I recently took an ultra-fun workshop run by the Queen of Shitty Robots, Simone Giertz. It’s the second of hers I’ve done, the first being a lightening round of Lego Mindstorm building to create robots that would then be raced against each other over the distance of one meter. This time, we were creating robot […]
This month I left Ottawa for the first time in years. It was marvelous to be somewhere else, doing something else, for once. It was not quite as marvelous to be in transit again. There’s nothing as boring as travel delay stories, but here’s a flavour of the experience: People were taking photos of the […]
Canada’s politics are stable enough that I can afford to be, more or less, a single-issue voter. Six years ago, I wrote to the incoming member of parliament for my riding – a candidate for whom I did not vote. “Dear Ms. McKenna: Congratulations on your new position as our Member of Parliament. My parents […]
Where do you go to read? There’s probably a chair or couch in your home where you read, but I’m talking about when you go somewhere to read. Out of personal preference or because homes can be chaotic or lonely, is there somewhere you go? I’ve keenly felt the loss of a place to read […]
What’s something you used to love but have lost your feeling for? For me, in a world that looks a lot like science fiction, I have trouble with the speculative novels I used to love. I’ve suspended my disbelief already, even in real life, and I shrug at the magic imagined in these stories. This […]
When I was 16, I went off to be a kayaking instructor at a Boy Scouts camp in Ontario called Opemikon. The camper population was divided into little kids and big kids, and I was the only girl on staff watching the big kids, so I got my own platform tent whereas everyone else had […]
This post originally appeared in 2012, before advances in artificial intelligence brought the possibility of deep fakes and other ways for storytelling artifacts to lie. Here I looked at the ways in which information can be false, and how we typically only look or check for certain kinds of veracity. Ever since reading the comment […]
This post originally ran in November of 2011. The universality of science – an obligation to produce identical results no matter the setting – removes a certain sense of place from science history. What does it matter where mitosis was first understood, if it could just as well be discovered anywhere in the biosphere? Furthermore, […]