Archive of Writings
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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 grad school. I can’t remember exactly what was in my poster, but I...
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 I'm still recovering from #@$!(*^!@% Bronchitis.] Memory is a...
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 me on my look & when I told her it was...
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 conference with talks ranging from how we train self-driving cars to handle...
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 about the travel; I get to see the world while being exposed to new...
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 my travel gets booked on American. This isn’t because they have the...
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 time." In astronomy education, we spend a lot of time saying "what...
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 away at the University. The conference site recommended biking, so...
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 Springfield, MO. I must start this by saying I am here as an individual. My...
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 were flying so fast it was bogging down my system - and here I mean...