Embracing change … and Japan

October 1, 2008

Last night, or was it this morning, I ranted about the unwillingness of bench scientists to try and make an effort to understand a little bit about the software being written to make their lives easier. I think I could have just pointed to Timo Hannay’s wonderful talk entitled The Future is a Foreign Country (I can pretty much picture him giving it, but would love to see video).

In this talk, Timo touches upon his past, and then dives headfirst into a topic near and dear to all our hearts, the networked future (and present) of science. He talks about change, about accepting new realities, about embracing that which would seem to be foreign. What is important is not the specifics, but that message. You have to embrace worlds that might seem to be foreign. You don’t have to master them. You don’t even have to fit in. But you will be the better for it. Timo distills all this into a few bullet points