Archive for July, 2011

A Longshot Tale of Family Debt

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

The third time is a charm, the saying goes.

I hope so.

I’m in Detroit for Kendra’s high school reunion, but it didn’t stop me from squeezing out a bit of writing. Below is my third raw and unedited submission to Longshot Magazine, whose ordained theme for this issue is debt.  The previous two stories I sent in perished during editorial review: one about the New Horizons spacecraft (for the hustle-themed issue) and the next about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (for the comeback issue).

This time I stepped away from science and did a little in-family reporting on my last name. Which may or may not be Mosher, thanks to our gambling-rich bloodline.

I want to be skeptical that the core story is true, but something tells me that it is.

Anyway, enjoy. As an added bonus, I’ve posted the conversation I had with my father.

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Posted in Experimentation | No Comments »

Why I’d Live in a Museum for a Month

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

You have 30 days to squeeze every ounce of awesome out of one of the biggest, baddest museums on Earth.

What would you do?

That’s what the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago asked hopefuls for the institution’s second and final “Month at the Museum” contest.

Being the über-curious and outgoing science reporter that I am, I couldn’t resist. My (hopefully) dark horse entry galloped into the stable of applications before the gates closed yesterday.

One part of the application called for a 60-second video showing off you + your creativity. For the $0.00 production above, I braved grumpy security guards, dodged speeding trains, fought sleep and turned my back on the last-ever space shuttle launch.

But 60 seconds wasn’t nearly enough time for this starry-eyed applicant.

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Posted in Travel, Video | 4 Comments »

The Nerdiest Marriage Proposal. Ever.

Saturday, July 16th, 2011

Yesterday, months of planning culminated into the world’s nerdiest marriage proposal.

I asked Kendra Snyder to marry me in the opened-up guts of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. (Where Kendra works as a science writer/communicator/public information officer-type.)

More specifically, I asked her on scaffolding below the center of RHIC’s 1,200-ton STAR detector. This house-sized machine examines the hot soup of energy present just moments after the Big Bang, which physicists recreate by colliding gold ions near the speed of light.

Make as many symbolic interpretations as you’d like — I chose the location for a lot of reasons! — but the truth is I wanted us to have a great story to tell. A ridiculously nerdy, epic and smile-prompting story.

So how did things go down? Here’s the skinny from each of our perspectives.

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Posted in Announcements, Physics, Video | 25 Comments »

Not Live, From Cape Canaveral

Saturday, July 9th, 2011

CAPE CANAVERAL – While covering the final space shuttle mission, I thought it’d be interesting to show the place where reporting of some incredible history has taken place.

I wanted to post this prior to launch, so it’s a day late (and a few thousand dollars in production value short). Fast-forward to the end for the launch from the press mound.

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Posted in Space and Astronomy, Video | 1 Comment »

Ready for orders at the final space shuttle launch

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

This is it, folks. The final space shuttle launch is upon us.

The glorified freight truck Atlantis launches Friday, July 8 at 11:26 a.m. EDT, and four lucky astronauts are hitching a ride. Once the crew gets up to a speed of about 17,500 mph — fast enough to keep them in continuous free fall — they’ll tag up with the International Space Station, perform a bread-and-butter mission, and coast back to Earth a couple weeks later.

I’m now a stone’s throw away from Kennedy Space Center* and parachuting into one of the geekiest and longest-lived reporting heritages on Earth, along with a veritable circus of other news media types.

My aim in this is simple: To document the end of a significant and contentious phase of human history. But I want to crowdsource the effort a bit.

I have a camera, a camcorder and my furious writing fingers. What would you have me do with these tools? Sky’s (not) the limit.

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Posted in Space and Astronomy, Travel | No Comments »