It’s been a busy week on many fronts, and this is the first opportunity I have found to add some thoughts to this page. Besides the fact that this is high-energy physics conference time (one of two spikes in conference activity for my field each year), this is also the […]
**Written in Chicago, Midway airport on Feb. 4, 2005** As my favorite comedian, Lewis Black, once said – and here I paraphrase – “for only the second time in history, Sodom and Gomorrah have been rebuilt”. He was referring to Las Vegas, and for a long time I think I […]
“Tonight is President Bush’s State of the Union address”:http://www.cspan.org. If we flash back to this time last year, the Mars rovers had made their historic landings on the surface of the red planet. From there, they set out on a remote-controlled quest which eventually led to a body of persuasive […]
This past weekend was a very pleasant departure from the norm. After a very successful work day on Friday, I hurried from my last meeting at 6 to the red line station. This was to be the beginning of my commute south and then westward to Riverside, where my sister […]
Bob Park’s column, “What’s New” (“available at aps.org”:http://www.aps.org/WN) is the way I close out every Friday. Most of the time, I read and smile (or groan). Today, though, his column raised a point which I think counts as fair turn-about. As you may know, there is a strong anti-evolution movement […]
Well, it’s been a truncated but highly productive week for me. The return to MIT, if only briefly, was meant to focus my efforts on developing the simulation of a background veto system for the proposed “Braidwood Reactor Neutrino Experiment”:http://braidwood.uchicago.edu. One of the primary needs of this experiment is a […]
During the Senate debate on the nominee for Secretary of Education, Senator Wyman of Oregon called on the Federal Government to enforce title IX (famous for its application to college sports programs) in the sciences to correct the balance of men and women represented at increasing levels of authority in […]
Symmetry Magazine, a joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC, presented its third issue today. The “centerfold” of the issue features a BaBar event containing the Ds*(2317)+ particle, “discovered at BaBar in 2003”:http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0304021. Thanks to Dr. Antimo Palano, who harvested the particle candidates from BaBar’s immense data set, I was able […]
Well, I suppose it’s not exactly **rocking** the Northeast, but it’s definitely snowing again. From inside the house, it didn’t look like very formidable snow. However, after a thorough cleaning of the sidewalks and the car, a single intervening half-hour was all that was required to covere everything in snow […]
Despite the bad winter storm that dumped upwards of 35 inches of snow in New England, I was able to get back to Boston yesterday with few flight delays. After an uneventful first leg of the trip from San Fran to Chicago (Midway), we were delayed by a half-hour. We […]
This has been one hell of a week. After a weekend of hopping planes and renting cars, I showed up at MIT on Tuesday ready to settle down for three weeks of neutrino physics. The lump in my left eyelid, however, was a serious concern to me. What didn’t help […]