Despite the passing of Labor Day, summer had not gotten the hint that it was time to pack up and leave. The sun shimmered in humid air, hanging slightly to the west now that lunch was done. Millie had a pink card in one hand and a stopwatch in the […]
On the main quad of SMU appears about 3000 tiny American flags, and a sign asking us to never forget. We won’t. But rather that just worrying about not forgetting, I find it a more valuable personal exercise to ask also what we value, and how those values are influenced […]
When religious beliefs are placed into the sphere of scientific test, scientific criticism of those beliefs is fair game. All questions put under the framework of the scientific method enjoy the same scrutiny, and it is imperative to approach the question with the same critical toolkit as one would approach […]
The first month of being a faculty member was one of the most difficult months of my life. Changing jobs is always hard, but going from post-doc to faculty is a promotion without a well-defined manual. The federal government made things extra special by creating a new DOE young investigator […]
Well . . . sort of. I took a long vacation from personal things this summer to work in Geneva, Switzerland, at the CERN laboratory. I posted lots of things in the SMU CERN blog [1] and mirrored those posts in my own professional blog [2]. If you missed those […]
Apparently, each year the SMU Provost hands out a book for the faculty to read. Last year, that book was Timothy Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time,” a collection of stories (including diary entries) about surviving the worst environmental disaster in American history: the dust bowl. The dust bowl was an […]
I’ve commented on how much I love my MythTV box, “Stevo.” I’ve found another reason to love it more: streaming recordings from my home in Texas to my laptop in France. Fundamentally, all MythTV does is take output from a TV tuner card and convert it to MPEG, writing it […]
When I was a kid, I got used to the idea that summers were my own. That’s thanks to the way the U.S. school system works, starting in August and ending in June of the next year. Summers were a time for play in my youth, yard work and play […]
The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is an immediate crisis, getting immediate attention. It poses long-term effects for sea life, coastal life, and human economics (fishing, tourism, etc.). That oil leak represents a major release of carbon into the Gulf; oil in its crude form is a thick […]