I am thrilled to hear that John Hennessy, my mentor when I was a student, has won the annual Turing award, the most prestigious award in Computer Science ( Read more... )

EDIT: Some of the sources I used commented on provisions of early versions of the legislation that have been changed. I will soon update this to reflect the final version of the bill ( Read more... )

About a year ago, I spent a couple of days in Birmingham, AL, and, among other things, I visited the 16th Street Baptist Church, where, in 1963, four young African American girls were killed in a racially motivated bombing. One of the four KKK members who planted the bomb was convicted of murder in 1977. An alleged perpetrator died in 1994. The ( Read more... )

I will be Marching for Science in DC on Saturday!

I'm flying United. Kind Ms. Irlweg tells me not to worry.

Here is another song about Donald Trump. Feel free to add additional verses. So many lies...

The Donald Lies Over the Ocean ( Read more... )

A friend of mine asked, "What does the Democratic Party stand for?"

My answer is below. I paint a rosy picture of the twelve virtues of the Democratic Party. I imply that the Republican Party must be really awful, because it has none of these virtues. Is this picture accurate? Maybe not. Like just about everyone else in the world, I am subject to ( Read more... )

This song is not sophisticated, not subtle, and not polite, but those qualities seem useless in today's political environment.

The Donald Trump March
tune: The Mickey Mouse Marchlyrics by Alan Thiesen, placed in the public domain ( Read more... )

In 1971, Sally Ride was an undergraduate at Stanford University, and she was the top player on the women's tennis team. Ride and three other players were denied travel funds to compete in a tournament in Ojai, CA. When they offered to pay their own way, they were again denied permission because they didn’t have a chaperoneAt a time when decades of ( Read more... )

Let me tell you about Mary R. Back in the 1970s, she was a single mother with no job skills to speak of. Poor planning? No, her husband had been shot to death ( Read more... )

Taxpayers made my life possible ( Read more... )