Well, it finally happened. The story about the Russian astrologer suing NASA over the “Deep Impact” mission hit mainstream media (NPR) this morning on “Morning Edition”. Yikes! And I thought this pointless mess would be relegated forever to the pages of Google News!
In science, when one trend tracks another in perfect synchronization – that is, the absolute value and the change in slope of two distributions track point for point – we treat that as a potential correlation and investigate the relationship. This is what climatologists have been doing for decades now, […]
Here is an example image of what NASA has been showing on NASA TV. Here you can see the impact. The pictures will all be downloaded from the remaining vessel and cleaned up over the next few days, according to the interview that have been on tonight. This one is […]
Tonight, the Deep Impact NASA mission appears to have made history: the first probe, sent by our species, into the surface of a comet. This mission will shed new light on the early solar system as we break into this frozen snapshot. The first pictures are amazing – a white […]
Inspired by this insane buzz in my head (which, in turn, was inspired by “the lawsuit a Russian astrologer is bringing against NASA over it’s mission to comet Tempel-1”:http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hs4321766jun27,0,6528169.story?coll=ny-health-headlines), I think it’s time we take this whole issue of “probing the universe with bombs” more seriously. No, seriously. I’ve previously […]
It’s a little uncouth to post twice in a few minutes, but this “second article on the lawsuit by the Russian mother in the Seattle Times”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002347919_comet25.html escaped my attention when last I scanned news.google.com. Wowsers. You gotta love this quote: “If the Americans can study comets with the help of […]
This past week was immensely fruitful for my research. It was also the week where I was really able to concretely identify the road toward solving the problem of the worst background in my research. Let’s refresh a bit. I’m looking for invisible decays of the “Upsilon meson”:http://pdg.lbl.gov/2004/listings/mxxxcomb.html#mesonsbbbarres. Suppress your […]
It’s summer for physics. That means a “large number of physics conferences”:http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/conf/wwwbrief?rawcmd=FIND+DATE+%3E+MAY+2005+AND+DATE+%3C+OCTOBER+2005+AND+%28TITLE+PARTICLE+or+TITLE+LEPTON%29 and lots of results to get out the door. It also means all my MIT colleagues are right here at SLAC, instead of spread all over the place with teaching responsibilities,classes, exams, or travel. It also means that […]
Saturday morning is typically when Jodi and I make our weekly pilgrimage to “Stacks”, a local small restaurant chain that specializes in large “American” breakfasts – pancakes, eggs, bacon, etc. We particularly like the one in Menlo Park (corner of El Camino Real and Santa Cruz Ave.), not just because […]
As reported by the Associated Press, “the Kansas State Board of Education has started internal personal attacks over the issue of science education standards”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050615/ap_on_sc/evolution_debate;_ylt=Aq5Y1YhEiEiFnO2zSr2eYQUPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl. Some personal venom is being exchanged between the subcommittee members, who held their sham hearings on the Theory of Evolution, and those who would maintain the […]
If you haven’t already heard the program, “give a listen to the last episode of This American Life, where the program engaged the separation of church and state in public life”:http://www.thislife.org/ra/290.ram.
Well, “it looks like the Kansas State Board of Education is gearing up to revise state science education standards to try to make the theory of evolution look weak”:http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/061205/sta_20050612013.shtml. The subcommittee that held the hearings has made this recommendation, and the board is set to vote on the proposal to […]