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Dreaming of success in an age of diminished possibility
It’s taken me me longer to get to this essay than I had intended. While I might offer valid excuses related to work and travel, that wouldn’t be the whole truth. The fundamental reason for this delay...
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Struggling for Work-Life Balance
Of all the questions people can ask, I never expected, “How do you get it all done?” to be the most common. I never thought I’d be the person anyone referred to when they said, “If you need something...
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Temp
I was born in December 1973, 1 year and a few days after the United States’ last crewed mission to the moon. I have been engaged in research astronomy since I was 17, and have spent the entirety of my...
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Abuse
I have PTSD. It’s from events that occurred when I was young; events forced me to learn first hand that sometimes when you go to authorities and ask for help they respond by breaking your soul. Some of...
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Arisia 2017
I’ll be attending Arisia in at the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel from January 13-16. I’m waiting to see what Friday the 13th at a con has to produce. I expect costumes, people; Friday the 13th...
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Resist; Persist.
It’s been 20 days since the Women’s March on DC (and the World). Resistance is not futile, but persistence is hard. Earlier this week I shut down Twitter while trying to get some work done. Messages...
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Science March 2017
Along with many other Americans, I peacefully and legally took to the streets on Saturday, April 22 to make a public call for the support of science. Below is my planned speech, to be given in...
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Rerouting or How Google Maps Tried to Kill Me
Because I wanted to take a pretty photo, Google Maps tried to kill me. I’m currently in Utrecht, the Netherlands for a conference. My hotel is in the city center, and the conference is a few kilometers...
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The Care and Starvation of Ignorance
To quote Randall Monroe: “Saying ‘what kind of an idiot doesn’t know about the Yellowstone supervolcano’ is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first...
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Why I fly American
Today I’m flying from St Louis to San Diego on Southwest Air and I feel a bit like a traitor. For years, I’ve flown on American Airlines pretty exclusively. One of my only speaker requirements is that...
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The Unacknowledged Costs of Academic Travel
I travel a lot. I travel for conferences, for planning meetings, for NASA collaboration meetings, for filming, for launches… for a ton of things that are related to my work. I can’t really complain...
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Big Data and our Humanity: A Talk
[Background: The week of March 11, 2018 I attended the “Computing Morality: Artificial Intelligence and ‘Big Data’ in Science and Faith” conference at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. This was a...
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Living in this body
Examining the Flowers (by Pamela Gay) Earlier today I ran by the post office to ship a package. It’s full on spring & I decided it was time to pull out spring dresses. A women in line complemented...
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Counting rocks: Maybe it’s enough
[N.B. Yesterday I accepted the Issac Asimov Science Award from the American Humanist Society. This is my acceptance speech, which you can watch it over on YouTube. If my voice sounds off, it’s because...
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Astronomy conference economics
What feels like a million years ago, I attended my first American Astronomical Society meeting. It was my senior year at MSU and it was expected that I’d be presenting research to help me get into...
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Will the Boeing / SpaceX space race be fair?
This Sunday, January 19, 2020, after multiple weather-related delays, SpaceX was able to launch a 3-time used Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center’s launch pad 39A. Atop this rocket was a Crew Dragon...
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For every generation a hero: Remembering Apollo 1, Challenger, & Columbia
credit: Jaideep Khemani from Dubai, United Arab Emirates This morning my Google calendar of space history woke me to say that the space shuttle Challenger exploded 34 years ago today. If you are GenX...
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Toward a greater good: TMT & Starlink
[N.B. This post has been bouncing around in my head since I was in Hawaii for the American Astronomical Society Meeting several weeks ago. I haven’t written it yet because I suspect I’m going to piss...
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COVID-19 — Do more than wash your hands
As I watch the COVID-19 virus boil up in hotspots scattered around the globe, I look around at the US and realize that 40 years of presidential economic decisions that favour profit over people have...
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The echos of genetics
When I was in 8th and 9th grade, whenever my parents wanted to buy my grandmother something to wear, I had to try it on. That was the age I stopped growing taller, and she and I were the same height....
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