Archive for March, 2013

Saturday poem

If you forget me Pablo Neruda, trans. Ochoa Pérez Isaac I want you to know one thing. You know what it is like: if I look at the crystal moon, the red branch of the quiet autumn through my window, if I touch you by the fire the impalpable ashes or the shriveled firewood, everything draws […]

While you’re waiting for the bus March 26, 2013

Stuff worth reading Red, Bike & Green wants to shift the color balance in bicycling The cycling community would do well to acknowledge that poor folks have been using bikes and their own two feet as their primary form of transportation since long before all their spandex and activism and bike lanes and $3000 bikes […]

Would NSF have funded Galileo?

Still, says Clette, it is fascinating to ‘work’ with colleagues from hundreds of years ago. For instance, he says that even though Galileo’s coverage of the Sun was spotty because Galileo was “busy with planets and other things”, the drawings are detailed enough to reveal information about the magnetic structure of the sunspot groups and […]

How to make the world worse when communicating your research

At a workshop on media relations for scientists, we read the first page of a paper from a totally foreign field and wrote a headline and first paragraph for a news story on the study. It was pretty challenging, but fun, to think of attention-getting but accurate ways to convey research. Then the presenter, someone […]