It’s vacation! Where do physicists go on vacation? Well, some go to exotic locations with lots of people. I pack up and head to my wife’s experiment. She’s currently 2600 feet below the earth, about a mile from here. I’m sitting in our room in the “Simmons House”, one of […]
Life
481 posts
I kept a paper journal during my travel to, stay in, and return from Moscow. I’ll be reporting here excerpts from that journal over the next few days and weeks. I intended this to be a report on the personal experience of international travel to a critical conference, as well […]
Before coming to Moscow, a friend of mine told me that it was quite an experience to visit the home of a Moscow resident. I’ve not had the chance to do that – to my chagrin – but the story had a theme that echos through Moscow. He said that […]
It’s the last day before I leave for Russia. In addition, we’re well into the summer heat, getting to temperatures up to 104 degrees. Even our normally cool house has been a sweatbox, and the frequent power outages make running the AC a dicey proposition. We spent much of today […]
The back-and-forth in the Senate and the White House these past few days had me thinking, thinking about life and what it means to be alive, to take a life. I kept thinking about what the President said, that he would execute his only veto in six years should the […]
Summertime is the worst time of the year for physics. I’ve said this many times before, but no season is busier. I suppose it’s timed to coincide with professorial “free time”, when classes end and researchers can get back to their life of labs and meetings. For a post-doc or […]
This morning, Jodi and I drove up to one of the four Russian Federation Consulates in the United States, conveniently located here in San Francisco. It was my day to hand in my visa application and hope I did all the paperwork correctly. It was a beautiful day, and from […]
After 30 years, it seems sensible to look back a bit and reflect on the life that was, and the life that will be. It would be wise to think about the contrast between my first decade, the second and third, all of which led to to where I am […]
This is going to be a hard month, and it hasn’t even started yet. I’m talking about July. I’ve been working pretty seriously on my research, getting it ready for the summer. Along with my 500 colleagues on BaBar, you could probably wring the toil out into a bucket and […]
Rituals are important to life. They can be secular or religious in origin, but having a regular event to which you can look forward is important. I’ve tried removing ritual from my life, and I always feel unglued as a result. Jodi and I decided a few months ago that […]
The horror of last year’s hurricane season, and its effects on Louisiana and Mississippi, were too many to count. While much of the nation has apparently lost interest in the plight of the South, as a scientist I am very much aware and concerned about this new hurricane season. Already, […]
Jodi and I hit the bike trail this afternoon. We drove down to Palo Alto, took Bayshore Drive East right off of Embarcadero, and parked by a wooden bridge and the bayshore bike trails. One of the attractions of this ride was that we knew it would take us very […]