Tag: science

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Amateur Earthling on Hiatus

I have lots of draft posts in progress here on the back end, calling to me whenever I log in like internet sirens:

  • The Scale and Form of Cities, about how one might design a city from the ground up today, with efficient resource utilization and conviviality in mind.  A follow up to What Are Cities For?
  • Corporate Paternalism, about the ways in which we (especially conservatives) seem to have more faith in corporations than our elected representatives when it comes to making decisions for us.
  • Our Newtonian Hangover, about the non-linear, non-deterministic nature of history and technology, and James Burke’s excellent BBC series The Day the Universe Changed and Connections.  Miraculously, they are almost as relevant today as they were 30 years ago, and we are in the process of implementing one of the strange futures he foretold.
  • The dunes told me to work on passive buildings, which is a more personal and spiritual response to the NREL interview questions than seemed appropriate for a job interview.
  • and a magnum opus entitled What’s Wrong With Graduate School, that examines both how my own graduate career has been uniquely flawed, why I believe the graduate education system as a whole is in general broken, and a vision of what I think higher education might look like by the time any offspring I could conceivably have would be there.

However, at the moment the thing most wrong with graduate school is that I’m still in it.  My PhD defense has been tentatively scheduled for November 20th, and I’m going to the AGU fall meeting in San Francisco in mid-December to present my work, so I’m going to be completely occupied until the beginning of 2010.  There will be no further blog updates between now and then.  Or at least, there shouldn’t be.  If you see me making posts, don’t read them.  Instead ridicule me in person, or offer up some kind of digital castigation.

Of course, you can still read my mind keep in touch with me via my linkstream, my tweets, and my photos.  Oh, and of course there’s always e-mail and the telephone.

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Spinning Europa 1: Introduction

Aaron suggested that my paper would would be much better if it read more like one of my blog posts, and less like a litany of torture lab notebook.  So here it is in parts, written as if I intended for you, dear reader, to read it.  (But don’t worry Bob, I’m actually working on the real paper).  It’ll probably be cathartic, as one of the things I hate about writing papers is the formalistic language.  It makes the content less readable, less enjoyable, less human.  I just don’t see the point.  If the content is up here, then anyone who feels the same way can get an idea of what’s going on without wading through all the passive voice crap.  It’ll also help me enjoy writing it, and let me feel like I got it out of my system.  Plus, on the internet, color figures are free (not $350 for the first page, $175 for each additional page… I mean jeez, that’s like a year’s worth of hosting fees just for one paper), you can insert links, and nobody has to pay $3975 per year for a subscription.  Oh, and sweet, I also get to retain the copyright.  Honestly, paper journals are so sad.  Of course there’s that pesky peer review, but you’ll find a comment form at the bottom of the page, and if you actually make it that far, by all means let me know what you think.  In a production environment, the publication would be hosted on a neutral third party site, precluding me from editing or deleting comments, verifying everybody’s identities, and ensuring that the content was archived effectively.  Alas, we’re not there yet.  Maybe this will seem ridiculous at this point in the grad school experience, but I actually maybe for the first time understand why someone would want to give a talk.  I have results, they’re interesting (if you’re into this kind of thing), but I don’t really know what they mean.

Continue reading “Spinning Europa 1: Introduction”
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Letter to Adam Schiff on Open Access Publishing

Dear Congressman Schiff,

I note that you are on the House Judiciary Committee, which is currently considering H.R. 801, sponsored by John Conyers (D, MI), and entitled the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.  I also notice, courtesy of MAPLight.org, that you received $6,000 from the publishing industry in the most recent election cycle, which is actually more than the average received by those representatives who co-sponsored the bill.

Continue reading “Letter to Adam Schiff on Open Access Publishing”

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Is Contraception the New Abortion?

I ran across this article at Science Progress, about efforts to aggressively enforce the Weldon (or “church”) amendments, which make it illegal to compel a health care worker to provide a service they find morally objectionable.  The author focuses on the possibility that the new rules would change the definition of conception from the time of embryo implantation, to the time of conception – but really, what they do (if you read the PDF) is give broad freedom to all medical personnel to decide for themselves what exactly they do and don’t find conscionable.  Which sounds fine of course, from a libertarian point of view.  But it also sucks if you happen to have accidentally gotten pregnant in Montgomery, AL, or some rural town in North Dakota.  It seems like the rules are so broad as to allow a doctor to refuse to prescribe birth control to an unmarried woman.  Additionally annoying is that this is just another example of the Feds bullying the states with money they took from the state’s citizens – the rule only applies to institutions that take federal money… like just about every public hospital (if there are any left that is…), and it will have the effect of shifting federal funding to conservative institutions, insofar as liberal ones are willing to refuse the federal funding in order to be able to require their personnel to perform all legal and medically advisable procedures.