The ants were coming in from some cracks in the step connecting our spare room – once a garage – to the main living room. I caulked the holes, sprayed the area, vacuumed the carpet with our steam cleaners, and… um… valiantly fought back the ant army leader using only […]
War! Steve and Jodi’s cottage is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Ant swarm. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere. In a stunning move, the fiendish ant leader, General Grievous, has swept into the cottage and kidnapped a delicious morsal of food hidden out of sight on […]
After Cardinal Schonborn’s recent NY Times essay, Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserver University sent a letter to the Pope, on nehalf of himself and several Catholic colleagues, asking for clarification on the Church’s position on the theory of evolution, and thus on the relationship between the scientific method and […]
“Science Friday discussed the recent authoring of letters by Rep. Barton to three climate scientists, requesting they submit their records for review by Barton and his colleagues”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4766641.
I was listening to BBC news on KQED tonight, and had a chance to hear the author Rick Warren speak about his new book, “The Purpose Driven Life”, claiming to use Christian philosophy to change your life in 40 days. The author talked about the three questions that plague us […]
Another long and busy week. The first part of the work week gave me a chance to focus on my efforts to understand the BaBar “background filter”, or “BGFilter”. The BGFilter is responsible for taking our triggered data, which is written to disk in a fairly raw format, and filtering […]
It’s sad. I know it was a busy day on the Hill, but every day is a busy day on the Hill. So when I read that “only three U.S. Senators from the Senate Commerce subcommittee on global climate change attended hearings where the new head of the National Academies […]
There are only a few stories that just plain worry me. Most of them I find horrific, but somehow amusing (i.e. the suing of NASA by an astrologer over their recent comet mission). However, a story that is gaining momentum is the “request of U.S. Rep. Barton, member of the […]
NERD: The **N**eed to **E**xperiment on my **Rotten** **D**SL The NERD experiment is a very, very small effort to understand why the SBC Yahoo! DSL service provided to my residence is so freaking crappy. The collaboration, centered in Redwood City, CA, has recently collected its first month of data and […]
Meeting some new neighbors at breakfast yesterday turned out to have the added benefit of more useful reading material about the teaching of Evolution on par with religious motivations. In particular, the “AAAS”:http://www.aaas.org, which declined to participate in the farce in Kansas, has provided a nice document entitled “Q&A on […]
This morning, Jodi and I had the pleasure of breakfast with our landlord and landlady, along with several of our neighbors. Everybody at the table had an industry or academic background: chemistry, computer engineering, physics, psychiatry, and language. At this eclectic gathering of minds, over coffee, waffles, and mimosa, a […]
As I’ve been muttering in these pages, a Catholic cardinal close to the new Pope printed an essay in the NY Times Op-Ed page that appears to condone a reversal of Catholic opinion on the Theory of Evolution. “NPR’s Weekend Edition program had a nice story on this ongoing discussion”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4757698. […]