Happy Friday the 13th! Of course, in Italy, Friday the 17th is considered to be the bad luck day. Though it’s only six days since my last diary, the weekend will be especially busy…
I am in Boston this weekend for the annual Boskone Science Fiction Convention, something I have been attending since about 1972, when I was an undergraduate at MIT. Back then, these conventions covered everything from movies to games to books; nowadays, each subgenre has its own conventions and so Boskone tends to concentrate on writers and what they write. I hope to meet up with a number of old friends, many of whom have become well known writers in the field. And I’ll be participating in four panels of scientists discussing things ranging from what’s new in astrophysics this year, to what the next big disruptive technology might be…
But that’s getting ahead of myself. I got back to Tucson from my trip to North Carolina and Ohio on Saturday, and immediately plunged into the world of Foundation business… trying to make sense of where the money has gone last year and how much we need to raise, this year. The good news is that we actually accused more money than I had thought, when one considers what our investments yielded. The bad news is that we also spent more than I thought. For the past many years, the Foundation has been running at a small deficit every year, and this year alas was no different. That’s one reason why we’re doing fundraising with this blog. (Please spread the word about the blog to your friends and neighbors!)
Toward that end, Katie Steinke came this week to work on two projects for the upcoming year. One is our trip to Chile, which will occur in April; it looks to be a very exciting time, where we will accompany Foundation members to visit the telescopes that make Chile famous in the world of astronomy.
The other is a wide-ranging plan for making the Vatican Observatory Foundation a nexus of materials on faith and astronomy that can be used by Catholic educators, and educated Catholics, in conjunction with potential funding from the Templeton Foundation. Watch this space!
