Prof. Sam Lawler
Prof. Sam LawlerWait wait wait wait... there are TWO GIANT TV's in this hotel room!! TWO! WHY ARE THERE TWO?!!
Ok time to go for a walk. This is too much for me.
Prof. Sam LawlerMUCH BETTER
Prof. Sam LawlerOh my gosh...the hotel that UVic got for me is so fancy it's... embarrassing? Horrifying? I got a "free upgrade" (extra free because I didn't pay) to a suite and this is actually bigger than the ground floor of my farmhouse. And it's 10 stories up. And there's a balcony. This is... super weird. (It actually wasn't very expensive, either. I guess nobody wants to visit Victoria in winter, except people who live in Saskatchewan). #ProfSamLectureTour
Prof. Sam LawlerWait wait wait wait... there are TWO GIANT TV's in this hotel room!! TWO! WHY ARE THERE TWO?!!
Ok time to go for a walk. This is too much for me.
Prof. Sam LawlerMy talk tomorrow afternoon at UVic is aimed at physicists and astronomers, but will be very digestible for anyone interested in space debris and a teeny tiny bit about Kuiper Belt orbital dynamics. It's open to the public: https://events.uvic.ca/physics/event/104470-physics-astronomy-colloquium-dr-samantha-lawler
#ProfSamLectureTour
Prof. Sam LawlerOh my gosh...the hotel that UVic got for me is so fancy it's... embarrassing? Horrifying? I got a "free upgrade" (extra free because I didn't pay) to a suite and this is actually bigger than the ground floor of my farmhouse. And it's 10 stories up. And there's a balcony. This is... super weird. (It actually wasn't very expensive, either. I guess nobody wants to visit Victoria in winter, except people who live in Saskatchewan). #ProfSamLectureTour
Prof. Sam LawlerI caught the very-expensive-but-UBC-is-paying-for-it coach bus that picks up passengers in Vancouver, drives onto the ferry, lets us off for the ferry ride, then we get back on and it heads to downtown Victoria. I forgot how nice the view is from coach buses! Haven't been on one of these in a while. Now waiting to board the ferry, judging from where the driver parked, it looks like the fancy bus gets on the ferry before anyone else. #ProfSamLectureTour
Prof. Sam LawlerA paper from a few years ago by Dung et al. looked at how often programmers were not credited as authors in genetics research papers from the 1970s and 1980s, but were acknowledged as programmers who ran the code for the analysis, and how often those uncredited scientists were women https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/211/2/363/5931132?login=false
It used to be very common practice to have a programmer do your analysis for you, and they weren't considered a co-author (probably because many were women)
Prof. Sam LawlerIn 1964, the first simulation showing that Pluto is in a mean-motion resonance with Neptune was published: https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1965Obs....85...43C
They ran a 120,000 year simulation that showed libration of the resonant angle for the first time. This must have been terrifyingly hard to do. Punch cards, vacuum tubes, FORTRAN? I don't even know how they did this, but it was run on the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator
This was the first time Pluto's orbital stability was explained.
Prof. Sam LawlerI'm sorry to see obituaries for Dr. Gladys West this morning: https://thezebra.org/2026/01/18/dr-gladys-west-mathematician-whose-work-made-gps-possible-dies-at-95/
She was brilliant and did a lot of incredibly important scientific work, a lot of which was hidden/uncredited early on, because she was a mathematician in a time when "computer" was a job description.
Prof. Sam LawlerA paper from a few years ago by Dung et al. looked at how often programmers were not credited as authors in genetics research papers from the 1970s and 1980s, but were acknowledged as programmers who ran the code for the analysis, and how often those uncredited scientists were women https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/211/2/363/5931132?login=false
It used to be very common practice to have a programmer do your analysis for you, and they weren't considered a co-author (probably because many were women)
Prof. Sam LawlerI'm sorry to see obituaries for Dr. Gladys West this morning: https://thezebra.org/2026/01/18/dr-gladys-west-mathematician-whose-work-made-gps-possible-dies-at-95/
She was brilliant and did a lot of incredibly important scientific work, a lot of which was hidden/uncredited early on, because she was a mathematician in a time when "computer" was a job description.
Prof. Sam LawlerMy talk at UBC went SO WELL!! I am extremely pleased. I managed to cram a LOT into that hour long talk, I had great audience engagement from professors and students alike, and I had excellent discussions with lots of different people afterwards.
My one major regret: there's a huge solar storm happening and it's foggy and light polluted here in Vancouver!
Now time to figure out how I'm getting over to Victoria tomorrow for my talk at UVic on Wednesday #ProfSamLectureTour
Prof. Sam LawlerIt is very cool to be here at UBC giving the colloquium talk and meeting with profs and students! Especially because I was on the other side of that ~15 years ago as a PhD student.
The impostor syndrome is going to be intense today... I keep reminding myself of a quote from Alie Ward on Ologies: impostor syndrome is a result of a space not being built for you.
UBC physics department, I am here to share my knowledge and I am a tenured professor now! So there.
#ProfSamLectureTour