I am saddened by the news that South Carolina’s governor has chosen a path of scientific and medical ignorance and vetoed a bill that would have provided young girls free access to the HPV vaccine, which is recommended for girls as young as 12 to head off the possible transmission […]
Today is my last day of Trigger Desk shifts this week. I have one more block of shifts next week. When I went to sign up for shifts 3 months ago, only these two blocks of Trigger shifts were left. In ATLAS, you take what you can get. I hope […]
I’ve been using the WPGPlus plugin for WordPress to cross-post blog entries on Google+. Recently, though, this plugin would post at least five duplicates of my entry. I contacted the author and he quickly narrowed in on the problem. So in this changelog for version 0.8.3 (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpgplus/changelog/) that “one user” […]
OK, I’ve found my first reason to not like Vidyo: when you join a meeting, the default it to (a) open your mic and (b) open your camera. You then have to scramble in a weird eye-darting frenzy to kill the camera. It’s embarrassing and, worse, it’s a waste of […]
The American Institute of Physics reports in one of its latest FYI bulletins reports on a letter sent by it and five of its member societies to the Senate [1]. I enjoyed one of the quotes from the letter: "Eliminating support for specific disciplines, such as the House did with […]
Since there is no beam right now and there is nothing in the ATLAS Trigger system that requires my attention, I can focus instead on this: thanks to CERN, I saved CHF 3.40 this morning. This summer, a friend of mine is hosting me in a spare room in his […]
The LHC is ramping beam energy now up to 4000 GeV per beam in preparation for the last stable beam running before machine development. Next week, we’ll resume data taking (I am told).
Skeptic Michael Shermer shared this fake cover image this morning, promoting the idea of a world where anti-science and pseudoscience are allowed equal rank to actual science. I agree with his comment, and go one step further: if this comes to pass, I want off this rock. ♲ Michael Shermer […]
Today I depart for Uppsala, to collaborate a little bit with my colleagues at Uppsala University. Uppsala is something of an intellectual powerhouse when it comes to the charged Higgs boson (they host a regular conference on the subject, and I have enjoyed participating in one of those conferences many […]
As of today, I am officially at CERN and will basically remain here until mid-July (I have a side-trip to Sweden this week). It’s certainly good to be back at CERN, and I looking forward to getting completely buried in research for the next 5 weeks.
Finding Parallel Worlds In the series “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” a well-crafted transporter modification is capable of hurling the crew of the station into a “mirror universe.” Everyone who exists in the known universe also exists in the mirror universe, but there they are not the same people. Major […]
In today’s New York Times [1], writer Jim Holt gave his opinion on the row initiated by physicist Lawrence Krauss regarding the value of philosophy. You can go read the details of that spat on your own; I’m about as interested in that debate as I am in polo. For […]