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, […]
Life
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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 […]
Tonight on “Tech Nation”:http://www.technation.com, the host (Dr. Moira Gunn) is interviewing the father of askjeeves.com (now ask.com), Apostolos Gerasoulis. I’m a sucker for a new technology, and I’ve been looking for an alternative to Google and Yahoo! ever since I learned of their complicity in search filtering China’s access to […]
Memorial Day is treated differently by everybody I know. Some people sleep in (that’s me), some people go to parades or cemetaries, and some people even work. I did a little of all of these today. For me, Memorial Day is quite a private matter. I remember in my youth […]
This weekend is the opening of the film adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code”, Dan Brown’s best-selling novel. Ron Howard brings it to the screen. The book was fun, and Dan Brown’s most notable skill as a writer became clear right at the very end: every prejudice you take into […]
Today, Jodi took me to the Kavli Institute picnic at Stanford. The Kavli Institute is a place where astrophysicists and particle physicists come together from Stanford, and all over the world, to tackle the most significant problems challenging science right now. The problem of dark matter, the nature of dark […]
There’s been a lot of buzz concerning a Spanish version of the U.S. national anthem. Like an electric field, things like this tend to strongly polarize the nation. The media seizes on this kind of thing, throws the switch, and suddenly the nation is feeling one way or the other. […]
For twenty years, the United States has invested less and less in basic research in the physical sciences as a fraction of GDP. The U.S. spends about $8-$8.5 billion per year on basic research in the physical sciences (that represents the combined DOE science, NSF, and NIST budgets). Today, “it […]
I Google myself. There… that’s much better. Always better to just admit things and get them over with. OK, with the air clear… I found this interesting little tidbit using Google tonight. Somebody (Aspasia S.) wrote a review of the SLAC public lecture series [YelpFoodForIntellect]. They also happened to have […]
This has been a pretty fun week, and it’s only Tuesday, After a bout of insomnia on Sunday night, Monday was a real drag. That is, until the end of the day when, as I was leaving work, I got into a conversation about knowledge, philosophy, science, and religion with […]
I’ve avoided the blog for the last few weeks, pretty much on purpose. The March 7-9 trip to Washington D.C. was one of the most singular and draining experiences of my life. It was terribly stressful and exhilarating, all at the same time. All in all, 29 of us spent […]
Sometimes I get so close to an objective in my research, I become utterly obsessed with it. I spent most of my life in graduate school in that state, chasing the results that eventually became the work of my thesis. This past week, I’ve been pushing hard to try to […]