by Nadia Drake | Jun 13, 2011 | Posts
Awhile ago, I wrote about the robots (Stormtroompas) working behind the scenes at the San Jose Mercury News. It would be great, I thought at the time, to capture these things on video. So I did. Here, for your amusement, is a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the...
by Nadia Drake | May 14, 2011 | Posts
The SciCom slugs have been out and about recently, perhaps seeking an escape from the swirling pre-graduation chaos? Part 1: Paintings and Pumas Last week, we attended the opening of the Science Illustration Program’s exhibit at the Pacific Grove Museum of...
by Nadia Drake | Apr 6, 2011 | Posts
Several of us trekked up to Google today to see the mothership a talk by Greg Asner, from the Carnegie Institution of Science, Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University. Asner studies tropical forests and uses a variety of spiffy techniques (Google Earth...
by Nadia Drake | Mar 22, 2011 | Posts
During winter quarter I interned at the San Jose Mercury News. On my last day, I saw ROBOTS. In the *building*. The bots keep the presses plied with newspaper, but really they’re plotting to take over the world (just a hunch). In a cavernous back room, the Merc...
by Nadia Drake | Mar 14, 2011 | Posts
For the past two weeks, I’ve been parked in front of my computer. Yesterday, I finally went stir-crazy and listened to my pleading, sorely underused muscles. “I’ve had it!” I thought, and promptly began stomping around. It was time to get moving. So...
by Nadia Drake | Feb 27, 2011 | Posts
As many of you know, I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. #ilovewaffles (1/2) Some days, I’m tempted to relinquish my membership for reasons that will remain mysterious, (2/2) and other days, I eagerly watch my Twitter feed as if it were the latest episode of...
by Nadia Drake | Feb 10, 2011 | Posts
NASA’s Kepler team announced last week they’d found more than a thousand potential planets – after just *four months* of observation. The numbers make my head spin like…oh, never mind. (Since you asked, my favorite Kepler story lede? Dennis Overbye’s, in the New...
by Nadia Drake | Jan 27, 2011 | Posts
By the late 1990s, my grandfather could no longer read. To be visible, photos needed to hover near his visual peripheries. Then, Jiddou –“grandfather” in Arabic – couldn’t see me unless I stood off to his side. My Jiddou had a growing blind spot smack in the...
by Nadia Drake | Dec 18, 2010 | Posts
I’m stuck at home and dealing with a formidable, unexpected foe: FREE TIME! I think my utter dread of unstructured minutes motivates much of my multi-tasking. Maybe I should be more aware of that. So — I’m creating a blog post, because otherwise,...
by Nadia Drake | Dec 5, 2010 | Posts
A few weeks ago, I was thinking about my beat. Today, it’s pretty obvious: I’m grooving with whales. I’m twitterpated (again). In elementary school, we watched videos about whaling (I went to a progressive school…). After seeing the videos, I...
by Nadia Drake | Nov 22, 2010 | Posts
Ben Franklin had a thing for turkeys, and thought they — not the bald eagle — ought to be the national symbol: “For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America . . . He is besides,...
by Nadia Drake | Nov 17, 2010 | Posts
Tuesday, 3:30 p.m., PST N: Keith and I are at our hotel in Irvine, the Marriott-something-or-other-resort-and-spa. It’s next door to Bloomingdale’s. Orange County. We’re chilling here for a few days while we attend the Keck Futures conference on...
