M Builds a Lecture Series

Settle in, this is a long one.

It turns out that there are a number of lecture series sponsored by universities in St. Louis.  Probably the best known is the St. Louis Speaker Series, sponsored by Maryville University - or at least it's the best known to me; I don't know if that's true universally.  Recently, though, I happened upon some marketing materials for upcoming lectures, so I decided to build my own series and check some of them out.

Speaker #1

Wednesday night I went with some members of my college alumni group to see Dan Pink, one of our own, talk about his new book, To Sell Is Human. He was presenting as part of the Maryville Talks Books series, and those of us in attendance not only got a peek at his new book, but also were spoon-fed the basic argument of his previous book, Drive.  (It's this: if/then types of motivation work well for a simple, repetitive, quantifiable task.  They are lousy motivators for tasks that require more creative thinking and analytical skills.)

The new book begins with the idea that we are all salespeople: one in nine people is in what he calls "sales sales" (inside sales teams, car salesmen, etc.), but the other eight out of nine are in "non-sales selling" (selling ideas, a service, our time).  And sales today is different than it used to be, because the salespeople no longer have all the information.  The availability of product information on the internet has created a level of knowledge parity that has never existed before in a sales situation, and that changes the game.

The old Glengarry Glen Ross model of "ABC: Always Be Closing" is shifting to what he argues are the new ABCs: Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity.  If you want to more about that, apparently you'll have to read the book.

Dan is a good lecturer.  He moved around the stage, made jokes, repeated people's names, wrote on his own face with a marker.  It was hugely entertaining.

Speaker #2

The very next night, as part of Wash U's Arts & Sciences Connections Series, I got to see Dr. Raymond Arvidson talk about his work with the Mars Science Lab expedition.  That's right, that's Curiosity.  [Holy sh**, this is the guy driving Curiosity!] (Remember how much I love Mars rovers?  Happy news, sad news, happy news.)

He actually began his lecture, Cruisin' With Curiosity, with a recap of Opportunity, who is still up there chugging away slowly.  He landed in 2004 and was expected to last three months and travel about 600 meters, but has gone over 21 miles in the nearly 10 years that have passed!  He's a trooper.

Curiosity, a plutonium-238-powered, car-sized rover on a mission to explore earlier Martian environments.  It's loaded with a brush, scoop, drill, lasers, and other goodies to help it pick up and analyze the composition of whatever goodies it finds.

Let's get this out of the way: there was once water on Mars.  There are gypsum deposits which are created when subsurface water rises to fill cracks in the rocks; there's evidence of cross-bedding probably caused by water carrying sand; there are sedimentary rocks, alluvial fans, ephemeral lakebeds.

Curiosity is working its little way over to Mount Sharp to take a look at some of its older strata, and particularly one which, thanks to the help of NASA's CRISM infrared spectrometer, is known to contain evidence of a particular type of hematite (iron oxide) which requires water for formation.  But, you say, we already knew there was water.  True.  But if there was water present when that particular stratum of mountain was laid down, that might be the time period Dr. Arvidson is looking for when Mars was warm and wet, just like - drumroll please - an early period of Earth's formation about which we don't have much data because our continuing tectonic and atmospheric activity have wiped it out.  Mars is, he said twice, "eerily Earth-like" - early on, the Red Planet's molten core gave it a dipolar magnetic field which created an atmosphere that shielded the planet from other solar objects.  Pretty much like we are now.  But somewhere back in history, because it's a relatively small planet and farther from the sun, its core cooled, atmosphere blew away, water fell into a subsurface deep freeze, and now it's a pockmarked desert.  Hopefully not like us.

So there you go!  We're trolling around Mars to learn about us, more scientifically called comparative planetary analysis.  (And also to learn about Mars, really, because that's just cool.)

The good doctor did give us a heads up to tune in to the NASA press conference next Tuesday.  Apparently big news is going to be revealed that was learned using a bunch of their fancy schmancy tools - the mass spectrometer, gas chromatograph, and laser something-or-other.  So listen in!

There's a video on the Fox2 website of an interview with Dr. Arvidson if you're interested.  He's pretty adorable in a nerdy scientist kind of way.

Speaker #3 (almost)

Unfortunately I missed seeing Dan Ariely, who was also speaking at Wash U.  His presentation was in the afternoon, and I had some work commitments!