In his state of the union address, President Obama said that “Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. (Applause.) Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped […]
Politics
277 posts
On this day remembering the life and contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , I performed my annual ritual of listening to his “I Have a Dream” speech. This year, I tried for focus my attention on one of the early themes of the speech: the bad check. King […]
In a lifetime, your chance of dying from heart disease is 1 in 5. Your chance of dying in a car accident is 1 in 272. Your chance of dying while walking is 1 in 623. Your chance of dying due to drowning or accidental submersion is 1 in 1073. […]
It’s a good day to look ahead to politics and science as we enter the fall. This is not only the day that Congress went “back to school”; it was also the day many kids in the U.S. did the same. The President addressed schoolkids today. We’re about to leave […]
Now that the public option for national healthcare seems to be on the table as a negotiating point, a new idea (championed by Republicans) has emerged as a compromise: health care cooperatives. These are organizations that unite healthcare consumers with their hospitals and doctors to spread the risk through a […]
Science advocacy has given me opportunities to grow not only as an American citizen, but as a citizen scientist. I’ve watched how some Americans have been acting at recent town hall meetings, and I have been horrified. I will not comment on the verity of claims made by those shouting […]
After some false starts trying to write this post yesterday, here we go. SLAC was treated to a visit by Secretary Chu, the U.S. Energy Secretary. Unlike previous people in his position, who showered the crowd with dumbed-down bureacro-babble and errant platitudes cobbled together from a patchwork misunderstanding of SLAC’s […]
Well, I decided to go through with it. I kept an audio diary of my trip to Washington. I think it conveys better than writing some of the emotions of the trip. I didn’t get to do interviews, like I wanted – there was just no good time to actually […]
Each year, about 50 physicists from all across the United States and, in a few cases, the globe, converge on Washington D.C. to bring messages to our lawmakers. These messages include thanks, first and foremost, for the support we receive for science. High-energy physics is a difficult enterprise to sell […]
Next week, I will be co-leading a team of physicists from the SLAC community to Washington D.C. As I remarked in my professional blog, the number of research physicists in Washington D.C. may spike next week in a historically unique way [1]. I haven’t done any audio projects in a […]
The weekly critical look at the media, NPR’s “On the Media”, did a piece on the changes to Texas science standards. It’s a good piece, and has the great quote from TEA Chairman McLeroy about “standing up to experts”. http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/04/03/01
The House and Senate both passed their Budget Resolutions last week. These are not actual appropriations. Instead, they are guidance on how to budget money in this and coming years (up to 2014, in this case). The right way to think about the budget resolution is as a ceiling; you’ll […]