Scrambling in the dirt fighting with sticks...
There was a time when I thought I would be a bench scientist. I worked at Terrapin Lab in South San Francisco in the 90s and even gained a Master of Science degree studying population genetics of arctic char and lake trout.
Everything I read is from the lens of a scientist so I especially love this quote.
“Not to take away anything from art or politics or engineering or business, but without science, we’d still be scrambling in the dirt fighting with sticks and trying to start fires.”— The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
There is a saying from Naval Ravikant that “Science applied is the engine of humanity”. I agreed and studied applied analytics. I wasn’t interested in learning Python simply to learn to code. I needed a problem to solve or explore. In fact, it was my work in public health that created the tension I needed. The jump into geospatial analysis.
Many of my colleagues are still taking data extracted from electronic health records and culling them for actionable insights. When you consider a data snapshot and attempt to tell a narrative or add context you are limited to a moment in time.
Award winning screen writer and author Robert McKee famously states that symmetry has no tension. I was dazzled by his premise of why art is framed in rectangular frames and not typically square. You can capture the evolution of time in a rectangular frame — not the case with a simple portrait. A simple portrait lacks tension. The symmetry does it in…
The picture that comes to mind for me is one I first learned about from my dear friend Amy Herman. Amy curates works of art to sharpen observation, analysis and communication skills. Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez when zoomed into a simple frame does not provide a tension.
But let’s zoom out to see the entire painting. Stories have the ability to not only expand your humanity but powerfully allow you to be an audience to something more complex. When we view the full frame the stories come alive. We have questions about the role of those portrayed and their relationships to one another. What we see is action, movement and a story told over a moment in time—the tension that drives narratives.
When considering public health, accessing stories to help motivate behavioral change or create awareness lives outside of the medical health record. For example, you need to understand environmental decisions that likely influence health downstream in communities.
The ability to zoom into community attributes and create risk probabilities for asthma or neurotoxicities caused by systemic inflammation, neuro-inflammation, or oxidative stress is a proven advantage of geospatial information.
Areas of Chicago for example with fewer trees, higher levels of lead in the air, or sewer overflow events will likely have different exposure to health risk and subsequent poorer patient outcomes.
“ Society, business, & money are downstream of technology, which is itself downstream of science.”— Naval Ravikant
Follow along to discover tools to ask better and bigger questions.