For the second time, Jodi and I participated in the annual Stellafane Convention. Last year, I was a speaker at the pre-convention event (The Hartness House Workshop) and then again at the end of the convention. This year, Jodi spoke at the workshop and then both of us participated in […]
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This post comes days after “part 1” for a simple reason: when you host your own servers at home there is the risk of interruption. In our case, around 8:30pm on Tuesday evening, something caused a power bump or brown out at our house. All systems are on battery backup […]
Last year, I had the great honour of being the keynote speaker at the 2025 Stellafane Convention of the Springfield Telescope Makers Association. I had such a good time at the convention, which is held over 2 days in the hills of Vermont, that I vowed this would become and […]
Note: I updated the post on August 9, 2026, after much later discovering one more step that might be needed after replacing a brick. See the bottom of the post. Hard drives terrify me. They are silent failure boxes that, despite the existence of SMART monitoring at the hardware level, […]
The last two days of the Aspen winter conference on “Paving the Way to New Discoveries in Particle Physics” ended with some pretty interesting stuff. From questions about sources of ultra-high-energy neutrinos to implications for the Standard Model from quantum information theory, this conference did not disappoint.
Sunday afternoon was spent exploring more of Aspen on foot, including a nearby park and walking trails. The conference kicked off that night with a reception, followed by the start of the program on Monday morning. Here are some highlights from the first two days.
Walking is my preferred mode of exploration, so yesterday I spent a bunch of time walking the area around downtown Aspen. The weather was lovely (hovering around or above 0C!), so it was a joy to be outside again. I also took the chance to find the Aspen Center for […]
I don’t ski. I don’t want to ski. So why am I in Aspen, Colorado for the next week? I am here because Aspen is home to one of the great centers for physics.
Several years ago, I was invited by a colleague of mine to join in an effort to teach a brief summer course entitled “The Secret City”. The few-day course, taught at a satellite university campus in New Mexico, explored the story of the Manhattan Project and its aftermath. It was […]
Updated Nov. 1, 2025 with WordPress information. The “fediverse” is the term for the federated social web, a collection of social media concepts (Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Friendica, Bookwyrm, etc.) that can all talk to each other by virtue of a common protocol: ActivityPub. The technical details don’t matter. What matters […]
Will a 2019 Intel-based iMac (without the T2 security chip) happily run GNU/Linux? This was the question I set out to answer when we recently retired the first Mac we ever bought for our house. The answer is YES. But the details matter. Background: Forced Obsolescence of Good Hardware For-profit […]
I am presently back in the US on a short vacation before heading to Vermont to participate in the Stellafane Convention. In what has been an intense and extremely busy year, this has been a few days of much needed rest and peace. After exercising in a state park yesterday, […]