The back-and-forth in the Senate and the White House these past few days had me thinking, thinking about life and what it means to be alive, to take a life. I kept thinking about what the President said, that he would execute his only veto in six years should the […]
The 2006 International Conference on High-Energy Physics is a little over one week away. This coming week is the full flood of practice talks, the final days of preparation for the conference. Analyses are coming out of review, talks are being written and practiced, and everybody is stretched by the […]
The BES collaboration has “recently reported results in a search for invislbe decays of the eta meson”:http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0607006. This is interesting, because I have long been interested in similar decay searches at BaBar. It’s nice to see the experimental community beginning to build a fervor for searching for these rare, but […]
Summertime is the worst time of the year for physics. I’ve said this many times before, but no season is busier. I suppose it’s timed to coincide with professorial “free time”, when classes end and researchers can get back to their life of labs and meetings. For a post-doc or […]
This morning, Jodi and I drove up to one of the four Russian Federation Consulates in the United States, conveniently located here in San Francisco. It was my day to hand in my visa application and hope I did all the paperwork correctly. It was a beautiful day, and from […]
The past few months have been crazy, by normal scientific standards. My instincts as a scientist tell me to be cautious in all proceedings, to carefully weigh and study choices and make decisions based on a balance of return and investment. For instance, if I have a choice to do […]
After 30 years, it seems sensible to look back a bit and reflect on the life that was, and the life that will be. It would be wise to think about the contrast between my first decade, the second and third, all of which led to to where I am […]
This is going to be a hard month, and it hasn’t even started yet. I’m talking about July. I’ve been working pretty seriously on my research, getting it ready for the summer. Along with my 500 colleagues on BaBar, you could probably wring the toil out into a bucket and […]
Rituals are important to life. They can be secular or religious in origin, but having a regular event to which you can look forward is important. I’ve tried removing ritual from my life, and I always feel unglued as a result. Jodi and I decided a few months ago that […]
When media outlets fail to employ reporters with either a grounding in science (no pun intended, as you’ll see), or the wherewithal to contact several sources in writing a story, I furrow my brow and wag my finger. While browsing my Sunday morning blogs, I found a “lovely little story […]
The horror of last year’s hurricane season, and its effects on Louisiana and Mississippi, were too many to count. While much of the nation has apparently lost interest in the plight of the South, as a scientist I am very much aware and concerned about this new hurricane season. Already, […]
Last year, I expressed my personal concern about action by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX), to personally investigate the careers of three climate scientists [TAOMPH83]. I did so not just in this blog, but also in a series of faxes to my elected […]