Howdy, y'all.

I would have liked my maiden post to has some great scientific or social import, but the best I can do is the blog equivalent of "Hello, World!" , which programmer types will recall as the output of the first program that introduced them to programming in the C language. "Howdy, y'all" is a reflection of my western Kentucky roots, and also reflects my delight at people being surprised to meet a scientist with a southern accent.

Assuming I can find time to keep the site updated, I plan to focus on science with some reference to economics and politics, at least when the intersection of these is interesting.

Doing science requires borrowing from areas that are outside one's area of expertise- one learns a lot of new and often unfamiliar things as a matter of course as a scientist.

While I am a professional scientist, I really can't talk much about what I do professionally. There are all sorts of intellectual property issues involved. I have a great deal of envy for academic scientists, who more or less have to talk about their work. But I am a scientist all the time, not just at work. I learn new stuff that interests me as an individual, and as a citizen. In this context, I am going to record a little of what I'm learning about, and why.

I build some electronic things, usually to help me measure something. I don't intend to make this a techie blog, but if it makes sense to me, I might include some of what I do for fun here.

Science and scientific method are powerful tools for understanding things like health, climate, risks of various kinds, and new technology, and one need not be an expert to learn to appreciate and evaluate the news that emerges from science. If I can record some of this in a way that someone might find useful, then this blog will be worth my time.