West of the Moon

writing and editing

the mystery of mystery.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been reading more and more mystery novels, and I’m curious about the genre.  (Also, totally enjoying the genre, which is why I’m curious.)
It actually all started about five or six years ago, on one of the long driving trips.  I was staying overnight in Wall, South Dakota, and [...]

Tags: mystery, publishing

sometimes the answer can surprise you.

So, as promised, my favorite reunion story. (Apologies to those of you who’ve heard this three or four times already.) It happened on Saturday night, the year that I was housing coordinator. Saturday is the best night, for reunion workers. Reunion week starts on Sunday, with very intense last-minute preparation, and [...]

Tags: personal history, reunion

math on the bias.

One of the projects I’m working on at the moment is a series of articles for an upcoming encyclopedia of world history; I’m writing a set of short pieces for them about various aspects of science and technology in the ancient and early medieval periods. Two of my assigned articles deal with Indian mathematics [...]

Tags: bias, history of science, teaching

what we’re doing here.

This June, it will be ten years since I first started keeping an online journal.
I was going to say something like, “online journal, that’s what we called them before they were called weblogs,” but that’s not entirely true.  Online journals were always much more about personal narrative, telling stories about your life.  They’re by nature [...]

Tags: personal history, weblogs

Bryant Park and Sigur Ros

For a few months now, I’ve been listening to the podcasts of The Bryant Park Project, a new NPR morning news show. I have mixed reactions to it–it’s a fun radio show, and interesting, but it’s not what I want from NPR in terms of a news show, and I’m extremely wary of the [...]

Tags: bryant park project, integrated media

Twenty Epics on Escape Pod.

The newest installment of Escape Pod features Stephen Eley’s story The Dinner Game, from Twenty Epics. ( Lulu | Amazon | BN ) (Also currently available at Borderlands Books in San Francisco and the Barnes and Noble in downtown Berkeley, in limited quantity.) It’s read by Maia Whittaker, who has a [...]

Tags: escape pod, twenty epics

machine translation.

One of the many problems with having so many writers as friends is that their language games aren’t as much fun when I play them. Case in point, the machine translation exercise that David and Ben were playing around with. I took a paragraph from my dissertation, ran it through a few Google [...]

Tags: dissertation

The State of the Susan.

It’s not a bad time for a general check-in, I think, given how sporadic my posting has been.

The Graduate Program: is almost over. I’m graduating in May, and my dissertation progress is pretty much right on track. I’m going to have to keep working pretty hard between now and May (my filing deadline [...]

Tags: checking in, graduate school, teaching