weirdNano because I felt like it.

The Poker Face

Dear Sir,

I've been forwarded your request for a press pass to the Origins Symposium. I'm not familiar with your publication, can you please fill me in a little on it?

Thanks,

The Gatekeeper

Arizona State University
Media Relations

Dear Establishment,

I can understand why nanoScale Press would be an unfamiliar name, the site is currently under development and has yet to publicize anything worth notice.  nanoScale Press is the name of the business, though it's not the name of the site... that's under wraps still.   The project has been a hair-brained tangent daydream of mine for several years.   When I finished my classes @ ASU in December, I finally decided that I would devote some serious effort to creating it.

Here's some backstory: At ASU, I studied Chemical Engineering for two years but switched to a Political Science major in an effort to loophole some administration & deadline issues that I faced after returning from a summer job in NYC... deadlines to register for the engineering college had passed, but I needed to continue attending ASU so that I didn't lose my funding. After my first semester in the CLAS I found that, while I was very interested in science and engineering as mental stimulus, I was better suited to the social sciences and much more interested in working for myself than as a mindless process engineer for some shady oil company. Realizing then that my time would be better spent graduating from school and moving forward with my own business interests, I continued down the Political Science path focusing my classes on the philosophy of governance and human rights.

Assuming things continue moving according to plan, the site will be launching in middle/late April as development is completed and I finish hammering down the content and logistical side of things. As I see it, my lifelong interest in science and technology and my education in human interests and social science give me a unique perspective from which to write creatively about our possible social and global futures, and how a/the Singularity might result in the emergence of a/several posthuman species. This will be the focus of the site's content.

It's my hope that interest in these topics will be shared by others, as I'll need them to be/stay interested if I plan on further developing nanoScale Press! The goal is for the site be visited by a community of scientifically minded readers and a few contributing writers, be they scientists or non-scientists such as myself. The Origins Symposium offers the unique benefit of being excellent source material, in that it's related to interests that will be represented by the site; current events in the fields of nanotech and genetics, the merger of society with it's offspring technologies, and transhumanist thought in general... while also being in my own backyard!

Of course, all business interest aside... the opportunity to attend an event like this doesn't present itself often, especially in AZ. I am tremendously excited to attend and grateful to all of those involved, for bringing the event to my doorstep... it's quite the Ideal Coincidence. A personal history reading Hawking, Greene, and Dawkins has directly shaped my worldviews... and while I've been an avid consumer of their content and popular scientific literature for years, I have never had the chance to attend an event such as this. I look forward to the opportunity to recreate the experience on my site, and to doing my best to present a respectable image of ASU in the process... however hard that may be.

That about does it. I hope this information has sufficiently familiarized you with nanoScale Press without giving you the impression that I'm some sort of depraved sci-fi lunatic bent on distorting the work of honest scientists in pursuit of my own terrible self interests... while I understand that the whole Singularity bit often puts people off, it's not my goal to preach... merely to pronounce.

Thank you in advance for your assistance. Please let me know if there's any other information that you need.

All the best and nothing less,

David V.