We, the attendees* of the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, talked a lot about how constraints can really foster creativity at the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop. In that case, it focused on the traditional style of a news article, … Continue reading →

I see metasemantics has having two major components (cf, David Lewis 1970, "General Semantics"). One component studies languages, what their properties are, how they're individuated, etc. The other component studies how languages are "cognized".On the first issue, for the metasemantics I prefer, languages are finely-individuated mixed mathematicalia, whose intrinsic syntactic, phonological, semantic, pragmatic, orthographic properties are essential. The corresponding individuation […]

Today at 4PM, the world lost something truly amazing.  Today, my cat, Nimitz, had to be put to sleep.  He was eighteen years old and lived a life to be envious of. Nimitz, not named after the admiral, but the treecat, was fearless and brave.  In fact, that’s how we found him.  As a little [...]

I have been known at times as the spider lady. I'm also the vulture lady and now the mother of a budding ornithologist (more on that later). But Arizona offers more than amazing birding and fodder for my nocturnal adventures. Dragonfly and damselfly watching has been growing, much like birding took off (har har) before it. Places like Boyce Thompson Arboretum do regular dragonfly walks in the summer, Chandler's Environmental Education Center holds days celebrating dragonflies, they're studied […]

For the past few years I've been carrying around a small notebook to jot down notes from talks, research ideas, expenses, etc. (I guess I could do it on my phone but I prefer pen and paper.) I like writing with fountain pens, but don't care to carry around an expensive one: I don't feel I need to impress people with how much I spend on accessories, and I don't want to worry about losing it. I had been using disposable Pilot Varsity pens, but occasionally (especially if I took them on airplanes) […]