Aug 4, 2019
Mixing Toxic Chemicals
Nina asked me about Miamisburg, Ohio, recently. In 1986, I lived about 35 miles away from Miamisburg when a CSX train derailed, releasing a toxic cloud over a large part of the…
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Archive page 17 of 73
Jul 30, 2019
Jamestown, Democracy Gone Awry
Colonial Virginia offers a different path toward governance. Jamestown was originally settled in 1607. Jamestown was not the first English colony in North America, but the Lost Colony of Roanoke had disappeared…
Jul 19, 2019
Blowing the Hatch
Something caught my attention. I watched The Right Stuff last night and was looking up something about Gus Grissom. Grissom's Liberty Bell 7 flight has been the subject of great controversy over…
Jul 13, 2019
Cache of Old Syllabi
I recently happened upon a cache of old syllabi for my math courses going to back to the fall of 2014. As these syllabi are centrally developed (more or less) by the…
Jul 1, 2019
This Post Means Nothing of Consequence
Effective today, I received a promotion at the University of Maryland Global Campus, which until yesterday, is what we called "University of Maryland University College." I've been teaching for 9 years at…
Jun 19, 2019
I Got a Master of Science in Environmental Engineering and Science!
Apparently, these things come as PDFs now! ::document{src="/assets/docs/JHU-MS-EES.pdf" label="Open the PDF document" embed="true"} Anyway, for the last couple of years, I've taken a few classes here and there at the Johns Hopkins…
Jun 15, 2019
Understanding Radioactive Exposure
Like a lot of people, I've been watching the HBO miniseries, Chernobyl : Chernobyl: Official Website for the Miniseries HBO The official website for Chernobyl, the Emmy and Golden Globe winning miniseries…
May 24, 2019
How Data Science Happens
I have a chapter in our planned book, Handbook of Military and Defense Operations Research . In this book, co-edited with Prof. Natalie Scala, our authors explore the fundamentals of operations research…
May 7, 2019
Social Security Policysplainer
It is apparently time for another policysplainer. The New York Times , among others, covered the report that Social Security will start running a deficit in the next decade and not long…
Apr 2, 2019
Piedmont Hydrogeology
The Piedmont Province is a geographic region stretching from southern Pennsylvania southward through Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, northern Georgia, into eastern Alabama. The Piedmont consists of a plateau region bounded on the…
Mar 31, 2019
Formal and Informal Language in English
Plain form versus formal form of the language is something Americans do not think they do. Except, they do differentiate between formal and informal language. Sociolinguists call this register, when we change…