Jul 29 2008
No sooner did my plane land than I had a voicemail from a long-time friend and colleague. I made it from the terminal to the SEPTA rail system, where I had a very pleasant ride to the University City station. From there, it was just a short walk to Houston Hall, where I registered and [...]
Jul 29 2008
When I traveled to ICHEP in Moscow in 2006, I kept a small leather-bound journal in my pocket to keep a record of my travels and my thoughts. I scribbled hot results from the conference in the book, which kept on going even when I couldn’t plug in my laptop. Old technology works great.
This time, [...]
Jul 27 2008
The SF Chronicle has run an article today regarding DOE’s desire to change the name of SLAC [1]. Sounds like the buzz is growing. It also sounds like a popular solution is to have “SLAC” continue to be the name, while probably standing for something other than “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center”. We’ll see.
At least this [...]
Jul 27 2008
This week begins the 34th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). The conference is being held in Philadelphia. While this presents much less of an interesting travel story [1], this conference may prove to be quite interesting. The LHC has not yet started operations, so this will be the last conference before the [...]
Jul 24 2008
When I was in college, I decided to try something. I changed my name. Well, I went by a different name – my middle name. I bear my maternal grandfather’s name as my middle name, and for I time I decided to alter my life a little and go by “Jacob” instead of “Steve”. I [...]
Jul 24 2008
I’ve been running silent these past few weeks, getting ready for the ICHEP conference next week. However, a pair of headlines today was just too much to ignore. When I scanned the AP stories listed on Yahoo News, these caught my eye:
Obama urges Germans to work with US to stop terror AP – 42 [...]
Jul 12 2008
The press release about the ηb discovery went out earlier this week, accompanied in SLAC Today with a very nice photo of the primary physics researchers working on the search. Looking back to the “winter of insanity” that started in December, I find it incredible that in such a short period of time that we [...]
Jul 08 2008
This has been an exciting week. My own work may be soon coming to fruition, and I’m starting to the “pre-unblinding jitters”. I even took a walk from my office to the BaBar detector today, even in the oppressive heat, to relax. But what are “pre-unblnding jitters”? This is a little hard to explain. Let [...]
Jul 07 2008
I’m pleased to announce that BaBar has submitted for publication its first paper detailing results from the dataset we secured on the Y(3S) resonance. It’s a doozy – nothing like finding the ground state of bottomonium 31 years after the discovery of the bottom quark!
I’ve written up a short piece in my professional blog:
http://www.cooleysekula.net/blogs/steve/goingupalleys/?p=20
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Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
