Events:March for Science 20170422-Philadelphia

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March for Science

As it happened, witnessed and participated in on April 22 2017. Earth Day .... or as I style it, Sagan's Day ..., in the March for Science.

I attended the Philadelphia "Satellite March" in company of my daughter and a few thousand friends I mostly haven't met yet.

I parked near where I work and walked from there rather than at the March official starting point. Being of German descent, I was on time .... and thus a bit ahead of the wave of the official marchers. I got to see the opening of the ceremonies before the wave came in. The opening and closing was by a band called "Reality Cooks". Not a great band, but hey, better than I could have done (well, I could probably learn to play the cowbell middlin' OK with a few years practice).

A half hour or so later, the pavillion was pretty well jammed. I have no idea how far out the crowd ran, but some people talking said it was fairly crowded all the way out to Front Street. One quadrant of the crowd ...

As usual I didn't take pictures as I should. But of course there are many off the official web site. One strikingly different thing about the event was that women speakers and organizer spokespeople greatly outnumbered men. In the sciences, the disparity between men and women still strikes heavily against the distaff side of the scale, but events like this provide some measure of hope that old structured patterns of privilege and prejudice can give way to more equitable social patterns. We can hope.

Mostly it was a rainy, miserable day. But at that thousands came out, and at least some of us endured through until the end. I was there to be counted and bear witness. That I did.

Reality Cooks closed and again nobody covered their ears and screamed, so I can't complain.

As things drew to a close, I encouraged my daughter ... real scientist about to defend her thesis in Anthropology ... to ham it up a bit.