Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

Here’s a blog to share:

WTF_nature is an irreverent blog that shares news stories about nature being stranger than one might expect. The most recent post is about animals appropriating genes from plants. A previous entry pointed out just how weird Ginko Biloba really is. (Although I could make a similar post about armadillos.)

It’s full of beautiful, strange, and shocking examples of natural phenomena. Pretty cool!

I’m looking forward to Arisia in the same way I used to look forward to school vacations! Here’s my bio and the panels that I’ll be on.

Vonnie Carts-Powell is the author of the popular science book, “The Science of Heroes” (published by Berkeley Press, 2008), and well over 1000 articles about science and technology. She is also an SF/F fan and a Morris dancer.

Sat 10:00am Kamikaze Costuming

Sat 2:00pm Ask a Geek: Physics, Chemistry, and Engineering

Mon 11:00am Subverting the Canon (This one should be exciting. Writeup: “Writers playing in someone else’s sandbox can’t help but bring their own sensibilities. How do writers of media tie-ins challenge or subvert what they’ve been handed? Is that a good thing? Can books and comics pushing the limits have their influence?” Cynthia A. Shettle, Marlin May, Vonnie Carts-Powell (m), Evan Jamieson.)

Mon 12:00pm Old Worlds, New Writers (And this one should be an interesting complement to the previous panel: “After Douglas Adams, Frank Herbert, Robert Jordan, and Roger Zelazny (among others) died, their books were given official sequels by new authors. Is this a legitimate way to explore their universes further, or just milking them dry? Vonnie Carts-Powell, Tyler Stewart (m), Paula Lieberman, Adam Lipkin.)

I ran into a friend of mine yesterday, who is working at a Harvard lab on making robots — actual, mobile robots — out of paper. It’s apparently based on work by Fearing at Berkeley (although mostly I know about his biomimetics work). Am chasing the story, but… so very cool!

By Jenny Huang

(That photo is of a mantis shrimp, which isn’t actually a shrimp at all, and in a bit I’ll explain what it’s doing in this post. Photo by Jenny Huang.)

I hope you all are enjoying the fourth season of Heroes as much as I am!

What have I been up to?
One of the more fun things I’ve published lately is an article on a car adapted for blind drivers (Optics&Photonics News, November 09 issue).

All those months of messing about with superresolution microscopy concluded with the cover feature story for Advanced Imaging magazine, Seeing Molecules With Visible Light.

I just finished some stories (that aren’t out yet, so I won’t point you at them) about the world’s longest laser (it’s 270 km long, so if you laid it out straight, it would stretch from San Francisco to beyond San Diego) (It is, for obvious reasons, not laid out straight. But it takes up a fair bit of room in the lab.)

I also just wrote about a bunch of biologists who have figured out how a mantis shrimp sees polarized light across the visible spectrum. And they discovered that it’s eyes put to shame our human attempts to do the same. (And that is why I included Jenny Huang’s photo of a mantis shrimp!)

And finally, I got the preliminary program for the The American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting, in February. I won’t be there, alas. AAAS is the most fun science meeting I’ve attended and a really good way to get a snapshot of what’s going on across the sciences.

Pi-Con was delightful!

I’m always amazed at conventions by the people I meet. On panels, sure: it’s a pleasure and privilege to chat with the other panelists about the topic of the hour, and I’m not surprised to meet smart, accomplished, articulate panelists. But the people I talk to in the hallways, the vendors, and the folks who end up going out to dinner together are, as often as not, also smart and articulate and accomplished. One gentleman at the convention — I never did get his name — is a math historian, who had just published a book about math in the Americas in the 1500s. How is that for a fascinating subject? [Edited to add: Michael suggests that this was Bruce Stanley Burdick.]

My favorite panel was undoubtedly the “Alternative Energy” panel, which I shared with Drew van Zandt, Ed Bishop, and Tom Wysmuller (who endeared himself to me by not only preparing a short subject-appropriate slideshow, but also by bringing along his own projection equipment just in case). One hour is too short for such a broad topic, but we hit on low-energy- and resourse-consuming houses, what a non-fossil-fuel-based future might look like, the need for better batteries (and electric transmission technologies), research on safer and more efficient fission by the Generation IV International Forum, and the challenges of energy for driving cars. (While we were chatting about it, the participants in the Boston Greenfest 1-gallon challenge were attempting to drive from Greenfield MA to Boston on a single gallon of gas.)

Tom also has been getting out the word on how global warming is changing the artic — keep an eye out for his presentations.

I was bowled over by the writing of horror writer Joy Marchand (I don’t read horror as a rule, but I may have to make an exception! If only to discover what happens at the end of “Black Annis”, published in the anthology Unspeakable Horror). I also learned quite a lot about podcasting technologies from Morven Westfield (who podcasts Vampires, Witches, and Geeks). Also: I met some open source software heroes and learned a tremendous amount about American foxhunting from a woman named Margaret. It was really pretty fascinating.

PS. The image is a Wordle. Click on it for a bigger, clearer, image.

My Mom, Sylvia Carts died June 10 at the age of 77, from lung cancer. With the aid of hospice, she was able to spend her last months at home in the company of her family.

We will miss her very much.

I dedicated The Science of Heroes to her, because she was a natural teacher, a scientist (with amazingly green thumbs), and when other parents were encouraging their kids to be practical about their choice of careers and college majors, she was telling me that I’d make a wonderful novelist.

I remember that when I was very young (in preschool, I think?) she taught me the names and characteristics of the plants in our yard, about chlorophyll reflecting green light, and how the tilt in the Earth’s axis causes the seasons. I alternated between thinking that this was secret knowledge and thinking that of course anyone over the age of 6 knew these things — and finally realized that the answer is someplace between these two extremes.

Family crises have eaten my time for the past few weeks, and are likely to eat my time for the next couple weeks. Something in my schedule has had to give, and it’s been this blog.

That’s not fair to you, and trying to keep up has not been fair to me. So I’m going to stop posting for a few weeks.

Regular posts will resume in June.

Until then, be well and keep an eye out for magnificent and ridiculous events in Heroes and science.

Photo by Marc Ryckaert, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.