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The Adventures of My Pet Hamster

The Personal Blog of Stephen Sekula
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The Adventures of My Pet Hamster

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Not a Number

This is the second day in a row that Collin County, TX, has not reported or updated its COVID-19 case or death count (or any other statistics). It is – likely not coincidentally – two days since the State took over the handling of cases from the County. The question […]

Not a Number

For want of a photo-op for the President, the U.S. Attorney General ordered the forceful clearing of Lafayette Square last night ahead of curfew. This was all apparently so the President could awkwardly clutch a Bible and stand in front of a church. [1] Setting aside all the obvious things […]

Où est Lafayette?

It has been 26 days since “C-day,” the day when the Texas governor began ordering the reopening of public places and businesses. It began on May 1 with the reopening of retail workplaces at 25% capacity (but not bars, salons, etc. – office workplaces). Seven days later, salons and similar […]

C+26

It is one day since the Texas Governor allowed businesses to reopen at 25% capacity. It is one day since the national stay-at-home recommendation was ended. Families gather in athletic fields, in tight groups. People don’t move off the sidewalk when I pass. I have to swing way out into […]

C+1

Friday (tomorrow) is the day that Texas’s Governor allows all businesses to reopen, but only if they cap their in-house customers at 25% of capacity for their facility. So where is my county, Collin County, right now? Anticipating this “momentous” day of continuing to re-open businesses in Texas, Collin County […]

Racing toward 25%

(updated 4/26/2020 with demographic and testing data) Maybe it’s because Texas, as a state, sent signals that it was “okay” to behave like we used to. Maybe it’s because the President lied to the nation over, and over, and over again about the reality of COVID-19. Maybe it’s because people […]

The Virus Strikes Back

As I wrote several days ago, Zoom has become highly unstable on my desktop computer. I’ve tried everything, including switching from the KDE desktop environment to the XFWM one; switching off compositing; using all different versions of the NVIDIA drivers; swapping other NVIDIA cards into the system; different kinds of […]

The spice must flow

Awoke a few days ago to find a line of cat toys stretching from the master bedroom into the foyer of the house. The cats have started communicating by toy. This means something. 🙂

This means something

Until there is a vaccine, or enough testing and tracking capability to ensure new cases are spotted quickly and isolated, this is no time for Collin County to quit its effective social distancing protocols. The doubling time for COVID-19 cases now is 25 days; before social distancing went into effect, […]

No time to quit

Fall down, go Vroom

Like many institutions, I’m using a video conferencing client whose name rhymes with “Vroom” in order to conduct classes. Things were going great for the first 2 weeks. Last Friday, things took a serious turn. It all started with a long-standing problem on my home desktop machine. I run Ubuntu […]

Fall down, go Vroom

In 1970, Hall, Lind, and Ristenen (Univ. of Colorado at Boulder) published a paper in the American Journal of Physics (AJP, vol. 38, No. 10) on “A Simplified Muon Lifetime Experiment for the Instructional Laboratory.” Basically, it articulates precisely the experiment at the heart of a similar instrument at SMU. […]

The Muon: 1970

One of my daily activities in the last 20 days (or so) has been to scoop up the COVID-19 case and death data for my county from the Texas Department of Health’s (DSHS) information center [1]. I’m not an epidemiologist; I’m a physicist. I’m not trying to make predictions; I’m […]

Scenes from Collin County, TX

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  • (no title)
    September 15, 2025
    Today was a day for blue skies, two long walks, tacos, a nap, reading out in the yard, and cheesecake. Also dinner and music […]
  • (no title)
    September 14, 2025
    Had a lovely sunset walk in Bell Park and enjoyed the "solar system walk" all the way to Neptune at the end of the […]

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