The conference, Rencontres de Blois, takes place annually in the Chateau de Blois. This year was the 30th anniversary of the conference and the 31st such edition of the conference. The conference is a synthesis of particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology – a perfect match to the strengths of our […]
Any person with a minimum sufficient experience in life has been rewarded with failure. A subset of those people, with sufficient practice, will come to recognize failure, not as a friend, but as a teacher. A recent useful (and ultimately harmless) failure in my class became a key teaching moment, […]
Tomorrow, my spring teaching begins. Again, I am teaching “Introductory Mechanics” (PHYS 1303), our 1st-semester introductory physics course. Inspired by the Marvel Studios movies, the theme this semester is “ASSEMBLE!” Enjoy my little fan art below. Many thanks to my undergraduate teaching assistants, and course veterans: Chase, Lauren, and Andrew!
Tonight, President Trump will address the nation during prime time (9pm EST). Major networks will carry the speech. The Democratic leadership will rebut the speech afterward. The speech is expected to focus on the following claims from the President: There is a national security crisis at the southern U.S. border. […]
I love podcasts. I don’t get to listen to all the ones I like all of the time, but I love knowing that interesting content – from polished news programs to amateur computing tips – are there at my command when I do have time. However, a trend has grown […]
Phase one of the home server upgrade, taking its operating system from Ubuntu 14.04 -> 16.04, was a fairly long process. In the wake of that upgrade I was left with a non-working MediaGoblin instance. Today, I took the next step: 16.04 -> 18.04. This went substantially better.
I’ve been putting it off for over a year: our home server is running an old Ubuntu Linux installation, and needs to be upgraded. Research and teaching and life intervened, and this upgrade fell farther and farther down the list. In the meantime, Ubuntu produced two stable releases… making the […]
We pass by St. Louis during our return trip to Texas. We have 90 minutes of driving left today before we call it quits.
By my own recollection, it was the spring of my second year in college. I was a sophomore who had stumbled in my physics and math classes at Yale. I had tasted what it was to no longer be the best student in your classes, and it was hard to […]