Isaac

It is time to discuss, once again, the falsehood known as "Hurricane Landfall." A hurricane is a whopping big thing. A hurricane can be bigger than some states. The physical region across which a hurricane is potentially deadly and damaging is very large, many tens of miles across, sometimes a couple of hundred miles across. The danger zones are often organized like this: The central storm surge. A central region may have a strong storm surge caused by the low pressure of the storm. This may be dozens of miles wide, but the area of effect is determined as much by the shape of the coastline…

The following post has been slightly revised in response to commentary below and elsewhere. I thank all those who commented for the helpful critique. The question of diversity in science, and more specifically, success for women, is often discussed in relation to bench or lab oriented fields. If you read the blogs that cover this sort of topic, they are very often written by bench scientists, for bench scientists, and about bench scientists. Which makes sense because most scientists probably are bench scientists. But a lot of scientists are fieldworkers, and the problems, challenges and…

Can you believe that I had a fight today with someone who's been dead for over 350 years, and I'm losing? -- Ethan, yesterday Of course you can believe it, when the man I'm fighting with is Johannes Kepler. I don't get a chance to tell you about my research very often, mostly because it's still a work in progress. But my latest paper was just submitted and is now out of the way, and so I'd like to tell you what I'm working on at the moment. Well, there we are in the galaxy. We look up at the night sky, and we see our planets as well as all the stars that surround us. But you know what we don…