Welcome

Hello and Welcome,

As I enter the rapidly expanding field of blogging I wanted to outline my goals and ambitions for starting one myself.

First of all I have always enjoyed writing about something I was passionate about. Science, particularly space and physics, has been an interest of mine for years. I feel this is an opportunity to share some of the really interesting stuff that I have learned from external sources as well as academically with whoever wants to listen.

Furthermore we are at a rather interesting place in the field of journalism. Mainstream media, namely print is being replaced by the internet as the medium of choice. Getting up to the minute news for free seems more appealing than paying for day old news for obvious reasons.

As I got more savvy on technical subjects I began to notice a surprising lack of quality mainstream science journalism. While it is understandable that they are looking for catchy headlines with exaggerated or misconstrued meanings I personally do not find this agreeable or acceptable. When I read news I want to hear evidence and the best conclusion as of yet by experts, if I wanted fiction I would be content with picking up a good book.
Over the past year as I began to read more science blogs and was astounded by the quality and detail they were able to produce while being entertaining and readable to the lay audience. Authors such as Phil Plait, P.Z. Meyers and Steven Novella have a style that I have been trying to learn from so I can contribute to the blogging scene.

The final reason is the lack of understanding of science and basic skepticism that permeates our society. All too often people will hear some sort of conspiracy theory, alternative medicine, or other pseudoscience and begin to research it on the internet. Unfortunately information supporting your belief is there just about all the time. It doesn't mean that the evidence is of good quality or from a credible source. There are websites supporting the flat earth theory or the geocentric model. Granted those are extreme cases but it illustrates my point. Information to support your theory regardless of its validity is available online. The key to making your conclusion is parsing through the information and determining if its quality evidence or complete BS.

That just about sums up my goals, I hope you enjoy this new endeavor of mine. Please feel free to leave comments or email me with questions/hate mail. If you see an error please let me know and I will correct it as soon as possible.

Cheers,

Scott Shannon