May
29
2006
Memorial Day is treated differently by everybody I know. Some people sleep in (that’s me), some people go to parades or cemetaries, and some people even work. I did a little of all of these today. For me, Memorial Day is quite a private matter. I remember in my youth in Connecticut often attending church [...]
May
28
2006
I realized this past week that I don’t yet have an entry in my “rant” category. Here, dear readers, is my first one.
I don’t know when you’ll see this. Why? Because my domain name registrar, “vhosting.com”:http://www.vhosting.com, cashed my check (deducted $15 from my credit card) on May 16th and then failed to renew my domain. [...]
May
21
2006
My favorite Sunday program is a radio show called “On the Media” (“www.onthemedia.org”:http://onthemedia.org/). It’s a week-by-week look at the media and its behavior. “This week’s show takes a look at media and global warming”:http://onthemedia.org/stream/ram.py?file=otm/otm051906d.mp3. My favorite quote from this piece is a look at a media spot put together by an industry group. Paraphrased, it [...]
May
20
2006
This weekend is the opening of the film adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code”, Dan Brown’s best-selling novel. Ron Howard brings it to the screen. The book was fun, and Dan Brown’s most notable skill as a writer became clear right at the very end: every prejudice you take into the book will be used [...]
May
15
2006
For the past five months, my professional life has been a roller-coaster ride. My research is now a constant source of stress, as deadlines rapidly approach and MANY questions need to be answered. Adding to this is a broader concern about the future of my own field in this country. High-energy physics, a field which [...]
May
14
2006
(Credit CERN)
To see the magnets of the Large Hadron Collider installed in the CERN LHC tunnel is quite a sight. These magnets, along with the towering components of the ATLAS and CMS particle detectors, represent the very near future of my field. Each of these is a component in a discovery factory, an engine colliding [...]
May
06
2006
Today, Jodi took me to the Kavli Institute picnic at Stanford. The Kavli Institute is a place where astrophysicists and particle physicists come together from Stanford, and all over the world, to tackle the most significant problems challenging science right now. The problem of dark matter, the nature of dark energy, the origin of the [...]
May
04
2006
News of the weird, my friends. Our “politics-and-religion-mixing President has declared, on this the national day of prayer, that the U.S. is a nation of prayer”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060504/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_prayer;_ylt=Auh2YG3m0lrz_xYEcS4QLD6s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3OXIzMDMzBHNlYwM3MDM-. I wonder if, on the national day of reason, he’ll declare the U.S. a nation of reason? Oh, right, we don’t have that national day. Yikes.
Thinking back to that [...]