Random
174 posts
Today, the following things – which have not happened in over a year – happened: I commuted to SMU with Jodi and essentially during rush hour. I stood, albeit masked, in a moderately socially distanced crowd. I was able to clap with a group of people and have all the […]
We are taking our home garden a bit more seriously this year. The pandemic, and poor health practices by shoppers at the local grocery store, have made it more important to offset time spent in the aisles by planting at home. If C-day was the day Texas’ leadership abandoned its […]
When I arrived at SMU in 2009, I was not a teacher. I was a researcher. Unfortunately, it has been common in our field to leave people unprepared for the teaching environment. When I was in graduate school, there either were no classes in, or no one advised me to […]
It is a difficult time. I hope that, in this season of birth, rebirth, and salvation, the people of this world can put aside their many grievances and find light, hope, and peace.
Six years ago on this date, the Higgs boson was (probably) discovered by the ATLAS and CMS Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. I say “probably” because, at the time, all we really knew for sure was that we had discovered a new particle, with a particular […]
Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” could almost, taken at face value, be the plot of a movie in the “Saw” series [1]. Prisoners in a cave, born into chains and forced forever to face a single wall, know nothing of the reality of what lives behind them. A fire somewhere […]
“Reality in the Shadows” is a book that required years to write. I was the latest addition to the creative team, but it is very much a shared vision between three co-authors each with different perspectives on the subject matter. Jim Gates has a keen mathematical mind and delights in […]