May 28 2005
My friend Jonathan and I walked from the Scarrit-Bennet Center to the park on the other side of the Vanderbilt campus. In that park is a recreation (full-scale) of the Athenian Parthenon. I “snapped a whole bunch of photos”:http://steve.cooleysekula.net/photos/nashville2005 of the place, which was really phenomenal. It included a 2-3 story statue of Athena, with [...]
May 27 2005
This is the last day of physics content meetings at the Frontiers in Contemporary Physics III meeting at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Today we closed with an overview of the theory of the strong interaction, referred to as “Quantum Chromodynamics”, or QCD. What amazed me was that this theory, whose development earned a nobel prize [...]
May 24 2005
It’s the end of day two of the “Frontiers in Contemporary Physics” conference here at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. The days are divided into two large subsections: plenary talks, from 8:30 in the morning until 3:30-4:30 in the afternoon, followed by 1-1.5 hours of parallel sessions on a variety of topics (QCD, Electroweak physics, [...]
May 22 2005
I am in Nashville, TN for the third in the conference series “Frontiers in Contemporary Physics”:http://www.fcp05.vanderbilt.edu/. This conference is held at Vanderbilt University, a lovely Methodist university nestled just beside the heart of Nashville. I arrived late last night and spent today finishing my talks, then taking a walk around the Vanderbilt campus.
If you check [...]
May 13 2005
It’s great to be back in the Midwest. It’s almost a rare pleasure to be here anymore, now that I’m not a student in Wisconsin. I’m back at Fermilab once more for a meeting of the Braidwood neutrino experiment collaboration. We’ve got two days of packed sessions, discussing everything from civil engineering to physics topics [...]
May 09 2005
“There is a strong Washington Post editorial that takes a fairly critical look at the recent behavior of Kansas in reviewing the educational, scientific validity of the Theory of Evolution”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/07/AR2005050700943.html.
I am fairly fond of this framing of the hypothesis of “intelligent design”:
Intelligent design is not your parents’ creationism. It’s a slick set of talking points [...]
May 09 2005
Crazy. And there’s not enough time in the day to suffer crazy. Why are things crazy? Well, I’m in the honorable position of giving three presentations in the next three weeks (not one a week, or I’d be less stressed). This Thursday night I head to Fermilab to attend a collaboration meeting for the [...]
May 07 2005
Well, it appears to be the end of not only day 3 of the Kansas state board of education hearings, but also of the arguments by those who adhere to the hypothesis of intelligent design and the religious doctrine of Biblical creationism. I “just noticed the Kansas City Star article wrapping up this day’s insanity.”:http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/11592176.htm.
Oh, [...]
May 07 2005
I just saw an “article about an astrologer in Russia who is proceeding to sue NASA because she believes that a future planned comet mission will disrupt the natural order of the universe”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/russiausnasaspace.
Says the woman’s lawyer, “My client believes that the NASA project infringes upon her spiritual and life values as well as the natural [...]
May 07 2005
It’s day 3 of the hearings in Kansas, held by the state board of education to determine whether science standards should be lowered to weaken the position of the theory of evolution in the classroom. The “Washington Post has an article from the AP reporting that the witnesses are betraying themselves as creationsists first and [...]
Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
