Apr 30 2005
**YAWN**. This was a loooooooooong week. When I was a graduate student it was “no big deal” [1] to have four 8-hour shifts, plus normal meetings and work.
Although I was expecting to sleep-in today, I was a little amazed that I slept until 1 pm. I can’t say I’ve done that for a very long [...]
Apr 25 2005
Ah, shifts. I love them. It’s the stuff that brings you as close to the experiment as a casual particle experimentalist gets these days. If I were a systems expert, I have my hands deep in the warm guts of the detector every day. But I am not, and so this is as close as [...]
Apr 24 2005
I decided that, despite my claims in a recent post, I might have an optical instrument in the house with more power than those binoculars. I charged up the Sony handicam and set it up on its tripod. A quick look at Kstars gave the rough coordinates of Jupiter in the sky, and I [...]
Apr 24 2005
It’s a cool, grey, overcast day here in Redwood City. It’s not raining – at least, it’s not supposed to rain. However, the sky is the color of dusty milk and there is a gentle breeze that makes shorts and a tee-shirt a little uncomfortable.
That’s why I was so struck by the contrast in color [...]
Apr 23 2005
It was in the early 1600s that Galileo gazed at the heavens with his telescope and first saw the mountain and scars on the moon, the moons of jupiter, and many other wonders. Tonight, here on the West Coast, it’s a nearly cloudless night. I decided to step outside into the brisk night air with [...]
Apr 23 2005
My wife has gone off for two weeks to Wisconsin and Minnesota. Her trip is one of mixed business and personal events. First, she went to her home in the northwoods for a wedding shower. Then she’s off to Minnesota for a stint at the Soudan Mine, where her experiment is housed. Finally, she’s going [...]
Apr 22 2005
Peer review is the basis of good science publication standards. Papers are sent to journals and the journal collects a group of experts in the field so that the material can be reviewed. A positive review of the work lends itself toward obtaining publication; a negative review, depeding on the severity, can mean the paper [...]
Apr 19 2005
The catholic church has “just selected its new Pope”:http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=1&u=/ap/20050420/ap_on_re_eu/pope&sid=84439559. Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, will soon begin his reign as Pope of the Catholic Church. In that role, he will affect the lives of a billion people on this planet. While not all catholics share the same views as Pope Benedict, or each [...]
Apr 18 2005
Just before heading to bed tonight, I was goofing about on Google (doing that hubris-filled “search for your own name” thing) and found a link that brought me back to my youth. My dad used to run a bulletin board system (BBS) from our home. In their golden era, the BBSes of the world were [...]
Apr 18 2005
It’s gearing up to be a rich spring, and a richer summer. Winter and Summer are the times of year most densely populated by high-energy physics conferences. The biggies for my field are the winter-time Moriond QCD (Quantum Chromodynamics) and EW (ElectroWeak) conferences, followed usually in the late spring/early summer by the APS conference, followed [...]
Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
