This story from the New York Times is disturbing–apparently bats are dying, in large numbers, and no one knows why. They’re looking at a set of caves and mines in the northeast that are home to large bat colonies, and in all of these caves, something like ninety percent of the bats are dead or [...]
Tags: science
Posted in personal | No Comments »>The weather’s been beautiful here, and I’ve been penned up indoors most of the time. Yesterday afternoon, I took a break from indoors and worked on my plants a little bit. I have probably talked about the plants before. I never kept houseplants of any kind before I moved to California, but when I first [...]
Tags: begonia, gardening, houseplants, photos
Posted in personal | 1 Comment »>Closing tabs, as they say. I’ve seen a lot of people linking to this article from National Defense Weekly, about SIGMA, a group of science fiction writers who are offering their services to the US government in an advisory capacity. News of this group has been around for a while–the idea being, presumably, that people [...]
Tags: academic trainwreck, hugo, sigma
Posted in academic, personal, science fiction | No Comments »>Rainy-morning flowers. Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi
Tags: flowers, photos, picture-a-day
Posted in personal | No Comments »>Yesterday, in my lecture class (Science in the United States), we ended up having a bit of a class discussion about the borders and boundaries of science. I love this type of question, and I think that we learn a lot about our own assumptions and categories when we try and work through possible answers. [...]
Tags: boundaries, history, science, teaching
Posted in academic | 5 Comments »>Just the other day, I was thinking that it must be some kind of indication about my personality that I got a warm fuzzy happy glow when I heard a newscaster on NPR use the phrase “giant robotic arms on the space station” and not be talking about fiction. Giant robotic arms! On the space [...]
Tags: robots
Posted in personal, science fiction | 3 Comments »>Within the community of people who make their living paying attention to science–science writers, historians of science, science ethics and policy experts, among others–there are a few recurring concerns. One is the lack of scientific literacy in the general public, which is usually seen as being related to a “soundbite culture”. Popular media sources need [...]
Tags: health, science, science literacy, statistics
Posted in academic, personal | No Comments »>I saw the Magnetic Fields last night, at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. It was a great show, a good mix of old and new material, and I always love the differences between the live and recorded versions. Every time I see them live, the older material gets slower and sadder, I think–it’s not [...]
Tags: magnetic fields, personal history
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