Nancy Drew

Morning edition's "In Character" series covered Nancy Drew today. I never read her books, but I appreciate the commentary.

Crime writer Laura Lippman said, "One of the nice things about Nancy Drew books is that it validates curiosity as a virtue, which was not always the message in a lot of things that little girls where told."

Engineers and scientists need to be curious to pursue research. My curiosity always came in the form of wanting to know and solve riddles and puzzles. I had Games magazine for a long time when I was a kid, and there was one riddle book at the Oak Park library that I would check out almost perpetually.

Still today, though, I have to remind myself to foster that curiosity. There are so many opinions and ideas of what research to work on, that I can easily get derailed on the high-level commentary and understanding. At some point I have to dig in, and it's my curiosity that will facilitate the transition.