Apr 29 2008
In his press conference this morning, the President defined the limits of his tolerance on the Iraq war supplemental: $108 billion. More than that, he says, and Congress can expect a swift veto. Since this supplemental is potentially to include science spending, and needs bi-partisan support to even get the the President’s desk, I was [...]
Apr 28 2008
Back in 2005, just after the March Washington lobbying effort by SLAC and Fermilab users, a few of us at SLAC decided to setup a website that could serve as a hub for political action by scientists. It was intended to be a resource more than an organization (unlike SEA, which formed later), a means [...]
Apr 23 2008
A friend of mine sent along this cartoon. As she said, it’s rare to find politics and particle colliders combined in a single image.
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Apr 23 2008
To one of my recent posts, a comment was made by the mysteriously named “The Chemist” criticizing my teaching of special relativity to my nephews as turning them to “the dark side”.
That’s nothing. Check out what my wife did. This makes relativity look like . . . well . . . child’s play.
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Apr 23 2008
Plane flights are an interesting way to learn what people think. The proximity of them to us on the plane makes it impossible to ignore conversations. Sometimes I like to introduce myself, if I feel the circumstances or the timing are appropriate. Once, two businessmen sitting next to me on a plane were having a [...]
Apr 23 2008
We landed in Portland not that long ago. I’m sitting in a cafe by the main security entrance to the terminals. I haven’t been anywhere near Portland since 2000, when Jodi and I packed my car and headed west from Wisconsin to California. It was almost the same time of year, early June of 2000. [...]
Apr 23 2008
Having just returned last night from Wisconsin, I find myself today in the San Jose airport waiting for my flight to the Tri-cities airport in Washington State. I had enough time to placate the cats, clean up the apartment a little (it was in excellent shape, actually, thanks to Roomba and a careful pre-trip cleaning [...]
Apr 20 2008
This weekend I have been in Wisconsin at the baptisms of my God-children, my sister-in-law’s new twin boys. It’s been a real pleasure to leave work behind in CA this weekend (where things have been going very, very well) and spend time with family I have not seen in quite some time. We actually has [...]
Apr 17 2008
In my read through the KIMS literature, I realized that while it does indeed use a crystal detector (as DAMA, except CsI instead of NaI), thye do not look for an annual modulation. Instead, they look for recoils of the nuclei against the WIMP, and so their result is in the same class of direct [...]
Apr 17 2008
Jodi sent me this interesting tidbit today:
Dark Matter announcement sinks like a stone
Yikes. I wonder if anyone is going to discuss the KIMS result in contrast to DAMA and DAMA/LIBRA?
Follow-up: a response from the scientist quoted in the above article is here:
About the DAMA-LIBRA result
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Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
