Now that the public option for national healthcare seems to be on the table as a negotiating point, a new idea (championed by Republicans) has emerged as a compromise: health care cooperatives. These are organizations that unite healthcare consumers with their hospitals and doctors to spread the risk through a […]
As a new faculty member at SMU, I am interested in the research being done by my colleagues. In the spirit of things, I have subscribed to the SMU Research Blog [1]. I was interested to see a recent post about the discovery of a fossil supervolcano in the Italian […]
Science advocacy has given me opportunities to grow not only as an American citizen, but as a citizen scientist. I’ve watched how some Americans have been acting at recent town hall meetings, and I have been horrified. I will not comment on the verity of claims made by those shouting […]
This was my first week as a faculty member at Southern Methodist University. It was pretty low-key, full of paperwork and unpacking. I was excited to choose anoffice and start moving in – that makes a place feel more like a home than a job. Let me step back and […]
Just about one year ago, the Large Hadron Collider had a very well-intentioned opening ceremony. It was globally advertised, and along with the opening came a number of strange controversies over how the LHC would destroy the earth. It all soon passed when the reality of a complex frontier physics […]
Global climate change, war, the economy – progress in all three of these things depend on innovating America’s energy demand to sustainable and acceptable levels, then exporting that innovation to the world before somebody else beats us to it. Tied to this is water conservation, and the need integrate stellar […]
When Galileo Galilei composed his treatise on cosmology, collecting his own many observations of the natural world into a coherent argument, he chose to present the work as a dialogue among three men. One of them, Salviati, spoke for Galileo, and the other two (Sagredo and Simplicio) represented the voices […]
(Written on July 20-21) The folks at the Honda dealership were quite nice, and were fairly fast in diagnosing the problem with the air conditioning. The bottom line: we’ll be in debter’s prison by tomorrow, but our air conditioning will work, by God. The parts won’t arrive until tomorrow morning, […]
(Written on July 19, 2009) We started our second day with a decent breakfast and a quick and early departure from Bakersfield. Jodi chatted with the desk attendant, and noted how long we had to wait for the cold tap water to actually get cold. We had postulated that this […]
(Written on July 18, 2009) After days of preparations for the move to Texas (weeks, really, including selling and eventually giving away furniture), we were finally on our way. We watched as the last of our belongings were loaded into a moving truck before we said goodbye to friends and […]
In its report on proposed funding for high energy physics, the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations subcommittee targeted a removal of some of the LHC funding from the proposed budget. The exact language in the report was, “The Committee questions the increased investment in Large Hadron Collider [LHC] support when […]
Michael Pollan’s name keeps popping up. This past week, I listened to his excellent discussion on one of the local radio forum programs. As the author of several popular books on our relationship with food, including “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” [1] and “In Defense of Food”, he has become the de […]