Oct 31 2008
PCSD is the feeling of accomplishment after a collaboration meeting, accompanied by the tremendous stress of knowing you just got 50 new things to do. I can only imagine what this must be like for a larger experiment, and oddly enough my observations of smaller experiments suggests this effect plateaus, but never ever EVER drops [...]
Oct 25 2008
Well, it’s that time again: time to collaborate in person. BaBar has its autumn collaboration meeting this week, starting tomorrow morning. I have so much work to do before I present in a few days. God. That one month trip was great, but things have a tendency to pile up when your hotel internet sucks [...]
Oct 24 2008
Today’s Science Friday program was super-timely. The second hour of the show contained a discussion of McCain’s reference to money for the Adler Planetarium as a pork-barrel earmark, and a discussion of promoting innovation in America. Here is the audio:
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200810244
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200810246
Regarding the projector, I enjoyed one of the interviewee’s comments that it’s ironic that McCain’s website [...]
Oct 24 2008
I heard today that Mayor Bloomberg of NY has succeeded in persuading the city council to vote in favor of extending term limits for elected officials [1]. This struck at my moral center for leadership, which I elaborated on a few weeks ago [2] – the Cincinnatus model. Cincinnatus was a Roman consul, called by [...]
Oct 21 2008
This morning, I awoke a bit later than usual, went through the morning routine, paid some extra attention to the cats, and then hit the road for Davis, CA. I came here today to give a seminar, just as I had been doing through my 8-state trek in September and October. This was particularly exciting [...]
Oct 20 2008
The following is imagined, and purely fictional, in the same way that Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” was a work of fiction about actual scientific principles. Some of the text is taken from Ref. [1].
(cue music)
Mr. Tom Brokaw: Our issues this Sunday: He is a junior physicist from the state of Ohio, [...]
Oct 19 2008
The sum, 27+1+11, are the number of days that I was away from home while Jodi was here in CA, the number of days we were both home, and the number of days she’s away from home, all for a period of 39 days starting on Sep. 18. Physics can be a tough life, when [...]
Oct 16 2008
I micro-blogged last night some thoughts I had on the debate. This debate left me with a few questions, which I’ll try to address here.
1. “$3M for an overhead projector in a planetarium? I wonder if he means one of those super-expensive star projectors? Sounds like education.” (http://www.cooleysekula.net/chirp/index.php?action=shownotice¬ice=32)
This sounded fishy to me. I checked out [...]
Oct 14 2008
I feel halfway home. I got up early this morning, after a nice solid 8 hours of sleep, and hit the road an hour later. This put me into Midway Airport four hours ahead of my flight, but I really like killing time at Midway. They have a decent food court central to all three [...]
Oct 13 2008
I don’t have a lot of time to say too much – in fact, I’ve planned a rather informative look back on my seminar trip that I’ll write later – but I can say this: what an incredible month this has been. I have learned a terrific amount about over a dozen experiments in this [...]
Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
