What a great five days! My mother visited from Connecticut, for the first time coming to the Pacific coast of the U.S. Jodi and I were really happy to have a chance to spend time with her on our coast. We hit “wine country, toured SLAC”:http://steve.cooleysekula.net/photos/SF-Annetta-1/, and “hit Fisherman’s Wharf […]
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Humanity continues its slide from reason to darkness. A cardinal close to Pope Benedict XVI “has published an essay detailing what might be the Catholic Church’s refined view of the Theory of Evolution”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/science/09cardinal.html?ex=1278561600&en=0c183426986e5e77&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss. Leave it to the Catholic church to bring down the hammer of dogma upon the long and […]
Well, it finally happened. The story about the Russian astrologer suing NASA over the “Deep Impact” mission hit mainstream media (NPR) this morning on “Morning Edition”. Yikes! And I thought this pointless mess would be relegated forever to the pages of Google News!
In science, when one trend tracks another in perfect synchronization – that is, the absolute value and the change in slope of two distributions track point for point – we treat that as a potential correlation and investigate the relationship. This is what climatologists have been doing for decades now, […]
Inspired by this insane buzz in my head (which, in turn, was inspired by “the lawsuit a Russian astrologer is bringing against NASA over it’s mission to comet Tempel-1”:http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hs4321766jun27,0,6528169.story?coll=ny-health-headlines), I think it’s time we take this whole issue of “probing the universe with bombs” more seriously. No, seriously. I’ve previously […]
It’s a little uncouth to post twice in a few minutes, but this “second article on the lawsuit by the Russian mother in the Seattle Times”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002347919_comet25.html escaped my attention when last I scanned news.google.com. Wowsers. You gotta love this quote: “If the Americans can study comets with the help of […]
This past week was immensely fruitful for my research. It was also the week where I was really able to concretely identify the road toward solving the problem of the worst background in my research. Let’s refresh a bit. I’m looking for invisible decays of the “Upsilon meson”:http://pdg.lbl.gov/2004/listings/mxxxcomb.html#mesonsbbbarres. Suppress your […]
Saturday morning is typically when Jodi and I make our weekly pilgrimage to “Stacks”, a local small restaurant chain that specializes in large “American” breakfasts – pancakes, eggs, bacon, etc. We particularly like the one in Menlo Park (corner of El Camino Real and Santa Cruz Ave.), not just because […]
As reported by the Associated Press, “the Kansas State Board of Education has started internal personal attacks over the issue of science education standards”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050615/ap_on_sc/evolution_debate;_ylt=Aq5Y1YhEiEiFnO2zSr2eYQUPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl. Some personal venom is being exchanged between the subcommittee members, who held their sham hearings on the Theory of Evolution, and those who would maintain the […]
If you haven’t already heard the program, “give a listen to the last episode of This American Life, where the program engaged the separation of church and state in public life”:http://www.thislife.org/ra/290.ram.
Well, it’s vacation time for the Cooleys-Sekulas… er… Whatever that family name would be in the era of hyphenated names. Anyway, we’re on a Frontier Airlines flight over Iowa, on our way to Milwaukee. My brother-in-law’s wedding is on Saturday, and then we’re taking a few days to just travel […]