I was recently hooked on Matt Smith’s incarnation of Doctor Who. It’s on Netflix – you should join me in this addiction.

Alert: Very light spoilers for S05E01, along with the disclosure of a character first introduced in S04E08. You stand warned.

For the uninitiated, here’s what you have to know:

The Doctor is a nigh-immortal being from another world. He has a time machine called a TARDIS, which is charmingly disguised as a British police phone box. The Doctor travels with human companions all over time and space. Most episodes take place in a new setting, with a variety of creatures, challenges and disasters each week.

So who’s the hero?

Often, sure, it’s the titular, male character.

Just as often, others get a turn.

Amelia Pond

The Doctor first encounters Amy when she’s a little girl. They have a pretty formative adventure together, then he leaves, promising to come back for her within a few minutes. Thanks to problems with the TARDIS, he doesn’t reappear until Amy’s early 20′s.

Meanwhile, Amy grows up a weirdo, believing in a man from another world who’s coming to get her any minute now.

This independent streak gives Amy some fantastic moments of heroism. She doesn’t let The Doctor order her around, she plunges headlong into danger, and she takes care of herself with the same aplomb as any other action hero. She may be a fish out of water at times, but she’s not helpless.

In one of the most powerful episodes I’ve watched so far, we see Amy separated from her companions and forced to live three decades alone, fighting well-meaning robots who will nonetheless kill her. She’s ruthless and strong – but still worthy of love from her companions.

River Song

I love River Song. She’s one of my favorite characters across this whole genre.

River is another badass time traveler. She’s certainly a rogue – the series makes both subtle and overt references to a criminal past. Her motivations are far more complicated than petty crime, though, and she cares a lot for The Doctor and his companions. She’s played pitch-perfectly by Alex Kingston.

Who’s 50 years old.

While River isn’t part of the main cast, she’s had a big role in The 11th Doctor’s arc so far. It occurred to me that you just don’t see that many women past their 30′s playing major roles in action series. This stuff is usually the domain of young men and whatever flavor of the week they feel like romancing.

Casting Kingston brings a confidence and credibility to the role that a younger actress just couldn’t portray. Within minutes you buy that she has traveled all over time and seen shit you can’t imagine.

So what about the little boys?

When I was a boy I would have loved Doctor Who. It’s a fun fantasy world with surprising, satisfying stories.

I really hope a whole generation of nerd boys – and girls! – are growing up as they’re enjoying this show. It promotes a healthy picture of both men and women being able to make substantive contributions to difficult problems. It portrays women as having agency and intelligence. It portrays men as having feelings and relationships. It portrays a world where more than just 20-somethings can get things done.

In short – it’s a refreshing antidote to the princess story poison so often fed to young minds. Rather than shellacking kids into rigid gender roles, Doctor Who describes a world where anyone can have courage, smarts and strength, no matter their age or the contents of their underwear.

I’m happy these stories have a found popular success.

I think the last time I really chewed through Babylon 5 was about 7 years ago. Something about it keeps it off of the streaming services I use.

But I still think about it a lot. I remember stories and lessons they carried, along with quotes that perfectly describe certain situations.

There were times where the show’s production values could feel a smidge low-rent. The early-90′s CG was rough at first. But the strength of the narrative powered through the superficial. Because Babylon 5 was a show about and inspired by mythology.

The show eases you into a war with an Army of Light pitted against a murderous force known as the Shadows. The great powers at play are divided by their passion for either order and cooperation or chaos and greed. It’s foundational stuff. It slots right into our need for stories that give us the big picture on how our actions have consequences. There’s endless exploration of avarice and sacrifice, tragedy and redemption, vengeance and forgiveness.

The building blocks for a morality.

The show was built by a guy named J. Michael Straczynski. JMS planned the whole series out in advance.

Who dies, who’s betrayed, who wins, who loses, what happens a thousand years later, what happened five hundred years before… the whole thing. He even had backup plans in case he lost an actor for a crucial role.

Unique in science fiction, unique in television overall, the show has a startling internal consistency. The characters respond and grow believably. Not everyone gets along and their gripes have purpose beyond immediate dramatic tension. Once-enslaved races want justice. Once-great empires long for a moment in the sun again. There’s business, religion, careerism, substance abuse, even gay people.

It is, plausibly, someone else’s world where things happen. Rather than hitting you with twists, Babylon 5 surprises you with snowballing consequences. A small event in season 1 might credibly ripple into something very big by the end of the show.

Before Game of Thrones, before Battlestar Galactica, before Breaking Bad, JMS was pioneering the high-brow serial drama. And setting a pretty high bar.

So you forgive the rough spots because you’re lost in the story.

But here I know I’m proselytizing. Because that’s what happens when you get really into the stories that help you interpret your moral compass. As an atheist most of my years, that realization gives me a reconnection to a point of view that had seemed impossible to meet.

I can see the power of that link to stories and deeds. The shared vocabulary between members of the tribe. The comfort provided by knowing “hey, this person buys the same concepts I do about how you should treat other people.”

Watching multiple links cross my streams with last week’s news on JMS’s return to TV gave me this really fun, tribalist, belong-y vibe. The reassurance that others out there valued the same stories, and the same heroes, I did. Finding the rare person who’s really into the lore is exciting – one of the worst dates I ever went on was at least redeemed by my companion being an avid watcher of Babylon 5.

Religion offers a compelling promise of having a trustable people to share an often dangerous existence with. A contract around decency. API for morality.

I may still have a list of legitimate beefs about how people negotiate the boundaries of their beliefs, but I feel genuinely bad for my dismissal of belief as a whole.

So, in a word of far-too-late advice for the sneering atheist fuckball I’ve been at times, and any others who might benefit from such perspective, I offer this:

What if I told you that you, too, had a religion? You’re not calling it that, but you’ve got one. You have a pantheon of figures who’ve passed through your imagination. The heroes. The villains. Some from reality, some from storytelling. They’ve drawn your contours of right and wrong. Everyone needs that. Nothing wrong with it.

So don’t be a prick.

Whether it’s Jesus and Mary or Delenn and Valen, everyone needs a starchart to help them navigate a world where seeing the future is impossible. Everyone needs a frame for guessing how their behavior impacts others.

End sermon.

I’m grateful to JMS, along with shows like Star Trek and Quantum Leap, and books like Speaker for the Dead, for giving me avatars for understanding right and wrong. Canons and pantheons exist for a reason – and whether yours comes off-the-shelf from a religion, or you assemble it from scratch, I feel a certain comfort knowing we have a lot more in common than I used to imagine.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about some of the unique privileges that helped make my career possible.

I was stunned by the outpouring of supportive tweets and emails, from people of all backgrounds. Crucially, though, a handful of fellow latinos reached out eager to meet and trade stories.

Before that post, I felt like the only boricua in the Valley. Overnight, I realized I wasn’t at all alone. I wasn’t prepared for how the experience of meeting these great folks would change me.

Assimilation and rejection

I assimilated hard.

I don’t know Spanish. This was actually by design – my mom, a lesbian, feared that high-fidelity communication between myself and my very Catholic grandmother would lead to problems. And I think she was right.

So English is my first and only language. No accent.

Growing up in Albuquerque, there were precious few artifacts of my Puerto Rican heritage around. By the time I was a teenager, what I did know of that heritage seemed grim.

My grandmother’s cooking rarely agreed with me. The island had a high unemployment rate. My grandfather told stories of neighbors raped and murdered for intercepting an air-dropped shipment of cocaine. Over time, my mother revealed the history of sexual abuse she’d suffered at the hands of family.

To say nothing of the fact that my Puerto Rican father had spent a decent amount of my life pretending he had no idea who I was. (Though I am heartened to note his VA pension administrator was of a different view, and cheerfully garnished those funds to help finance my upbringing.)

When I looked at my heritage, I felt precious little to be proud of – and saw plenty that I found repellant.

I ran from my brownness.

How come there’s no Puerto Ricans on Star Trek?

…’Cause they don’t have jobs in the future, either!

- a joke I told often as a teenager and young adult

Craving success

I don’t know why. I don’t know when it started. The earliest memory I have of ambition was being five years and declaring “I’m going to be a business man!” I wanted to carry a briefcase and fly on airplanes. Because that’s what success looked like.

You know what it didn’t look like? Puerto Rican. All the great successes I saw in the media, the heroes I’d come to identify, they were white dudes. They talked a certain way, they looked a certain way. Whatever that was, I wanted it.

And because hispanic people weren’t often players in the realms I wanted to enter, it furthered my prejudice against my own heritage. Success, it seemed, required a wholesale rejection of all in me – all in anyone, really – that was from that place.

Whatever I was, I was going to build myself with parts from anywhere but Latin America.

Stranger in a strange land

The result has been a life where I’ve endured an ever-present feeling of being somehow alien. There was nowhere for me to belong. But I thought it didn’t matter. Survival and success required ignoring anything that might hinder my progress. So the contradiction was left quietly unresolved.

Until, at long last, I started having conversations with other people who were like me. People who were ambitious and driven. People who worked in technology. People who, it just so happened, shared my heritage, and many of my struggles with it.

It was only then that I realized how orphaned I’d been feeling all these years. Only then that I realized that my origins were not incompatible with the success I’d spent my whole life chasing.

It was like a knot untangling itself.

So now what?

Honestly – I don’t know.

But this is what I’ve figured out.

Existence is hard. I am not unique. There is, in so many of us, components of our origins that are difficult to reconcile. Whether you grew up rich or poor, whatever shade of skin you were born with. The messiness of human affairs makes it unlikely in the extreme that you can pop into existence without something hanging over your head that you don’t know what to do with.

Some of the people I’ve grown closest to over the years couldn’t have been more different from me in their upbringing – yet we shared a fundamental rattling of doubt around the identities we inherited through genes and circumstance. It’s a difficult pain and the instinct is often to bury it since its resolution seems impossible.

In Milk, a scene depicts gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk and his lover considering a death threat received in the mail. Milk sticks the letter on his fridge:

If you put it away in a drawer it just gets bigger and scarier. Now it’s right here, it can’t get us.

Avoiding the problem might have been exactly what I needed for awhile. But it grew in the process. For me, dragging matters into the open and having real conversations with people who understood my challenges made all the difference in the world.

So that’s what I know. And if you want to talk to me on this subject – whether you were born in Arecibo or Atlanta – you’ve got my ear.

It’s hardly a new argument, but I’m making it anyway:

Computer programming should be a required subject for K-12 students.

This isn’t vocational

A common refrain from both luddites and technologists alike is that not everyone wants to be a programmer when they grow up. This is a red herring.

Not everyone wants to be a novelist, nor do they wish to be a physics professor. We nonetheless construct curricula that require literacy in language and math, as failure to grasp these subjects limits the basic options and earning potential of any given human being.

Even work seen as “menial” – fast food, say – requires the ability to read and do math. You can’t operate a point-of-sale terminal or count money without those skills.

Computing has risen to similar importance. It’s a simple function of ubiquity. Computers are in our pockets, they’re in our homes, they’re all over human existence. They’re certainly in the workplace.

Computers run research labs and they run Burger King. Each year, manufacturing becomes less about humans doing things and more about robots doing as humans tell them. Selling things requires a web presence, whether you make high tech smartwatch or a pastrami sandwich.

It’s hard to see a way to succeed in the coming decades that doesn’t somehow involve a computer.

This is about ending the magic

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

- Clarke’s Third Law

The problem with computers is that their abstractions have proven too successful. It is possible to be productive today without understanding a single thing about how and why a computer works as it does. Which is great.

Until things break down.

There are untold numbers of people getting $200 “virus scans” at office supply stores. The efficacy of these scans would be more than surpassed by any number of free tools available to anyone with an internet connection.

And this is just one example of the snake oil that becomes very easy to peddle when you exploit asymmetry of knowledge in technology. Computers handle our money, our communications, our friendships, our very identities. When a single class of technology is responsible for such an enormous swath of our prosperity and wellbeing, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of the capabilities and limitations of that technology.

That understanding keeps you in the driver’s seat – while preventing your exploitation.

Programming illuminates what’s possible – and what isn’t

There is no clearer demonstration of how a computer works than the act of giving it orders yourself.

Quickly you learn that these machines are dumb and literal, especially compared to our fuzzy but nimble minds. They require logical, ordered instruction. They expect and demand consistency.

There is no magic.

But there is order and predictability. Tell the computer to flash a light continuously if and only if the user is pressing a given button, and sure enough, the computer will.

Every single time.

The computer will not read your mind, the computer will not take initiative, the computer will not conspire against you. It will sit there, obediently awaiting instruction.

Computers are not magical things, operating beyond any mortal’s ability to fathom. They are powerful tools that any person can leverage. The difference between hearing that and knowing that is driven home powerfully by act of writing some code.

This is the part where you’ll stop me and say –

Now then. Why does it have to be programming? Why can’t it be some broader computer literacy or some such, where people can learn about the computer without having to get into the messiness of variables and logic and control flow?

I’ll tell you.

Bugs, man

It’s not that programming per se teaches fundamental computer literacy. Rather, it’s the act of creating bugs. Because once you’ve created a bug, you must learn to debug. And that is where the transformation happens.

Often, bugs are dumb. The wrong variable here, over-released memory there, forgetting to break out of a loop on the other thing.

Bugs also drive home the helplessness of the computer itself. As it has no initiative, it can only reproduce the same wrong behavior over and over again, slavishly obeying your orders until the inevitable crash they produce. So it’s up to you to resolve the problem.

The first stage of debugging is despair.

“I have no idea why this isn’t working the way I expect. Maybe I never will.”

The next stage is investigation.

“Let me try unhooking some things to see if prevents this crash.”

Then despair again.

“Fuck!”

Until finally,

“Oh. That was dumb. Fixed it.”

The intuition and creative problem solving derived from debugging practice is a powerful combination of skill and confidence. The experience will leave the student with a framework for understanding, fixing and preventing technological problems in their lives. It is potent to know, from experience, that while a given issue might be inscrutable at first, it will yield under a logical, focused attack. Even basic stuff like fixing the wiring in your home or getting your stereo and your television to play nice with each other becomes easier with this mindset.

No one can argue that computers are going away. Since they’re only going to further saturate our lives, why not make sure our kids have a strong chance to master them?

After months of waiting, my Pebble arrived Thursday. It sounds like I’m among the first to receive one, a matter of luck in my timing and choosing the black-colored model, which was the first go to mass production.

I didn’t have many expectations for the device – I’d backed it on Kickstarter because it seemed neat and I was excited to see hardware startups to pick up a bit of steam.

But after just five days of wearing it, I gotta say – this thing belongs in my life.

Second Screen

With the Pebble, I can check my iPhone without checking my iPhone. Spare me the first-world problems meme for a moment and consider:

Decorum

Sometimes I want to give the people I’m with my undivided attention. That means the phone stays firmly in my pocket. And as long as no calls or notifications come in, that’s fine. But once my pocket starts buzzing, my mind can start to run wild with curiosity. Is someone in trouble, or did a dumb tweet get faved by someone? That game can erode attention after awhile. With the Pebble, I can discreetly glance at my wrist without breaking the flow of conversation.

Good for walking

I spend a lot of time walking. Touch screens demand real attention, as you have to engage both eyes and fingers to use them. Kinda need my eyes for walking. Since Pebble can control any media app on my iPhone, I can keep the phone in my pocket and my eyes on the sidewalk ahead of me. The Pebble’s hardware buttons are large and meaty, very easy to operate blind.

This is worlds better than the remote controls included on some earbuds – back, forward and play/pause get their own buttons when Pebble is in music mode. If there’s any ambiguity about which track is playing, it’s quick and easy to glance at the Pebble’s screen.

Since Pebble is waterproof, it also makes it easier to use your phone – which isn’t – in the rain.

The best part about walking with Pebble – no more missed calls or texts when you’re out and about. With your legs in motion, it’s easy to miss the buzz of your phone. Pebble’s built-in vibration motor gives a nice kick to the wrist. Notifications display right on the screen, so you can make a choice about answering or ignoring without breaking stride.

Safety first

San Francisco is my favorite place on earth, but a reality of living here is sometimes you’ll walk through an area where you’d rather keep expensive things in your pocket. The benefits I’ve described above make it easy to interact with your phone even under circumstances where you’d like to pretend you don’t have one.

 

For me, having a second interface to my iPhone is proving to be pretty handy.

Quirks and needed improvements

Pebble is a good product, full stop. Pebble is amazing for a product made by a small team without VC funding. The build quality is first-rate, the software is reliable.

I found the stock strap to be a little chunky and, as it was thick rubber, it didn’t breathe very well. I replaced it with a nice nylon number for $12 on Amazon.

Out of Pebble’s hands is a bug in iOS that requires fiddling with notification settings on a per-app basis each time you reboot the phone. The tech that allows iOS to pass notifications along to Pebble and other Bluetooth devices was introduced in iOS 6 and its immaturity shows. Hopefully this flakiness is resolved sooner rather than later. But fuck it – I live in early adopter town, this is how it goes.

Entirely in Pebble’s control is the ordering of “apps” on the watch itself. I use two apps – a particular clock style I like and the music app. Switching between these two is cumbersome, requiring me to scroll up or down a menu to make my selection. Ordering apps by recency of use would solve this immediately. If you could re-order the system apps, that would do the job too.

Pebble uses a clever but proprietary magnetic connector for charging. This allows it to be waterproof, which is great news. The tradeoff is that there is one and only one cable in my possession that can charge the watch and, for the moment at least, there’s no easy way to get a second one for the office or travel bag. Pebble’s week-long battery life mitigates the pain I’d probably otherwise feel around this point, though.

Overall, it’s a love connection

I’m impressed. I love using it. At one point I forgot to put it on my wrist and I spent the rest of that day regretting it. I can recommend the pre-order for city-dwellers and techies. I’m excited to see what they do with their SDK, so I can start to build custom apps that run on the watch.

While there’s still a lot to do in Pebble land – most Kickstarter backers haven’t even gotten theirs yet – there’s a bright future ahead of this product.

I was born to a 20-year-old single mother with a GED in Caguas, Puerto Rico.

I am writing to you today because a series of events occurred in my life. While none of these events is unique on their own, what is unique is that together they accrued certain privileges that allowed me to become the first person in my family to earn a six figure income in their 20′s.

I’m the first to make a career in tech.

You can contrast this to a cousin of mine, born around the same time, near the same place, who killed himself with alcohol at age 19.

Did I get here thanks to hard work?

Partly.

But mostly – I got here thanks to privilege.

‘Life is all right in America!’

The greatest gift my mother ever gave me was packing up and moving to New York City, eventually landing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I know with certainty that having access to America – the mainland, the honest-to-god US of A – was the most crucial part of my privilege.

Total immersion in America left me free to absorb and fully adopt the culture. I sometimes forget I’m hispanic. My nerdiness hinders me more than my race with regard to cultural references. I have a perfectly unremarkable American accent – to the point where I can pass for white as far as Texas State Troopers are concerned.

When I got old enough to work, Albuquerque’s unemployment rate was a third of Puerto Rico’s, leaving me ample opportunity to make money and gain experience. I even had a chance to work at Sandia National Laboratory – but my clearance came through too late in my senior year.

I also had tons of examples of what was possible in America. Albuquerque may have been a bit of a backwater, but it’s a beautiful backwater. There’s money tucked away there, and people weren’t shy about making use of it. I saw breathtaking houses that gave me pole stars for what I could achieve in my life.

And let’s not forget the symbolism of New York, buried deep in my psyche.

In short – I have no trouble relating to the group of people who have been 90% of my bosses.

White guys.

My mom dated a school teacher

My mom speaks two languages, and I give her credit for doing more than I do in the linguistics department. But like tons of hispanic parents, she didn’t have a strong grasp on written english.

So her solution was to date a school teacher for a few years.

I began reading pretty early; I’m not going to do a pissing contest on the age. But it was pretty good. My then-co-parent gave my young mind tons of attention. Reading, writing, the sciences, Sherry knew everything I could possibly ask her to tell me for quite a few years. (Maybe you’re scratching your head – my mom’s gay.)

I still remember being age six and having a conversation about atoms over a slice of pizza. I remember being in day care and arguing about evolution with the adult supervisor.

Lots of hispanic kids have to grapple with a bronze age mythology that places the earth’s age at a few thousand years old – imposed as rigid fact.

So I like my deal better.

Welcome to Macintosh

Sherry wasn’t to be permanent in my life – but she left a legacy of multiple literacies.

In addition to teaching me solid english, Sherry was the first person who sat me down in front of a Macintosh. By then, she and my mom were separated. There was no computer in my house.

But sometimes, I’d go to visit Sherry, and spend a substantial amount of time using the Macintosh SE she’d brought home from her job.

My mom took up the baton a couple years later, buying the first computer in my home by the time I was ten.

Of course, it was a Mac. I insisted.

By 12, I was using a pirated copy of Photoshop. Which is good experience to have if you’re going to make a living as a UI person one day.

Values, Values, Values

In elementary school, I had a friend named Anthony Diaz.

Anthony was a thief.

He was given to visiting the 7-11 near our school and helping himself to whatever candy he wanted. I found this behavior scandalous and repugnant. Because my parents had taught me fundamental values. I knew right from wrong. I knew please and thank you. I knew I had to take responsibility for my actions.

Anthony wasn’t so lucky. He got involved with gangs, he talked back to his teachers. His lack of values held him back.

By age seven, my mom had started her own business – and by her 40′s, she’d  be the first in our family to hit the six figure mark. This lesson in self-sufficiency and work ethic is helpful when you want to, say, teach yourself programming, quit your job and switch careers.

Meta-Stable

My home life was pretty stable. There were a few years of utter crazy at the mid-point of my childhood. Still, I never had to worry about the lights going off, about being evicted, about anyone in my life disappearing into the correctional system.

Since my mom is gay, there were also no surprise kids popping into existence – aside from me.

So, to recap, here’s a conservative estimate of my privileges:

• Access to a college-educated parent
• Access to a stable and responsible parent
• Access to American culture
• Access to American jobs
• Access to examples of success
• English literacy
• Science literacy
• Technology literacy
• A home computer
• Freedom from oppressive mythologies or superstitions
• Spare time to indulge intellectual curiosities (no siblings to care for)
• Values education
• A role model for self-sufficiency
• Overall stability in the home

Have I worked hard to earn my current position? I have. I spent months beating my head against programming books. I worked 30 hours a week on iPhone development, on top of the 50 hours I gave to my day job. I saved tons of money so I could leave that job. I risked homelessness – and almost got there.

And now I have a great career.

But if you start taking away components of my privilege, it doesn’t take very long before the life I have now starts to look increasingly unlikely. For example – what if my grandmother hadn’t been living in Manhattan at the time when my mom had planned to move? We crashed there for over a year before my mom got on her feet.

So I stand upon the shoulders of giants. Holding a winning lottery ticket.

And it’s only because of those facts that I even got a chance to work very hard for my career. Any pride I take in that hard work is dwarfed by the anxiety that I don’t yet know how to help others get to the point where they can work as hard as I have.

If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

This week I’ll remember the brave crews of the shuttles Challenger and Columbia. I wasn’t yet sentient when the world lost Challenger but I was a teenager for Columbia. The news hurt. I’d never heard the names of the crew before that day. But nonetheless, I felt it – some important part of us had been lost.

These men and women paid with their lives for the furtherance of the human condition. They were heroes. I’ll end with Aaron Sorkin’s explanation of why their work mattered:

‘Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next.

The West Wing, “Gallileo”

Macworld reviews Hipmunk for iOS:

You could try any one of a number of free search tools from the likes of Kayak, Expedia, and whatever travel site you care to name. But save yourself the time and jump directly to Hipmunk’s offering for a clean app that really takes advantage of Apple’s mobile operating system.

Over two years at Hipmunk, I had the good fortune to enjoy some solid press for my work. Michaels’s review is extra satisfying, though, as he seems to appreciate many of my favorite parts of the design.

Hacker News has a habit of being hostile to young people who include their age when sharing their projects.

This pissed me off.

Do they want attention? Of course! They believe, correctly, that the attention of more experienced people will lead to their growth. We should absolutely give it to them.

Getting young people into science and technology is the single greatest professional duty any technologist has. We need help. The problems are so many and the minds equipped for them so few.

We have an entire planet of dumb objects waiting to be woken up. We need software written and interfaces designed for classes of products we can’t even imagine yet.

So we need kids to grow up and choose the very, very hard work of learning to bend technology to their will. We need them to believe they can make careers out of it.

And we certainly need them to believe that when they get there, they won’t be surrounded by assholes.

A few weeks ago, I discovered the Twitter account of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.

He was an instant follow.

Hadfield uses the service in the stereotypical way – to share photos and the mundane happenings in his day-to-day existence. When a guy is tweeting from the International Space Station, the day-to-day quickly becomes extraordinary.

For the first time, I’m getting a daily glimpse at what life is like for the small number of people who don’t live on this planet. And I’m not alone – to join the fun, all you need is internet access. As of today, almost 200,000 people around the world are following Hadfield as he snaps photos out of the ISS cupola. They’re reading 140 character briefings on the experiments and equipment in orbit.

They’re getting to know an astronaut.

For better or worse, our media has long been dominated by corporations who, like all businesses, prioritize their profits. Science hasn’t always been an easy sell in previous forms of mass media. We’ll see dozens of lawyers or cops for every one researcher or astronaut who graces our TV screens.

Despite early frivolity, despite years of derision both fair and not, social is proving its unique value as a mass media. Rather than the hours and dollars and wheedling needed to produce a television show or book, Chris Hadfield’s Twitter costs little more than bandwidth and some of the astronaut’s attention.

200,000 followers, some of whom are surely bots, is nothing close to a Super Bowl, that’s true. But part of the value of this new form of mass media is its granularity. Space nuts can get a daily, personal fix of news from out there. Low production costs means that Hadfield can keep tweeting for as long as he finds the conversations rewarding. Audience size and profitability take a back seat to the simple satisfaction of all parties. No clueless bean counter or suit can cancel this show.

While a TV network might scoff at these numbers, for an individual, it’s pretty impressive to be able to reach 200,000 people with just 20 days of musings and photos.

This level of access to role models in science gives me hope for humanity’s future. I’m not sure that the television age would have found the imagination or insight to give Chris Hadfield and his colleague Thomas Marshburn a daily, public platform. Luckily, kids today are going to get a better deal. They’ll have help to imagine themselves in space, and maybe just a few more of them will opt into the very hard journey to get there themselves.

There’s plenty that still needs fixing in our culture. Yet, I feel a renewed optimism. We’re inheriting a future where science and exploration can begin to credibly compete with the standard media trifecta of sex, scandal and violence.

Maybe that’s even better than a hoverboard.