I think that much of the public forgets that scientists, including physicists, are people, too. Partly, this is because of the myth of the scientist – the recluse, the weirdo, the hubris. Partly, this is because often the most outspoken scientists are, indeed, the reclusive, weirdo, snobs. It’s the greater […]
Sometimes, life is more like Fox News than the Daily Show. Yesterday was a prime example of that, perhaps more evidence that my poor country is collectively going bat-shit crazy. What happened? A woman on a flight from London to Washington appears to have been unable to control her claustrophobia. […]
We closed the trip into the mine yesterday the way that they close it every day: rush to get to the elevator before final call. The 8-minute announcement sounded as the last CDMS people hurried out of electronics rooms and clean rooms, gathered their belonging, and collected at the exit. […]
My “day off” in the mine has been anything but. Well, to be fair, I volunteered. I had planned to spend the day catching up on news, listening to some statistics lectures from SLAC [SLUOStats], and generally take photos of all the cool stuff down here in the Soudan Mine […]
A great draw of physics, especially particle and astrophysics, is the list of exotic locations available to study the origin of the universe. Jodi has traveled from the soaring heights of the Antarctic plateau to the depths of the earth in the Soudan Mine (a total vertical distance of 12000 […]
I’m scheduled to give the “wine and cheese” seminar at “Fermilab”:http://www.fnal.gov on August 25, so part of my vacation has to be spent writing slides for the talk. I’m planning to give the audience a promenade through recent results using searches for leptonic decays of heavy mesons. BaBar is what […]
This morning, while sitting on the bed reading and listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition” streaming over the internet, I heard a story about Windows Vista being hacked – intentionally – by a Polish security expert [ZDNetVista]. Microsoft handed out pre-release copies to security experts, who then took a crack at […]
I am a huge fan of the Star Wars series. Even despite the rather poor quality of the prequels, I was engaged by the political and mythological exposition in the three movies. I delight in the mythology of the series, drawn from major world mythologies in human history. A lot […]
The next day was worse. Here we go! August 4, 2006 – 7 am, Moscow Time I couldn’t sleep past 7, a disease I acquired in Moscow. International travel always does that to me. I got up, showered and repacked, and then had a delicious breakfast downstairs in the hotel. […]
My time in Moscow was excellent. Getting out – that was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. Let me break this down for you. August 3, 2006 9:30 am I arrive at Sheremetvo-2 airport in a car co-hired by myself and two colleagues from England. We part […]
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. […]