I'm speaking at the Blogging While Brown Conference

I have been selected as a panelist/presenter at the 3rd Annual Blogging While Brown Conference. I attended this same conference last year and was initially unsure of what I might gain from the conference, I was pleasantly surprised and was very glad...

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What I Said

Yesterday I described how a Great Man of Science sat in my office and explained to me some exciting research done by one of my recent PhD students and me, as if the work had instead been done by one of our collaborators, a very famous scientist (the...

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Diversity in Science Carnival # 9: All Shades of Green is up

Yes, it's a party!  Celebrating the people of Science and Engineering!With April being the month we celebrate Earth Day, Arbor Day, and Environmental Education what better way to celebrate these Green activities than to celebrate the people who...

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Invisible Me

Not long ago, a Great Man of Science came to my department, gave some talks, and met with faculty, students, and researchers. I have met him before, most recently ~ 6 months ago, but we do not know each other well at all.I expected him to be familiar...

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Selected readings 4/28/10

Interesting reading and news items.These items are also bookmarked at my Diigo account.Cross-discipline Effort Tracks Evolution of Human Uniqueness and Modern BehaviorA panel of scientists challenges what it is to be distinctly human and retraces the...

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Solar Flare

The main character and narrator of the novel Solar by Ian McEwan is Michael Beard, a repulsive Nobel Prize- winning physicist who had the stereotypical experience of a flash of brilliance as a young physicist, soon after which he intellectually burned...

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One-way Traffic?

One of the committees I was on this year recently consumed quite a lot of my time, and involved a marathon session in which a group of faculty from all over the university got together and discussed other faculty. I (mostly) enjoyed the wide-ranging...

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Finger on the Button

The administrative staff members at a university's Sponsored Research Office (SRO) are the ones who actually submit proposals on behalf of the university and individual PIs. They push the button that sends the proposal to the funding agency.When preparing...

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Active galaxies and supermassive black hole jets

Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole in their center – sometimes even more than one. These black holes can have masses up to ten billion solar masses (1010 M⊙) or more. One of the largest known examples is part of a binary system, and it weighs...

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Travelog San Francisco: Protecting the Coastal Bay

When I was in San Francisco I did the tourist-y things.  I took the double-decker bus to Fisherman's Wharf, China Town, and the Golden Gate Bridge. I love the Bay.  I can see why people bit the bullet and pay the huge costs of living to call...

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