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 […]
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 […]