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 […]
News of the weird, my friends. Our “politics-and-religion-mixing President has declared, on this the national day of prayer, that the U.S. is a nation of prayer”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060504/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_prayer;_ylt=Auh2YG3m0lrz_xYEcS4QLD6s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3OXIzMDMzBHNlYwM3MDM-. I wonder if, on the national day of reason, he’ll declare the U.S. a nation of reason? Oh, right, we don’t have that national […]
I checked my usual news sources, the Google and Yahoo! news aggregators, after the release of the EPP2010 report. Nothing. I was shocked. Plenty of bad news about this or that, but nothing about a diverse panel of scientists and non-scientists, chaired by an economist, calling on the nation to […]
There’s been a lot of buzz concerning a Spanish version of the U.S. national anthem. Like an electric field, things like this tend to strongly polarize the nation. The media seizes on this kind of thing, throws the switch, and suddenly the nation is feeling one way or the other. […]
For twenty years, the United States has invested less and less in basic research in the physical sciences as a fraction of GDP. The U.S. spends about $8-$8.5 billion per year on basic research in the physical sciences (that represents the combined DOE science, NSF, and NIST budgets). Today, “it […]