The Library Has Landed! Phoenix Takes Books to Mars
Human interactions with the Red Planet have long been a blend of wonder, science, imagination, fear, longing & engineering. In honor of this interplay, The Planetary Society has placed a DVD among the scientific instruments on board the Phoenix Lander that touched down on the Martian south pole this last memorial day. And it carries books.
Learn MoreFirefox 3: How to Surf the Web
I’ve been using the open-source Firefox web browser since 2003, when a techie friend (thanks, Rocky!) emailed our church list to suggest it as a less virus-vulnerable alternative to the standard Microsoft mess.
That makes me an internet expert 😉 –and since I know everything there is to know, I thought I’d write you this handy guide:
Learn MoreWordPress 2.5 Widgets: Taking the Load Off Your Mind
WordPress, the free and open-source software that runs this site, has recently been the victim of a major upgrade. We can draw on educational psychology to help us understand where the redesign fails, and how we might do better.
Learn MoreBlog Gone Naked!
All day today, April 9th, this blog will be naked. Normally, you see, it is wrapped in a sheet–a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), to be precise, which takes the basic building blocks of Reading Circle Books, the words, paragraphs, pictures, and widgets that make up the content of this site, surrounds them with padding, backgrounds, […]
Learn MoreSacrifices and Community
Do we even know how much we’ve lost, how poisoned we are, how far away we’ve been driven from the land? By connecting the science of toxic materials with our human knowledge of childbirth in Having Faith, Steingraber gives us new knowledge; what would it mean for us to inhabit it?
Learn MoreDo you breathe the water?
During my first pregnancy, I lived on a truck route. My pregnancy manual, the ubiquitous and sometimes disturbing What to Expect When You’re Expecting, said that unless I was living in a bus terminal or a tollbooth, “breathing in the big city…isn’t as risky as you might think…. Even in the 1960s, when pollution was […]
Learn MoreWhat Are Blogs? Not Monologues but Conversations
Here at the beginning of the 21st Century, the internet connects us (however imperfectly) across barriers of geography, race, class, age, ability, family situation, income, education, religion, culture, and even language. The monologue of the powerful few, for good or ill, is overcome by connections among the many. With those connections come power — ordinary people like you and me are given the power (and therefore the responsibility) of participation in each others’ lives.
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