I was noticing in the tweets coming out of the American Meteorological Society meeting in New Orleans that NASA and NOAA have renamed the recently launched polar orbiter, NPOESS preparatory project, the Suomi NPP, after the late Verner Suomi. This brought back a memory confirming in my own mind the suitability of the choice. Years [...]
This past week I had a rare opportunity to explore using the virtual world of Second Life (SL) as an immersive means of visualizing and exploring real life topography. Generally, a SL sim already has set terrain and arbitrarily replacing that would break everything developed on it. When a friend is obtaining a new sim [...]
Models and simulations of many kinds are tools for dealing with reality; they are as old as humanity itself. Humans have always used mental models to better understand reality, to make plans, to consider different possibilities, to share their ideas with others, to try out changes and alternatives, to develop blueprints for realization of some [...]
I recently had a massage teaching colleague ping me about: 1) Why we need mitochondria? and 2) How many molecules of ATP are used per second in typical muscle contractions? Both questions are a matter of energy, thus piquing my underlying physicist nature. Glucose to ATP The first question really was really along the lines [...]
In the serendipity of looking through various RSS feeds, I came across Don Vandergriff’s recent post, The Best Leadership Article I have Seen, which reprints and links to William Deresiewicz’s lecture Solitude and Leadership posted on The American Scholar. I agree with Vandergriff that it is a very timely and thought provoking piece of writing. [...]
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I’ve found it!), but ‘That’s funny…’ — Isaac Asimov. This piece got its immediate stimulus when I read a recent Opposed Systems Design (OSD) post on “Watts, intuition, ‘ahas’ and go”. What caught my eye and mind was [...]
On the Twitter side, I’ve wandered into the discussion about the inaccuracies and damage to public understanding resulting from ‘he said, she said’ journalism. This is most simply defined as journalism in which both sides of a ‘public debate’ are quoted without regard to their actual expertise and scientific accuracy. Back in 2004, Chris Mooney [...]
I’m off to San Francisco again for more of the AGU conference and tonight’s Science Writer’s dinner. Yesterday I caught the press conference on the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), scheduled to fly “not before 30 January”. The OCO session talks and posters are today and tomorrow. The OCO takes us from about 100 flask samples [...]
Today was the first day of this year’s fall American Geophysical Union meeting. It was also the first time I attended an AGU meeting under freelance press/media credentials rather than as a scientist affiliated with an organization. But let’s move on to content. I spent a goodly portion of the day, first at a press [...]
This is one of those bits and pieces posts. Being almost two months out from being sacked in the LLNL layoffs has added both to my learning curve and to my lists of tasks done. Last Sunday marked the fourth of four weekly required newspaper publications of my filed fictitious business name “Ramblemuse Associates”. What [...]
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