Sunday, June 21, 2020
By:
Well I thought I’d be writing this post on the “longest day of the year,” but the physicist in me forgot to actually check the date of the summer solstice which it turns out for this year was yesterday (June 20th). Michigan still finds itself with a surplus of sun in the evening though -- we’re about as far west as you can go in the Eastern time zone and sunset today is at 9:19 pm. Upon finding out that I missed the solstice and the days are now getting shorter, I also found out that we’re currently closer to the aphelion of our orbit (farthest from the sun) which will be on July 4th, than the perihelion (closest to the sun) which was back in January. Whatever. The sun felt pretty up close and personal on my run yesterday and I now have a lovely tee-shirt tan that no one will see.
This week was a little quieter on Virtual Capitol Hill. Not as many briefings to attend for the committee, but still plenty of cool science webinars to watch and take notes on that are open to the public. For anyone in SPS who is interested in science policy but hasn’t subscribed to FYI’s weekly newsletter, I highly recommend it as a way to get the latest scoop on how policy (and sometimes politics) and science collide. Also a plug there for our FYI intern, Hale.
I was in charge of editing our intern weekly newsletter this week for the House Science committee. I forgot to mention our title last week, which is the “Science Committee Intern Newsletter.” The acronym, S.C.I.N. gives rise to our motto: “It’s SCINsational!” Roll your eyes, slap your knee, close the computer if you must. It’s a quality pun and I still apologize for nothing. As it turns out, the newsletter hasn’t actually been sent out yet like it normally would at the end of the week. The committee office was given the day off on Friday in observance of Juneteenth, which was a conscientious move in my opinion. It does mean however, that I can’t say if the newsletter was sent out successfully yet until tomorrow. Being the editor this past week meant spending a lot of quality time with my archnemesis, Microsoft Word. To be fair, it’s probably easier to combine these memos in Word as opposed to LaTeX or Docs (I’m sure some reader somewhere will disagree with me on that), but the fact remains that between now and tomorrow morning there is a non-zero probability that I’ll move an image a fraction of a micrometer and all of the text will be changed to hieroglyphs. Thanks Word.
On a final note about our newsletter, I’ll add that my piece this week was about marine management in the Arctic. I definitely did not have as much appreciation for the policy interests in the Arctic in addition to environmental conservation prior to writing this piece. For anyone interested in Arctic research, especially in the era of covid, there’s an interesting podcast out from the Economist’s Babbage science podcast this week on the MOSAiC expedition that I highly recommend. Link is below. Anyway, until next week, when the days are shorter and winter is coming, stay safe, stay sharp, and stay suave.
-Paul
Link to Babbage episode on the Arctic: https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/06/17/pole-position-the-polarstern-expedition-reveals-the-arctics-secrets
Paul McKinley