Tonight, viewers in the U.S. were treated to the premiere of the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory”. Portraying the lives of reclusive young scientists coming to grips with their likeable female neighbor, the show roots itself in the usual stereotype of the scientist (and in particular, the physicist). While […]
Yearly Archives: 2007
173 posts
Today an interesting ruling came from the European Union regarding Microsoft, Vista, and the distribution of services (like a media player, or a search engine) as integrated operating system technology. The EU courts ruled against Microsoft in its appeal of a previous ruling that its Vista technology creates an unfair […]
Jodi and I signed up for a weekend NY Times subscription. For years, I’ve heard the lament that my generation doesn’t take the printed word seriously enough. I get this from academics, the media, and my reporter friends. Fine. Now I have a newspaper subscription. Leave me and my generation […]
There is a coming change in the American landscape of particle physics. It’s an interesting violation of some basic tenets of physics. As the center of gravity shifts from the U.S. to Europe, more and more of the weight of the field is being born by fewer people here at […]
As adults, we have the pleasure of a high vantage point from which to look back on our misspent youth. The locker betrayals, the backstabbing clique politics, the Hamlet soliloquies of the heart writ in the boiling ink of our hormones. In the last couple of months, I had the […]
I have never hinted at the meaning of this blog’s title – “The Adventures of My Pet Hamster”. Well, I have a treat for you regular readers. Recently, while going through a bookshelf with old lab notebooks, I finally found the original adventures of my pet hamster. These will give […]
For the last seven years, and certainly in many decades prior, we have faced issues regarding convenience and privacy. A specific subset of that pair is security vs. privacy, popular instances of which have arisen in airport screening and warrantless wiretapping. However, these particular examples can seem ethereal and distant, […]
Tonight I have a bittersweet occasion to attend. My long-time friend and colleague, once my graduate school apartment mate in Geneva during my first summer at CERN and then my grad school office mate, is saying farewell to the U.S. physics community and going to Switzerland. Like many, many other […]
It’s been a while since I jotted some thoughts here in the old blog. It’s been a rather on/off series of weeks. I went on a four-day vacation while my sister was here, then returned for a full week of research. Labor Day weekend was spent in Connecticut with my […]
Quite a while back, I believe in early 2006, I setup a home personal video recorder (PVR) using a Hauppauge 350 TV Tuner card, a small form-factor system and an old monitor, and MythTV. My MythTV distribution of choice, at the time, was KnoppMyth. However, after one or two scary […]
I’ve largely avoided the political pageantry surrounding the alleged candidates for U.S. president in 2008. This is for several reasons. The first is that I am still a little burned out on the pure doses of politics that came in 2006, during my last round of physical science outreach to […]
This has been a really refreshing week, quite a turn of events from the constant obsession with fundamental particles. My sister arrived on Tuesday, and after finally clearing my plate of all my last minute research items I was ready to put aside physics. We hiked, we biked, we watched […]