The future of U.S. high-energy physics is uncertain, and as a consequence I have had a lot on my mind of late. This entry will be the first in a series of essays on messages: messages to the American people, to the Congress, and to the physics community. This time, […]
steve
1601 posts
It’s conference season again for particle physics. We’ve just passed through the period known as the “Winter Conferences” — Lake Louise, La Thuile, and Moriond are notable highlights from that period. BaBar unveiled the discovery of D-meson matter/antimatter mixing at Moriond, and one can expect many experiments to similarly unveil […]
A few years ago, there was a book that appeared on shelves called the “Poltically Incorrect Guide to Evolution”, which used the very typical tactics of pseudoscience to make it look like the theory of evolution and the untested idea of intelligent design were competing scientific principals in how we […]
In my continuing quest to bike more, I wanted to go on a ride up our hill today. That sounds lame, but this is a serious hill. We started from our cottage, at about 450 feet. By the time my legs gave out, we’d gone about three miles and up […]
Jodi and I took a break from cleaning paint off old metal funiture (her weekend hobby) and getting the laser printer to work with the upgraded server (my job) to go out to Mountain View tonight. Mountain View has long been our favorite place on the peninsula. As a student, […]
Today, I wanted to try out Skype on Mac OS X 10.3.9. Unfortunately, the newest webcams we own are about 7 years old, and Logitech doesn’t make drivers for Mac. Fortunately, the open-source community does. If you’re in this boat – an old Logitech camera and a Mac – check […]
There are a lot of people in my field who manage to work morning, noon, and night. I’m not sure how they ever manage families, and I’m not sure how they manage to do it for decades at a time. As I’ve gotten older, I find myself increasingly unable to […]
Yesterday, Barry Barish (the head of the International Linear Collider Global Design Effort) came to SLAC to deliver the weekly Monday colloquium. I was very excited about this particular colloquium. It’s the first that Mr. Barish has given at SLAC since the GDE cost estimate was completed and made public […]
A few days ago, I mentioned that there are independent spoofs of the Mac/PC ads on YouTube which involved Linux. This is now my absolute favorite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa1RCg-Ccp0&NR#
After a farily straight-forward upgrade of the operating system on cooleysekula.net yesterday, I caught up on a few bulletins from Fedora Core regarding changes to Core 6 packages. I noticed this little gem in the update notes to the timezone data (tzdata) package: Mongolia has abolished DST. Good for Mongolia. […]
A lack of ingenuity, running around pretending to be ingenuity, often breeds that quality in other endeavors. The linux and open-source communities are brimming with innovation, something which is reflected every day from tabbed media players like “kaffeine” to sexy window managers like “beryl” and its crazy wobbly windows physics. […]
In the spirit of Senator Inhofe’s definition of alarmists as “scientists who support the evidence for human-induced global climate change”, I propose that physicists who support the Standard Model as an acceptable description of nature be called “alarmists”. That makes string theorists, supersymmetrists, MONDians, “skeptics”. Now, doesn’t that sound silly? […]