Archive of Writings
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The First Day of Summer Not-a-Break
There is a fascinating myth that academics get their summers off to play in the Sun. While the only time most of us are allowed to take vacations is in the summer, we generally work just as hard from the last day of spring semester to the first day of fall semester,...
Detritus of a Geeky Childhood
When my husband and I moved to Illinois we packed all our belonging in two PODS with some (but not much) room to spare. When my parent's sold their house 3 months later, they shipped me my childhood in a PODS-sized space inside a classic moving truck. It took two...
End of Semester Carnival
I JUST FINISHED GRADING EXAMS! I JUST FINISHED GRADING EXAMS! I JUST FINISHED GRADING EXAMS! <insert random happy dance with confused dogs> Wheeeeee 🙂 Ok - now that I have that out of my system... Go visit this weeks carnival of space over at Space Cynic....
Things man will never do 1: Rebuild the Sun
There are certain themes that arise in Astronomy Cast comments and fanmail. Most of the themes are happy, good, warm fuzzies. There are also your typical cranks. There are also, in the humorous category, a regular stream of well-meaning, highly hopeful people saying...
Researching Ourselves: Trends in Paper Citation
While poking through arXiv, I came across a fascinating piece of community introspection. Titled "Disentangling Visibility and Self-Promotion Bias in the arXiv:astro-ph Positional Citation Effect", this paper by J. Deitrich (accepted into the Proceedings of the...
Majoring in Astronomy: Like English, but more expensive
Today while gardening my iPod got stuck on "repeat" while my hands were very very dirty for several hours. This resulted in me listening to Jonathan Larson's Tick, Tick, ... Boom three times before I could get my hands clean enough that I dared touch my happy little...
Caring for Students: 1 in 4 need more
I have to admit that I am a long time SNL fan. There is no good reason, other then tradition, to spend most Saturdays watching, but... It's what I do. And sometimes their opening bit and Weekend Update give my brain something to chew on. Last night I tuned in hoping...
Sunday, Eta Aquarids and Opposing Moons
It is a warm, crisp and clear, spring evening. The stars are bright and Sirius cast an angry glow in in the west as I walked home from a local pub with my husband. I live in a historic neighborhood filled with older homes and midwestern attempts at English...
Anniversary edition of the Carnival of Space
One year later, and still going strong the Carnival of Space plays an anniversary visit to its founding blog, Why Homeschool. Check it out here.
The Middle Ages: Globular Clusters
As an undergrad and even for most of my graduate school years, astronomy had this problem: Globular Clusters seemed to be older than the universe. We all knew this was a matter of someone calculating something wrong, but no one knew what. Cosmologists, looking at the...