As some know, I'm doing a mid-career PhD. Until now, my research was largely focused on systems related to the ocean, energy, food, climate, etc. Now I've ventured into the social sciences to study people & how we make decisions about science & policy.

Today I took the final exam for my last class. Evolution. It might just be my last class ever.

Or maybe I'll go back in another 20 years to learn something new again.

Now all that's left is to complete & defend the dissertation this Fall.

Our sun is big. It’s 864,000 miles or 1,392,000 km in diameter. Or 109x wider than Earth. But it’s also an average sized star.

Some stars are much bigger.

Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion, is a red supergiant star ~700x the size of the sun.

If we replaced our sun with Betelgeuse, it would stretch past Jupiter's orbit. https://universe.nasa.gov/news/237/what-is-betelgeuse-inside-the-strange-volatile-star/ #space #science

This is an important and thoughtful piece in UnDark on confronting the ghosts of race science past, especially in our heroes. https://race.undark.org/articles/ghosts-of-science-past-still-haunt-us-we-can-put-them-to-rest

One of the things I always end up thinking about is how often people want to go to the mat for their heroes. It...mystifies me.

Because like, most of the time you've never met them! They will not go to the mat for you! Why are you so invested in someone who doesn't know or care in return?

I never did a proper mastodon intro post but I’ve got some new followers so I’ll do that now!

I work at Texas Monthly. I cover politics, arts, food, sports, business, and weird Texas stuff. Mostly online, sometimes for the magazine. I write a lot, and I’ll post some of it here.

I wrote a YA novel called The Fight For Midnight. It’s set at the Texas capitol on the day of Wendy Davis’s filibuster of the state’s abortion ban. It’s out in June. I’ll talk about it more as it gets closer to release.