Networking

I've just gotten back from a rather intense set of conferences, having spent the majority of my time for the last week just plain networking.  This is something that most definitely does not come naturally to me.  I am not a politician, in the sense that I am not good at estimating what people's wants and desires are, or how my actions will be interpreted by them.  Sometimes, this happens even for those friends and family who I most know and love.  It's not that I don't understand emotions---I don't fall anywhere on the autism spectrum---but that I simply get too swept up in my own momentum and my own desires and feelings and stop paying close enough attention.  And I do have to work to put myself in others shoes---again, not because I can't, but because the pull of my own perspective is so compelling to me, and I'm often quite bad about making assumptions that I should not and don't even realize that I am making.

It's a flaw.  It's especially a flaw in science, though perhaps there is a bit more margin for error there than in other entrepreneurial professions. After all, if what you can deliver is valuable enough, then there are many sins that can be forgiven.  But it makes a difference, and a big difference at that.  For those of you not scientists, this fact may be surprising.  Is not science the land of the fact, the truth, the existence of rightness against all odds?  Eppur si muove?

What you have to remember, dear reader, is that the classic image of the scientist as lone scholar or brilliant genius is rooted in a time when the practitioners of science were by and large the lordly class, set apart and at idleness to think by their wealth or their position.  From the classical Greek philosophers to Confucian scholars, medieval monks to Indian astronomers.

Over the past two to three centuries, however, the democratization of science and its fusion with technology have expanded the breadth of participation in science by many orders of magnitude.  At the same time, the advance of technology enabled by this democratization has been tying us ever more tightly together into a single large, global community.

Scientifically, there are so many things going on now and with so much complexity, that one person alone is quite limited in what they can accomplish, even if they were in the privileged position of one of those ancient lords and could take things like food, shelter, and internet access for granted.  To be really effective in the world we live in now, a scientist must collaborate: colleagues bring problems to solve and techniques to help in solving them.  Working together strengthens your ability to publish, to seek funding together, to think of new ideas, and in all other ways to go out and get your science done.  So any scientist who wishes to pursue their ideas in research, as opposed to being a technician in the lab of another person, will of necessity need to learn to be effective to at least some minimal level in the land of networking.

For me, I hate the necessity of having goals in mind for networking.  I basically like people.  I like a lot of my colleagues, and I really enjoy debating things.  If networking just meant socializing, shooting the breeze and debating the nature of facts, I would have no problem with it.  But it's also important to get things done, to avoid offending people accidentally, and to step beyond "interesting discussion" and forward to "mutually beneficial action."  These are the things that I struggle with, and above all else I fear offending colleagues, for I know that is something I can do all too easily, especially if I think I'm debating a bit of science, but they feel like actually I am attacking them.

This last few days went well, I think, with lots of exciting discussions and the opening up of new opportunities, though if there are any ways that I have screwed up, the most important mistakes are the ones that I am least likely of all to know about.

But on I go, to live, to learn, and hopefully to keep making good progress: in my science, in my relations with colleagues, and at simply being a decent human being.

Scientific Posters

I have a confession to make.  Posters are the method of scientific communication that I like the least.  I've just been preparing three right now, for presentation next week---two on synthetic biology and one on representation for electromechanical design.  The problem is really the logistics: design, production, transportation, and presentation.

Let us consider the poster's two main forms of competitor, the paper and the talk.

When I produce a paper, these four stages are:

• Design: Assemble the document in LaTeX, a system extremely well adapted for this task, using figures built however I feel like it.
• Production: Run LaTeX on the document, admire the beautiful PDF.
• Transportation: Upload electronically to the publisher's site.
• Presentation: The publisher does everything automatically, and the paper is disseminated to some fragment of the scientific community.

Talks are not quite so smooth, because I usually have to deal with PowerPoint.  I resisted this for a long time, and still use OpenOffice when I can.  The problem is that a lot of material from collaborators comes to me in PowerPoint form, or is explicitly required to be in PowerPoint by the US Government.  So I just have to put up with substandard editing software, giving me a workflow of:

• Design: Curse the Beast That Dwelleth in Redmond as I wrestle with its Hideous Offspring.
• Production: Flip into presentation mode and walk through to make sure nothing weird is happening with animations or videos.
• Transportation: Get myself to the conference, bringing my computer and its precious, precious bits.  Leave a copy of the presentation accessible to myself via SSH, in case my computer self-destructs and I have to download it and try it on somebody else's machine.
• Presentation: Stand up in front of a room full of scientists and talk to them, take a few questions, continue the interesting bit of discussion in the hallway after.

Posters are also very graphic heavy, and so they tend to end up in PowerPoint also, if only to ensure smooth transfer of images from existing slides to the poster design.  But that's only the beginning of the trouble.  My poster workflow is:

• Design: PowerPoint was never intended to edit poster-sized images, and so it goes very slowly.  This interacts with its already iffy UI to result in lots of waiting for updates, discovering that event processing lags have resulted in PowerPoint changing the wrong object, undoing, trying again, etc.  It also really wants to resize text pasted in from smaller documents to fit the poster, turning some things into 80+ point font and leave others the same, in a pattern that I haven't entirely figured out yet.  Eventually, though, the beast is tamed, and I've got a PDF that PowerPoint isn't resizing down to 8.5x11 because it has decided I can't really have wanted A0 format.
• Production: Print on a specialized piece of hardware for that is generally temperamental and poorly maintained, because it's not part of the daily workflow.  Then get a pair of scissors and trim the poster down to size because the size requirements of the poster session are always different from the width of the poster printer.  Or, like today, discover that the poster printer is down, everybody's taking the day off, and desperately search for an outside shop that can print my posters before my flight leaves.
• Transportation: Roll the posters up, putting them in a tube if you can lay your hands on one, then carry giant delicate pieces of paper through taxis, airports, planes, and public transit while attempting to preserve them from crushing, rain, etc.  If something bad happens, you're out of luck.
• Presentation: Give an interactive talk like you're singing a round: as people arrive and leave, you'll generally have a mixed audience who have all come in at different phases of the discussion and have missed different parts of the material.  It's essentially the following (please hum along, to the tune of "Row, row, row your boat"):

Primi:                    Secundus:             Tertio:
This is my abstract
Methods over here         This is my abstract
Here you see experiments  ...                   This is my abstract
Conclusions are so clear                        ...

Moreover, you're probably doing this in a crowded hall with dozens to hundreds of other posters all being presented simultaneously.  At the end of a good poster session, I'm always hoarse.

So posters are just much more of a hassle than the other forms, from A to Z. It does have its advantages, though, in that it's much more interactive than any of the other forms.

Now, dear readers, I'm sure that somebody is going to want to suggest that I could solve all my software problems by ditching Microsoft.  Let me head that off at the pass by saying that, much as I think Beamer and Prezi are awesome, Beamer just can't illustrate or animate worth a damn, and Prezi has some serious usability issues.  Don't talk to me about Keynote.  Network effects mean my world is going to be dominated by PowerPoint, with OpenOffice/LibreOffice the only hope of salvation.

But for now, I'll carry my precious cardboard tube and be thankful the production nightmare is over...

Ethics & Retraction Watch

I have a confession to make: I read Retraction Watch.  It's one of my pieces of mental junk food, like bad soap opera.  And though I started for the soap-opera and schadenfreude, I've stayed also because of the serious questions about ethics that get raised.

The Programmer Litmus Test

One of my current projects has induced me to learn Haskell, a rather dogmatic programming language notorious for its insistence on purely functional programming and extremely strict data type enforcement.  It's been both interesting and frustrating: Haskell clearly shows its origin in mathematical thinking.  On the good side, there is the elegant way that data types are inferred, the fact that sophisticated and subtle manipulations of mathematical functions are elementary to the language, and the intuitive handling to sets and recursion.  On the bad side, anything that doesn't fit the elegant paradigm is horribly painful to handle, when things do go wrong they go very wrong very quickly, and there is a mathematician-style culture of using single-character symbols and minimal comments.  I detest this last, since it renders programs extremely hard to decode.  It reminds me of a criticism of Perl that I once heard: "banging on the keyboard has a 50/50 chance of producing a valid program."

Learning Haskell also reminds me of a litmus test that I like, for testing whether somebody is a Real Programmer.  The test is a single simple question: 

"What programming languages do you know?"

If the person responds with a clear and simple list, they aren't are Real Programmer.

My own answer?  Well, mostly I work with C, C++, MATLAB, Lisp, Java, and now Haskell.  But I also deal with GNU make and bash and tcsh, some Python, recently a little SQL, then HTML and Javascript of course.  I've done a little bit of elisp hacking when I needed to, a little VHDL.  I don't know if I should count representation languages like SBOL or LTML.  Do nesC and AVR macros count as the same as C/C++ or separate?  I think the other parts of the autotools suite besides Make probably count as separate languages.  Almost forgot about regexp patterns, I think they count.  And parser definition languages like flex and yacc.  680x0 assembly, back in the day, when graphics accelerators and OpenGL didn't exist, and I guess I did some x86 assembly too in classes, and there was another processor, a toy processor specifically for classes whose name I don't remember.  Oh, and BASIC of course, my first language ever.  Research languages like Proto and MGS.  LabView made me use G---I hate graphical programming languages---though I guess Logo was fun as a kid.  I can't remember whether I ever actually wrote any AppleScript or not; same with SmallTalk.  Curl was another that came from classes, along with whatever it was we used for PAL programming before we switched to CPLDs and used VHDL instead.  Oh, and LaTeX of course---anything you can write quicksort in definitely counts as a programming language.

You get my point, I think.  I could probably keep going on for a while, and still not have everything.  This is part of the nature of working with code.  If you spend enough time working with enough complex systems, you'll inevitably have to tangle with lots of different programming languages, just through the pragmatics of making things work in whatever context of duct-tape and spackle your partners and predecessors have had to set up to get stuff done. Likewise, if you tangle with enough languages and gain a deep enough understanding of the underlying concepts, then picking up new languages is relatively easy---at least to an intermediate level.  Real Programmers have done both of these things, and it will have left its scars on their memory in one form or another---and I don't think you can really be fluent without it.

Note that being a Real Programmer doesn't necessarily make you any damned good at any particular task, though.  It just means you've got the potential to get there with a sharp learning curve if you've got the time and motivation.  For example, I'm no longer competent to carry out any but the most basic system administration tasks, since I stopped tracking that field early in grad school, which is why I own a Mac.

So, dear reader: are you a Real Programmer?

Outbound Again

It feels like a much shorter time than the two and a half weeks since my last professional travel---though perhaps that's because the time since has still had several talks, a significant paper submission, and a major project deadline.  Tonight, I head out again, this time for an experience that is all new to me as a variety of professional service.

Despite the fact that I'm at a company rather than a university, I still have a number of opportunities for academic advising, and it is rather encouraged by BBN as well. I've advised students at both the Masters and Ph.D. level before, but never before has helping with a student involved an international journey.  Some months ago, one of my close colleagues asked me to serve on the thesis committee of his Ph.D. student, whose work I respect and have been following closely for some time.  Since they're over in Europe, I assumed my participation in the defense would be via some sort of remote dial-in (see previous discussion of my fondness for the magic of modern telepresence).  In fact, however, they'd like to have me there in person, so I'm getting on a plane this evening, and will spend about 48 hours on the ground over there, attending the defense and connected celebrations, as well as getting some good time to catch up with my colleague and hear all about his latest ventures.

Alas, I do not get to wear my doctoral hood, which will continue to remain undisturbed in its quiet corner at the back of my closet.  Apparently, there is a special and different form of garb that the university traditionally prescribes for committee members employed by industry (remember: academia is one of the only still-extant reservoirs of medieval guild traditions in the modern world). So one of the first things I'll be doing upon arrival is getting fit for the archaic scholastic version of a rented tuxedo.  I'm unsure just what it is that I will be wearing, and I fear that it won't live up to the gaudy inventions of my imagination.

Another lovely side benefit of this trip comes from the fact that its financing means I wasn't restricted to a US-flag airline---one of the typical requirements of traveling with any aid from a US grant.  As it happened, the cheapest fares (by far) when I was booking my tickets went through Iceland, so it became not only possible but the Official Best Travel Option for me to stop off and see my dear friends in Reykjavik on the way back---I'm taking a day of vacation, and quite looking forward to meeting their new baby in person, who I've previously met only over Skype.

This trip is another piece of time away from our own increasingly intriguing and interactive baby, but at least I've had a long and quiet time together with her this weekend.  We were all going to a wedding down in Maryland, of one of my wife's oldest and dearest friends, but Harriet went down with various standard unpleasant baby ailments that I shan't embarrass future-her by describing to the Internet.  In any case, it became clear that subjecting Harriet to 16 hours of driving would be a bad idea, but with no actual danger in the offing I encouraged Ananya to go without us.  So while Ananya went by Amtrak, Harriet & I rolled around on the kitchen floor, playing with pots and pans, discovering how magnets go back on the refrigerator, and listening (me at least), to my newest audiobook to keep the non-baby half of my mind happy too.

And since I can't fend her off from this keyboard much longer, it's time to post and see if I can answer a few of those long-neglected emails from friends before I vanish again for the airport...

Know Your Time-Zones

In this business, sometimes you've really gotta know your time zones.  When you come down to the wire on a paper, sometimes it really matters whether it's East Coast, West Coast, or (as in my unfortunate case this evening), Central Europe.  At some point, the deadline has really, truly passed, and the submission site shuts down, and the computer won't take your paper any more.

It's important to know exactly when that is, which is why computer science conferences generally choose 11:59pm or 12:01am, avoiding the date ambiguity of midnight, and always specify the time zone---usually somewhere in the US or Europe, but occasionally as far West as American Samoa (because computer people love to find extreme edge cases).  A later deadline doesn't necessarily help, of course, because it's just encouraging you to stay up later at night if you aren't yet done.

Properly, this shouldn't matter.  We should all be good little boys and girls and get things in before the last minute.  Nobody should ever have to wonder which midnight it is, but we do have to sometimes: maybe there's another deadline first, or maybe you figure out something new as you're editing a paper and you have to make lots of extra changes to fix it, or maybe it's ongoing work and you're still adding new material, or maybe you're just crap at deadlines.  I honestly don't think the last actually pertains very often to last-minute submissions: I think more often it's just the combination of perfectionism, triage, and shrinking margins of error.

When I was an undergraduate, I had a theory about deadlines that worked pretty well for me.  I held that taking a semester of classes was like surfing on a wave: you start out up at the front on top, and every time you let anything slip, you slide a little bit further back on the wave.  If you slide far enough back, you're in danger of falling off (missing assignment deadlines), and you get really stressed and can't do anything that you want to because if you miss one step, you fall off the wave.  But you're always doing the same amount of work: it's just that when you're farther from the deadline you've got more options for moving it around and doing the stuff that fits better with your mood/desires/headspace at the moment.  Oh, and having less stress.  So every semester I'd start off doing my assignments the moment that I got them, and slowly slip back towards the deadlines as the work piled up.  Then the semester would end, there would be no homework assignments over break, and I'd be reset up on the top of the wave again at the beginning of the next semester.  Only now, as a working professional, there are no semester ends for me any more.

Technically, I'm already 10 days past the deadline on this submission, but first the conference extended the deadline by seven days (which is not unusual), and then a note went around that the submission site would actually continue staying open for three days beyond.  And so I embraced work-life balance for the weekend: played with my daughter while my wife dealt with her own last-minute paper crisis, went up to Maine to visit my parents, got a couple good nights' sleep.  Today I spent most of the day on an ongoing project that's actually billable, as opposed to this paper which is more directed at future work and foundational principles.  No problem: I knew I had only about three hours of work to go to finish up the paper, and I came in right on time, even a little bit early (though not as early as my ambition, of course).

And the site was closed.

You see, I'd read "CET" and thought "CST".  CET is Central European Time, where Italy and Hungary and Germany are.  CST is Central Standard Time, and has Iowa and Texas, and Chicago.  Seven hours difference this time of year, most times of year in fact, except for a brief transient when Daylight Savings is different in Europe and the US (God only knows why).  And so that's why my paper is still listed as "abstract only" at this moment.

I'm not sorry, because it's ended up as a damned good paper, full of pretty pictures too, so if it doesn't go here, it will find another good venue.  And hopefully the program chairs will have mercy on me and allow my paper to proceed into review in any case, because I'd really prefer it to have a chance to go where I intended---that's an audience that I like a lot and think will really appreciate the ideas.  But for now, I'm tumbled off my wave and hoping to avoid the same mistake on the next one.

Compromises

One of wife's colleagues, who is also a parent, had this to say about the challenge of being both a scientist and a parent: it's not about whether you will drop balls, but about choosing which balls to drop at which times, and making sure that you don't keep dropping the same ball.

I just spent the last hour in a steam-filled bathroom, singing a terribly unhappy, snuffling and coughing baby back to sleep, steaming the congestion from her sinuses and rocking her in her chair.  "Swing Low, Sweet Harriet" was about the right speed, with lots of low, resonant, sleep-inducing notes; "Harriet the Eukaryote" is a bit too upbeat.  It's hard to watch a baby who really, really just wants to be asleep and cannot get there, but with warmth and song and rocking, she finally at least has made it.  Tonight, I have to get a full night's sleep, because of a critical presentation I'm going to be giving tomorrow, and I'm singing to my baby and writing to you, dear readers.

Career and life inevitably come into conflict for a scientist.  I didn't have a weekend this past weekend, because there was a major workshop on Mammalian Synthetic Biology (fortunately right here in Cambridge), and I needed to be there to present my work, talk and make plans with my colleagues, and also to run a workshop of our own on metrology (more on that one later).  But I didn't get to see Harriet much, and so I've been snatching every bit of time I can at the moment.  Tonight, I met Harriet and Ananya in the library, and we played together there for a little bit before I had to go off to my photo critique group.  Why didn't I skip photo group?  Because it will be the last one that I can attend before we move to Iowa, and it's been my one really consistently peaceable and pleasurable hobby for the last few years.

And so my life grinds finely, sometimes.  I pick which balls to drop, and which to catch, and try to remember that one of those balls is my own ability to find time to rest and recover.  I plan to take a day off later this week, to catch up on weekend.  I'll probably be able to write back to the friends whose letters I'm neglecting now as well, and deal with the pile of mail sitting on the kitchen counter.

But also, unstructured time is precious.  I have a form of meditation that I do for myself at times, where I simply get moving---on foot, on bike, in a car, or even the Paris Metro---and simply see which way I turn as I move forward.  It's an exercise in letting go of planning, just getting in touch with my basic preferences and impulses.  It's not even so much about understanding them as simply giving them a free rein to move me and help to separate out "should" and "need" from "want" and "like."  There are times when I go in circles, and times when I go in straight lines, go out on familiar streets or proceed down random side-roads where I've never set foot before.  I haven't done that for a little while, maybe not even since Newcastle, when I had a day two weeks ago to wander the afternoon around the edge of the North Sea.  I promise myself these times every so often, and have to preserve them even in the face of possible guilt that I could be spending the time on a paper or with my daughter or wife.

This blog too is a promise to myself, which is why I'm making sure that I don't drop it.  It's not a duty, exactly, but a promise to remember to step back and stop doing and just think about the things I'm doing every once in a while.  But that promise now is done, and the promise of sleep is beckoning.

A building tension of words...

I'm experiencing a synchronization event right now, currently sitting in scientific meeting three of four in a three week period.  With only a couple of days at home between each of these events, I'm afraid that you, dear reader, have been falling below my wife and daughter in my priorities.  But the tension of unwritten words is building, and soon they will emerge, to tell of Newcastle and Atlanta, Minneapolis and Boston, workshop and journal, synthetic biology and spatial computing, morphogenesis and metrology...

Returning to Standard Life

My psyche may not be quite settled again, but it is now officially time to return to a more standard existence.  And by that, I mean the establishment of scientific and engineering standards.  I'm on my way, right now, out of the country over to the UK for the next SBOL standards development workshop.  SBOL expands to Synthetic Biology Open Language, and it's a community-driven effort to make it easier for practitioners of that science to exchange information about the systems they are building.  This applies to person-to-person communication, but also (perhaps more importantly) to communication from one computerized tool to another.  This latter is so important because building new organisms involves a lot of different types of information and processes, and it's hard for humans to track all of it correctly except for the very simplest of designs.  It also allows engineering services, like fabrication of new DNA, to be taken on by specialists who can take advantage of economies of scale to do them efficiently and cheaply.  The group at Newcastle is hosting this meeting, and we'll spend three days showing off our newest tools to each other and delving into such weighty topics as prioritization of working groups, standards body governance, interoperation with related standards, and extensions to handle additional types of knowledge.

Not long after I get back, I'll be hosting another standards discussion, the Workshop on Metrology for Mammalian Synthetic Biology that we're organizing in conjunction with the first Workshop on Mammalian Synthetic Biology.  At that one, we'll be asking a lot of really basic questions that don't yet have good answers, like "Who wants to know how a biological part behaves in a cell?", "What do we need to measure about its behavior?", and "How do we tell whether we got the measurement right?"  I expect the discussion will be much broader than just mammalian cells, but we needed to narrow the scope enough to have a productive discussion.  Mammalian cells also have some interesting properties that make them an attractive target: they're relatively big and tough, which seems to let them get less messed up by adding our new biological computing circuits into them, and there are also starting to be a lot of good mammalian biological computing components to choose from, which means we might soon be able to try to build much more complex systems.

In one sense, this type of work is boring.  After all, most of the process of getting things done is about having long dry arguments about tiny points of detail, and there's nothing inherently sexy about building better rulers or trying to agree on a data format that doesn't leave anybody too dissatisfied (consensus and satisfaction are necessarily opposed qualities).

That first impression is misleading, however.  Every scientific endeavor, no matter how sexy the topic may seem, has a lot of tedious work underlying it that is necessary to building a solid foundation.  Debugging code is never sexy.  Building makefiles and regression tests is never sexy.  Feeding mice or culturing cells or staring blankly at columns of data in Matlab is never sexy.  But you can't get where you need to go unless you do the hard work.  The alternative is to practice "slash and burn" science, where you go just far enough to get proof-of-concept results, then publish them with grandiose claims and move on to the next thing, leaving little for those who follow you to build on and yet making it difficult for them to do the work you ignored: "Didn't Smith and Jones already do that?"

When you get the unsexy parts right, you enable great things.  And standardization is a huge, huge, part of that.  Standards, and especially standards of measurement, are civilizational infrastructure.  Consider, for example, a 2x4 in your local hardware store: that humble piece of wood represents an absolute revolution in the construction and remodeling of houses.  Likewise, the next time that you chance to use a tape measure, think about how hard it is to make tape measures the same length.  How is it that you don't get different lengths of tape measures from different stores?  Why doesn't the length of tape measures drift over time as the machines used to make them slowly wear out? They do vary, of course, but a remarkably complex system of engineering mechanisms, professional associations, and government bureaucracy combine to ensure that you always have as many significant digits of length available as you need and are willing to pay for.

I didn't get into synthetic biology out of a desire to work on standards.  I got into synthetic biology to practice sexy cool mad science with living organisms.  Getting there from where we are today, however, will require that we build that depth of infrastructure that is so much needed and so often unappreciated.

I am proud of my city tonight

I am proud of my city tonight.

It has been a long and unusual day, locked down in our home while every law enforcement agent for a hundred miles was searching through Watertown for the second Marathon bomber.  Everything felt both nervous and detached at the same time: we weren't even technically in the lock-down zone, since we are just over the border away from Cambridge, but my office is in Cambridge, and it all just felt too close for comfort to go outside, and especially not with a baby.  Yet at the same time, I felt basically safe: one of the amazing things about our informational age is that I could be sitting here, in my apartment, and know the minute that something critical occurred, popping up in the feed on my computer or phone.  So I knew that nothing was likely to occur in our neighborhood.

Still, it's been with us all day.  It's why I quickly decided that today could not be a work day for me, not even from home.  There was simply too much on my mind, and I wanted to take my time here with my family and just be.  Last night, when the suspects killed Sean Collier, the MIT police officer who died, they did it right outside the building where I completed my Ph.D.  I know the spot well, having walked or biked across it many times.  The 7-11 they were reported to have robbed (though it seems to have turned out otherwise), it is right on the corner by the building where I meet my synthetic biology collaborators.  When they carjacked somebody over by Third Street, that is where I used to drive all the time, getting from my previous apartment to the lab and back.  The gas station where the carjacking victim escaped them is where I used to fuel up when I lived in Cambridgeport, right after undergrad.  The area the police were searching in Watertown is back behind where all the good Armenian bakeries are, and the place the suspect was finally caught is just a couple of blocks from where I bought my car.  The apartment where the brothers Tsarnaev lived?  Just 15 minutes walk from from us, on the other side of Inman Square.  So this whole drawn out incident feels very close to home, but at the same time almost surreal.  And I can still hear the helicopters overhead, as I have been able to since late morning.

So with all of this in the ambient, what is it that's making me proud of my city?  What makes me proud is the way that the city has responded.

I remember, after the attacks of September 11th, that my first thought was how scared I was of what our response would be as a nation.  What depths we might lower ourselves to, having been stung so badly by those attacks.  And I think that I was right to have feared that.

Here, from the moment when this attack occurred, there has been a sense of measured judgement and sympathy in the response of people.  Even while the first responders were delivering first aid, Bostonians came out of their homes to feed, warm, and house the stranded runners.  While CNN speculated wildly about Saudis, the local media has been rock solid, clearly distinguishing known and unknown, and getting us real information while never reporting rumor as news.  And then today...

Today, while a million citizens were shut up in their homes, the whole city seemed to me to feel like an embrace of "keep calm, carry on."  There's something scary and deadly going on out there, but we've put our trust in tax-funded professionals who are moving cautiously and deliberately.  People from within the search zone, sought out and interviewed by the media, really portrayed the best of Boston's tough but peaceful values.  And as the picture of the suspects continued to develop, I haven't yet heard anyone drop into xenophobic or Islamophobic rants.  Over and over, the direction goes more towards sorrow and sympathy, and a strength that has nothing to do with aggression or revenge.

That's something that I think we need to celebrate.  Our strength, as a free and liberal society, to find a place for the whole breadth of the world, in open celebrations of humanity like the Boston Marathon itself, and to hold and embrace that even in the face of what horrors the world can bring.  It takes a great moral courage and strength to do that, far more than it does to throw up walls to try to keep out the world and seek safety in isolation.  We have always been strong on the strength of our diversity, and even amidst tragedy and fear, I heard that strength in every word that came from Greater Boston today, all the way to the vast multi-ethnic crowd who lined the streets of Watertown after the suspect was arrested, and cheered every one of the officers who passed, thanking them for a safe resolution that even brought in the suspect still alive.

This city is old, by American standards.  It has deep roots and a proud history and attitude, and tonight I think it certainly has that right.