Author: ejesse2

UW–Madison Science Alliance Updater 22 February 2021     Hi Everyone,   A year from today we’ll be marking the Day of Deuces:  2/22/22.     It seems everything else in in our national crystal ball is coming up 8’s.  Therefore, what we lack in clarity of prescience let us make up for with audacity in science. …

UW–Madison Science Alliance Updater 15 February 2021     Hi Everyone,   We have just endured the coldest nights of the winter so far, as low as -18 last Tuesday and -10 on Valentine’s Day.   On the brighter side, we are nearly two months into days of growing daylength, with the sun climbing higher every day in the …

  UW–Madison Science Alliance Updater 8 February 2021     Hi Everyone,   Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on February 12, 1809.  In Illinois public school children get a day off for Lincoln’s birthday, but in Wisconsin we get a celebration at UW–Madison to mark Darwin’s arrival upon this mortal coil.     This year UW …

UW–Madison Science Alliance Updater 1 February 2021     Hi Everyone,   As the old saw goes, “We value what we measure, and we measure what we value.”   Every year the National Science Foundation compiles the Higher Education Research & Development Survey.  For fiscal year 2019 the report came out late Friday afternoon (https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21313).  UW–Madison again ranked …

UW–Madison Science Alliance Updater 24 January 2021 Hi Everyone,   This evening millions of Packer fans in Wisconsin are channeling the angst The Tin Man expressed as Dorothy departed Oz:  “Now I know I have a heart, because it’s breaking.”      As my Mom warned, “Losing hurts worse than winning feels good.”  She would know:  she was a …

UW–Madison Science Alliance Updater 18 January 2021   Hi Everyone,   The sea change for science in public policy continues at the federal level as President-elect Biden announced Eric Lander as his chief science advisor and raised the position for the first time to cabinet level.     Closer to home, Andrea Palm of Wisconsin will be the new Deputy Secretary at the …

UW–Madison Science Alliance Updater 11 January 2021 Hi Everyone, Starting last Wednesday afternoon we’ve been dealing with both a coup and covid.  As Pat Remington noted with the opening slide of his WN@TL talk on January 6 on “Covid-19:  The Pandemic, Public Health, and Politics,” the two are intertwined. The competing worldviews of what we know, how we know …

UW–Madison Science Alliance Updater 4 January 2021 Hi Everyone, Happy New Year to all! Two weeks ago many a telescope was pointed towards Jupiter and Saturn for their Great Conjunction.  Some 411 years ago this January 7 Galileo pointed at Jupiter a 20x telescope built by his own hand. Through it he saw for the first time three …

UW–Madison Science Alliance Updater   21 December 2020   Hi Everyone,   What a day, and what an evening, for astronomical delights in the heavens.    Every year we get a winter solstice here (it was 4:02 this morning CST), the day when the sun sets furthest in the southwest, and then resumes it trek northward, tracing the …

  UW–Madison Science Alliance Updater   14 December 2020   Hi Everyone,   On November 10, 1942, following the British victory at El Alamein and three days into the Allied invasions of North Africa, Winston Churchill growled words of flinty optimism:  “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, …