OK, I’ve found my first reason to not like Vidyo: when you join a meeting, the default it to (a) open your mic and (b) open your camera. You then have to scramble in a weird eye-darting frenzy to kill the camera. It’s embarrassing and, worse, it’s a waste of […]
Monthly Archives: June 2012
33 posts
The American Institute of Physics reports in one of its latest FYI bulletins reports on a letter sent by it and five of its member societies to the Senate [1]. I enjoyed one of the quotes from the letter: "Eliminating support for specific disciplines, such as the House did with […]
Since there is no beam right now and there is nothing in the ATLAS Trigger system that requires my attention, I can focus instead on this: thanks to CERN, I saved CHF 3.40 this morning. This summer, a friend of mine is hosting me in a spare room in his […]
The LHC is ramping beam energy now up to 4000 GeV per beam in preparation for the last stable beam running before machine development. Next week, we’ll resume data taking (I am told).
Skeptic Michael Shermer shared this fake cover image this morning, promoting the idea of a world where anti-science and pseudoscience are allowed equal rank to actual science. I agree with his comment, and go one step further: if this comes to pass, I want off this rock. ♲ Michael Shermer […]
Today I depart for Uppsala, to collaborate a little bit with my colleagues at Uppsala University. Uppsala is something of an intellectual powerhouse when it comes to the charged Higgs boson (they host a regular conference on the subject, and I have enjoyed participating in one of those conferences many […]
As of today, I am officially at CERN and will basically remain here until mid-July (I have a side-trip to Sweden this week). It’s certainly good to be back at CERN, and I looking forward to getting completely buried in research for the next 5 weeks.
Finding Parallel Worlds In the series “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” a well-crafted transporter modification is capable of hurling the crew of the station into a “mirror universe.” Everyone who exists in the known universe also exists in the mirror universe, but there they are not the same people. Major […]
In today’s New York Times [1], writer Jim Holt gave his opinion on the row initiated by physicist Lawrence Krauss regarding the value of philosophy. You can go read the details of that spat on your own; I’m about as interested in that debate as I am in polo. For […]
APS Physics reports on a challenge from Alan Alda. He challenges scientists to do a better job of communicating ideas to non-scientists. For instance, he posits, how would you answer the question, "What is a flame?" The article quotes Alda as saying that "scientists need to be able to speak […]
We’ve now lived in our house for one year. Unlike last year, we were here already when it was time to start planting in Texas. We started with a 4’x4′ planter box and a few tomato and pepper plants, the idea being that if this went well we’d expand in […]
I mean it this time. Really. (F***ing Yahoo). I almost can’t stop watching this time-lapse video of the Venus solar transit, taken by NASA instruments at high resolution. http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?collection_id=13587&media_id=145648241