The plenary sessions at ICHEP were what I was most looking forward to, but they didn’t really deliver. I expected to catch some results that I missed during the parallels in the summary talks, but there wasn’t too much “hot stuff” that I hadn’t already seen. What was very clear […]
On the last night of the parallel sessions at ICHEP, a group of us went out for dinner. We were under the leadership of one of our Russian BaBar colleagues, Dmitriy, who wanted to do something a little “touristy” and go to a tram restaurant – a restaurant on rails. […]
Time for another installment of my ICHEP Journal. I kept notes on all the parallel sessions I attended. I tried to mix it up: astrophysics, heavy quark physics, spectroscopy and new states, computing. I tried to avoid topics that are typical to BaBar, things I ought to know, unless there […]
Our trip to Soudan began in San Francisco, hours after the TSA changed the carry-on rules for domestic and international flights. The arrest of 21 (now 24) suspects in and around London, England ignited a knee-jerk blanket ban on all liquids and gels on flights. People who didn’t wake up […]
It’s vacation! Where do physicists go on vacation? Well, some go to exotic locations with lots of people. I pack up and head to my wife’s experiment. She’s currently 2600 feet below the earth, about a mile from here. I’m sitting in our room in the “Simmons House”, one of […]
I kept a paper journal during my travel to, stay in, and return from Moscow. I’ll be reporting here excerpts from that journal over the next few days and weeks. I intended this to be a report on the personal experience of international travel to a critical conference, as well […]
Before coming to Moscow, a friend of mine told me that it was quite an experience to visit the home of a Moscow resident. I’ve not had the chance to do that – to my chagrin – but the story had a theme that echos through Moscow. He said that […]
I arrived in Moscow yesterday with a bunch of other BaBarians on a Delta flight out of JFK airport. We were tired, starting to feel jet-lagged, and eager to get to our hotel. To make a long story short (I’ll post more details from my ICHEP journal later), the taxi […]
It’s the last day before I leave for Russia. In addition, we’re well into the summer heat, getting to temperatures up to 104 degrees. Even our normally cool house has been a sweatbox, and the frequent power outages make running the AC a dicey proposition. We spent much of today […]
Symbols are important to nations, and often horribly abused in politics. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, from the state that avoided teaching science by redefining it, gave a tedious presentation during the recent stem cell debates. In it, he made the following analogy: bald eagles come from eggs, and it […]
The “International Linear Collider”:http://www.linearcollider.org is the priority machine for the high-energy physics community after the Large Hadron Collider begins operations in just over a year. This week, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver hosts a huge ILC workshop, a forum for discussing technical, research, and educational issues surrounding the […]
The President exercised the first veto of his two terms today, and chose to act against science while upholding what he called “America’s culture of life”. This is the same “culture of life” that leads to the state-sanctioned execution of criminals, that turns an eye wounded by moral cataracts toward […]