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 […]
Life
490 posts
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 […]
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 […]