Oct 30 2006
I am lame. We established that a while ago [TAOMPH243]. Every now and then, I punch my name, or my domain name, into Google and Yahoo to see what turns up. Most recently, I’ve been curious to see if the changeover from cooleysekula.net to cooleysekula.net had taken in the search engines. In Yahoo!, this is [...]
Oct 29 2006
I’ve had the privelege of participating in lobbying Congress about science for almost half a decade, and in that time I have seen scientists take more steps to raise their public profile. We have been graced by a number of opportunities to engage the public, and the government, about our fields. In physics, the world [...]
Oct 29 2006
My dad is a chemistry teacher, and a chemist by training. Naturally, a son who wound up as a physicist (and a daughter who married a physicist) must be a great disappointment to such a proud man. I’m kidding, of course, except the part about my sister marrying a physicist. That’s just creepy.
Dad and [...]
Oct 28 2006
I like “Numb3rs”. Not just the kind that let you do math, but also the TV show that attempts to popularize the life and minds of scientists. Centering on the stories of Charlie, a math prodigy and the youngest full faculty member at “CalPoly” (clearly modeled on CalTech), and his FBI agent brother, Don, the [...]
Oct 26 2006
The International Linear Collider, a cornerstone of future progress in physics, is many years away. But as I am constantly reminded, the seeds of groundbreaking experiments are planted in one decade, to be harvested in another. BaBar, the experiment I work on here at SLAC, is an example. Conceived of in the late ’80s as [...]
Oct 26 2006
This has been quite a set of seasons for me and Jodi. The whole thing started for us just before the summer, as we were getting ready for our variety of shifts and analyses. I popped off to Moscow, then we headed to Minnesota for my vacation and her shifts, ending up at Fermilab for [...]
Oct 22 2006
When I was a senior at Yale, I decided to see how much I had really learned in junior year quantum mechanics by taking solid state physics. Solid state physics is the study of crystalline structures. It is an exercise in applying quantum mechanics – you have to have a good working knowledge of wave [...]
Oct 21 2006
Yesterday, a number of us congregated in an office at SLAC and did some hard earned slacking off. One of the issues that came up was the egotistical masturbation called “blogging”. The statement was made, in effect, that everybody who blogs should be lined up and asked to get a life, to find something useful [...]
Oct 15 2006
Jack and Jill, went up the Hill
To pass some legislation,
Jack fell down, in Germantown,
and Jill hit “Face the Nation”
I just returned from a fall trip to Washington D.C. on behalf of users of
SLAC, Fermilab, and the U.S. LHC community. There were six of us, and while it would be unethical of me to discuss all [...]
Oct 08 2006
Tonight was the first and only debate between Phil Angelides and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the two candidates for governor of California. It was a one-hour debate, with about 7 questions asked of the candidates. The format was meant to be a conversation between the two men, but it degraded IMMEDIATELY into stumping and scripted statements. In [...]
Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
