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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Tags: robots
Posted in personal, science fiction | 2 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 [...]
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 [...]
Tags: magnetic fields, personal history
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