheerful. But they’ll be heartfelt.
But technically landslide are fluid-like, not fluids.
Why?
Because they’re a mixed mess of materials that act differently when moving than when still. You can’t just sample a tree trunk, some peat, and water to figure out the rheologic properties (how it flows).