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 Merc-bots. And the massive printing presses, and some charming humans….
Author Archive | Nadia Drake
mud, mountain lions, and my dad
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 Natural History. Word on the street is that one of the Slugs is putting…
The Google
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 images, spectroscopy, CLIMBING TREES, derring-do) to image and analyze ecosystem health and…
Stormtroompas
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 hides an army of paper-toting automatons that hoist…
weekend warrior seeks tutus ‘n trees
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 I did some ballet for the first time since busting my ankle during…
#AAAS in 140 or less
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 “Glee.” #gleek! But until the #AAASmtg, I didn’t regularly…
a thousand splendid planets
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 York Times: “Astronomers have cracked the Milky Way like a piñata, and…
moonlight meditation
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 middle of his visual field: he was suffering…
AGU = A Great Undertaking?
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, I’d have to…I don’t know what. Anyway. I’m blogging about blogging at AGU….
Whales — and a twitterpated writer
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 — all of 11 years old — wrote to Greenpeace, wanting to help the whales….