About me and this site
Name: Lara Eakins
Email: rhubarble {at} gmail.com
Location: Austin and Elgin Texas
Job: Instructional Technology and Public Outreach for the University of Texas Department of Astronomy
So what is the purpose of this blog? Good question. I’ve been wanting to get a bit more involved in the skeptical community but I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to go about it. I read lots of skeptical and science-oriented blogs (as evidenced by my ever-growing blogroll) and I love listening to skeptical podcasts, but I’m really bad about commenting on blogs that I read. So, decided to start writing my own blog so I can at least be talking to myself about stuff. 
A little about me and my interest in science and the paranormal…
I’ve been a science geek (in particular astronomy) since I was pretty young. I remember seeing Cosmos when I was 7 or 8 when it originally ran on PBS, which is probably a big reason why I ended up getting a degree in astronomy. I’ve also long been fascinated by the paranormal. I can’t honestly say that I was a believer, since no matter how much I *wanted* to believe in some of these things (especially the cryptozoology), I always was looking for good proof.
I spent a lot of my high school years as a space and aeronautical nut and for a long time had the goal of becoming an astronaut. I chickened out of applying to the Air Force Academy and ended up majoring in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin (conveniently located in the city I already lived in). I also took a few geology classes (which served as the unofficial minor for my degree) because that was another of my loves and because I was mostly interested in planetary astronomy. I also volunteered one summer on a project out at the Vertebrate Paleontology Lab, which is where I discovered that I can get seasick by looking through binocular microscopes for too long. I’ll stick to telescopes for the foreseeable future.
An interesting combination of things occurred when I was in my last semester of college. I became hooked on the X-Files (which was in its first season at the time) and I took a class called “Pseudoscience and the Paranormal”, taught by Dr. Rory Coker in the physics department. I wish now that I had taken the course much earlier in college, since the critical thinking skills that I picked up in it were invaluable. I’m still really annoyed with myself for eventually getting rid of all the articles and notes I took in that class. For a few years after graduation I had planned to take the notes and start my own skeptical website, but I never followed through since my Tudor History section on my personal homepage started to take off and I started to concentrate on that instead.
After I got my undergraduate degree, I was originally planning to go to graduate school, but that didn’t work out. I was accepted at a school, but they didn’t offer any money so I decided to stay in Austin. I had a chance to work part time in astronomy (and I made ends meet by working at Hobby Lobby) so I stayed. After a year, I was able to take my current job full-time in the department in our education office. Dealing with the public on a regular basis also kept my interest in pseudoscience and science education at the forefront of my mind. I’ve also been lucky to have an opportunity to take some additional classes on our staff educational benefit, so I’ve been able to fill in some of the gaps in my undergraduate science classes with two chemistry classes and three biology classes, in addition to another geology class and one on human origins and evolution.
One of my big interests was the creation-evolution debate (I’ve been a paleoanthropology nut for a long time as well… I actually took a copy of “Lucy” to Cancun with me in high school). I used to mostly lurk and rarely contribute on Talk.origins back in the early-to-mid 1990s (I think) and learned a lot of valuable things there. Another one of the reasons I decided to start this blog was to keep an eye on the upcoming fight over Texas state science education standards.
This is just sort of a hodge-podge about where I’m coming from, which I’ll surely expand on further in posts on the blog. Oh, and I just want to make clear that all opinions that I express on this blog are my own and not to be taken as a representation of views of the University of Texas, Department of Astronomy or McDonald Observatory.
Here are some more blogs that I have for various other interests and parts of my life:
It’s All Just a Bunch of Rhubarb - My personal everyday stuff blog
Lara’s Loose Threads - My needlework blog
Tudorhistory.org Blog - A blog for updates to my Tudor History site and other related news
Tudor History Q&A - A question and answer blog for the site above
And the picture up top is me and a big, giant rock from space at the Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in August 2006.