This first ran May 17, 2013. The running kids are grown and going to college or have graduated from it. So they’re not running any more, not in that way that looks like they’re powered by lighter-than-air energy sources. That’s fine, because another generation of littles just ran across the yard, running for no good […]
That photo there was a lucky shot. I was sitting on the couch minding my own business and looked up, and the sunlight had hit the glass vase and the water in it and had gone nuts with optics. It went right through the tulip petals so that for me, sitting there, they were translucent […]
Oh jeez I should not write about this. I don’t even want to. I’m doing it anyway. It’s this professional tension between senior women astronomers and junior women astronomers which I hear about it from the juniors, not a lot and never loudly, but intensely. I think — I think — I see both sides […]
This first ran July 2, 2018, back when UNCONTROLLABLE STRESS was only politics, not yet politics/election or politics/election/insurrection; and before the pandemic and way before the pandemic/alpha/delta/omicron; and of course before Putin invaded Ukraine; and on and on, far into the night. It really has been a LOT for a LONG time, hasn’t it. These […]
Ann Finkbeiner: My son died, as did my husband; and so did parents and grandparents whom I loved dearly. I’ve written articles and LWON posts about grief, plus a book. So I consider myself a kind of expert, the kind who knows what she’s lived and read and what other people tell her. But I’ve […]
This first ran July 15, 2013. I was just learning to stay out of Twitter fights. I’ve needed to learn this several times since but I think I’ve about got it now. My reasons have changed though: not only the impossibility of a logical argument but also the improbability that everyone will understand the subtlety […]
Twitter, 11/15/2021, 7:42 a.m. [Time zone? Who knows.] A German satellite watcher says Russia hit one of its own old spy satellites, Kosmos 1408, with a missile and blew it to bits. I wanted to say “blew it out of the sky” but the satellite was of course in orbit so the exploded bits don’t […]
Some things I seem to write about over and over, year after year, far into the night. One of these things is the situation of women in science, usually physics and/or astronomy. The subject bores me until I start thinking about it, and then I get sort of irate. Enraged actually. Well, flame-throwingly furious. The […]