Long Burn

Jimmy Stewart from Mars

Pop quiz: what do I have in common with David Lynch? (Besides that we are both Eagle Scouts and served as ushers at JFK's inauguration.) The answer is that we both gave talks at High Schools in Copenhagen yesterday. David Lynch was there to open the David Lynch program in cinematography and got reviews in all the newspapers. They wrote that he attributes his success to transcendental meditation and that he has meditated twice a day, every day, since the early 70s. Also they wrote that his hands were constantly in motion, that they had a life, energy and animation of their own.

I did not attract any reporters or photojournalists, and I didn't notice that my hands had a life of their own. I talked about global warming and atmospheric chemistry to about 45 students at a school in northern Copenhagen as part of the University's 'Loan a Researcher' program. It was a lot of fun to simply be in a High School again and feel the ambience, and they even let me use the bathroom in the teachers' lounge. The students had a lot of good questions. The biology teacher asked me what the students could do about global warming and I said they could eat less meat (producing meat takes a lot of fossil fuel energy and its inefficient compared to making vegetables and farm animals emit methane, a powerful greenhouse gas), and that they should talk to people. Later the teacher told me that the school is going to have a conservation week and whatever money they can save on utilities and food during that week will be put into the class fund.

posted by Matt_J @ 8:48 AM