Feb 24 2007
As a physicist, I do a lot of flying. Many physicists do a hell of a lot more, and many do less. I get to conferences and workshops, or join my wife at her experiment, four to five times a year. Throwing in family visits, unexpected life events, and vacations, the number winds up somewhere [...]
Feb 23 2007
My good friend Eric posted a piece in his blog today about “Connecticut seeking to ban violent songs from being taken into school”:http://blogs.courant.com/eric_danton_sound_check/2007/02/bombs_bursting_.html. This got me thinking, and I posted my thoughts as a (yet to be moderated) comment in his blog. I reproduce them here:
At last, we can get all of these terrible and [...]
Feb 22 2007
Physics can be busy, especially physics on a big collaboration at a very active national laboratory. This week has been a real highlight for me, mainly because for over half of it I have been in a meeting from first thing in the morning until the last hour of the day. Take yesterday, for example. [...]
Feb 19 2007
As I mentioned a few days ago, the smells and sights of spring are returning to the Bay Area. It cooled off a bit today, but that didn’t seem to stop some of the wildlife from making appearances. Our cats have noticed the sudden boom in birds in the last few days, particularly hummingbirds. I [...]
Feb 19 2007
Over a year ago, The State Board of Education of Kansas revised science education standards, and admitted supernatural causation as part of science. This was part of a concerted effort by so-called socially conservative members of the board to revise science standards to make them more religiously correct. Science is not supposed to be religiously [...]
Feb 18 2007
Dirac matrices. Spinors. Matrix elements. Trace rules. These are just a few phrases describing how I spent my Sunday. You see, on Friday when I gave an overview of my recent work to one of the SLAC research groups, I got a question early on that I could not answer. It was a simple question, [...]
Feb 17 2007
This has been a long couple of weeks. I feel better today, because the smell of spring is lingering in the air. The temperature has been climbing upward in the past week, taking us to very pleasant springtime weather in the Bay Area. Today, the neighbors have mowed their lawn, capping off the experience. There [...]
Feb 08 2007
Food safety is one of the most pressing challenges facing the overall security of the United States. Jodi’s recent trip to India gave me a new appreciation for the safeguards already in place in this country. Outbreaks of E. Coli, as happened last year in spinach, remind us that a great system isn’t a perfect [...]
Feb 05 2007
If you’ve never had a chance to listen to “The Hold Steady”, it’s a must-hear band for people who grew up before the internet in suburban America. Somehow, when you cross the 30 mark and listen to this stuff, it puts the lunacy of childhood in perspective. “Boys and Girls in America” is their latest [...]
Feb 05 2007
If you weren’t at SLAC this afternoon, then you missed a great colloquium. Art Rosenfeld, the Commissioner of the California Energy Commission, gave a presentation on how standards are a leading effort in the fight for energy efficiency and CO2 reduction. He was a charming man, whose dedication to the data was refreshing. He’s worked [...]
Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
