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14 April 2009
Where the Moon Rocks Live
This month, I am working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and I have to say, it’s a pretty cool place to work. Every morning I ride my bike past the pair of NASA T-38 jets that mark the entrance to Space Center Houston (the touristy part of JSC). I ride through the security checkpoint and on my left are a handful of rockets from the early days of …
9 April 2009
I have joined the dark side
Guess what? I finally joined twitter! I am marschronicler! Do you want to know about the minutiae of my life? My most (and least) profound thoughts? What I had for breakfast? Well, then you are in luck, my friends!
4 April 2009
Yuri's Night and 100 Hours of Astronomy
Are you going to a Yuri’s Night party this year? I am! In about five minutes! In case you’ve never heard of it, Yuri’s night is a worldwide series of parties held on April 4-12 to commemorate Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight! It is the brainchild of Loretta Hidalgo-Whitesides, a fellow NASA Academy alum and all around cool person. This year there are 171 parties in 41 countries on six continents …
14 March 2009
Rocket Scientista
A friend of mine from undergrad, who is an honest-to-goodness rocket scientist had started a new blog about astronomy and grad school and what it’s like to be a crazy rocket scientist. She just put up a nice post about grad students looking ahead to faculty positions and how we need to take time to appreciate how cool our current jobs are. Here’s an excerpt: While everyone talks about how …
12 January 2009
Colonizing Earth
The other day I helped a race of hideous spiderlike aliens colonize Antarctica. I’ve posted about the game Spore before, but the basic idea is that you begin as a protozoan in the primordial ooze and work your way up through various stages of evolution until you become a space-faring civilization capable of colonizing other worlds, terraforming them, and populating them with plants and animals of your choosing (or even …
15 December 2008
AGU Impressions
Attending a conference this large (15,000 abstracts) is an interesting experience. Boarding the plane last night, I saw a few dozen poster tubes, a clear sign of a scientist on the way to a meeting. The person in the seat in front of me was working on a table of atmospheric isotope ratios in a tattered notebook, and next to me was a friend from Cornell (now at Brown) who …
21 November 2008
Holst's 'The Planets'
A month or so ago, Cornell hosted a planetary science conference, and one of the big events associated with that was a performance of Holst’s famous symphony “The Planets”. For each movement, some of us in the astronomy department put together a slideshow to go with the music. The concert was totally awesome, and there is now a video and audio version available online! For me, firefox crashed when I …
29 October 2008
NaNoWriMo
“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.” – Leonard Bernstein Starting on Saturday, I will be participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an annual activity in which insane writers attempt to complete a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. The rules are that you can plan as much (or as little) as you want beforehand, but the page must …
24 October 2008
New President of the Planetary Society!
I just found out that the Planetary Society has selected a new president: none other than my adviser, Jim Bell! I was wondering where he was earlier this week… I guess I’ll have to start addressing him as Mr. President. 🙂
23 May 2008
Facebook for Scientists Launched
Check it out, facebook for scientists: http://www.researchgate.net/ This site just launched today, and it looks like it could be a really sweet tool for “early career scientists” – if it catches on. You can make a profile for yourself, a research vitae with descriptions of current research projects, upload publications, connect with other researchers, and probably much more. There are some hilarious facebook-ish aspects to this site, though: there’s a …
