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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
I love surprises. I love them more when I know about them but get to share in surprising someone else. It was a real win when I was asked if it was okay for SMU President, Gerald Turner, to drop in on my digital classroom to chat with students. The […]
Scenes from Collin County, TX. Sidewalk chalked with Biblical messages, presumably ahead of Easter. “Spread hope, not Coronavirus” one implores. The sidewalk runs in front of the park. It’s a city park. A sign is staked into the ground nearby, indicating the park is closed by order of the city. […]
Get up at 6am, or thereabouts. Grab Chromebook. Head to living room. Make coffee. Read newspapers. Shower. Dress for work. Attend morning meetings. Eat breakfast and plan day with Jodi. Start normal work day in the home office. If it’s a Tuesday or Thursday, prepare for class; otherwise, focus on […]
One benefit of social distancing and self-isolation has been exercise. Because my work is conducted out of my home office, and because I am not interrupted by unscheduled things that erupt in my workplace, I am able to better focus and stick to my need for regular exercise. As a […]
I have really thrown myself into physics, since I am stuck at home (a) because there is a pandemic and (b) because SMU won’t let me on campus until tomorrow (because I was abroad when they ended work-related international travel 2 weeks ago). This has been a grand opportunity. Here […]
I spent today mainly in a online-only workshop for the Electron-Ion Collider, a new (and partly funded) accelerator project to be hosted by Brookhaven National Accelerator Laboratory in the U.S. I’m just listening and learning right now, but I am trying to get thinking about heavy flavor measurements with such […]
SMU is running two straight days of online faculty training for teaching digitally in the next few week. I spent a good part of today in various Zoom sessions, listening to rundowns of how to use certain features for certain purposes. The most useful thing, though, was hearing the concerns […]
Muons are a gateway drug. They are just difficult enough to detect that they are really not obvious to humans. They are just easy enough to stop in material that, once you learn to spot them, you want to stop them and watch them do what they do. What do […]
When I rescheduled the doctor’s appointment this past Friday, I made it very clear to the person on the phone that I had traveled abroad in the last 14 days. I made sure to lay that out in case that was an issue. They rescheduled me for 09:30am the next […]