I miss blogs and their great mix of discovery, long-form writing and discussion. Writing, reading and commenting in them on a regular basis lent itself to purposeful connections and a sort of truth I am unable to get from Facebook and Twitter. You definitely wouldn’t know anything about me from what I post in the latter media. Some of this has to do with a third corporate party curating (controlling) the conversation and a lot comes from what I think is our inherent reluctance to share real successes and failures in spaces that were constructed as showcases.
Once upon a time, I created this blog to talk about what I want how I want and they’ll pry my words from my cold dead server space, dagnabbit. And I will again soon. Too much in the way of marvelous and grievous has happened in the last few months not to slice up here. I got what I wanted. I didn’t get what I want. First, I need to sleep on it. No, really, sleep deprivation is a thing.
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Two more of my post-Katrina blog posts were published in Please Forward: How Blogging Reconnected New Orleans After Katrina. Here is a nice interview with the anthology’s editor Cynthia Joyce.
I am now Chair of the SEG Women’s Network, which promotes greater participation and leadership by women in geophysics worldwide. At this year’s network breakfast, we raffled off Women in the Geosciences: Practical, Positive Practices Toward Parity. I’m pretty excited about this book as it’s a much-needed addition to existing resources for women in STEM.
The SEG Annual Meeting 2015 and the Agile hackathon right before it were great successes, despite lower turnout. In this low oil price environment, almost every company is cutting people to cut costs, but processes are as arcane as ever. They’ll figure it out some day, when it’s too late.
Galacticon 4 was comically disastrous (due to the organizers), but somehow redeemed itself (with no help from the organizers). SciFoo 2015 before that was much better for me this time around as there were many refreshing new attendees, and no cliques from the previous years to deal with.
D and I have very little added sugar in our diets, but we’re drastically reducing our intake of processed foods. Along with the preservatives, a bottle or packet of almost everything seems to contain added refined sugar, so simply cutting out regular sugar and high fructose corn syrup is pointless. Why do sriracha chili garlic sauce, canned chicken soup and refried beans require added sugar? If you need convincing that refined sugar is bad for your metabolic health, check out the results of this recent study by Robert Lustig. I met Dr. Lustig at SciFoo this year, coincidentally. Nice guy.
Happy Halloween! While Google tells you how unoriginal your costume is, only I warn you that blackface is always a bad idea.
