I'm in Rio (my first visit to South America!) for the annual Symposium on Computational Geometry.Your out-of-context quote of the day:"I don't care about geometry." — Jeff Erickson(as part of a nice talk exactly characterizing the three-dimensional manifolds-with-quadmeshed-boundary that can be partitioned into a mesh of topological hexahedra).I think my favorite talk of the day was the first one, by Raimund Seidel, on exact exponential-time algorithms in computational geometry. Raimund […]

This is a guest post from Alea Tuttle, a former graduate student of Anne’s at UNC Charlotte, who now works in environmental consulting. Alea recently discovered the 10 hundred words of science challenge and was inspired to write her own … Continue reading →

The GOES 13 weather satellite problem a couple pf weeks ago was apparently caused by tiny meteorite travelling several kilometers per second. From the National Environmental Satellite Data Information Service (NESDIS to we meteorologists): NOAA returns a healthy GOES-13 to normal operations as GOES-East June 10, 2013 GOES-13 Satellite–Artist’s Rendering  NOAA today officially returned the GOES-13 spacecraft to normal operations, after tests showed a micrometeoroid, likely hit the […]

An inexcusable delay in posting these answers–I blame my travel debacle of late last week. More on that next time. As for the DBQ, I must thank the universe for bringing Wouter to this blog as Bird A is a perfect example of how dead bird i.d. is basically nothing like live bird i.d. Wouter […]

Many people have never even heard of cancer of the oesophagus – a form of cancer affecting the pipe that connects the mouth to the top of the stomach. Yet rates of this cancer are on the rise. According to … Continue reading →