Personal Thoughts

There's a blue collar worker who goes by Junior working in the chemical plant with me. He's been working at the plant for 20 years, so everyone looks up to him. Apparently when he started working here all those years ago there was an older worker who looked a lot like him, so everyone started calling him Junior and it continues to stick with him even now that he's everyone's senior.  "Does the nickname bother you at all?" I asked him once. "Nah," he said. "Nobody can pronounce my name anyway, so every group of people I know calls me by a different nickname. People at work call me Junior, so here I'm Junior." Junior emigrated to the US from Cambodia with his parents when he was a child. As soon as you look past his traditional name, he's as American as a man could be. He believes in hard work, he loves big loud trucks and motorcycles, and he devours pizza and wings like a feral animal. Junior acts like a big brother to everyone he me...

Being a scientist is just a job. In fiction and popular media, scientists are often portrayed as being the only elite minds capable of solving the world's problems, or as being socially inept weirdos who have no grasp on the real world. I think the former idea might come from the latent hope in all of us that there is someone running the world who actually knows what they're doing, and the latter comes from the fact that many scientists didn't pay enough attention to other subjects in school. Regardless of the cause though, I have found that most people have never met a scientist in real life, so their expectations of us are larger than life in many ways.  I'd like this blog to serve as a bit of an opportunity to get to know a scientist as a regular living, breathing person. When I'm at work, I think about things that might sound complex and foreign to you, but that path runs both ways. Whenever a skilled professional tells me about how to fix a car, or patch a hole...

All You Need to Know Let’s presume that you want to take a crisp, deep photograph of a fast-moving subject—for example a player in a sports game, a fluttery bird, or a sexy celebrity who you’re shaking with nervous excitement to meet—well that picture is gonna cost you. Light is the currency you use to buy a good picture, and since light is very limited you’ll need to spend it wisely to get the most out of it. There are two main things you can spend your light budget on: Shutter Speed Fast shutter speed produces crisp, blur-free images of moving subjects and it compensates for any shaking in the camera. Faster-moving subjects require faster shutter speeds to capture clearly, but the higher your shutter speed the darker the photo appears, so it’s best not to use any higher shutter speed than necessary. Aperture Higher aperture value (or F-stop) produces greater depth to the photograph. This depth is generally what makes a photo look “professional” or “cinematic,” but the h...

  I’m a strong believer in good scientific practice, and one of the biggest parts of doing good science education is rigorously citing your sources so readers know that the information is reputable and they can learn more if they want to. However, I don’t intend to cite my sources in this blog, at least in the near term. Fact-checkers and editors deserve enormous credit for their contributions to educational media of all kinds, because it can easily take twice as long to track down and rigorously cite sources as the time it takes to write an article. I write this blog alone as a hobby, so adding full citations to each article would require enough time and effort for me that it would turn this hobby into a job. I’m not interested in making this blog my job at this time, although if you want to send me a donation I certainly wouldn’t complain *wink*. For now I am drawing my information from the knowledge I have accumulated from my 10 years as a scientist along with occas...

  I’ve resisted the call of social media for quite a while, primarily because it has always felt like work to me to spend time revising and publishing my life experiences rather than just spending my time having more experiences. My interests still mostly lie in growing skills and listening to everyone’s story other than my own—I have to spend every day with myself, I’m sick and tired of hanging out with that guy all the time. Since I spend so much of my time acquiring and growing skills though, I have found that many simple and fun things in life are made needlessly complicated by their greatest evangelists, so my aim with this blog is to provide an easily accessible on-ramp to various fields that I find interesting. In doing this I also hope to create a footprint for myself online so that people who are interested can get to know me, not through a projected social media persona of myself, but through my passionate advocacy for things that I love. Donations