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26 April 2011
Why Read (Speculative) Fiction?
Today I gave a two-part guest lecture to a bunch of Cornell freshmen. The first part of the lecture was The Science of Red Mars, which you can read about over here. But since this writing seminar (taught by my officemate) might be the only course that some of these students take which involves reading fiction and writing about it, my officemate encouraged me to talk a bit in general about reading fiction, and particularly speculative fiction. I figured that since I already put together the guest lecture I might as well post it here!
12 January 2011
Teacher Webinar: Rovers and Career Advice
Yesterday I had the opportunity to give my first ever “webinar” to a group of teachers and some of their students, and thanks to the miracle of the internet, the whole thing is recorded so you can watch it too! Shoshe Cole, another Mars graduate student here at Cornell gave the first presentation, focusing mostly on general Mars background info and the current Mars Exploration Rovers. My presentation starts at just shy of 1 hour into the recording, and I talked about Mars Science Laboratory and my involvement in the mission through ChemCam work and landing site selection.
We also both included some career advice for the teachers to pass onto their students, so if you or someone you know are interested in a career in planetary science (or science more generally), you might want to take a look!
21 February 2010
Reaching out to the Interested Public
Emily Lakdawalla over at the Planetary Society blog posted the other day about a talk that she gave at the Next-generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) about how to get the most bang for your buck with public outreach. The main point was that the most successful outreach efforts do not necessarily target The Public as a whole, but rather cater to members of the public that are already passionate about …
17 November 2009
Be a Martian!
Fact #1: As a Mars scientist, I am incredibly spoiled. There are so many missions to Mars right now sending back so much data, that even if they all went silent tomorrow, it would be decades before we managed to look at all the data and figure out what it’s telling us. Fact #2: There are lots of people out there (I’m looking at you, loyal readers!) who would love …
9 September 2009
If This is Socialist Propaganda, Please, Send More
Surely by now you have heard that president Obama attempted to brainwash our nation’s children with socialist propaganda yesterday. It is apalling, isn’t it? An outrage! But have you actually heard or read what he said? I’ll let his words speak for themselves: I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself. Every single one of you has something that you’re good at. Every single one of you …
