[Extremely Boyz II Men Voice] The End of the Blog

Blogging? What’s that? The new hotness is newsletters. Which is to say, I’m shuttering the Bowler Hat Science blog, where I post links to new articles I’ve written. The number of readers of this blog has never been high, and when I took a poll a while back, a fair number of my social media connections admitted they never even look at this site. So, I’m moving announcements of articles onto my…

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Twitter is dead (and I don't feel so good myself)

Just over two weeks ago, I went into the hospital in excruciating pain, and came out about a week and two surgeries later without my gallbladder, absolutely covered in bruises, incisions, and bandages. I’m back home and on the mend, but I’m still recovering and unable to do much work beyond thinking. I’ll spare you any of my hospital-room reflections on mortality and the fragility of the human…

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A tangled tale of worm jello

The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). As such, I included some mathematical content, but I tried to write the piece so that you could gloss over that bit without losing the gist of the story. This particular article has a lot of really fascinating content for a wide range of fields, from pure mathematics to drug…

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Space barons' dreams of space resemble nightmares

[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Musk and Bezos Offer Humanity a Grim Future in Space Colonies For Scientific American: A million inhabitants live in the city under the soft pink sky of Mars, just a century after the first robotic probes from Earth visited the Red Planet. They farm and…

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Predicting heatwaves with machine learning

The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). As such, I included some mathematical content, but I tried to write the piece so that you could gloss over that bit without losing the gist of the story. In any case, this is an example of using AI/machine learning to help save lives instead of depriving people of their…

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Hate the game, not the playa

[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Here’s why the geometric patterns in salt flats worldwide look so similar The shared geometry across playas may come from fluid flows underground For Science News: From Death Valley to Chile to Iran, similarly sized polygons of salt form in playas all over…

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Is there life on Maaaaaars?

Even our best equipment can't always identify life on Earth, which has important implications for the search for life on Mars

[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] We (Probably) Can’t Tell Whether Mars Has Life State-of-the-art equipment can’t always identify life inhabiting the most Mars-like spot on Earth, leaving scientists wondering how to do better on the Red Planet. For Eos: Many features on the surface of Mars…

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What Is Life?

I've republished my 2015 feature article for the now-defunct magazine Mosaic. Would we recognize life if we found it on other worlds? I went to western Canada to find out

If we met new life – on this planet or the next – would we know it when we saw it? [This piece originally ran in Mosaic Science on October 20, 2015, but the publisher decided to remove all of the magazine’s archives from the web. This is the complete text as published — including British spelling — using my photographs instead of the original illustrations.] “Why would NASA want to study a lake…

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The Anxious Ghost of Tsushima

I can already hear my teenage nibling screaming “Your new shoes are so gay!”

New Comics Anthology "Failure to Launch"!

Maki Naro and I have a comic in the upcoming anthology "Failure to Launch" from Iron Circus Comics, and you can pledge to make it happen!

On February 6, 2023, Iron Circus Comics — one of the premier independent comics publishers — launches its crowdfunding campaign for Failure to Launch: A Tour of Ill-Fated Futures. This volume includes comics essays by luminaries such as Ryan North (whose contribution you can preview here), Evan Dahm, and two guys named Matthew R Francis and Maki Naro! Our contribution talks about the first and…

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m1=148.4 m2=58.8 m3=103.8 (solar masses) v1x=-3.821 v1y=-3.478 v2x=-3.12 v2y=5.216 v3x=3.119 v3y=1.641 (km/s) x1=-23.0 y1=-22.0 x2=4.0 y2=13.0 x3=30.0 y3=-26.0 (AU from center) Music: Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor (Posthumous) – Chopin

Callisto is taking a spa day, but I may actually try to tumbl occasionally

I’m baaaaaaaack (maybe)

AI art is popular, but it is ethical?

AI art is popular, but it is ethical?

The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). However, even though the main audience for this magazine is professional mathematicians, this article contains no mathematics whatsoever, but does contain possibly the worst pun I ever have contributed to a published article. [ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most…

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