BAN #47 Phil yells, following Mika

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Personal Stuff

Yeah, but not too personal

A few years ago, a drawing my daughter did when she was in high school won an award from the Colorado Art Education Association. Her artwork was hung along with others at the Denver Museum of Modern Art (a very cool place you should visit if you’re in town). 

While we were there, another young woman’s art somehow stuck out, speaking to me in a way that’s hard to explain… but of course a picture is worth one kiloword:

Yeah. This makes me happy. I wish I had her name; it’s too blurry in the original to make out (and I blurred it further here to maintain her privacy).  

Oh, and my daughter’s artwork?

Yeah, nerdery runs in the family.  Award-winning nerdery I’ll add.

Follow o’ the Letter

Someone you should follow on social media

My friend Mika McKinnon has a career that sounds vaguely familiar: She’s a research scientist, a science communicator, and has consulted on several scifi TV shows. Huh. But I have to admit more than a twinge of jealousy: She’s consulted on Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe (if you’re a fan of the latter: Remember when Rush was hiding out in the bowels of Destiny scribbling equations on the walls? Yeah, that was all Mika.)

Her specialty in science is geology, specifically landslides and other disasters. She’s a field researcher, going to places where geology happens (it’s more common than you think!) and applying hammer to rock. She also commonly tweets about disaster preparedness, and I know that whenever there’s a hurricane or an earthquake or the like, she’ll be on Twitter rapidly with solid advice on how to prep and deal with nature at its worst.

She also a prolific writer, penning (I guess more accurately keyboarding or electroning) articles for Gizmodo, Astronomy, Smithsonian, the BBC, Wired, and more. She cover s a lot of ground, including geology, astronomy, space science, even nuclear testing!

You can follow her on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and read more about her on Wikipedia.

Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

Monday Sept. 17, 2018: How far away are the Pleiades?

Tuesday Sept. 18, 2018: TESS is now doing science. Really BIG science.

Wednesday Sept. 19, 2018: Exoplanet News: Astronomers have found Vulcan! (This one is a BIG deal)

Thursday Sept. 20, 2018: Revisiting the Tarantula Nebula to find an old friend

Friday Sept. 21, 2018: Science speed dating

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!