As glaciers around the world transform into rivers and ultimately dry ravines, entire ecosystems will be changed forever. While we often talk about the problems faced by polar bears and penguins, we must also consider the less fluffy endangered creatures, such as the rare planetary science graduate student.

This starved-for-data subgroup of humans, along with the more common geology graduate student, is known to migrate by the dozen to glaciers every summer as they search out one of their favorite research foods: meteorites.

Working side-by-side with members of their sub-group who have somehow survived to become senior scientists and faculty, these early-career researchers learn to forage along the surfaces and melting ends of glaciers for meteorites revealed by the glaciers’ melting.

It is estimated that 300,000 meteorites are at the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet. During their summer meteorite hunt, eager researchers can gather as many as 1000 meteorites that can feed their research for months or sometimes even years. Without climate change, these rare scientists could go centuries without needing to find new hunting sites.

Unfortunately, because of climate change, things are going to get much harder for these young researchers. With every 1/10 degree of warning, it’s estimated that 5,100 to 12,200 meteorites will be lost from the ice sheet. By 2050, it’s estimated that a quarter of these precious space rocks could be lost forever. These lost space rocks could contain the samples needed for these students to get PhDs… or maybe even discover life from other worlds.

It is up to all of us to protect all the rare and endangered flora, fauna, … and researchers in this world. In the words of Harry Zekollari, “To secure this invaluable extraterrestrial material, we need to intensify and coordinate the recovery of Antarctic meteorites before we lose them to climate change. In similar efforts as collecting ice cores from vanishing glaciers or sampling coral reefs before they bleach, our study identifies the loss of meteorites as an unexpected impact of climate change upon which we need to act”.

If you want to help protect these students, please consider donating to your local geology and planetary science programs, getting involved in efforts to restrict greenhouse emissions, and spreading the word that space rocks and the grad students who research them may just be the next victim of climate change.

This piece is inspired by the following research paper:
Tollenaar, V., Zekollari, H., Kittel, C., Farinotti, D., Lhermitte, S., Debaille, V., … & Pattyn, F. (2024). Antarctic meteorites threatened by climate warming. Nature Climate Change, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01954-y

The post The Endangered Antarctic Meteorites & the researchers who feed on them. appeared first on Star Stryder.

This year, 2024, is a presidential election year here in the United States. There are no perfect candidates, but this year’s choices are – to judge by current primary results – particularly unappealing. For the first time in my adult life, we’re seeing “None of these candidates” picking up traction.

Like Diogenes looking for one honest man, modern political parties are struggling to come up with ideal candidates; people young enough that “death by natural causes” isn’t a concern, people who put country before self, and who act with honor and integrity. I believe these people do exist, but in our 24-hour news cycle, where attacks on character are food for jokes by late-night comedians, these people likely keep their heads down and serve in other ways than as elected officials.

But what happens to a nation when good people turn silent?

This particular question is explored in countless novels. The best example of what can happen when the populace disengages may be Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” (that’s an Amazon affiliate link – so are other links in this post). This 1953 novel imagines a future where all media is made to hold onto your attention while saying nothing. All pleasures are allowed and the only rule seems to be “No books allowed.” Why? Because then people just might think independently and recognize the horrors going on around them. This cautionary tale is a must-read in our world where book banning is again on the rise.

This novel, while more than 70 years old, is still under copyright here in the United States. If it was out of copyright, I’d be getting ready to record this book on YouTube in hopes that I can get more people to hear its words.

Sadly, many of the classic cautionary tales that I feel are must-reads for modern society – books like George Orwell’s “1984“, Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower“, Marget Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale“, and pretty much anything by Phillip K Dick – are all still locked away by copyright.

But there are amazing books out there waiting to be read that are available for free. And I want to read them with you.

My Election Year, Public Domain, Booklist (Project Gutenberg links)

• “Anthem” by Ayn Rand (1938)
  This novella looks at a world where individuality is removed and technology is carefully guarded, lest anyone go one step too far in their scientific research.
• “My Bondage and My Freedom” by Frederick Douglas (1855)
  This is Douglas’ 2nd autobiography and is written 17 years after his escape from slavery. This book reflects on is abolitionist efforts and his hope for equity among all Americans.
• “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville
  See what democracy should be through the eyes of French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville. You just might fall in love with the idea of America all over again (or for the first time.
• “Rights of Man” by Thomas Paine
  In a series of articles and pamphlets, Revolutionary War leader Thomas Paine discusses his ideals for democracy. These are the words that motivated the founding of a nation.
• “Metropolis” by Thea von Harbou
  In this early science fiction novel, Thea von Harbou sees through to its ultimate end the consequences of capitalism on society.
• “The Metropolis” by Upton Sinclair
  What do you do when you realize the people paying to protect the poor are the same people benefitting from the labor of the poor? This book examines that question through the eyes of a lawyer facing the realities of the turn of the last century in New York City.
• “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921)
  We live in a world of the rising popularity of totalitarian leaders. In this Russian novel, we see the reality of end-stage totalitarianism, where conformity is the rule, and harmony is enforced.
• “Babbitt” by Sinclair Lewis
  This satire on the American middle class feels like an inspiration for the Step Ford Wives, Pleasantville, and so many other modern stories that call out how easily one can gro disillisioned by the American Dream.

Over the coming months, I’m going to work my way through these books and I invite you to come with me. I’m going to start tonight, Monday, March 4, with “Anthem”. I’ll be reading aloud on Twitch and posting the videos on YouTube. You are invited to join me as we read, think, and try and dream of a future where good humans once again seek to lead.

The post Introducing: Election Year Story Time Picks appeared first on Star Stryder.

That is not an exaggeration. That is not hyperbole. It is, quite simply, a thing I did because it was the right thing to do.

At the time, I was at the top of my career. I’d just been awarded a $12 million grant. I was an officer in multiple professional societies. My podcasting was continuing to grow, and I was traveling the world to promote science.

But then I gave voice to victims of sexual harassment who had been brave enough to come forward. I did what you are supposed to do as a society officer and a senior researcher – I reported the information that was brought to me. I did what I could to make sure this one particular man would never again harm any future women.

And I had a congresswoman’s aid. I worked with Congresswoman Jackie Speier to try and say “never again”. You can read about what happened here and google as you will. 

Honestly, this situation was the best a woman could possibly be in when reporting a sexual harasser. What happened to me should serve as a cautionary tale about why women are reluctant to report harassment and how our system works against them. 

In late 2016, I was sued for $33 million in a defamation case brought against me for reporting what those women told me, for sharing the evidence they brought me, and for sharing my personal experiences. 

Due to retaliation related to this lawsuit and all its trickle-down effects, I ultimately had to switch jobs twice, and my $12 million grant was canceled. A colleague trying to help me manage the situation was able to put together over 900 pages of documentation demonstrating how the cancelation was retaliation. The documentation was presented to the inspector general to no avail; there was no getting that grant back. 

And all the while I was being utterly isolated by the lawsuit. At one point, I had an employer (not my current) who forbade me from discussing the lawsuit on pain of being fired. I lost my savings because I couldn’t ask for help through a legal advocacy fund. I was isolated from friends because I couldn’t talk to anyone in confidence: the lawsuit sought complete access to all my social media, all my emails, all my other digital communications (like texts), and all my hard drives. (They didn’t ultimately get it, but how could I have kept talking to people and risked things getting read into the record?) I had to leave all Facebook groups where I’d found mentoring and community for fear that if I had to turn over my passwords, these safe places would be made public in my potential trial. This lawsuit, which continued on and on and on through 2020, drove me to isolation while allowing retaliation without real consequence.

And on the day the case was thrown out, someone tried to kill me. 

My beloved jeep of 20 years, which lived with its nose in our garage and its butt hanging out (our garage was designed for model Ts), had the lug nuts on its two rear tiles loosened. While a grad student who was living with us drove it down the highway, one of those tires flew off. Somehow, he was able to prevent the car from flipping. The police were never able to say if it was related to the court case, or anything else. All they could say was it looked like someone did it, we should get a dog that bites (Hi, Malachi), and maybe purchase some security cameras (we purchased sooo many security cameras).

And now we get to why I’m writing this essay.

A few weeks ago, I needed to be the adultier adult helping a young woman figure out how to handle being assaulted at her workplace and having her identity stolen by her ex-boyfriend. You’d think with the police involved that the dude would back off, but that’s not how this story ever goes. 

We were sitting on the floor sorting legos, and he kept blowing up her phone with messages that ranged from “I’ll kill myself if you don’t come back” to “I like the new color of your hair. I see everything” to threats of violence. In a desperate attempt to say something to cheer her up, I said, “Look… it could be worse… you could get sued for $33 million, and have someone try and murder you.”

I am not ok. At that moment, I realized just how not ok I am.

But I want to find a way back to being ok again.

Many negative voices are living rent-free in my head. There are the women – including senior women who give talks on DEIA all the time – who told me I don’t know what real abuse is and made it clear I should have kept my mouth shut. There are all the people who worked with me before this all started, but who never reached out to ask if I was ok. I’ve been told to my face that I’m the problem; that I’m the reason these things happen. (That one likes to put itself on repeat).

Then there is the silence. Just silence. My messages don’t get returned, and through back channels, I get told, “Tell her we can’t; there are too many harsh consequences from working with her.” 

I knew in 2015 when I got the evidence of what those women had experienced that I had to do something and that nothing would ever again be the same. I knew that women who reported harassment disappeared from our communities. When things go right, both they and the abusers lose their careers. I hoped to at least fall into that latter group. I just hoped no more women would be hurt.

From 2015 to 2020, I dealt with the harassment reporting and then the lawsuit. 

Then there was a global pandemic. We all know how that has felt on a variety of levels.

And now, in 2024, I’m trying to find a path forward so that I do, against all odds, get back the career I was on my way to having.

I don’t regret what I did. It was right. I would report what I reported over again. I just… I want to still be an astronomer.

After spending several years just trying to survive, I’m now focused on getting my research going again. (Hello, IRB forms. Hello, GitHub). I’m continuing over and over to try for grants. I will start actively seeking the speaking gigs that used to fall into my inbox. I am going to invest in taking a risk on me and doing what I need to do to prove I’m still the researcher and science communicator I was in the before times.

I cannot do this alone. 

Science is collaborative, and I know – because I keep getting told – that I’m not someone many of my old collaborators can work with because they are afraid it will affect their funding or they are afraid of retaliation. Or perhaps afraid on an even deeper level of the repercussions.

If you aren’t afraid, will you reach out? If you are looking for things to collaborate on with someone with me-shaped skills, will you reach out? I am here, and I need to do more than just survive. I need to explore the universe through data using citizen science, and I need to share what we learn with audiences everywhere.

Will you please reach out, so that we can build something great together?

The post Back in 2015, I knowingly blew up my life. appeared first on Star Stryder.

As we gear up for our yearly fundraiser, I feel confident in saying that just about everyone on our team is wishing we could somehow cram more hours into every day. At a certain level, our world is happy to oblige, and every year our days get the smallest fraction of a second longer and the Moon gets a few centimeters farther away.

In science, we often find things related in the wildest of ways. In this case, conservation of momentum is trying to keep everything rotating with the same amount of energy: we have the Earth rotating about its axis, the moon rotating and revolving around the Earth, and the Earth and Moon going round and round the Sun. All things being constant, everything would stay exactly the same forever, but… things aren’t constant. Because our Earth isn’t perfectly spherical, the Moon’s gravity is pulling on mountains and others high-mass points a little bit harder, and in the process slowing our world’s rotation. As the Earth slows, the Moon moves outward. This is the same physics that describes how an ice skater can slow down by flinging their arms outward.

In this simple situation, everyday from here forward will get a little bit longer, and everyday — looking back through history — we thought the days would be getting a little bit shorter.

But the universe and our planet are rarely simple, and it turns out that our moon isn’t the only thing affecting our world. Our Sun also affects the Earth, and it has the ability to speed things up.

And new research shows that when the Earth’s day is about 19 hours long, the Moon’s habit of lengthening the day and the Sun’s efforts to shorten the day almost balance out.

According to a new paper by Ross N. Mitchell & Uwe Kirscher appearing in Nature Geoscience, fossil records indicate that from about 1 billion years ago to about 2 billion years ago, our Earth’s rotation rate stalled out at about 19 hours. During this time, evolution also stalled out in its own way: Photosynthetic bacteria weren’t able to create the oxygen-rich atmosphere we enjoy until the days grew longer.

This means, life as we know it actually requires longer days. As we go looking for life elsewhere among the stars, it looks like there will be a sweet spot where worlds rotate fast enough to maintain even heating and decent weather, and slow enough to maintain photosynthesis — a sweet spot where life may thrive just a bit easier.

Lots of different things can affect the Earth’s rotation. Our world really is a really big version of a spinning ice skater, and just as every tilt of the head and movement of the hand will change the ice skater’s rotation, every change in the distribution of land and sea can change the Earth’s rotation.

We hear about these changes on the news when big things happen like the filling of the Three-Gorges Dam in China, which slowed our planet by 0.6 s.

What we sometimes miss is how small things can build up to also change things.

In a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers led by Ki-Weon Seo document how the pumping of groundwater changed our planet’s rotation — and tilt!

It’s estimated that 2,150 billion tons of groundwater was pumped out of the landscape between 1993 and 2010. This is enough water to raise sea labels by 6 mm or about ¼ of an inch.

This redistribution of mass has moved the Earth’s rotation axis about 80 cm, and will continue to change our planet as we continue to pump water, use it in our homes and businesses, and send it back into the environment.

According to Seo, “Observing changes in Earth’s rotational pole is useful for understanding continent-scale water storage variations. Polar motion data are available from as early as the late 19th century. So, we can potentially use those data to understand continental water storage variations during the last 100 years. Were there any hydrological regime changes resulting from the warming climate? Polar motion could hold the answer.”

This kind of research really shows how everything is connected, from household water pumps to the Sun’s push and pull on the Earth, everything plays a role in our planet’s evolution.

The post The Earth is trying to give you more hours in your day… but it wasn’t always appeared first on Star Stryder.

For those who’d been following the team’s work, hopes were high. This team had been carefully monitoring the metronome-like ticking of radio pulsars to see if they could see alterations in the fabric of space-time that are caused by gravitational waves. That big news — we hoped — would be a description of our universe warping in observable ways.

Funded by the National Science Foundation in 2015, NANOGrav used the Arecibo and Greenbank radio dishes, as well as the CHIME and Very Large Array to monitor an ever increasing number of pulsars.

These spinning neutron stars blast our radio light like an over-caffeinated lighthouse spinning 1000 times a second. Neutron stars are the high-density remnants of massive stars that can no longer fuel nuclear reactions. Neutron stars are just what their name implies: giant balls of neutrons. Because these particles can get much closer together than a mix of protons and electrons, neutron stars can cram all their mass into a volume that could rest comfortably on Manhattan Island. That mass — it is 1.4 solar masses to something like 2.2 solar masses.

When that much mass crams into a space that small and spins extremely rapidly, that you end up with a nature-made top that doesn’t have a single wibble or wobble to its motion. A stand-alone pulsar is the ultimate clock, and when we find pulsars paired up in binary systems, their obits can be precisely measured by the shifting of their pulses.

Essentially, as the pulsar moves toward us in its orbit, each pulse has to travel a little less distance than the one before, so the ticking of the clock seems to speed up. As the pulsar moves away from us, each tick has to travel a little bit farther, and the beating seems to slow down.

This kind of timing measurement is so accurate that the first planet ever discovered was found in 1992 orbiting a pulsar that it ever so slightly moved to and fro in a detectable way.

Their precision rotation makes pulsars true beacons in the sky, and many sci fi series have used them as navigational plot points. The gold plate on the Voyager missions even included a map indicating where our solar system is located relative to a series of pulsars.

And if our universe is made of stretchy spacetime that can expand and contract, as Einstein predicted, these beacons should move with the space and that motion should show up as tiny timing variations in the pulses.

According to Einstein, this kind of stretching of space can occur when massive objects combine and send gravitational waves rippling through the universe.

If a lonely pulsar, with no planets or stellar companions, appears to move ever so slightly to and fro, we might be seeing space getting smaller and larger in response to a gravitational wave while the pulsar stays put on the fabric of space-time.

Measuring changes in the ticking beat of a millisecond pulsar is not exactly easy, and if researchers only see one pulsar seem to change just once, there is no way to know if the measured time is wrong or space is stretching. This is why researchers monitored as many pulsars as they could.

As a wave moves through space, we should be able to see pulsars in different places get affected at different times. Pulses in line with the moving wave will appear to change in one way while those off to the side will appear to change in a different way.

When this project was funded, ground-based gravitational wave detectors still hadn’t found anything, and many folks — myself included — were starting to think that we’d never be able to detect tiny variations in space time effecting our planet. Systems like LIGO and Virgo are sensitive to everything from seismic noise to passing trucks. While pulsars wouldn’t allow us to see the small gravitational waves that LIGO and Virgo might detect, they would let us potentially see the massive waves from merging supermassive black holes and other giant systems.

So… in 2007 NANOgrav started.

And 2015, with funding from NSF, researchers built a Physics Frontiers Center out of NANOgrav.

In 2016, LIGO and Virgo would announce their first detection of the merger of two stellar mass black holes.

And the folks at NANOgrav would keep monitoring.

And keep monitoring…

And we would get hints in papers and conference presentations that fluctuations were being seen, that the data was sensitive enough for the experiment to work, and that someday we’d have a new way to see our universe.

And… on June 23, in a series of papers, NANOgrav released their data and said (in fancier words) “Look, the signal is here… we can see the fabric of space being wibbly wobbly through the tiny timey wimey changes in pulsar ticks.”

The central result, highlighted in a special issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is the correlation in timing variations measured in 68 pulsars with 3 or more years of data. Looking at 2,211 distinct pairs of events, they are able to replicate within error the expected signal of supermassive black holes merging and rippling our universe with their gravitational waves.

The signal is clear, but the data is still noisy and doesn’t yet allow researchers to say — “This timing event is related to something that happened in that exact direction”. We can’t yet see a gravitational wave signal and then point a telescope to see what happened.

Not yet.

But now this is a technological problem.

And it isn’t a problem that only NANOGrav is working to solve. Other collaborations around the world also raised their hands and said, we saw this too. From OzGrav using Parkes Radio telescope in Australia, to the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array on FAST to myriad other teams, this result is being seen to varying levels of accuracy by researchers around the world, and with NANOGrav’s data release, we can look forward to seeing more teams release their data and, with their combined results, get a better and better understanding of what is going on.

Until one day, we can see the gravitational waves and point our telescopes and say “Yes, I see the source.”

More than 400 years ago, Galileo pointed a handmade telescope at the stars, the Moon and the known planets. When he made his observations, many saw our world as perhaps the center of a universe with 5 planets, a Moon, the Sun, and a sphere of stars. There were some who granted that maybe the Sun could be the center, but … we really had no idea of the vastness of our Universe

In 400 years, our study of the Universe using light has allowed us to piece together a detailed understanding of how our universe expanded out into what we see today, how stars form and how planets come to be. We know that we are star dust, and we know that there is a lot that we don’t know because light only allows us to see so much, and all events from moment 0 to 400,000 years after the universe formed are hidden behind the cosmic microwave background light.

And I kind of feel like on that future day, folks will look back on 2015 and the start of NANOgrav, on 2016 and LIGO and Virgos first detection, and on 2023 and these results and say, “And this is where it started. Not with one man with one handmade device like Galileo… but with massive collaborations of humans working together to push technology for one simple reasons: to see what science can be seen.”

The post NANOGrav: Fluctuations in space captured in real-time appeared first on Star Stryder.

Looking back from the perspective of adulthood, I see now that my grandmother had celiac disease that was complicated by a Latex allergy and Latex Fruit Syndrome. I had figured out the celiac disease years ago, but it took developing my own latex allergy in 2017 to understand that this slight women really just couldn’t find anything she could eat because she had latex fruit syndrome.

This blog post is the first in what will be a periodic series on my journey in figuring out how to live with a Latex Allergy and includes Latex Fruit Syndrome.

Allergies suck, and we live in a society where allergies cause many to roll their eyes and say “those aren’t real.” Others think that if something is wrong, it probably isn’t that bad, and you’re just being dramatic. It can be exhausting, and I’m writing this as I realize that for the rest of my life, I’m going to be that pain in the ass person who has to say, “Here is a sheet of paper listing all the ingredients I absolutely cannot eat.”

I am not slight like grandma anymore. I’m used to eating almost everything. This is all still new to me. Sure, I have a diary allergy, but it didn’t used to be that bad, and stress munching food is part of my identity.

Or at least it was.

Now … now I’m a bit afraid of food. I’m tired of itching.

From developing a basic latex allergy in 2017, when I started reacting to a respirator I had for painting, I have gone on to reacting to elastic in socks and underwear, to getting rashes from the iron-on designs on many of my T-shirts, and to developing Latex Fruit Syndrome. This last thing means my body reacts to a latex-like protein that is in many fruits. A single banana will make me swell like Violet Beauregarde. Apples lead to eczema. When I was in Hawaii, the avocados and papayas that are everywhere, did me in. I now keep open the Allergy and Asthma Network page on Latex Fruit Syndrome and use it to screen ingredient lists as I shop on Instacart.

Allergies are one of those things that can cumulatively get worse the more you are exposed to what you are allergic too. When your body is stressed, your allergies also get worse. When you are exposed to one thing you’re allergic too, you will react much worse to everything else you’re allergic to. Certain foods, like strawberries, contain molecules that exacerbate allergies. It seems that everything just makes reactions worse and worse and worse, until one day, if you are me, you wake up and realize your allergies are out of control.

I can no longer tolerate all my allergy-related issues, and I must make a change. I’m actually kind of glad that if this had to happen, it happened during plague times, when I can stay home and be super careful with what I eat while I learn what I can and can’t tolerate.

This week, I’m going to reach out to a nutritionist because I don’t know how to eat healthy, and I am not succeeding in eliminating everything I’m now allergic to from my diet. I’m tired of hives. I am tired of runny eyes and swollen everything. I’m ready to make the hard changes. I’m really not ready to lose so many foods. I just know I have to.

For the coming weeks (maybe longer?) I’m going to be grouchy as I try and get used to this new normal. No longer can I have an apple a day – no longer can I have apples at all. So many things have to change. My inner child is screaming “I don’t wanna!”, but these allergic reactions are too much of a distraction. There is just too much else going on that I want to be my focus. I just have to acknowledge, I can’t focus on anything I want to focus on when I want to claw my skin off or just go to sleep because my head is clogged. This will pass. I will get through. I’m just pretty sure that changing my diet is going to be hell.

But grandma did it. And I can do it too.

The post The echos of genetics appeared first on Star Stryder.

Back when I started college in 1992, I was an international relations major in James Madison College at Michigan State University. As part of our election-year course work we read the latest books by Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, respectively Bush & Clinton’s economic advisors. This had 3 out-of-the-classroom effects on me. The first impact was perhaps silly. I was so impressed by Paul Krugman’s book that the next time I was in Boston visiting my boyfriend at MIT, I emailed Krugman to ask to meet. He was heading off on a trip himself, but we overlapped at Boston Logan airport. We met in the terminal, he signed my book & we talked econ. The second impact was life changing. I discovered I hated understanding economics — understanding that what is best for the rich also destroys the working class — that I switched to astrophysics. Yes folks, the fact that it is beneficial for a factory to kill rather than maim drove me to astronomy. The third impact is the one that is actually relevant here. In reading these books, I decided that my 18 year old, Massachusetts democrat, socialism-loving self was going to vote for Bush because I wanted to live in Paul Krugman’s economy instead of Reich’s. We didn’t get to see Paul Krugman’s 2nd-term future. Clinton won.

The thing that terrified me about Reich’s book, “The Work of Nations,” was a call to offshore industry to other nations and transform our nation into what would today be called a nation of thought-leaders. In his vision, we would innovate, lead, and industry would go elsewhere. His argument was, we needed to increase the education of our population & if we are well-educated we can take that population doing industrial work at good union salaries & get them doing other jobs. This would benefit US companies that would benefit from lower production costs (Hi, Mexican factories) & focus our people on more lucrative innovation. I was living in Michigan when I read this, and surrounded by students whose parents worked in the auto industry. I have a family of truck drivers and skilled crafts people. Looking at these well-paid, technically skilled people, I saw first hand that not everyone wants to be educated into being a thought-leader & not everyone can be. We need industry jobs.

I remember hearing in class that there would always be the need for service industry jobs for those who can’t be educated Into the white collar workforce. Thing is, your McDonald’s employee isn’t unionised, & has no hope of healthcare, retirement, or other benefits. There is a cruelty in this “well, they can work in service” only option.

Put simply, it was and is my opinion that a healthy nation needs a diversity of jobs that provide insurance and a living wage that allow people of all educational attainments to flourish. The rust belt once built our economy by making a large middle class possible.

The rust belt was just starting to oxidise when I was in college. I lived in Michigan when GM left Lansing and Ford started opening plants in Mexico. I saw the fear it put in people who had been buying cars regularly, using vacation time to travel, & who pumped money into the economy as they lived the American dream.

Today, more than 20 years since I left Michigan State University with an Astrophysics degree, we are seeing the results of Clinton-era economics. Our supply chains rely on cheap offshore labor, and the majority of non-“thought-leader” jobs are now in the service economy and the new gig economy. From the 1990s through to the numbers of uninsured people steadily increased until Obamacare began to kick in. While things are better, there is a difference between better and good. Service industry workers can’t afford time off. They don’t get insurance through their job, and they may not be able to afford rent (let alone insurance!) if they miss a shift or two. If they are sick, they will still serve. These are the people we will see collapsing on US streets and transit in coming weeks, just like we’ve seen in photos from Asia. (There may have been the first such case in NYC today).

Hell, I’m a PhD Astronomer now, & I’ve only had health care as an option for 3 of the last 14 years. Currently, because I’m not full-time on a grant, I’m an hourly employee with no benefits. This is reality for so many adjuncts and research scientists. If we don’t work, we don’t get paid, and we will work when sick. (I am lucky — My husband has insurance through his job.)

Many of us end up waiting until we’re unable to function before we go to the doctor because we hope to get better on our own. Why? Because of the cost. I have insurance, but the few $100 that blood tests & X-Rays will cost me in co-pays in more than I sometimes have. Combine those bills with the impact of lost wages and sometimes gambling on free versus pneumonia seems the better option.

Right now, we have a nation filled with pockets of people (like me) who just can’t afford time off and struggle when we have medical bills. In the face of coronavirus, I can decide to simply just work from home and not leave the house. Most don’t have that option.

The economics of this isn’t going to just hit at the personal level. It is also hitting companies large and small.

Our nation relies on foreign manufacturing of medicine, machinery, and most everything else. Our former factories, the ones that defined the assembly lines perfected by Japan, are literally rusting apart. If international travel to the US is cut off, supplies are cut off.

We’re watching in the news as country after country is cut off to stop the spread of coronavirus. Flights to and from China, Iran, Italy… What if that happens to the US? We have what’s called “Just in time inventory” in most stores and what few factories we do have.

Did I mention I hate economics? That hate doesn’t mean I don’t try to understand economics. OK, so we don’t have massively stocked backrooms of goods. The US doesn’t have massive industrial capacity. We’re a lean mean economy with no excess — goods ideally arrive just in time to be used without ever sitting in inventory. If supply lines are cut, we have only the national reserves.

So let’s look at COVID-19. We aren’t testing efficiently. This means we have unchecked person-to-person spread of unknown degree. Why? Funding to teams developing tests had previously been cut by Trump, so we’re running on skelton crew of tired researchers who make mistakes and have a slow response.

As a consequence, we can’t know who is sick at the moment. But does that matter? Sick people can’t afford to stay home and often really sick people can’t afford to go to the doctors. People are going to hide their illness, which will spread one service transaction at a time. Hospitals will only see people after illness takes hold, when denial of sickness is impossible.

Honest talk here: I’ve twice had pneumonia because I said “it’s just allergies” until I was so sick my admin demanded I go to the doctors.

Beyond the issues of cost, this is also an engrained response. In graduate school I was yelled at for not being back on my campus working immediately after a major surgery, and decades later I was dropped from a collaboration after I told the primary PI I was having a substantial health issue. We are trained that sickness is unacceptable.

This isn’t a poor people issue. This isn’t an uneducated people issue. This is an American issue.

In recent years, it’s become normalized to treat people poorly at work if they have a health issue; calling them unreliable or otherwise marginalising them if they get sick.

If people only go to the doctor when they have hit the severely ill stage (as I’m guilty of doing), what is the result? Instead of heading off the disease (any disease) while it is treatable or manageable, doctors have to start in crisis mode. This is a lot more expensive.

For Coronavirus, crisis treatment appears to mean ventilators. Most hospitals have just enough to get through a normal flu season with some extra units in national reserves and storage.

I’m hearing on the news that we don’t have factories to make respirators in the US. We will have a shortage. This could mean that people will die due to the one-two punch not going to the doctor early enough to have their symptoms treated before lung damage takes hold, and a lack of ventilators. (These two aren’t necessarily coupled. There will be people who seek timely care and still die due to a lack of ventilators).

The lack of supplies goes beyond ventilators. We also don’t have enough protection equipment for health care workers. This could mean fewer health care workers caring for more people, more sick/dead HCWs.

But what if you survive and don’t get sick?

Most Americans are 4 paycheques from homelessness.

Most Americans don’t get paid sick leave.

If a business shuts down, you don’t get paid. If you get sick, you don’t get paid.

People will, as they always do, stop making non-essential purchases. This will hurt small business, construction, major manufacturing, and the service industry first. No new cars, no new stoves, no new Easter dresses, no vacations, no replacing the roof, no extra anything.

When families get hit with hospital bills, they’ll end up selling their homes, tanking the housing industry. Rents will get driven-up as people stop owning. This will lead to overcrowding. Also homelessness.

The same will play out when businesses shut for weeks or months.

So how do we stop this?

1) Test wildly — find everyone who is sick

2) Make tests free

3) Offer emergency bailout measures to pay all medical bills associated with cold / flu / bronchial illness so no one fears the doctor.

That is the medical side of things — and some places like New York are trying to implement this.

But we also have to look at treating economics.

1) Offer immediate unemployment benefits to anyone out of work due to coronavirus related business closures

2) We need to put into effect emergency policies preventing price gouging in all sectors. Freeze rents.

And we’re going to need a bailout plan in place so that people know that when this is over, America will be here to help them rebuild.

We can do this. We can come out stronger like we did with the great public roads programs of the New Deal.

I’ll pay more taxes gladly.

But right now, frankly, we are fucked. Because none of this is going to happen with the Trump administration.

And I’m scared.

So how do we make it through?

We have to take care of each other and be prepared to be our own community safety net. If you have extra, stock up extra food — dried beans, canned goods, and be ready to share. If you have an extra room, imagine saying “I have space” to the friend who becomes jobless. Give.

We are going to have to take care of each other. Plant a garden, share a meal, make your extra someone else’s only.

Pray / hope / work to make this never happen. Employers enact paid sick leave now. Researchers, make those COVID-19 tests CDC authorised.

We’re on our own, but we’re not alone.

We have each other (and you really should wash your hands).

The post COVID-19 — Do more than wash your hands appeared first on Star Stryder.

While I was at AAS I saw two different groups of humans talking about how their/our heritage by preserving the sky. They talked about how preserving their culture included preserving the sky; a sky that is sacred.

I also saw two different groups of people saying that culture is nice; saying they’d do what they could to preserve cultural heritages, but they’re going to do what they’re going to do because it advances greater things.

One of these groups – in both situations – was astronomers.

TL;DR 1 – Starlink: We are at a turning point. We have a choice to launch Starlink and other satellite constellations that will provide internet access to people in rural and remote places, or we can deny people the internet to make it easier for astronomers to do ground-based astronomy, in the process denying them educational, financial, and other opportunities. If we launch Starlink there will be consequences. Yes, it will slow the progress of astronomy, as we are forced to build into our observing plans the need to linger longer on targets and observe things in weird orders to make sure we get satellite free images. Yes, the sky will be full of satellites. But which is the greater good?

TL:DR 2 – TMT: We also have a choice about building one of the largest telescopes planned – the Thirty-meter Telescope – at Mauna Kea. We can forcibly deny people the chance to maintain their ancestral traditions at the top of Mauna Kea without the scar of one more massive telescope. Alternatively, we can mend relations and find a way to make TMT something everyone looks forward to, or we can build that telescope in the Canary Islands where the the science won’t be as great. Yes, this will mean more delays and potentially less science. But which is the greater good?

Story 1: Of Mauna Kea

Back in 1968, when times were different and efforts were being made to pave over inconvenient Hawaiian culture with whiteness, a lease was pushed through that gave control of the Mauna Kea – a sacred site to the Hawaiians – to the University of Hawaii for the construction of telescopes. This 65 year lease left the University of Hawaii responsible for maintenance and security, allowed for 15 telescopes to be constructed, and required the indigenous population be allowed reasonable access to the mountain for their rituals and cultural celebrations. (Overly brief summary – see complete lease text here)

Today, the indigenous people of Hawaii are working to recapture their traditions that are still remembered by their elders, and that were recorded in writings and recordings. The Hawaiians aren’t exactly trying to take back their mountain, but they are trying to make sure it is better taken care of in the future, because let’s just say things have gotten a bit out of hand. Rather than going into details here, I’m going to refer you to these two official websites: Office of Hawaiian Affairs website on Mauna Kea, County of Hawaii website on Mauna Kea.

Things came to a head in 2017, after the international astronomical community competitively selected Mauna Kea as the future home of a new 30-meter Telescope that would dwarf everything else on the mountain (the building will be similar in size to Subaru’s, but the telescope will be a giant).

Image parents who have noticed their adult children are only kinda responsible in caring for their dogs (and sometimes forget to give them water – thank God for toilets). These parents might react poorly when they hear their children are about to become parents.

The indigenous Hawaiians saw how their mountain was only mostly taken care of, and they reacted poorly when they got the news about TMT.

And things have gone increasingly sideways ever since, with the Hawaiians asking (and demanding) to be made part of the process; asking for the land to be better cared for, asking for access, and asking to be seen and heard (instead of being patted on the figurative head and dismissed). (This is simplified.)

The argument coming from astronomy was that the benefits to astronomy outweighed any religious arguments the Hawaiians might have. The arguments coming from astronomy were that the benefits to science and the world outweighed the cultural needs of the Hawaiians. (This too is simplified.)

And things were said by astronomers that can never be unsaid. And things went to court. And only now, in 2020, do we see people successfully trying to build relationships through communications instead of litigation, and it is unclear how things are going to move forward, but the astronomers have more than once tried to just do their own thing, without regard to the local wishes. The were only stopped by Hawaiians literally barricading the road.

It’s unclear when and if TMT will be built at Mauna Kea, and there is a not-quite-as-good-but-still-good-enough site in the Canary Islands. (Yes folks, there is an option to Mauna Kea – it’s just not quite a perfect option). It remains possible that through honest listening and dialogue, a positive way forward will be found; one that allows a respectful building of the observatory and allows the Hawaiian people to feel their land is respected and they have the access to the mountain that best allows them to continue their traditions for generations to come. I

The Story of Starlink

Back in 2015, Elon Musk looked around the globe for problems he could solve and profit from. He had SpaceX, with the aim of backing up the human race on Mars (it was more complicated than that). He had Tesla, with the aim of putting an electric car in every garage (eventually) by innovating high-end and then lower- (but still high) end cars and all the needed battery and recharging infrastructure (again, I’m simplifying). He didn’t yet have the Boring Company for innovating mass transit (that would come in 2016). In 2015, Elon Musk looked at the world and seeing that not everyone has internet and decided to fix that so business men like him would be able to sell their goods and hire enough technologically literate people. The world needed access to internet, and thus started Starlink.

Before going forward, let’s consider the Digital Divide. Access to the internet gives us access to information, to websites that allow us to sell our ideas, goods, and services, to tools to compete for scholarships, grants, and opportunities. From settling arguments over “Where else have I seen this actor,” to allowing kids to compete in international robotics competitions, the internet changes lives for the good. People who don’t have access to the Internet miss all kinds opportunities. And lack of internet doesn’t just limit opportunities, it also makes required tasks harder to complete; students have to scramble to use library computers to submit homework other kids submit from home, and job applicants wait in line to complete things from public computers and have to store their lives on memory sticks instead of hard drives … But these scenarios assume that a community has public access to free computers that are on the internet. There are rural areas – farms in the fly over country (except where someone pays for a satellite connections). There are islands not connected by any physical lines to the global internet. And there are so many places in between that no one has paid to connect, and that no one will pay to connect because physical infrastructure is prohibitively expensive.

Enter Starlink (and all its planned competitors). These networks of low-orbit comms satellites plan to provide internet to these corners of the world. In May 2019, the first batch of 60 satellites was launched and it was very quickly realised that these satellites are really really really reflective. At various points in their orbit, these shiny pieces of hardware catch the Sunlight and reflect it back to the night-side of Earth, appearing brighter than most of the stars and planets in the sky.

The brightness of Starlink satellites led to a rash of people racing out to observe them night after night. People learned about magnitudes, and tracking, and orbits. And Astronomers got angry because these satellites were utterly totally and horribly bad for astronomy; their brightness is such that when they pass through the field of view of a massive telescope, their light can saturate the digital detector, like a camera phone pointed at the Sun, such that an entire column of data might be overwhelmed as the signal from the bright satellites spills from one pixel to the next (and the next and the next). When sensors look at objects that are too bright, it can cause a ghost image to effect multiple exposures, leading to bad data in those images. The only way to avoid these issues is to avoid observing where Starlink’s are located in the sky. This is possible, but it’s annoying and will cause it to take longer to obtain most data sets (and frankly, most astronomers don’t want the bother optimising their observations around the positions of moving satellites.

The thing is, sitting there at AAS in January, I listened to people emotionally argue that Starlink should be halted (and the other constellations should be prevented): They argued that the sky is our heritage and that we must preserve it as a mostly satellite free dome so our children can enjoy a light-pollution free future. Folks argued the sky is sacred and must be protected from the pollution of swarming satellites. As I listened, I kept hearing the parallels to the Hawaiians wanting their mountain protected because its vistas are their cultural heritage; the mountain is their sacred space.

And while TNT can be moved (with some impact to the science it can do) to the Canary Islands, the only way to get low latency internet to the world is with constellations of satellites.

Our shared sky

I have been looking sky ward my entire life. I still remember where I was the first time I say a satellite pass overhead. It was the summer of ’89 and I was part of a People-to-People science exchange to the Soviet Union. I was the second youngest of 20 some odd high school students who were there to study astronomy and take place in random recreational activities. That night, a group of us were camping not too far from a glacier in the Caucus mountains, and because being a teenager is hard, I’d left the tent I shared with a bunch of others and sat on a rock. The sky was the darkest I’d ever seen – we were hours drive from even a village – and as I sat their contemplating the things a 15 year old girl contemplates, I saw a tiny speck of light moving in a way I’d never seen. As I stared, I realised it could only be one thing – a satellite. That dot of light made me feel less alone and filled me with awe.

Ever since the first Sputnik launched in October 1957, people have been going outside to see satellites pass by. At star parties, people check to see if they’ll be able to glimpse the Hubble, ISS, or something else they love. Websites and apps, like Heavens Above, exist to make it easier for people to see satellites. Ham radio operators have made a sport of detecting satellite pings and bouncing signals off of some of their reflective surfaces.

When I hear the argument that having 5-10 satellites in the sky at once will ruin the night sky, I’m just confused. Satellites don’t wreck dark adaption – you can still see the Milky Way and the faintest stars. Satellites don’t make it impossible to see the Northern lights or to study (as kids often do) the movement of the planets against the stars or the phases of the moon. We already have so many planes (especially where I live, under the STL landing path), that these tiny non-blinking streaks will appear comparatively staid. And, dear White scientists, what sacred heritage are you claiming? I can’t think of any western child who is taken out and taught the darkest skies are our cultural heritage, and if the skies are sacred and need protected, why is it so hard to pass lighting ordinances?

So here we are.

We have a choice to either deny people the internet to make it easier for people to do ground-based astronomy, in the process denying them educational, financial, and other opportunities. Alternatively, we can slow the progress of astronomy, and build into our observing plans the need to linger longer on targets to make sure we get satellite free images, while at the same time allowing Starlink and other satellite constellations to grant global access to the internet you are using to read these words. Yes, they sky will be full of satellites, but which is the greater good?

We also have a choice at Mauna Kea. We can forcibly deny people the chance to maintain their ancestral traditions at the top of Mauna Kea without the scar of one more massive telescope their grandparents didn’t realise they were agreeing to the construction of in 1968. Alternatively, we can mend relations and find a way to make TMT something everyone looks forward to, or we can build that telescope in the Canary Islands where the the science won’t be as great. Yes, this will mean more delays and potentially less science, but which is the greater good?

I’m a scientist. Advancing our understanding of the universe is what I’ve dedicated my life to in one way or another. I don’t want to slow the progress of science, but I think that the greater good may come in embracing the launch of satellites like Starlink (with the understanding that this must lead to low-cost, global internet). I think the greater good will come in only building more telescopes at Mauna Kea if the Hawaiian people will also celebrate these new scientific facilities’ future first light.

We need to ask; which path is the greater good? That is the path we need to take, even if we don’t want to.

The post Toward a greater good: TMT & Starlink appeared first on Star Stryder.

This morning my Google calendar of space history woke me to say that the space shuttle Challenger exploded 34 years ago today.

If you are GenX like me, you remember exactly where you were in 1986 when the Challenger lifted off but failed to reach orbit with a crew of 6 astronauts and one schoolteacher from New Hampshire.

For each of the older generations there has been this kind of a winter disaster. For the boomers, there was the Jan 27, 1967 loss of Apollo 1. The 3-man crew lost their lives during a preflight test when a spark ignited their cabin’s oxygen atmosphere. For Millennials there were was the February 1, 2003 loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry.

One of the things we talk about over on CosmoQuest is the simple fact that space is hard. Getting to space is one of the most challenging things a machine with or without humans can accomplish, and the only task that is more challenging is getting to the bottom of the ocean. It is amazing that so few astronauts have died.

This month, we saw the inflight abort test of the SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule. That successful test sets us up to start sending astronauts to space in a brand new spacecraft. As we do that, it is important for us to both remember past tragedies, and not let them hold us back.

I wrote about my experience with the Challenger loss in a blog post I apparently wrote 12 years ago. Rereading that post today, and looking at how long it has been since the final shuttle launch on July 8, 2011, I feel sad and tired and old.

I am sad because so little has happened in the “Dare Boldly” category since 2008. I feel tired because I know how hard so many people including myself have worked to advocate for space and innovate new ways to do science, and it seems that we’re still always 6 months away from something happening. I feel old because I just realised the current NASA administrator is two years my junior.

In 2008, I called for NASA to make space for young people to rise and take on the mantel held by the Sputnik and Apollo generations, and let us fly with bold dreams. I now look at the GenX NASA Administrator, Jim Bridenstine, and realize we may dream boldly, we may even lead, but NASA is still bound by the constraints of a fickle federal leadership, with changing goals and tight purse strings. We want to stride boldly into the future, but I feel instead like we are stumbling forward as best we can, shackled to a bureaucracy of favored companies, favored planets, and irrational costs that are only going to grow out of control as the direction we are supposed to be going keeps changing.

We may be just months from the launch of humans on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon. It is unclear at this time how long it will be until humans launch on Boeing’s Starliner capsule, but it could be just half a year. Those astronauts are either preparing the way for the executive branche’s dream of the moon or the legislature’s dreams of Mars.

As we prepare to return to space on these still-to-be-proven new spacecraft, we need to remember that space is hard. There will be loss of life again. And we need to remember that the astronauts accept that risk when they sign up.

As we move forward, let’s celebrate the lives of those who died in the pursuit of space, and let’s be inspired to once again dare mighty things. The real problem comes in implementation; doing bold things may require a fundamental change in how we explore. By allowing the whims of the government to dictate NASA’s direction, long term planning becomes impossible, and since science and engineering can take longer than an election cycle, we keep ending up with incomplete ideas. In many areas of research, this problem is avoided through a competitive process where peer-review, review by the National Academies, and investment in deciding community goals through processes like Decadal Surveys, allow the field to act (more or less) coherently to define longterm projects and priorities.

Imagine a competitively funded space program where people didn’t just pitch science missions, but they also pitched human space missions. Imagine if instead of picking a planet or asteroid to head toward based on a presidential decree, we instead had a call for proposals and had our best and brightest (who didn’t propose) evaluate the most efficient and scientifically useful path forward. I want that future. I don’t think I will get that future… but it’s fun to dream.

We need to let the space explorers explore, competitively and doing what is best to build a longterm, sustainable infrastructure that carries us and/or our robots to new worlds. We need to explore boldly and with purpose, and we must honour the fallen heroes who helped get us where we are today.

The post For every generation a hero: Remembering Apollo 1, Challenger, & Columbia appeared first on Star Stryder.

Less than 2 minutes after launch, and after sustaining Max Q (that point in flight when the rocket experiences maximum dynamic pressure), SpaceX had their Falcon 9 just… turn off. This had two effects. As planned, on board software correctly processed sensor and system data to recognize the problem, and released the Dragon Crew Capsule and fired its Draco Engines to get it the hell out of there. The next thing that happened was the unpowered and now unstable rocket, as planned, exploded in a very dramatic way. The jettisoned capsule accelerated away with a maximum acceleration of 3.4 g. This is significantly easier on the body than what astronauts experienced during a necessary abort of a Soyuz capsule in October 2018.

After the Crew Dragon reached a maximum altitude of around 25 miles or 40 km, the capsule began its safe journey home, with all parachutes deploying as planned, concluding with a safe splashdown into the ocean. This successful test prepared the way for a crewed launch sometime this year.

In a press conference following the abort test, there was a clear attempt to maintain a single narrative between NASA administrator Jim Bridenstein and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk; Musk even stated they’d agreed on messaging prior to appearing, roughly 15 minutes late, on the press conference stage.

Musk made it clear that SpaceX should have hardware delivered by the end of February or at worst early March, and ready for launch shortly thereafter. Bridenstein, on the other hand, stressed the desire for additional tests of the parachute system on the Crew Dragon, and said that NASA is going to be rethinking how to use this new hardware. Specifically, they will consider if they’d like to change their current plan to have a short mission to the ISS, and instead have the astronauts stay for an extended period. That latter option would require additional astronaut training, and would delay launch by an unknown amount of time. Many of us wonder why NASA didn’t already provide training for both kinds of missions — long or short — and some question if this is a delaying tactic to allow Boeing and its Atlas launched Starliner a chance to catch up in development (recall they had an unsuccessful trip to the ISS in December).

Bridenstein was extremely clear that NASA wants to have multiple suppliers of human space launch services, and continues to publicly back Boeing and United Launch Alliance. In December, when our Daily Space team visited Kennedy, we found that the information given during facility bus tours actually stressed these older companies and talked about how it would be Boeing that returned Americans to space from American soil. Since NASA is a government funded agency, there are complex politics behind every public message — messages often designed to keep the congress people who write the budgets happy. As we watch the similarly politically motivated actions in the following months, we will be playing close attention to see if Boeing is required to put their capsule through the same tests and experiences the same timeline delays as we’re seeing for SpaceX.

I am a fan of a take it slow, test everything, and move forward boldly kind of approach, but we want to see fairness in how these two companies are allowed to advance their technologies.

Let’s look at the facts: SpaceX has had a successful launch to the ISS, numerous successful parachute tests, pad abort tests, and now a successful mid launch abort test. They are being asked for potentially more testing of their parachutes. On the other side, Boeing had a parachute not deploy during their on-the-ground abort test, and announced that landing on 2 of 4 parachutes was deemed a success and their schedule would not be effected. They also had an unsuccessful launch to the ISS that is being called a success because they had their capsule return to Earth just fine. Currently, we see plans for a June 2020 launch with three people, and a subsequent launch planned with 4 people in December. These 7 humans will each cost more to launch on these Boeing capsules than they would cost to launch in the proven Russian Soyuz capsules.

SpaceX? While all flight-tests have so far been successful, they did have a fuelling accident related to an engine test that resulted in the loss of the capsule originally planned for this weekend’s in-flight abort test. Their parachutes have consistently worked, they have consistently flown to the ISS, and the Falcon 9 rockets are showing they can fly over and over from location after location. Currently, we see plans for a possible April launch with 2 astronauts, but NASA is saying this could be delayed. We also see plans for a July launch with 3 astronauts and no other flights planned for 2020. These 5 astronauts will launch at a substantially lower cost than what is currently being spent on Soyuz capsules.

Currently, NASA has orders in to fly astronauts on 6 additional Starliner and 6 additional Crew Dragon capsules in 2021 and beyond. In the coming months, I hope to see both companies included side-by-side in discussions of our nations’ reborn human space program. I hope see the same tests from both companies, and discussions on how to get costs under control. I hope for fairness. I hope, but I’m not optimistic, but I will be here watching and reporting on what we see happen.

The post Will the Boeing / SpaceX space race be fair? appeared first on Star Stryder.

In the (mumble mumble) years since that first poster presentation, I have attended a never ending march of these astronomy meetings. Sometimes I go as a journalist, and my media badge precludes me from presenting. Sometimes I go as a scientist, and there is a professional expectation that I must present, no matter what, as much as possible.

The thing is, if everyone is presenting (often multiple things), it becomes extremely hard to find the best content, and to find the time to consume that content between presenting and meetings. Sure, there are award talks and plenary sessions, but outside these rare longer presentations, everyone is trying to cram their science into 5 minutes or onto a 3’x4’ sheet of paper. There is little incentive to do more than a last minute effort when you know that if you’re lucky maybe 10–20 people will take the time to take in your work. These massive conferences often turn into a life changing event for the students (yea!) and there are social gatherings that may lead to new collaborations for more senior attendees, but mostly conferences lead to bitch sessions over beer.

The economics of this makes no sense in our funding strapped reality. At the cost of typically $1500-$2000 per person per meeting, and with typically a few thousand participants per year at just the AAS meetings, these events consume millions of dollars and I’m honestly not sure what the return is beyond getting to hangout and eat overpriced food with people I otherwise might only see in a video conferencing window. Since it’s easier to justify funding to go to these conferences then to get together face-to-face to do meaningful collaboration work, there isn’t any incentive to do things better.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

For the past few years, I’ve been attending computer science conferences when I can. I’m usually there to talk about the unique challenges of astronomy’s big data or how you test the accuracy of an algorithm that uses a human being as part of the data processing. These meetings are fundamentally different in two amazing ways: the expectation is that the majority of attendees are there to learn, and the speakers are invested in doing the best job they can because they are getting paid.

These two differences create an environment where the speakers want to shine, and the attendees are <gasp> actually paying attention.

It is frankly punishing to give an invited talk in astronomy. I generally have to pay my own way to get there (out of pocket, or out of grants that also pay my salary), including paying a several hundred dollar registration fee. Then, in some cases, my name and image is used to promote the event, and I’m pestered by organizers to advertise the event. Put another way, I get to pay for the privilege to do extra work and be used. The audience is generally sitting there, laptops open, checking their email and writing their own presentations instead of focusing on me.

In computer science, everything is different. Typically, a nice human will ask what airline I would like to fly, where I would like to stay, and things will magically be arranged. In one case, there was profit sharing and the amount of money the conference brought in was used to pay honoraria to the speakers! And the audience… they are there to learn, and while they may be tweeting, they are rarely working as they take in sessions.

In trying to figure out how these two fields ended up so different, I’ve been asking folks how their conference travel is paid for, and what their goals are in going to these meetings, At the heart of things appears to be a difference in what matters. People attending computer science conferences often have their travel paid for by their company or they pay out of pocket, and their motivations are to increase their skills and build the connections they need to get to the next step in their career. In astronomy, our travel is often paid for by our grants, sometimes by our institutions, and sometimes by us personally. We are there to attend professional meetings (unpaid labor), collaboration meetings (often but not always paid labor), and to always always present (sometimes we even have to pay our own poster printing fees!) We aren’t there to learn. It’s not unusual to hear a senior person say they didn’t get to attend a single session at a conference, and it’s not unusual to see someone arrive 10min before they present and leave a session room as soon as their own presentation is done (I’ve been guilty of both these things).

The thing that I find ironic is that astronomy, an academic field, doesn’t emphasize learning at the meetings were everyone is trying to disseminate all their results.

Imagine what these conferences would look like if our institutions valued people going to learn and to bring back new ideas even just as much as they value people presenting? Imagine if session and poster spots were competitively selected (with a lower bar for students). This might encourage higher-quality content to be produced and audiences to pay close attention.

Unfortunately, I think the — industrial — academic complex of astronomy precludes this kind of change. Institutes need to report that their people are presenting to attract the best students and funders, researchers need to report that they are presenting to get promoted and maintain funding, and even students need to say they are presenting to get into grad school. If we suddenly tried to change the paradigm, putting the emphasis on learning instead of presenting, the number of things being reported would plummet, failure would likely be perceived instead of change, and people would get punished for being part of doing things a better way.

So, we will maintain a false conference economy in astronomy.

And we will continue to bitch over beer, as some of us dream of doing things a better way.

The post Astronomy conference economics appeared first on Star Stryder.

Memory is a strange and fickle thing. Not every moment is stored. Somewhere I lost the names of the dinosaurs that I knew when I was 5. Gone is the family tree of the Greek gods I memorised in 5th grade. There is an inexplicable alchemy to what is remembered – did you know, birds can’t fart, wombats poop cubes, and Ceres was a former planet more than 70 years before Pluto was even discovered. Somethings, I just can’t forget.

There is this one memory that stays with me. I was about 12 years old – a 7th grader – and I was getting teased for my intelligence as we all lined up to go inside that morning. I can remember the crowding, the noise, and his taunt of: “You just think you know everything!” 

I still remember my retort “No. I. Don’t. … but someday I will.”  

I was wrong, I will never know everything, but that hunger to try – to work each day to learn more and understand more, that hunger that pulsed through that pre-teenage me is what has carried me to become and stay a scientist.

Scientists aren’t people who know everything: we are people that strive everyday to expand humanity’s understanding of this universe we share.

As I stand before you, I see echos of that little girl in who I’ve become. Back then, I read all the science fiction I could, from the Star Trek novels that made my English teacher roll her eyes to the Frank Herbert and Michael Crichton novels that left me terrified of viruses and genetically engineered plagues. I’m not going to lie, I still read too much, and the works of Gaimen, Jemisin, Scalzi, Okorafor, Wendig & Lafferty fill my ears and eyes as I whisper sync from audio book to paper white in stolen moment found everyday. Back then, by day, I filled my brain with the latest astronomy as I poured through the news in Sky and Telescope, and at night I lugged my Sear’s sale brand telescope out into the yard to try and find Mars. Today, well, my view comes from cameras mounted on spacecraft orbiting other worlds. I get to write astronomy news and share it online. I think this is where I’m supposed to say you can tune in to catch Daily Space, most Mondays through Friday at 1pm Eastern on Twitch.tv/CosmoQuestX. 

It was and is in science and science fiction that I have found my home. I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. The teasing of middle school… well when you’re a girl interested in science that never really goes away. I was a Cold War child, a Gen Xer, growing up to a sound track of Billy Joel reminding me that we didn’t start the fire, but we tried – we try – to fight it. 

It was in Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway of Sagan’s Contact, that I found my hero. As I lay in the grass clinging to the earth I felt myself – like her – almost falling into the stars. I longed for something more. In Sagan’s fiction, something amazing was possible, the world could, for one brief moment unite as we all worked to science the shit out of something greater than all of us.

Today, my iPhone is more likely to be playing Amanda Palmer than Billy Joel, but as I read my Twitter feed, I think it’s safe to still say, we didn’t start the fire, and it is going to go on and on and on. The thing is, we have something that really only Asimov had fully predicted: we have the internet on a screen in our pocket, and through our constant connection, we are united, if only by DNS servers, to almost the entire world. There is the potential for all of us to come together, one internet connection at a time.

While I did grow up to get that same PhD in astronomy as the fictional Ellie Arrowwood, I’m not someone who’s looked for anything more in my radio data than radio galaxies. I’m not the kind of astronomer who can help solve global warming. All I can say is it is real, and it scares me. I’m not the kind of big data scientist who can run the numbers and find a way to free our oceans of plastic. All I can say is bring your own cup, and maybe pick up the ones other people have cast away. There are so many problems out their that are bigger than me – racism, increasing economic inequality, heck – I had to shut down Twitter yesterday because of a picture of an abandoned pitbull I don’t have the ability to adopt, and I shut it down today because of the image of a pregnant orangutang clinging to the last tree in a bulldozed forest. There is so much I can’t fix, and some days, I feel so impotent as I just want to do something as I fear our Ecosystem is collapsing. I am haunted by that episode of Star Trek: TNG, The Inner Light, where Picard lives out a dead man’s life through a space probe’s simulation; a simulation that is all that’s left of a dried out world’s civilization. 

There is so much I can’t do.

And there is one thing I can do. 

I can science.

And I can ask you to take out your phone, or click into a new window on your tablet or computer and use the internet to help me share the word, that we can do science together. We can solve real problems  working together. Here is the thing I want you to share on the social media, WhatsApp, or the listserv of your choice: we – all of us together – can help a tiny spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx find a safe place to grab a soil sample from the asteroid Bennu. Join me by going to Bennu.cosmoquest.org, and help me map out all the potential hazards that cover Bennu’s surface. This half kilometer across asteroid is nothing like we imagined. It looks like a load of rubble that some interplanetary dump truck left between the worlds. The surface is just rocks, on rocks, with boulders, and more rocks – and you know what, sometimes Bennu even ejects shrapnel from its surface. Mapping out this asteroid is tedious work that requires people – people like you – to digitally trace out the lengths of the boulders and dot the centers of the hundreds of rocks that fill each image. We have roughly 4500 images that each need to be viewed by 15 people so that our spacecraft can start doing higher resolution follow up images of the best looking regions. We have until July 10 to do this… and we can do this. We launched our website May 22, just 2 weeks ago, and already we have completed more than 1100 images. 

We can do this.

Will you do this with me? Will you science with me? 

It may seem like folly to say, come, while the world or at least our twitter feeds burn, lets map rocks on an asteroid so many millions of miles away. But this is something real, and it is one small step in the direction of making a world where people work together to do meaningful things in an arena where it shouldn’t matter the colour of our skin, what pronoun we chose, who we love, or in what god or gods we do or don’t believe. All of us… we can map rocks. It’s so small a thing, but maybe it’s enough.

Maybe we can make our own community, where the only thing that matters today is those rocks. And then later, can we map the moon? I’ve heard NASA is thinking of going back there.

I wish I could say science, as a whole is a safe place where people are judged without bias by their accomplishments only. I wish I could say we all have an equal chance at success. I can’t. I could tell you about the harassment and abuse I’ve faced as a woman or the racism I’ve seen affect others. I could do that, but it hurts too much. I could show you the research and statistics, but why? That won’t change anything.

Instead I want to map an asteroid at Bennu.cosmoquest.org. And I’m not the only scientist saying come, help me, let’s do this small thing that means so much. There is a project called Stall Catchers that needs you to help map brains to better understand Alzheimers. There is a project Budburst, that is tracking the blooming of flowers, and the Lady Bug project has uncovered insects that were thought extinct.

Will you join me? Will you join them? Will you join us as we escape into science? 

When I first found out I was getting this award, I have to admit, I had to do a quick review of Issac Asimov’s life. Like everyone one else, I think Nightfall is amazing.  I read his Galactic Empire and Foundation series 10 year ago in a summer binge. I loved them mostly – there are slow bits and not everything stood the test of time – but… I think the fact that I raced through them in three months says everything that needs to be said. But loving someone’s books doesn’t mean that person is someone whose name you want tied to your own. Before standing here I need to read about Asimov the man and what he did besides write. It turns out, I had nothing to fear, and the more I read, the more I wished Asimov had lived to see how intersectional-diversity is becoming a new normal in science fiction.

Asimov believed that science fiction was an important way for humanity to see what is possible. And I dream that the society he fought for and imagined will become not just the new normal in fiction but also in science. 

I wish he was still here. I wrote something as I defined the CosmoQuest community. I wish I could show it to him because I think it would make him proud. He died the year I graduated from high school, and since he isn’t here, I’m going to read it to you instead.

At CosmoQuest, all are welcome. In this time when there are too many global tragedies taking place local to too many of our community members, I want you to know we wish for you to be safe, be well, and come help us explore our universe when you can. Our hope is that if we acknowledge, as stated so well by Astronomers without Borders, that we are all one people sharing one sky, maybe it will get easier for us to show each other compassion and understanding.

There are too many places in our world that are literally and figuratively on fire for me to list them and ask for you to act to help those who need help. Instead, I want to say that in this place we will tolerate no hate. This is a place where people are accepted without regard to their colour, culture, religion or lack of religion, their education level, their wealth, or their caste. We do not care who you love, but only that you find love in this world. We believe that everyone can do great things, and we want you to be part of us doing great things.

If you have the capacity to act, please help those who need it.

If you just need a safe place for your mind to find sanctuary in science, please come here and be welcome.

When I originally wrote that post, I ended it there, just like when I originally wrote this speech, I ended the quote there. But reflection back then, and after listening to the prior session on racism today, I must continue.

[I] didn’t originally state #BlackLivesMatter because I couldn’t find an adequate way to also express our sorrow for refugees and other people killed through hate, apathy, and silence. No life should be thrown away. When humans with the potential to be the next Albert Einstein or Chris Hadfield are washing up on beaches, being struck dead walking home with Twizzlers, and sometimes just die dancing or playing in the park… I have no words to express my sorrow. Our support does not say these lives matter more than others, but rather we recognize that culturally (in different ways in different places), some populations are treated as though they matter less. This is wrong. We are proud of the people within CosmoQuest who are peacefully participating in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, #pride, and those who are opening their homes and communities to people escaping potential death in their native lands. We see your compassion and commend it.

I”m just a scientist, Just a girl who wants to know everything. I’m just a science fiction reader who dreams of a world where we are all united to do something.

I’m a person trying to make that place where we can all learn and do science together. 

Thank you for this award, that ties my name to Issac Asimov. I’d like to believe he’d help me mark rocks, and measure boulders, at CosmoQuest. Since he can’t will you?

Together we can explore our universe.

Thank you

The post Counting rocks: Maybe it’s enough appeared first on Star Stryder.

Earlier today I ran by the post office to ship a package. It’s full on spring & I decided it was time to pull out spring dresses. A women in line complemented me on my look & when I told her it was from #eShakti she was totally confused, & we had a good laugh as I explained yes they are as good as they claim on Facebook. Pockets, custom sizing and all, they are that good. Feeling pretty, and wanting to take advantage of the one day the magnolia tree will have fabulous blooms, I tried to get some pictures.

And this is when I learned the self conscious teen inside me is still alive and well.

In my head, I still have the body I had in high school, which isn’t too different from the brown-haired model on the ad. I just had much bigger hair. Seeing the pictures I took, I had a moment of “oh shit, I must diet… ” But that was wrong. I’m 45, not 15. I embrace the diversity of bodies I see on projects like @girlgaze. I am a diverse body. This body – my body – has been lived in, seen things, done things, and experienced the world (and all the foods of the world). It has done more than 15 year old me ever dreamed.

That woman at the post office, thin and the societal ideal in her athleisurewear, didn’t see a fat middle-aged loser. She saw someone in a perfectly fitting beautiful dress, someone full of confidence and pleased with spring. I need to learn how to see what she was able to see. And, maybe this larger lady in the picture, who stress ate through winter and a job change, needs to get a couple more perfectly fitting dresses from www.eshakti.com because, really, they are as cute as they look on Facebook and they do have pockets. (And if you decide to shop there, my referral code is PAMELAGAY.)

Embrace who you are and smell some flowers (or at least give them a hard look if pollen isn’t your thing).

The post Living in this body appeared first on Star Stryder.

When I was 15, I was able to travel to the Soviet Union for the summer to study astronomy. I was part of a People to People exchange program with 20 some odd students from 15 to 18. We were young, and thought we knew everything in that way that only clever teenagers can think.

A highlight of the trip was visiting the 6-m telescope in the Northern Caucasus mountains. At the time, it was the largest in the world, and here we were – high school students – getting to explore its dome and sign the visitors wall alongside some of the best astronomers in the USSR and the world. That night, exhausted but exhilarated, we piled into the back of a bus to travel down the mountain. It was a long ride, and we were too drunk on being alive to consider sleep.

As we rode, we asked those fundamental 4am questions that at the time had no answers. How will the world end? Where did our universe come from? Where did life come from? Are we alone?

Back then, it was impossible to know any of these answers, and we could only debate our opinions. We drew on science, and we drew on our religions and lack of religions as we argued. It was the last 80s. Laptops weren’t yet a thing, the Internet was only a science fiction dream, and the fundamental questions had no answers.

We didn’t know if in our lifetimes these questions could have answers, but like Aristotelian philosophers, we wanted to believe the truth of life the universe and everything could be gotten at from first principles and careful thought experiments.

When we were teens, it was a different time. We had been children who could wander free (as long as we were home by dark). Our parents might tell us to stay on the block, but there was nothing to stop us from dashing a couple miles away to the corner store and when asked where we’d gone, it was easy to lie and say we’d just been climbing trees. We were becoming teens who might say we were at the local mall, when in reality we’d snuck into the city. We weren’t bad children. We just knew the world was big and needed exploring.

A lack of data gave us freedom. It let us imagine, and it let us run wild in the world and in our minds as we dreamed, pretended, and escaped.

The world has changed in the nearly 30 years since that summer. That 6-m telescope is no longer the largest. The USSR is no longer a nation. Those impossible to answer 4am questions? Many of their answers are now graspable, and sometimes they are even solved.

In gathering data, we technologists have made our world smaller. As people, we don’t explore to discover… we google. We can’t disappear on a day off… we are tethered and trackable by our cell phones.

As a scientist, this explosion of information is truly thrilling, but as a armchair sociologist, I find it terrifying. Let’s consider the life and death of our universe for a moment, because these are questions we can now grasp through multiple lines of evidence. We know the universe expanded out from a single point that became everything. We can measure the cosmic microwave background with the Planck Satellite and see a temperature that matches what you expect from a cooling expanding universe. We can measure the universe’s expansion. We can look at the chemical composition of space and see in it, ratios of elements that match what we expect from Big Bang nucleosynthesis. We can even look at the structure in the cosmic microwave background and see the signatures of acoustic waves that oscillated through the early universe, leaving behind slight over densities and under densities in matter – variations that would lead to the stars, galaxy, and large scale structures we see today.

From the cosmic microwave background, we get an age of 13.82 billion years old.

In looking through the composition of stars, we can measure some of their ages using a technique not too different from radio-carbon dating used here on Earth. This technique, called nucleicosmochronology, yields stellar ages for our milky way of about 9 billion years on average, and gives us a solar age of 4.57 billion years. Our supercomputer powered models align with these observations as well, and allow us to model the formation of the stars and structures we see with our telescopes. Our models of a 13.8 billion year old universe match the universe that we see.

The universe is not just old; it is ancient.

But there are those who will call me a liar. Who will say my science is false and that my words come from the devil.

In 2009, I was part of a debate between old universe scientists and a young earth creationist. It was me, Don York, Bill Keel and Hugh Ross on the side of Big Bang cosmology, and Danny Faulkner defending young earth creationism. We were all astronomers, but somehow, not all of us could lose ourselves in the data. This was no Ken Ham versus Bill Nye debate born out of publicity and a desire to publicly “win” against the other. We were all Christians, and we argued from a point of compassion.

That day I learned an important lesson: I realized there are those whose faith is inflexible, and like a glass put under pressure, will hold up to significant weight, but cannot bend without shattering. I realized, that to some, belief in a young universe, and a literal creation are interwoven with a belief in God. To change one would be to lose the other, and lose a meaningful part of a person’s identity. There are foundations that are brittle, and there are no words to allow such a person to gain science without losing God and losing themselves. I hurt for these people because they have put god in a box, and can’t see our potentially limitless universe.

The more data humanity collects, the more we challenge people’s beliefs. This is both the power of big data, and it brings the potential for social revolution.

For science to win in this battle, we must argue from a place of compassion. We must remind people that it would be a cruel god indeed who explained to a preliterate society a creation that requires the mathematics of relativity. In 1 Corinthians 13:11, Paul writes: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” In science, we were children, but we’re growing up, and we need to find ways to grow our ideas.

In looking out of the gutter at the stars, we find narrow religious ideas challenged. We also find it challenged when we look inside ourselves.

The US Scopes Monkey Trials of 1925 demanded that we allow the teaching of evolution in the classroom. At the time, evolution was understood in only the broadest ways, and yet people fought against the fossil record. Today, evolution is known in much greater detail, and we need to teach it in detail, as we can learn about ourselves in genetic detail.

In the US it is now possible for anyone with $99 to get a basic genetic work up. You can learn what percentage of your DNA is from the Neanderthals and how likely you are to become addicted to caffeine. Just as we struggle to face the truths of global warming, we also struggle to face the truth of who we are. People don’t just struggle with their low-browed Neanderthal ancestors, the also struggle with questions of race and identity.

As much as me might wish for a non-racist modern age, the truth is, we live in a world of hate and ignorance.

There are those who base their self-worth on racist ideals that their people are superior to that people. These racists are now being challenged by facts. We are learning that one of the primary breast cancer genes is tied to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry that many people had no idea they had. We are finding that many of the whitest men genetically have some black African ancestor. If our self worth is tied to our racial identity, what happens when we learn we are in truth related to our so called enemy?

I would hope the truth would set us free, but the reality is, denial is easy and we live in what many are beginning to call a post-factual world.

Practicing denial is easier than learning to love the other.

As humans, we don’t like to feel shame. We don’t like to feel regret. We don’t like to acknowledge our mistakes.

Facing our own mistakes is one of the greatest struggles we deal with in examining some sets of data.

One of the mostly frequently asked questions I get is some form of “how will it all end?” Early in my career I got comfortably saying, well, someday far in the future, our warming Sun will overheat our world, and than, once it bloats up into a red-giant star, it will either consume our planet, or just toast it to well-blackened; it all depends on the Sun’s mass loss rates.

Once upon a time, I could say, we don’t know how the universe will end, but Robert Frost summed it up well:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Today, we have data that brings us answers, and the longterm truth is sad, but beautiful. It appears that at about the same time our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are colliding, our own Sun will expand into a red giant. The Earth will have a front row seat for all of this, and it is looking more and more like our planet itself should survive.

It just won’t be habitable.

We also know from a myriad of supernovae studies that our universe isn’t just expanding, it’s accelerating apart.

This means that in the fullness of time, our universe will expand so much that there is no longer sufficient energy in any one given place to support life. The black holes will evaporate, and if protons decay as predicted, all the small compact embers of stars and planets that remain will also decay away. The universe will be a great diffuse nothing, with the structure erased through the stretching.

For now we have time. We have more than 5 billion years before we collide with Andromeda and until our Sun expands. We have trillions of years before what is called the heat death of the universe,

Humans have trouble grasping numbers larger than 1000. When I say these things will happen in billions and trillions of years, that boggles the mind, and it is easy to shrug it off as something we needn’t be concerned about.

But the things that we needs most fear aren’t billions or even millions of years in our future, they are in the next 100 years.

Just as we constantly observe the Sun, and vigilantly explore the heavens to learn about our place in space, we also monitor our own world with multiple suites of instruments and satellite networks. Scientists are gathering data from across the planet, and from above the planet, and we are using this data to derive a more immediate understanding of own and our children’s future.

Man made pollution, deforestation, and construction are all radically altering our landscape. After the World Trade Center terrorist attack on 9-11, US flightspace was shut down for several days. This provided scientists a chance to measure the difference in cloud coverage between days with and without airplanes, and that difference was shocking; airplane contrails seed cloud formation and change our world’s heating.

We are changing our environment. We are changing how the clouds come and go, and how the temperatures rise.

We have been able to monitor our world from space with increasing precision since the 1950s. This long baseline allows us to see how our own actions influence our world.

We can measure the differences between how rural and urban areas retain heat in their paved parking lots and their blowing fields of green. Today, Los Angeles is painting itself white to try and lessen its heat retention and stave off one small part of Global warming.

We can measure changes in erosion where forests have been lost and where forests have been gained. Today, Iceland struggles to replant it forests.

We can measure our warming world. We can measure our rising seas. We can see changes in the oceans and measure changes in year to year weather patterns and global average temperatures.

I’m not going to lie, this data terrifies me. I want to turn my back on it and deny that we must act. I want to, but I don’t.

But there are many who do deny these facts.

And again, we are faced with a contradiction in belief systems and data driven reality.

I have heard it argued that we needn’t worry about global warming because we will face Armageddon before we face a ruined world. I have heard it argued that God would not let us destroy our world, and God will save our planet because we are saved.

And every time I hear these arguments, it reminds me of this modern parable I first heard on an Episode of West Wing:

You remind me of the man that lived by the river. He heard a radio report that the river was going to rush up and flood the town, and all the residents should evacuate their homes. But the man said, “I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.” The waters rose up. A guy in a row boat came along and he shouted, “Hey, hey you! You in there. The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety.” But the man shouted back, “I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.” A helicopter was hovering overhead and a guy with a megaphone shouted, “Hey you, you down there. The town is flooding. Let me drop this ladder and I’ll take you to safety.” But the man shouted back that he was religious, that he prayed, that God loved him and that God will take him to safety. Well, the man drowned. And standing at the gates of St. Peter, he demanded an audience with God. “Lord,” he said, “I’m a religious man, I pray. I thought you loved me. Why did this happen?” God said, “I sent you a radio report, a helicopter, and a guy in a rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?”

The reasons for denial are aren’t always wrapped in religion. They are motivated by economics, by the desire for a life of ease, and by our own denial that what we are doing may cause harm.

As long as I don’t acknowledge the data, I can deny that my every Amazon Prime airmailed package is harming the planet. As long as I don’t know the data, I can deny that buying oranges out of season is increasing the carbon in the atmosphere. As long as I don’t know the data, I can eat any fish I want, without worrying about the collapse of the oceans.

But I do know, and climate change terrifies me.

Currently, no one is watching me to see how I’m changing the world. At least as far as I have learned from the news headlines, this is true. But I don’t think this lack of watching will stay true for long.

Big data can be our big brother, looking over our shoulder and informing us of our sins. It can be there, monitoring not just our carbon footprint, but also almost everything else from our water intake to our daily commute.

Today, smart cities like Utrecht are monitoring the streets for noises consistent with rowdy behavior, and they are tracking the teens to see who is hanging out with who, and trying to use algorithms to decide where and when the police need to be seen.

With smart cities, we must ask ourselves, how much privacy dare we give up in the name of safety?

The TV show Black Mirror asks us this question over and over and over in its stories of technology gone wrong. Like modern day morality tales, the parables ask us to confront the possible consequence of big data.

Where do we draw line on monitoring our children? Is it right to monitor their positions through their phones? Is it right to monitor what they are doing by monitoring them through their webcams? Where is the boundary?

Can we investigate people based on their internet search history? What conclusions should we draw from a person’s purchase profile?

The real question needs to be: Where do we draw the line on monitoring our citizenry? While it’s annoying to have Target predict a pregnancy and target ads based on purchases, it is worse when more vulnerable health issues are explored. As we explore the gun debate, we have to balance safety and privacy. Image if we demand mental illness be logged in massive government databases the same way we report significant diseases do the World Health Organization. Now imagine if that data is released? Hell, imagine if the database of case reporting of HIV is breached!

We also need to ask, what is it right and wrong to do with this information. In China, online profiles are starting to be used to predict criminal behaviors. According to the Japan Times: “The data are collected under the “Integrated Joint Operations Platform,” which pools information from individuals’ bank records, legal past, computer details and other sources including security camera footage, HRW said.

“According to people HRW interviewed, some of those targeted are detained and sent to extralegal “political education centers” where they are held indefinitely without charge or trial.”

Do we as humans have the right to remove freedom by forcing people to act in specific ways through big data driven carrots and sticks? Or is that playing at being a vengeful god?

I don’t know the answers to a lot of the questions I’ve raised today. I am a scientist, and to Paraphrase Thornton Wilder, there some things only the saints and the poets can understand.

What I do know is that as much as big data can challenge our beliefs, it can also be used to show that people are good.

It is often claimed that people on welfare in the US are lazy drug addicts, but in those states that temporarily required drug testing,  very few tests were positive, and the money spent on testing may have exceeded the savings the states received for ending benefits to addicts.

While there are terrible people in this world, there is also goodness and light.

Now that it’s possible to engage people in charity through the Internet, we see people giving to support the creation of art, to support the creation of science… people are donating to make our world a place of makers and doers.

And people are helping to solve the problems big data sometimes runs into. I’ve talked a lot about this in the context of citizen science, and how we are engaged volunteers to help us solve problems we haven’t yet gotten deep learning to solve, like mapping craters, and labeling astronaut photos.

As we move into this week’s discussions, I would ask all of you to come at big data with a scientists’ eyes. When the data reveals a new truth, we need to find flexibility in our world view. We need to take out beliefs out of the box, and allow them to expand to encompass the true awesomeness of our universe and of our pale blue dot that is just a speck in the vastness of space.

As we explore the limits of what technology offers, we need to ask not just what is possible, but also what is fair and what is moral. We need to ask, what choices set us free to be our best selves and what choices take us into a dystopian future .

We are at a turning point. How we choose to use the data that is now available to us will decide if we are able to save ourselves through our actions or lose ourselves to a post factual age.

I’m an astronomer. I can’t tell you how we can save our society. I can tell you that the Earth will be here for another 5 billion years, with or without us. I can tell you our world is just one of countless worlds in our galaxy, but that due to the vast emptiness of space, we are essentially alone in the darkness. It is up to us to find our own way and use the data to move ourselves forward without losing our humanity.

The post Big Data and our Humanity: A Talk appeared first on Star Stryder.

Right now, I’m at 35,000 ft somewhere over Arizona. I’m on my way home from spending just over 24 hours in San Diego. For several hours, I enjoyed the productive boredom of working in the Phoenix Admirals Club. This gave me a chance to contemplate things and stuff. More accurately, I contemplated spending and stuff. My 24 hours of work-related travel cost me the tips I left, the insane mark up on the Kleenex I bought at the airport (because of the cold I picked up), and the cost of the coffee that went beyond what I can expect to get reimbursed, but needed to keep functioning through sleep deprivation. This trip, I got off cheap. There wasn’t anything I needed to buy to work effectively while traveling. I didn’t lose anything during this trip. It could have been a whole lot worse.

We don’t generally talk about the cost of travel. There are taboos involved in anything regarding money. Those of us with funds know we’re lucky, and to complain would be to be ungrateful. Those who travel on their own dime know it is a choice: we do it to advance our careers and the money is an investment in our future… but this is a false economy.

We need to stop being silent, and start recognizing that academia taxes people for the right to keep and advance their careers.

I have worked with many faculty who know that in order to be promoted, they must present their work at academic conferences. They also know that the alternative is to be fired. There is no middle ground. After generally 6-years, professors are either promoted to associate professor, or they are terminated. Put simply, to keep their jobs, some faculty must spend personal funds to go to conferences.

This free business travel saves the institution, and provides a service. People paying their way are showcasing research, spreading the institutional brand, and often recruiting future students, funders, or collaborations. These faculty can easily spend as much as 10% of their after tax income on just 3 conferences, assuming typical conference costs and typical early career 9-month salaries.

Even for people who manage to get funding for travel, the trips aren’t free. Beyond the issues of tipping, replacing lost items (because things will get lost), and random expenses like the Kleenex I got, … beyond all of this, there is the cost of not having access to your money (and sometimes having to pay interest on expenses) while you wait to get reimbursed.

Even our worst paid adjunct faculty are generally expected to pay for things out of pocket and then await reimbursement. Our travel is a no-interest loan to our employers. People who don’t have institutional credit cards may have to fund an entire trip personally, and then wait 30 or 60 days after their trip for reimbursement for conference registration (bought 90 days or more in advance and around $500), airfare (often bought 30 days or more in advance), hotel (which can cost over $500 for a shared room at the typical 5-day conference), and food (which inevitably include expensive collaboration meals). This means an early career researcher earning (pre-tax) $30-$50k might float $1500 for several months (probably paying interest) on stuff they do for work.

And then there are all the other costs: trips may be to climates we’re not used to and require the purchase of professional cloths we’d otherwise never need, it may be necessary to buy a suitcase (and the cost of used is still greater than nothing), and sometimes you just need an external battery and that not-free and not-reimbursed hotel wifi. It all adds up, and it is the price of doing business; the price the business puts on its employees.

As I sit here at now 30,000 ft and descending, I look at the costs I pay to work effectively while traveling. There is my subscription to Gogo Airborne internet. There is the Bluetooth travel keyboard I bought. There are the external batteries I carry and the duplicate set of cables I keep in my travel bag. There are the cloths that are so different from the jeans and T-shirt I wear to work; the dresses and suits and other professional business wear. And there are random things, like travel pillows and travel-sized containers for liquids. It all adds up. It is the cost of advancing my career and choosing not to suffer in the process. I can afford it, but it does mean that the amount I earn in my paycheck doesn’t reflect what I get to keep.

I know that part of the justification for managers earning larger salaries is to cover these kinds of costs. If you have to wear the dry clean only suit for work, you should be able to afford the dry cleaning. When professors become deans, they get a pay bump and have to stop wearing jeans and t shirts.

But the travel I’m talking about is done by everyone, and starting salary for a professor is just $30k in some fields. I can afford it, but can they?

If we aren’t going to pay our people better, and we are going to ask them to travel, changes need to be made. First of all, anyone who has to travel for work needs work to pay for travel, and to pay what it can up front with timely reimbursement on the back end. Second, we need to reconsider per diem rates in the context connectivity costs; incidentals needs to be sufficient to include wifi. Next, we need to consider creation of travel kits that can be checkout and that contain cables and batteries and all the other random stuff that is needed.

Beyond this, we must sort how to make tipping affordable so the trickle down economy doesn’t trickle down poverty. That maid who cleans your hotel room is underpaid and deals with things you don’t want to think about. It is custom in this country and many others to tip daily, and this is built into how she or he budgets and how his or her manager pays. We need to not punish housekeeping by tipping poorly (or not at all) when hotels host academic events.

Yes, being an academic is a privilege. Yes, we are lucky to get to see the insides of conference centers the world over. And yes, we need to have a discussion about the cost we’re required to pay to keep this privilege.

The post The Unacknowledged Costs of Academic Travel appeared first on Star Stryder.

I started flying American pretty exclusively after moving to St Louis in 2006. There wasn’t any real reason for this beyond they fly international and St Louis (at the time) had a ton of flights because it was a slowly fading TWA/American hub.

The first time they saved me, it was a little thing. I had plans in 2009 to go to an event at Microsoft Research in Seattle, and after everything was all set for that trip, I had a random “Want to go to Shanghai?” opportunity open up related to that year’s solar eclipse. Because of how my initial trip to Seattle was booked, I ended up with a ticket that got me home to St Louis from Seattle after I was supposed to leave St Louis for Shanghai. When I looked at the change fees and price differences, I despaired. Rather than try and move flights bought by others, I just bought a 1-way cheap seat on another airline that would fix everything, but leave me exhausted. The thing is, American called me a few days before this crazy flight fiasco was set to begin, and basically said, “Um, you know your one set of flights forces you to miss your other set of flights? Let us fix that for you for free.” They rebooked my Seattle to St Louis flight at no cost (and I kept my 1 way cheap seat as a backup), and off I went. It turned out this was a trip saver! The plane my cheap seat was booked on never flew. I would have been rebooked, leaving Seattle after my flight to Shanghai was supposed to take off! I would have missed the cruise ship I was speaking on, and things would have just been every kind of bad.

That was the first time American saved my butt, but it wouldn’t be the last. From rescuing a forgotten laptop from a plane, and having it make a connection that got it to my final destination only a couple hours after I got to my final destination, to fixing it when I booked a 12:05am flight and showed up 24 hours late because I forgot which day 12:05am belonged to, to sorting wild options when weather delays tried to prevent meetings from happening, they have just been there to help. The staff is always overworked but kind, and exhausted but willing to try and make things work.

In 2014, shortly after Russia claimed Crimea and roughly the week after the US placed various sanctions on Russia, I went to Moscow to attend the COSPAR meeting. I was working with Rosa Doran of the Galileo Teacher Training Program on programs for those wanting to learn education, and we also did teacher training for local teachers. While I had safety concerns about this trip, Rosa convinced me I was needed: I speak Russian (very badly) and that would be useful working with the local teachers. She was right (she usually is), and the trip went well until the final day. I got to the airport something like 4 hours early because traffic wasn’t as bad as expected and I was paranoid. My visa expired that day, and given the state of the world, outstaying my visa seemed like a very bad idea.

I was not the first one in line at the check-in counter, but I was near the first. I was a Platinum level frequent flier, and in the priority line. Since American doesn’t fly to Moscow, I was booked on an Air France flight that would connect through Germany to my normal American Airlines flight. When I got to the counter, the Russian woman who helped me took one look at my American booking, my US passport, and my place in the priority line and told me I would have to buy an entirely new ticket because my passport spelled out my middle name, but my ticket did not. I asked if she could just change it in the system or something. The answer was no, and no to anything else. These were new Russian regulations. I would have to buy a ticket.

Thing was, as a paranoid American and a University Professor, I had chosen to travel with just my ATM card, a $500 limit credit card, and nothing else. The conference had paid for my hotel and food, and that should have been enough. I literally couldn’t buy a ticket if I wanted to, and as an assistant professor with an assistant professor’s salary, I certainly didn’t want to.

So, I stepped away from the ticket counter, found a plug, sat on the floor leaning against the wall, plugged in my phone and computer, took a Xanax, and called American Airlines. I explained to the person who answered that if I sounded panicked, it’s because I was, and I explained the problem I was having and how my visa ended that day.

This is where I think I need to explain why I speak Russian (very badly). In 1991, I was a foreign exchange student to the USSR. I was 17. I left the US on the first day of Desert Storm, and arrived home just weeks before the coup that displaced Gorbachev and marked the ended of the USSR. My trip was originally only supposed to be 5 months. But things. And stuff. And it became 7 months. And I saw things. And I have PTSD, and thus that prescription for Xanax.

Going back to Moscow, I’d originally thought, would be my chance to see that things were better and to close the door on old memories. But then Crimea. And the Ukraine. And my timing, which has always been bad, became awful.

The man who answered the phone at American said that what was happening didn’t sound right to him, so he’d call (the counter?) and see what he could do. He explained he’d need to put me on hold, but he’d be back as soon as he could. About every 10 minutes, for the next more than an hour, he kept coming back, making sure I was ok, and updating me on what was happening as he tried to sort how to get me home. In the end, American Airlines did have to buy me a new Air France ticket, and my original seat, a nice exit row window, sat unused. My new ticket, with a receipt I paid nothing for, appeared in my inbox. I was able to take one of the few unsold seats in the back of the plane.

Let me say that again: American had to buy me a completely new ticket to get me out of Moscow, and they did this at no cost to me.

Most importantly, that guy kept coming back on the phone line to assure me it would be ok.

That one moment, and that one man who kept coming back on the line – that is the reason I try to only fly American Airlines.

Today, I was stuck. I needed to be in San Diego early to film a tv show, but there were no direct American flights. I could have either canceled an event at the museum I did yesterday, or I could fly Southwest. … So, for the sake of the museum event, I flew Southwest. They are the friendly skies, and they’ve never done me wrong. But. … I still feel a bit like a traitor.

I will fly home, layover and all, on American.

The post Why I fly American appeared first on Star Stryder.

In astronomy education, we spend a lot of time saying “what kind of idiot doesn’t know about lunar phases.” I think it’s time to ask ourselves why we get upset that people (especially kids!) don’t understand things we haven’t yet taught them, and how we can make it ok for people to say “I don’t know” instead of BSing bad answers.

I’m currently attending The International Symposium on Education in Astronomy and Astrobiology (#ise2a) in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Over the weekend, I attended the Psychology of Programming Interest Group (#ppig2017) meeting in Delft, the Netherlands. While the one meeting uses the modifier “Education” and the other uses the modifier “Psychology” they both had largely overlapping content, with talks addressing: barriers to learning; educational frameworks and progressions; and ways of determining expertise.

There were/are two major differences between these conferences.

1. The kinds of interdisciplinary engagement is not the same. At the computer science conference (N ~ 25) there was an amazing mixture of CS professors, industry programmers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and people focused on education – there didn’t seem to be any clear majority. At the astronomy conference (N ~ 80) we have astro professors and people with astronomy and education degrees who are focused on education and communication, and who work in research centers or schools. The majority of attendees are people with astronomy degrees at some level.
2. The way novice/new learners are discussed is very different. In computer science, the focus was on transforming blank slates and novices into experts. In astronomy, people start from a point of concern about misconceptions, and actively pre-test for knowledge but get frustrated with the wrong answers on the pre-tests.

I’m going to only briefly touch on the first topic: It was amazing to watch what discussions arose from having psychologists, neuroscientists, and content experts all discussing education together. More of this please! (Also, I now want to stick people in MRIs and watch them learn.)

Moving on…

One of the things I’ve been thinking about (and am still thinking about), is why does CS start from “Folks are blank slates” while astronomy starts from “People have lots of misconceptions that need measured and fixed”?

At the most simplistic level, all little kids are interested in space and dinosaurs, and get exposed to the sky above them and what they can read in books and see on TV. They both absorb information (and misinformation) while bombarding people with “Why” questions that may or may not get correctly answered. Kids/people try to piece together their own gut level understanding of their place in space the same way they piece together ideas like “if you let go of an object, it will fall.” Put simply, kids (who become adults) stitch together a patchwork of factoids, inferences, and (right and wrong) answers to questions to build an understanding of their reality.

Kids (who become adults), don’t generally develop misconceptions about programming algorithms and when to use ‘for loops’ vs ‘while loops’ while using a computer or mobile device. They do often think that writing software must be hard (but they think astronomy must be hard too!). While thinking something is hella hard effects learning, (IIRC – I need to do a literature review of this) it is easier to overcome “hella hard” than misinformation and misconceptions. (Again, I need to verify this with the literature.)

One concern I have about this simplistic model is that the focus on misconceptions in astronomy may be leading to bad results because our methodology isn’t careful to separate lack of knowledge from false knowledge. This may in turn be effecting our understanding of our learners in negative ways that cause us to focus on “fixing” learners, instead of focusing on transforming new/novice learners into experts. If we could focus, as computer science does, on teaching information to blank slates whom we can get learning while doing, while skipping all the “let me fix this misconception…” that would be a beautiful thing.

Pre-testing is a (necessary?) evil. A student faced with a pre-test that asks them questions about things they don’t know is going to do their best to please, and will use their existing experience to pull an answer out of thin air (or, as we often say when grading, the kid is going to try and bullshit their way through the questions). This is consistent with Piaget’s theory of learning, which focuses on how humans construct their own mental models of our world that are shaped and reshaped by our experiences. With a lack of complete experiences and knowledge, students can’t build an accurate mental model and can’t accurately answer questions. When we ask kids to complete a pre test and we don’t say “Leave this blank if you don’t know”, we require students to extrapolate beyond their understanding.

According to Descarte, sin originates from acting beyond knowledge. In a pre-testing, leave-nothing-blank, scenerio, we are demanding people answer questions beyond their knowledge. I wouldn’t say we’re asking them to sin, but perhaps we are “sinning” when we are upset with their lack of knowledge that appears as misconceptions.

Over my career, I have over and over and over seen education researchers present the ridiculous answers that learners have written on pre-tests as evidence of how mis-informed the public (and kids!) are. Over and over and over, researchers have scorned all the learners who, prior to being taught, wrote that the phases of the moon must be caused by the Earth’s shadow. This is punching down (here’s a good essay on the topic re: education ); this is mocking people for trying to use their experiences to problem solve what they weren’t taught. We need to stop doing this (and encourage problem solving with testing).

One thing computer science has that I want to find a way to steal for other disciplines is the idea of unit testing. Each piece of code can have a test developed to make sure the answer (=algorithm) being proposed is actually right. I guess at code syntax all the time, and I (because I don’t use compiled languages) usually know in about 5 seconds if guessed wrong. I don’t get a chance to build misconceptions about how code works, because if I’m wrong, my unit tests fail, and my code doesn’t get the chance to go spectacularly sideways. I don’t know how to bring this “test test test” mentality to astronomy other than to say, “Dear Student, it’s ok to say I don’t know, but I would guess” and to then test your guess against the answer listed in a respectable source.

When we focus on pre-tests, we are also creating a bad starting point educationally.

First of all, we know from research that the mere act of mentioning a misconception can reinforce a misconception. If you tell people who don’t know a misconception, “It is a misconception to think that vaccines are dangerous,” you may even seed them with doubts and ideas. They will walk away hearing, “There are folks who think vaccines are dangerous.” They will walk away asking, “Who are you to declare vaccines are safe!” They may even decide, “This is complex, and I am not an expert, and rather than try and understand, I’m just going to say la la la la la and not deal with vaccines at all.”

Second, when you say or imply, “We’re doing this pre-test to see what misunderstandings you already have,” you are essentially saying, “You have a lot of misunderstanding.” Research shows that if prior to a test you tell women or minorities that they are worse at some subject than their white / male peers, they will do worse. I think we need to see if we are biasing pre-test outcomes with how we explain what we’re doing. I now want someone to study, if you say, “We are looking to see what you know so we don’t bore you with explaining things you already understand” if you will get different results than if you say “We are looking for misconceptions and weaknesses we need to address.”

Finally, there is a fundamental difference between someone not knowing but doing their best to answer a question in an academic setting (e.g. BS’ing an answer) and someone having a misconception they are confident is right. I suspect all of us at some point have confidently written out an answer we were certain was right only to … be very very wrong. I suspect many of us have also, with a fair amount of self-loathing, desperately tried to write down enough vague words and best guesses that maybe we’d get some points even though we had absolutely no idea what the answer should be. The difference between not knowing and “knowing” the wrong answer is taken into consideration with many standard tests in the US (such as the SATs and GREs for college and graduate school). In these instances, points are added for right answers, fractional points are deducted for wrong answers, and nothing happening when answers are omitted.

When we look at what a student has BS’d and claim “they have a misconception” and wring our hands, what we are doing is 1) not giving the kid credit for trying to problem solve, and 2) mistaking ignorance for misunderstanding.

If we then mock the ridiculousness of the guess a student made, we are punching down instead of lifting up. Education should be only about lifting up. Kids are cruel enough to each other. It is our job to be the light.

So what can we do? How can we do better?

First of all, we must be consistently thoughtful in how we do our pre-testing. We must try to distinguish between common wild guesses and common misunderstandings that people are confident are right. We should consider asking students to state how confident they are in their answers (and tell them “not confident” is ok). If testing fatigue is a concern, then we should encourage students to leave answers blank instead of writing down guesses.

And, to say it again, we should never punch down.

If it is a common misconception that people strongly think the seasons are due to the Earth’s changing distance from the Sun, and they are confident in this wrong answer, then we should never make fun of this. We should ask, “Where do they gain confidence in this bad information?” We should look to cut things off at the source, and if the source is students confidently thinking their assumption must be true… Well, maybe we need to learn from computer science and find our own version of unit testing. Maybe we need to work to teach questioning, and the importance of verifying our inferences and checking our data. Isn’t that better than trying to get every possible concept into every child’s head as young as possible?

It’s ok not to know things. It’s amazing to learn new things. It’s even more amazing to have the tools that are needed to explore our world as problem solvers and test and verify our answers.

And I still want to stick someone in an MRI machine and watch them learn.

header photo by arbyreed

The post The Care and Starvation of Ignorance appeared first on Star Stryder.

I’m currently in Utrecht, the Netherlands for a conference. My hotel is in the city center, and the conference is a few kilometers away at the University. The conference site recommended biking, so I rented a bike for the week.

No. Big. Deal.

Bikes here are just enough different from bikes at home that I’m not as comfortable zipping around and weaving between other cyclists as I might usually be, and I don’t start out as that much of a zipping weaver. This personal discomfort leads to a fair amount of trepidation about making left hand turns across roads in heavy bike traffic.

While kind of zipping along this morning I totally missed a left due to dense bike traffic and I triggered the Google “Rerouting” thing. While it was sorting a new route, I spotted this gorgeous tower and decided going an extra block wouldn’t be the end of the world, so I went an extra block, took the photo below, and instead of going back to the turn I missed, I let it reroute me through old Utrecht.

This was a mistake.

As I worked my way back toward my intended destination, I found Google resolutely telling me to go the wrong way down one way streets… Um… ok? I’m on a bike, maybe that is a thing here? The roads were utterly empty, so, whatever.

And then it told me to TURN RIGHT NOW onto a fairly busy road. As an American, I know this can be a thing. I’ve more than once plugged along the side of a 55 mph road as the highway bridged from one bike route to another, but… this is apparently not a thing in the Netherlands.

As I was going along on my single gear hipster rental road bike at all of about 10 mph (maybe), on a 70 km/hr road I was being honked at and decided this was not where I belong. There was a canal to my right and I saw no where to get off, so, fuck it, I just kept going.

And then a motorcycle cop pulls up beside me and informed me I was on the highway.

Um, yes. Yes, I was on the highway.

I went straight into “I’m so sorry, I was just doing what Google Maps said, and I can’t figure out how to get off. Please, how do I get off?” He kept starting to do an angry “You can’t listen to Google, there is no where that a bike belongs on a highway,” and then would trail off realizing I’m an American and maybe in the US… And he’d repeat “You can’t listen to Google.” He then said he was going to ride behind me, stop traffic, and get me off the highway. He got me across three lanes, we did a u-turn at a busy intersection, pulled over on the other side of the highway, and he pointed at the bike trail about 15 feet away through high weeds and told me to go over to the bike trail and stay on the bike trail.

I picked up my bike, said thank you, hung my head, and walked through the weeds with my rental bike.

Lesson learned – when you decide to reroute to take a pretty picture, you must go back to where you deviated or Google just might try to kill you.

The post Rerouting or How Google Maps Tried to Kill Me appeared first on Star Stryder.

I must start this by saying I am here as an individual. My words are my own. I represent no company, no government, and no sponsor. I am here speaking my mind, and my opinions.

I am here to speak my truth.

It’s Earth day. I have admit, this is a holiday that never stood out for me. My Freshman year of high school, my geometry teacher made us right papers for Earth day, and I remember resenting the assignment, and I don’t remember what I wrote on. I don’t think I really even noticed Earth Day again until 2009, when it was celebrated as part of the International Year of Astronomy, and the world was ask to turn of their lights off for a single hour on a single night so everyone might see the stars.

Earth Day, isn’t a day most people mark on their calendar. For the most part, this holiday has largely been ignored here in the US. It lacks the commercial tie-ins of candy and cards that make Valentines Day and Easter so popular. It’s missing the drinking and parades of Saint Patrick’s Day. No, Earth Day – this Day – is not a day of consumerism that the marketing machines can get behind and remind us of. Earth Day is a celebration of our planet, and the science that is used to study it and the conservation that is needed to help humanity and our ecosystem thrive.

In 1970, Denes Hayes founded Earth Day and encouraged peaceful protests to demand environmental reform.

Today, 47 years later, we’re here to recognize that understanding our world and its place in the universe requires not just Earth Science but all science. Earth Day has become our day – a day to March for Science and demand better of ourselves and of our world.

We demand that science be supported through excellent educational opportunities; and through sufficient federal funding that our scientists have the freedom to try to try new things, to experiment, and to not fear sometimes failing as they push forward our understanding of this universe we share; we demand open access to their results; and we demand that when scientific discoveries necessitate changes in human behavior, science-based policies and regulations get put in place and enforced. We demand this for all of society; for all peoples in all their diverse and wonderful forms.

Of Funding

I was born after Apollo. I started high school as the iron curtain fell. My youth, in a field dominated by the Apollo generation  scientists, gives me a disheartening perspective.  In my life, I have watched as our society has grown complacent about our so called leadership in science. After all, I hear from my seniors, we won the race to the moon, we are winning in the Nobel Prize count, the best of the brightest from around the world are all coming to the US to go to university. We are winning!

No. We were winning.

In 2016, none of the 7 science-related Nobel prizes went to an American.

In 2015, it was 1 in 8.

Since 2000, only 38 of the 130 science prizes went to US born scientists.

Since 2011, U.S. astronauts have travelled to and from space on Russian rockets because we lack our own human-certified spacecraft.

Students who come here for education are returning home, and American-born scientists, including Nobel Prize Winner Brian Schmitt, are leaving the US to seek better options else where.

There are reasons people are leaving.

It is getting harder and harder for scientists in the U.S. to get needed funding to do research. Grant funding rates at the National Institutes of Health have dropped from over 35% in 1978 to just 17%. At NASA we’re seeing just under 25% of grant submissions get funded. In my personal field, Astronomy, we’ve seen National Science Foundation funding rates fall from 35% to less than 15% just since 2000. What this means is that in my field, for every 6 grants submitted, maybe 1 will be funded. Every unfunded grant means students who won’t have jobs; professors who won’t have salary for the entire year; and early career researchers who won’t… well, do research or have a career. It means medical trials that won’t be done, satellites to monitor our planet that won’t be launched, and technology that will never be pioneered. Lack of funding, means lack of science.

We demand change. We demand the restoration of Federal funds for research in all scientific fields.

Of diversity

But it’s not just about America.

When Earth Day was founded, celebrations were held at two thousand colleges and universities, at around ten thousand  schools, and in hundreds of communities across this nation. Last year, celebrations had spread to 192 nations and included over a billion people.

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a global community to raise our understanding of science. Some breakthroughs require the unique mix of creativity, genius, and inspiration that might only be found in one person in a generation and we can’t know which village or city will produce that child.

We all know of a the young Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi Germany after his property was seized and his books were burned. His name was Einstein, and he gave us relativity – a field of science necessary for GPS and so much more. Some of you may even know of Chandrasakar, an astronomer whose theories let us understand that matter at high densities changes form, and that our most massive stars can collapse into moon and even Manhatten sized objects. He made this discovery while on a boat from his homeland of India to England, where he was going to attend graduate school. Let that sink in – Young Chandrasakar only had his undergraduate degree when he redefined the possible forms of matter.

Each of these men changed our understanding of the universe in a fundamental way. They changed our understanding of the shape of space, and the possible structures of reality. Neither man could fully succeed if they had stayed in their home nation. Einstein most likely would have been killed. Chandrasakar simply wouldn’t have had the same educational opportunities. It was because the global science community recognized their talents and found places for them to strive forward that they were able to thrive.

This nurturing isn’t available to everyone.

In reviewing the list of Nobel Prize winning scientists, I found that since 2000 only 6 women, and no blacks or hispanics had won. There was one fellow from India, and several Palestinians, but largely it was a list of white and asian men. This lack of diversity at the highest levels is mirrored throughout our fields. For instance, we saw less than 500 blacks receive PhDs in Physics between 1972 and 2012. These individuals represented less than 2% of all Physics PhDs. Women – they made up just 10% of degrees. Black women… there were only 36 in a field of nearly 25,000.

What great discoveries never happened because the wrong little girl was encouraged to take advanced placement English instead of the math she loved? What medical breakthrough was missed because the black child was told maybe they should focus on sports? What have we as a society lost because science, this thing that allows us to advance, has walls around it that are just too hard to cross for too many.

Science – the methods by which we understand our reality, and the means by which we develop medicine and technology – science needs to be welcoming to people of all nations, all races, and all genders.

Of truth

We are here, on this the 47th Earth Day, to demand that science be recognized as necessary for understanding our reality, to acknowledge that while scientists may sometimes falter, science is a means of getting at the truth – the truth of where did we come from, how did life evolve on this Earth, and how will it all someday end? Science is our only hope if we want to stop climate change, if we want to head off the spread of anti-biotic resistant diseases, and if we want to simply find ways to produce enough food that hunger stops being a concern.

Of education

For science to advance, we need scientists. We must train our children in the ways of science. They must be given the chance to learn to reason and to use observations to understand their world, and to learn for themselves the theories that explain why apples fall, and why the Moon orbits, and how that is really just one theory called gravity. They must become problem solvers who aren’t told to stop asking questions, but who are instead told to always question, and always explore.

Our education system is far from perfect, and with education we must do more then supply books and labs with technology. We must also work to overcome biases in the system, and actively welcome children of all backgrounds into our classes. It is not enough to say all are welcome. We must actually make the environment welcoming.

In mid-March, a group of 5 minority students – 2 African American and 3 latino – won their regional FIRST Robotics competition. During the competition, they didn’t just have to demonstrate engineering excellence, they also had to overcome parents and students from competing teams saying they needed to go back to Mexico. These were elementary kids – just 9 and 10 years old – and they were being trained by society that instead of building the best robots they could in the nation with some of the worlds best robotics programs – they … they were told to go back to Mexico. They were told to go back to a country that they didn’t even know.

This must change. Science needs all of society, and we must actively welcome diversity, and squash hate. All races, all genders and orientations, all kinds – able bodied and not, religious and not – all are needed and it is through our diversity of perspectives, inspirations, and genius that we will advance science. Intolerance will not be accepted. Our biases will be acknowledged. We will work to do better, to actively be better, and to keep improving our fields until our scientists reflect the society they are advancing.

Of open access

You are here, because you want to see those advances.

And for you to see the science, we must do our research in the open. I am proud to have spent much of my career working with NASA, and being not just able to, but required to share my results freely and as widely as possible. We are here because we demand that the work being done with Federal funds be made fully available to all. Researchers should not be asked to hide their results behind firewalls, and they should not see their discoveries censored because they might be bad for someone’s political agenda. Forecasts for rising sea levels don’t care which candidate you voted for. My lungs demand clean air to breath. My lips demand clean water to drink. I demand data to be released so that we can make informed decisions as voters, as consumers, and as compassionate human beings.

Of Policy

We demand open access to data and research results, but that alone is not enough.

With understanding comes responsibility. We demand that our government base policies and regulations on our best scientific understanding.

On this day in 2016, the Paris Agreement was signed by 194 UN member states. This international document calls for a decrease in the emission of greenhouse gases, and works towards finding ways to combat climate change and to mitigate the devastating effects of sea rise and changes in rain patterns. This is not the first time the many nations of the globe have worked together to save our planet.

In 1987, the Montreal Agreement declared that chemicals responsible for depleting the ozone layer would be phased out. Ratified by 197 nations, this agreement forced us to change the chemicals we use in our air conditioners and refrigerators. It forced us to change hair sprays from aerosol to pump. It changed a lot of consumer products. It also has allowed the Earth’s ozone layer to slowly recover. What it didn’t do was collapse the global economy.

From the Montreal Agreement we learned that saving the Earth is possible if we work globally and enforce policies and regulations that are meaningful and data driven.

Today, there is concern that the United States will set aside the Paris Agreement, and set aside our commitments to the environment. These are not data driven decisions.

Today, we demand our government enact and enforce science driven policies and regulations that protect us, and protect our lands for generations to come. This is right for the economy, and it is right for humanity.

Closing

Science is right for humanity.

Science is a human endeavor. We will fail. We will make mistakes. We will go down rabbit holes that lead no where.

But we will also make extraordinary discoveries.

But only if we are enabled to do science.

Science takes education.

Science takes funding.

Science takes people.

Science takes all of us, working together to demand that our elected leaders fund science education, fund science research, make all federally funded research open to all, and make federal policies that are informed by that research.

We are science. Our voices together can change science, change society, and even change this world.

We are the global community that will raise our understanding of the universe.

We will not be silenced.

We will let science ring.

Thank you.

The post Science March 2017 appeared first on Star Stryder.

Earlier this week I shut down Twitter while trying to get some work done. Messages were flying so fast it was bogging down my system – and here I mean my computer not my head, although both may certainly have been true. When I turned things back on I was inspired by the stories flying past with the quote, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

In response of Warren’s continued attempt to speak and the following vote to demand her silence, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KS) remarked, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

Had McConnell just let her speak, this inspirational moment on Twitter might never have happened. The letter, and the concerns it raises for the equitable treatments of racial minorities might have gone largely unrecognized. A new rallying cry was created behind the basic truth: She resisted.

I still wish she hadn’t needed to persist. I wish her voice had been respectfully allowed to rise.

In the social media dialogue that followed, many of us discussed how we want to hold on to this moment. Tattoos were being tattooed, and protest posters purchased. In a thread on Facebook, I asked for something more lasting (perhaps something I could get stamped into metal) and reached out to artist, engineer, and overall awesome human Ryan Consell. He came back with the concept of a resistor symbol and a heartbeat. With permission, I added words and expanded the beating heart. This was our result.

This is a result that goes beyond “She persisted.” It acknowledges we must all keep resisting and keep the heat on as we push to create a world that is safe and equitable and where no life has less worth. Black lives matter. Refugees need sanctuary. Just as I personally must keep resisting the voices that push against women in science, and keep persisting, I must also help others resist, and persist so that tomorrow maybe these words can a historic rallying cry that is no longer needed.

We don’t have this stamped into metal. We do have t-shirts and mugs. We have setup a Redbubble account where you can order a myriad of other things with this symbol, both with and without words. All proceeds raised through sales will be donated to ACLU.org.

Resist.

Persist.

And make tomorrow better.

The post Resist; Persist. appeared first on Star Stryder.