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with Lans Nelson/Pacifico
“Spacequakes: Dodging Plasma Bullets”
There’s a storm brewing in space. Not the kind that floods rivers, drops hailstones, or snatches up houses in Kansas, but the kind that messes with your cell reception. We know about it thanks to new information from THEMIS. Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms, launched by NASA in 2007, is an […]
A Certain Slant of Light, Typographically Speaking
April 6, 2013
The project was vastly ambiguous, and also constrained. Assignments like this always break my brain in the beginning. It’s like breaking in fresh clay, I think. In the right hands, something good will undoubtedly come out of it. Speaking of breaking, here’s the project du jour: I could have done an Emily Dickinson variety show. But […]
Posted in: Digital Humanities, Electronic Literature
New Punctuation for Digital Communication
June 12, 2012
Social networking and digital web-based media are creating a new set of unsuspecting creatives: People who never kept journals or wrote letters are now published authors in these new media. And these electronic authors are publishing to a worldwide audience. Amazingly, we are able to communicate in this new, integrated territory with relatively little difficulty. […]
Posted in: communication, Digital Humanities
The Superior Mirage of Mount Hood
January 15, 2015
Today I discovered why mountains sometimes look bigger: Looking at Mount Hood, you are a standing y-axis on the ground with great distance on the x, between you two. 11,250 feet above its base, its icy spike chills the atmosphere. The air is dense, with compressed layers. Look up and imagine where that peak would […]
Twelfth Night Comic
February 18, 2014
This comic had to publish in two parts due to length. I hope you will read them both. The first image will appear small at first, but if you click it you can enlarge it to a readable size. Enjoy!
Posted in: Digital Humanities, Electronic Literature
“Microwaves and their Ovens”
July 16, 2013
Did your grandmother ever call her microwave a “radar range” when you visited her on the holidays? If so, blame the discovery of RADAR (RAdio Detection And Ranging). RADAR was big news back in the early 20th century, enabling the Navy to spot boats and planes while enabling biologists to explain how bats can zip […]
“Why Space Exploration Still Matters”
July 15, 2013
We’re human, and we’ve conquered Earth. That’s our history in a nutshell. In the 200,000 year history of our existence we’ve managed to sprawl across the entire habitable surface of our little blue planet. So what’s next may seem only natural: space. Scientists have been shooting for the stars as long as history has been […]
“Clocks”
July 15, 2013
From H.G. Wells to Batman’s villain Francis Grey to Heroes’ Hiro, humankind has been fascinated by the idea of controlling this phenomenon called Time. Perhaps it’s for the best that timepieces are as close as we can get to harnessing the power of chronology. But how did clocks come about? The first notable timepiece was […]
GAs, ACO, and Traffic Lights
July 15, 2013
Red, yellow, green. Where did traffic lights come from, and how do they work? From distributed intelligence to heuristic optimization by simulation, these guardians of auto safety are secret marvels of modern scientific mentality. Each year that goes by adds more new humans to our population, and within them, more drivers. Congestion has grown to […]
The Humble Pencil
July 15, 2013
digg Is it safer to do your crossword puzzles in pen? Some say yes, if only to avoid lead poisoning. Do pencils really contain toxic lead? Where’d they come from, anyway? The instrument we know as a pencil was called a stylus back in ancient Rome. At the time of its creation it was, […]
“Rosies and Crypto-Chicks”
July 15, 2013
In Season 4 of Eureka, time-traveling Allison saves a wounded soldier in the 1940s using medical techniques she gleaned in the future. When we think of occupations of women in the forties, we might think of Army nurses or Rosie the Riveter…time-traveling lifesavers and heavy cryptographers probably don’t pop to mind. But the crypto ladies […]
“That Doo-Doo That You Do”
July 15, 2013
digg Excrement: It’s smelly, messy, and generally a bit of a burden. So is crude oil, but we don’t consider that a burden (except when it’s spilled on large bodies of life-sustaining water). It’s safe to say crap always gets a bad rap, but what if it could do something about those oily ocean disasters? […]
“Space Camp: More Than Campy Fun”
July 15, 2013
digg Who hasn’t watched Battlestar Galactica and wanted to be Captain Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, intergalactically hotwiring bioengineered Cylon ships in an effort to save the human race? Or totally related to Holly, Fargo, and Parrish in Eureka, as they desperately vie for spots on the Astraeus mission? If this is you, you’re not alone. A […]
Some Science 
July 15, 2013
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