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 […]
Ann
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 […]
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 […]
I’ve been interviewing women scientists again, younger ones this time. I ask them if they have some kind of semi-official, almost casual way of staying connected with other women scientists. Because, you know, staying connected helps you survive the bullshit. Every time I ask them this question — and the answer is almost always “YES!” […]
Our mother died on August 7, 2010, quite a while ago now. Our father had already died way back in 1978. Last Monday, I noticed the date, thought it was probably their wedding anniversary, and then thought, “Oh, Mom will be sad today.” Then I thought, “No, she’s dead too.” Everybody does this, deaths never […]
I have some unfinished business with an article I wrote. It was about grief, and it got a lot of questions and comments and though I’ve answered some already, I need to answer one more. The answer turns out to need a science metaphor. Science, which goes about its orderly business of sorting out the […]