May 26 2008
Two plane trips, two trains, one bus, one boat, one cab, and 30 hour without sleep, and it was all worth it. I’m currently on the island of Elba, off the west coast of Italy. The BaBar collaboration is meeting here, perhaps for the last time in this locale, to get ready for the summer [...]
May 22 2008
The tumultuous Iraq War Supplemental lumbers forward [1]. Despite the President’s threat to veto the bill if it contains domestic spending, about half the Senate Republicans voted to include domestic spending in the bill. Whew. This one gets thicker every day.
The AIP has highlighted the money proposed for NSF ($150 million) and DOE ($100 million) [...]
May 19 2008
It’s easy to forget that until the famous case in Dover, PA in 2006, the Discovery Institute and its passionate fight for the right to have intelligent design taught alongside evolution was succeeding in a number of test cases. The wedge strategy, a strategy to make intelligent design an equal to evolution in the mind [...]
May 19 2008
It’s unbelievable. I had my popcorn, a nice cold beer, and a stats sheet. I was all fired up to watch the unfolding grudge match of the Iraq War Supplemental. Now, I’m just tired of it. Who can keep track of it all? Democrats bypass the appropriators in the House. Republicans revolt, against that and [...]
May 18 2008
This is going to be a stressful week. Deadlines for my research are starting to approach, and this coming weekend I fly to Italy for the last of the Elba BaBar collaboration meetings. Every four years, BaBar has convened in the spring in Elba to discuss the work that is needed in order to get [...]
May 18 2008
With all the disagreement about how to proceed on global climate change, you begin to forget that not that long ago energy companies were paying scientists to go out in public and speak against the science of climate change. We have gone from an era where scientists themselves were issue advocates into an era where [...]
May 11 2008
I found this interesting article on the whole ecosystem of the innovation crisis: the “Gathering Storm” report, the America COMPETES act, the failure to fund all of this last year, the efforts to get science into the supplemental, and the connections between science and the economy. Science Magazine’s article [1] has some interesting statements in [...]
May 11 2008
As many programs on TV and radio – both humorous and not humorous – have noted, whether you call the state of the economy in “recession” or “slow-down”, people are generally unhappy with the financial state of the nation. Making things frustrating for the high-tech sectors of the economy critical to the 21st century, the [...]
May 09 2008
The controversial Democratic House strategy for pushing the Iraq War Supplemental through the House and into the Senate has failed for now [1], partly owing to Republican protest but also a “revolt” of Blue-Dog Democrats, more moderate Democrats who opposed the strategy and some of the extra funding proposals. Sounds like we shouldn’t expect action [...]
May 05 2008
I posted a short note about a week ago, expressing concern that the hyper-politicization of the war supplemental had begun. Well, it has begun. As reported in several online news articles [1] [2], the Democrats in the House are trying to bypass the appropriations committee (with what looks like at least the implicit consent of [...]
Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
