Tonight on “Tech Nation”:http://www.technation.com, the host (Dr. Moira Gunn) is interviewing the father of askjeeves.com (now ask.com), Apostolos Gerasoulis. I’m a sucker for a new technology, and I’ve been looking for an alternative to Google and Yahoo! ever since I learned of their complicity in search filtering China’s access to […]
Tonight on Studio 360, they presented the next in a series on presenting science. Their piece was about “an exhibition on Darwin”:http://www.studio360.org/stream/ram.py?file=/studio/studio060206g.mp3 and the environment and conditions in which he did his groundbreaking research. This piece really brought the sense of humanity and discovery that is often missing in portrayal […]
The issue of energy, energy dependence, and the economy has been on my mind for some time. As a research scientist interested in the investment by the public in high-risk, high-payoff basic science, the framing of the conversation about energy, its sources and uses, is of great concern. It is […]
The “HEP rumor mill”:http://www.freewebs.com/heprumor/ is just creepy. I feel naughty just looking at it. It’s a site maintained by… well, somebody, I don’t know who… that lists who’s hot and who’s not. OK, I’ll back off from that one. It lists who’s (allegedly) interviewing for what jobs in the high-energy […]
I am a fundamentalist when it comes to open access to scientific information. In graduate school, when I learned that many disciplines give paid access to journals can run thousands of dollars, I nearly fell over. I had grown up in the era of the internet. To boot, I was […]
Memorial Day is treated differently by everybody I know. Some people sleep in (that’s me), some people go to parades or cemetaries, and some people even work. I did a little of all of these today. For me, Memorial Day is quite a private matter. I remember in my youth […]
I realized this past week that I don’t yet have an entry in my “rant” category. Here, dear readers, is my first one. I don’t know when you’ll see this. Why? Because my domain name registrar, “vhosting.com”:http://www.vhosting.com, cashed my check (deducted $15 from my credit card) on May 16th and […]
My favorite Sunday program is a radio show called “On the Media” (“www.onthemedia.org”:http://onthemedia.org/). It’s a week-by-week look at the media and its behavior. “This week’s show takes a look at media and global warming”:http://onthemedia.org/stream/ram.py?file=otm/otm051906d.mp3. My favorite quote from this piece is a look at a media spot put together by […]
This weekend is the opening of the film adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code”, Dan Brown’s best-selling novel. Ron Howard brings it to the screen. The book was fun, and Dan Brown’s most notable skill as a writer became clear right at the very end: every prejudice you take into […]
For the past five months, my professional life has been a roller-coaster ride. My research is now a constant source of stress, as deadlines rapidly approach and MANY questions need to be answered. Adding to this is a broader concern about the future of my own field in this country. […]
(Credit CERN) To see the magnets of the Large Hadron Collider installed in the CERN LHC tunnel is quite a sight. These magnets, along with the towering components of the ATLAS and CMS particle detectors, represent the very near future of my field. Each of these is a component in […]
Today, Jodi took me to the Kavli Institute picnic at Stanford. The Kavli Institute is a place where astrophysicists and particle physicists come together from Stanford, and all over the world, to tackle the most significant problems challenging science right now. The problem of dark matter, the nature of dark […]