Hello, Lawyers, Guns & Money!
By I’m glad to be here.
Some of you know me. I’ve been blogging since 2004 and commented on a now-defunct message board before that.
I worked at the Los Alamos Scientific (and then National) Laboratory for 35 years, on a variety of projects from laser isotope separation to environmental cleanup. The latter took me to Estonia and Kazakhstan. All my projects were connected to policy – what Iran may or may not be doing, the Chemical Weapons Convention and a few other treaties, and Chernobyl in real time.
One of my projects required modeling of chemical reactions, which, it turns out, uses the same mathematics as does epidemiology. I like science and math, unlike too many people who write for newspapers.
Among all that, I learned strategy to survive in my job and to make sense of funding and the treaties and other national interests my work supported. Feminism has been a continuing thread in my life and is becoming more of what I write.
A big project right now for me is to reinterpret US defense doctrines through a feminist lens. I take my direction from Carol Cohn. I don’t always do it explicitly, and there’s a strategic reason for that.
I consider my yard a nature preserve and keep finding fascinating things in it. I play piano and venture into literature. I have two cats, but that is not as big a deal here as it is at Balloon Juice.
I may get off to a slow start because August is full of challenges in real life. Today, for example, I have to get my chain link fence fixed after a bear went through it, and my microwave oven is not heating. Ugh.