Recommended reading

Those of you with keen eyes may have noticed that I added a new link to my list of blogs I frequent. It's a bit off the beaten path of what you might be expecting. The author is a grad student in astronomy at the Ohio State University so I'm rather predisposed to liking it.

So why do I say it's off the beaten path? Well, it's not like most other blogs I've linked to thus far, dealing with hard issues of the interplay between science and everything else. Instead, her blog is mostly a personal narrative of what she's been doing as a grad student. There's not really a lot of science all the time (indeed, most of the recent posts have been devoted to the hastles of flying), but it's a good insight into life as a grad student as far as I can tell.

For those of you that have been following this blog, you probably already know that this is something that I find rather important to communicate. I feel that it is necessary to remind the world on occasion that we're astronomers, but yeah, we're real people to. We have lives and we face the same problems and enjoy the same leisurely activites as non-scientists do. We're not some secret cult of the intellectually smug. This is part of the reason I've had my series of posts on my internship, even though many times, it's just me laying around in bed or going to the beach.

I think Mollishka's blog does a great job of illustrating this, which is why I'm tossing the link her way. She does, what I feel to be a very good job illustrating the humanity of a scientist in training, while at the same time not putting out too much that would be better suited for a journal for best friends.

But that's not to say there's not good science in her blog either. This post I especially like. It's a nice little introduction into galaxies that was meant to serve as an introduction to her soon to be published paper. It's by no means comprehensive, but then again, there's entire books dedicated to the basic understanding of galaxies, so we can't expect too much.

So if you're looking for another blog to read that's not going to stress you out with how stupid people can be, or terribly long winded like mine can get, make sure you stop by and say "hi".