It’s about time. Applying “Google’s”:http://www.google.com search technology to the world of scholarly information has been a long time coming. I’ve use Google to search “The Arxiv”:http://www.arxiv.org (pronounced “Archive”), but now a ton of other information from beyond physics is available through http://scholar.google.com. I’ll be adding this to my usual tools, […]
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The ants were coming in from some cracks in the step connecting our spare room – once a garage – to the main living room. I caulked the holes, sprayed the area, vacuumed the carpet with our steam cleaners, and… um… valiantly fought back the ant army leader using only […]
War! Steve and Jodi’s cottage is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Ant swarm. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere. In a stunning move, the fiendish ant leader, General Grievous, has swept into the cottage and kidnapped a delicious morsal of food hidden out of sight on […]
After Cardinal Schonborn’s recent NY Times essay, Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserver University sent a letter to the Pope, on nehalf of himself and several Catholic colleagues, asking for clarification on the Church’s position on the theory of evolution, and thus on the relationship between the scientific method and […]
I was listening to BBC news on KQED tonight, and had a chance to hear the author Rick Warren speak about his new book, “The Purpose Driven Life”, claiming to use Christian philosophy to change your life in 40 days. The author talked about the three questions that plague us […]
Another long and busy week. The first part of the work week gave me a chance to focus on my efforts to understand the BaBar “background filter”, or “BGFilter”. The BGFilter is responsible for taking our triggered data, which is written to disk in a fairly raw format, and filtering […]
NERD: The **N**eed to **E**xperiment on my **Rotten** **D**SL The NERD experiment is a very, very small effort to understand why the SBC Yahoo! DSL service provided to my residence is so freaking crappy. The collaboration, centered in Redwood City, CA, has recently collected its first month of data and […]
This morning, Jodi and I had the pleasure of breakfast with our landlord and landlady, along with several of our neighbors. Everybody at the table had an industry or academic background: chemistry, computer engineering, physics, psychiatry, and language. At this eclectic gathering of minds, over coffee, waffles, and mimosa, a […]
As I’ve been muttering in these pages, a Catholic cardinal close to the new Pope printed an essay in the NY Times Op-Ed page that appears to condone a reversal of Catholic opinion on the Theory of Evolution. “NPR’s Weekend Edition program had a nice story on this ongoing discussion”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4757698. […]
Jodi made me promise, right off when she started training for the Milwaukee Marathon, that I would start biking with her on the long runs to make sure she got enough water. She can’t carry the amount she requires, and the water stops mean slowing down and not running through […]
I had a chance tonight to read through the contents of Cardinal Schönborn’s essay from the New York Times Op-Ed page (July 7, 2005). Reading it gave me an opportunity to refine my thoughts on this particular issue. The essay itself is at the bottom. First, I am beginning to […]
As I mentioned in a blog entry a few days ago, a cardinal close to Pope Benedict XVI recently published an essay that dismissed Pope John Paul II’s interpretation of the Theory of Evolution. In this essay, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn suggested that the interpretation of evolution as a natural process […]