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. […]
Jodi made me promise, right off when she started training for the Milwaukee Marathon, that I would start biking with her on the long runs to make sure she got enough water. She can’t carry the amount she requires, and the water stops mean slowing down and not running through […]
I had a chance tonight to read through the contents of Cardinal Schönborn’s essay from the New York Times Op-Ed page (July 7, 2005). Reading it gave me an opportunity to refine my thoughts on this particular issue. The essay itself is at the bottom. First, I am beginning to […]
As I mentioned in a blog entry a few days ago, a cardinal close to Pope Benedict XVI recently published an essay that dismissed Pope John Paul II’s interpretation of the Theory of Evolution. In this essay, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn suggested that the interpretation of evolution as a natural process […]
What a great five days! My mother visited from Connecticut, for the first time coming to the Pacific coast of the U.S. Jodi and I were really happy to have a chance to spend time with her on our coast. We hit “wine country, toured SLAC”:http://steve.cooleysekula.net/photos/SF-Annetta-1/, and “hit Fisherman’s Wharf […]