Jodi and I hit Borders Bookstore and Cafe last night. It’s one of those regular consumer things we do: go to a bookstore, browse, buy things we shouldn’t buy, and drink some caffeinated beverages and talk. We were scanning the new arrivals last night, when I noticed that Senator Rick […]
Monthly Archives: July 2005
29 posts
“Here’s a man who really knows science and who really knows government,” Specter said. “So it is a very, very profound change. It’s an earthquake.” That’s a quote from Sen. Arlen Specter, concerning the shift in position on Federally funded stem cell research made by Senate majority leader, Sen. Bill […]
What a week. Busy, busy, busy! Let’s start at the beginning. BaBar is engrossed in its fifth run, which we aptly denote “Run 5”. A lot of things changed in the accelerator and detector when we shutdown for the 2004 upgrade last fall. It’s critical, given such changes, to validate […]
There’s been a lot of hubbub lately about the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s nascent investigation into a very particular set of climate science. This science, conducted by Dr. Michael Mann and two colleagues (who have also been requested to present documents for this investigation), demonstrates that that average global […]
I here reproduce the excerpt of Rep. Sherwood Boehlert’s (R-NY) letter to Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) regarding Barton’s initiation of a political inquiry into a scientific study of climate change. This excerpt is taken from “AIP FYI #112”:http://www.aip.org/fyi/2005/112.html. From the FYI: In response to these letters, House Science Committee Chairman […]
It’s about time. Applying “Google’s”:http://www.google.com search technology to the world of scholarly information has been a long time coming. I’ve use Google to search “The Arxiv”:http://www.arxiv.org (pronounced “Archive”), but now a ton of other information from beyond physics is available through http://scholar.google.com. I’ll be adding this to my usual tools, […]
The ants were coming in from some cracks in the step connecting our spare room – once a garage – to the main living room. I caulked the holes, sprayed the area, vacuumed the carpet with our steam cleaners, and… um… valiantly fought back the ant army leader using only […]
War! Steve and Jodi’s cottage is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Ant swarm. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere. In a stunning move, the fiendish ant leader, General Grievous, has swept into the cottage and kidnapped a delicious morsal of food hidden out of sight on […]
After Cardinal Schonborn’s recent NY Times essay, Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserver University sent a letter to the Pope, on nehalf of himself and several Catholic colleagues, asking for clarification on the Church’s position on the theory of evolution, and thus on the relationship between the scientific method and […]
“Science Friday discussed the recent authoring of letters by Rep. Barton to three climate scientists, requesting they submit their records for review by Barton and his colleagues”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4766641.
I was listening to BBC news on KQED tonight, and had a chance to hear the author Rick Warren speak about his new book, “The Purpose Driven Life”, claiming to use Christian philosophy to change your life in 40 days. The author talked about the three questions that plague us […]
Another long and busy week. The first part of the work week gave me a chance to focus on my efforts to understand the BaBar “background filter”, or “BGFilter”. The BGFilter is responsible for taking our triggered data, which is written to disk in a fairly raw format, and filtering […]