Yesterday, former Vice President Al Gore sat before the House Science Committee’s subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, and the Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works, and testified to the importance of takign action against global climate change. The science is clear, and those who would still sow doubt […]
About a week ago, Jodi mentioned that an issue of “Stanford Scientific”, a student-driven science magazine, had hit the market. A few days ago, when I was at the Stanford physics department (while Jodi was at some kind of post-doc survey), I grabbed a copy. You can get the online […]
Jodi and I have a favorite Saturday breakfast place: Stacks, in Menlo Park. Yesterday, we got the corner table on the back terrace, which gave us lots of fresh air and sunshine to enjoy alongside breakfast. Behind us was a father and his little girl. She was probably about 5-7 […]
This morning, as I made my way from the shower to the kitchen (with some steps in between involving a towel and a dresser), my bleary eyes fell on a new fridge magnet. “Quarked!”, it read. I asked Jodi about it, and she responded, “I wondered when you’d see that.” […]
Many years ago, a friend of mine sold me an early tablet PC that he’d picked up at a tag sale. the “ProGear”, as it was called, sported only about 40 MB of RAM and a modest TransMeta processor, not to mention a few gigs of native disk space. Over […]
Last week, the world witnessed a fascinating new discovery. The Babar Collaboration announced the first compelling evidence that the charm quark, like its siblings strange and bottom, plays a role in the mixing of matter and antimatter. What follows is a slightly edited version of a description I sent to […]
Physics pops up everywhere, even in pop culture. My sister’s recent visit to California brought with it some new music. I’ve spent a good deal of time listening to “Muse”, with particular interest in the album “Black Holes and Revelations”. The song “Starlight” has the refrain, Our hopes and expectations […]
I run Fedora Core 6 (FC6) on my laptop. Today, after listening to a podcast featuring commentary on the best blogging software for Apple’s OSX, I went searching in the FC6 package repository for similar software for Linux, and found this – BloGTK. It’s a GNOME-based blogging program that talks, […]
A lot of people get a little time on the radio, or on the internet. In that time, they often pitch a premise, and based on that sell an idea. Much of what is out there is crap. This blog might count. Regardles, when you’re presented with a radical idea […]
What a couple of weeks. I’ve been pretty lax about keeping the blog, but I’ll try to make up for some of that. My attention was first distracted by the winter Babar collaboration meeting, a four-day morning-to-night affair that was draining and exhilarating. I got to catch up on a […]
As a physicist, I do a lot of flying. Many physicists do a hell of a lot more, and many do less. I get to conferences and workshops, or join my wife at her experiment, four to five times a year. Throwing in family visits, unexpected life events, and vacations, […]
My good friend Eric posted a piece in his blog today about “Connecticut seeking to ban violent songs from being taken into school”:http://blogs.courant.com/eric_danton_sound_check/2007/02/bombs_bursting_.html. This got me thinking, and I posted my thoughts as a (yet to be moderated) comment in his blog. I reproduce them here: At last, we can […]