My friend Jonathan and I walked from the Scarrit-Bennet Center to the park on the other side of the Vanderbilt campus. In that park is a recreation (full-scale) of the Athenian Parthenon. I “snapped a whole bunch of photos”:http://steve.cooleysekula.net/photos/nashville2005 of the place, which was really phenomenal. It included a 2-3 […]
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I am in Nashville, TN for the third in the conference series “Frontiers in Contemporary Physics”:http://www.fcp05.vanderbilt.edu/. This conference is held at Vanderbilt University, a lovely Methodist university nestled just beside the heart of Nashville. I arrived late last night and spent today finishing my talks, then taking a walk around […]
I just saw an “article about an astrologer in Russia who is proceeding to sue NASA because she believes that a future planned comet mission will disrupt the natural order of the universe”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/russiausnasaspace. Says the woman’s lawyer, “My client believes that the NASA project infringes upon her spiritual and life […]
I am concerned by this recurring “story about 100M dollars going missing in the Iraq reconstruction effort”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050505/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/iraq_money;_ylt=At9K0nB3DggPB8jukqks16ZG2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl. The AP news story on http://news.yahoo.com leads with “U.S. government mismanagement of assets in Iraq, from the lack of proper documentation on nearly $100 million in cash to millions of dollars worth of […]
**YAWN**. This was a loooooooooong week. When I was a graduate student it was “no big deal” [1] to have four 8-hour shifts, plus normal meetings and work. Although I was expecting to sleep-in today, I was a little amazed that I slept until 1 pm. I can’t say I’ve […]
Ah, shifts. I love them. It’s the stuff that brings you as close to the experiment as a casual particle experimentalist gets these days. If I were a systems expert, I have my hands deep in the warm guts of the detector every day. But I am not, and so […]
I decided that, despite my claims in a recent post, I might have an optical instrument in the house with more power than those binoculars. I charged up the Sony handicam and set it up on its tripod. A quick look at Kstars gave the rough coordinates of Jupiter in […]
It’s a cool, grey, overcast day here in Redwood City. It’s not raining – at least, it’s not supposed to rain. However, the sky is the color of dusty milk and there is a gentle breeze that makes shorts and a tee-shirt a little uncomfortable. That’s why I was so […]
It was in the early 1600s that Galileo gazed at the heavens with his telescope and first saw the mountain and scars on the moon, the moons of jupiter, and many other wonders. Tonight, here on the West Coast, it’s a nearly cloudless night. I decided to step outside into […]
My wife has gone off for two weeks to Wisconsin and Minnesota. Her trip is one of mixed business and personal events. First, she went to her home in the northwoods for a wedding shower. Then she’s off to Minnesota for a stint at the Soudan Mine, where her experiment […]
Peer review is the basis of good science publication standards. Papers are sent to journals and the journal collects a group of experts in the field so that the material can be reviewed. A positive review of the work lends itself toward obtaining publication; a negative review, depeding on the […]
Just before heading to bed tonight, I was goofing about on Google (doing that hubris-filled “search for your own name” thing) and found a link that brought me back to my youth. My dad used to run a bulletin board system (BBS) from our home. In their golden era, the […]