Skype has become an invaluable tool for communicating with family and friends. PC-to-PC calls are free and PC-to-phone calls are cheap. Lately, I have been trying Skype on Linux, Windows, and Mac. As an avid follower of the (not frequently updated) “Skype for Linux” blog [1], I was pleased when […]
As part of my faculty preparations, I have been required to take a web course in research ethics. Let me begin by saying that ethics in research are the single most important thing to me in the lab, and they are things which I strive to imbue in others. I […]
I’ve been thinking some about my next laptop. I already have a great personal laptop, but I am thinking that I should buy one for work. I would then move work off the personal machine and keep the two on separate tracks. The tablet PC that is my personal machine […]
It finally happened: I setup a Facebook page. http://www.facebook.com/stephen.sekula Don’t get excited. My primary means of communication, listed in order of their important to me, are still: face-to-face, phone, IM, e-mail, and social networking. That means that I won’t be spending every waking hour on Facebook, so please don’t get […]
Jodi and I went to SMU today to do some work on our grant proposals. This happens to also be moving-in weekend, though our end of campus was not at all busy. The science buildings are located on the north end of the SMU campus, behind and to the east […]
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 […]