To one of my recent posts, a comment was made by the mysteriously named “The Chemist” criticizing my teaching of special relativity to my nephews as turning them to “the dark side”. That’s nothing. Check out what my wife did. This makes relativity look like . . . well . […]
Life
490 posts
Plane flights are an interesting way to learn what people think. The proximity of them to us on the plane makes it impossible to ignore conversations. Sometimes I like to introduce myself, if I feel the circumstances or the timing are appropriate. Once, two businessmen sitting next to me on […]
We landed in Portland not that long ago. I’m sitting in a cafe by the main security entrance to the terminals. I haven’t been anywhere near Portland since 2000, when Jodi and I packed my car and headed west from Wisconsin to California. It was almost the same time of […]
Having just returned last night from Wisconsin, I find myself today in the San Jose airport waiting for my flight to the Tri-cities airport in Washington State. I had enough time to placate the cats, clean up the apartment a little (it was in excellent shape, actually, thanks to Roomba […]
This weekend I have been in Wisconsin at the baptisms of my God-children, my sister-in-law’s new twin boys. It’s been a real pleasure to leave work behind in CA this weekend (where things have been going very, very well) and spend time with family I have not seen in quite […]
I stood in the back row of the textbook floor in the Yale Co-op. My summer job as a janitor had given me about $2000 to spend for the two semesters, including book expenses. I had all my class books, but that didn’t matter. The dark beauty standing in front […]
Tonight is very likely my last shift on the BaBar experiment. I just got the baton from the penultimate liaison shifter, my colleague Jose, and here I sit. The usual Liaison console has been commandeered by the staff of the PEP operations crew. There’s a buzz in the room. The […]
This weekend marks the final shifts of the BaBar experiment and the final operations of the PEP-II collider. The last few months have been among the most personally exciting time of my life, a time in collider physics that I had been led to believe was long dead. Of course, […]
After a week of traveling and reading and generally reminding myself of the joy of the world outside of SLAC, it’s time to return to my research. I set guidelines for this past week. No work-related e-mail. This was helped along by the fact that the place to which I […]
I just got my new U.S. passport today, after only sending the paperwork in about 1.5 weeks ago. Crazy. A little brochure came with the passport, its cover reading “With Your U.S. Passport, the World is Yours!” I’m writing an open letter to the U.S. State Department in response to […]
The press of the past few weeks has now officially caught up to me. While I am very much looking forward to returning to my research, I am also mentally and emotionally burned out. The last meeting of the trip was on Friday, late afternoon, at the Department of Energy […]
I’m trying not to be paranoid, but I think the universe is trying to tell me something. It started over a year ago, when I had my last real vacation. It was Christmas break, and Jodi and I did our usual family-to-family cross-continental hop. That’s tiring, with driving and flying, […]