About

The camera obscura was the earliest camera: people thousands of years ago discovered that a tiny hole into a dark chamber would project an upside down image of the outside onto the wall of the chamber. Like in a camera obscura, I also feel like I'm in the dark trying to understand a huge universe that I can only see through a pinhole. And like the images of a camera obscura, my view of the world sometimes the world seems pretty upside down.

Except I'm looking at robots and stuff like that, so I thought the name of this blog was a clever play on words.

You can read more about me, Julia, in this little bio, or you can check out my website.


This website doesn't have a clear and consistent audience. In large part, its purpose is to help me develop my writing voice and a writing habit. But I do hope some people will find useful information.

Some posts provide hopefully useful information to a niche group, like students planning to go to graduate school.

Others posts are aimed at science communication, trying to explain concepts to people outside of a narrow subject area. These are the things I wish I had found when I was trying to learn it.

And then there are posts that serve as a pensive so that I can remember how I did something when I inevitably need to repeat it after my short term memory has expired.