My wife and I cozied up on the futon tonight to watch the 10 o’clock airing of “Faith Under Fire” on PAX, a cable TV network with ostensibly religious overtones to its programming. I was interested in seeing how the religious side, represented by its own media, framed this debate. […]
Random
174 posts
I was picking about in the internet, checking out some of the places I don’t usually go. One of those is the “Discovery Institute”:http://www.discovery.org, the leading institution pushing the philosophy of “intelligent design”. Intelligent design has so far only been an attempt to veil creationism as pseudoscience, claiming that the […]
I was a graduate student at the Universe of Wisconsin-Madison from 1998-2004. When I first moved there, I lived in a studio apartment on Spring St., two blocks from the physics department. I also happened to live right behind the geology department. While thumbing through “Yahoo! News”:http://news.yahoo.com tonight when I […]
I am on shift today, here in building 5 (the SLAC accelerator main control center, or MCC). I am filling the shift position referred to as “liaison”, and my job is to make sure that the experiment (Babar) know’s what the accelerator (LINAC and PEP) is doing, and vice versa. […]
Of this whole private matter of the Schiavos and the Schindlers, I’ll only say this: I wish that the legislators who tried to meddle in private affairs, that the President in his pajamas with so much determination, that these enthusiastic and sometimes agressive protestors in Florida, would take all the […]
It has been a VERY long time since my last entry. I have a lot to catch up on, so this will have to be brief. First, I went to Washington D.C. two weeks ago to lobby for increased funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the […]
My wife has recently been given a work laptop for her research on the “CDMS”:http://cdms.berkeley.edu experiment. This laptop happens to be a gorgeous Apple PowerBook G4. It’s a great machine for work – nice and light-weight, solid processor, lots of disk space – and the first time I’ve ever seen […]
After weeks of putting it off, I finally went to the Redwood City Library and picked up my library card. It’s been ready for several weeks, but I just wasn’t making the time for it. However, I am certainly glad I did get it, because it led me to a […]
I’ve been a bit glum these last few weeks. At first I wasn’t able to exactly pinpoint the problem, but given how well I’ve felt this week I think I’ve figured it out. I needed research, and I needed it **bad**. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed my time at […]
When I was in high school, I participated in only one sport: quiz bowl. I know what you’re thinking: quiz bowl isn’t a sport. Only a stupid jock who’s never played would say that. You stupid jock. Anyway, this weekend is my chance to give back to the bowl. SLAC […]
**Written in Chicago, Midway airport on Feb. 4, 2005** As my favorite comedian, Lewis Black, once said – and here I paraphrase – “for only the second time in history, Sodom and Gomorrah have been rebuilt”. He was referring to Las Vegas, and for a long time I think I […]
This past weekend was a very pleasant departure from the norm. After a very successful work day on Friday, I hurried from my last meeting at 6 to the red line station. This was to be the beginning of my commute south and then westward to Riverside, where my sister […]