I recently made the analogy between the potential mis-management of stimulus money to hire lots of people, and the mis-management of diabetes [1]. This analogy resulted from a conversation with a close colleague of mine. Today, my discussions with that colleague (I’ll respect his privacy for the time being, referring […]
I love that you can watch the show “Big Bang Theory” on United flights. There is something deeply satisfying to a particle physicist about a whole plane full of people exposed to a situation comedy about young researchers at the frontiers of their respective fields.
I have known several diabetics. They manage their condition by becoming intimately familiar with how their body responds to certain food, how their stomachs hold and release food, and how that translates into rises and drops in blood sugar. Spikes in blood sugar have to be anticipated and mitigated with […]
Oh, sweet three-day weekend. After the last few weeks, having a couple of days to sleep in sounds like heaven. I started off on the right foot last night by doing a little drum practice on my electric kit (my sweet Christmas present from my family). Ah, rest. What’s amazing […]
Reports today [1] indicated that the result of the House/Senate conference on the stimulus plan resulted in the re-introduction of the House science numbers into the bill. Whether it will pass on a second vote in the House and Senate is in question, but if it does it means $3B […]
As satisfying as it was to see a state supreme court in Pennsylvania rule against a school district that tried to teach intelligent design as science; as satisfying as it was today to see a special court rule that routine childhood immunizations are NOT linked to autism [1], I am […]
It’s been 200 years since the births both of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. I’m not smart enough to pontificate on the significance of this day, but I will say this: what a day, that marks the birth of the man who would one day reunite a broken nation, that […]
At a time when scientists and politicians are trying to raise the federal investment in research, selling it not just for its intended work but its benefits to society, we see the emergence of criticism of some of the culture in the federal research agencies. Specifically, an astronaut has apparently […]
This coming week is a BaBar Collaboration meeting, the first one since last fall when we celebrated the life of the B-factory with a one-day symposium. This is a chance to think ahead in the short-term about the winter conferences – just around the corner! – and to look to […]
Today, members of the three teams from the Fermilab, SLAC, and U.S. LHC users’ communities met at Fermilab to set the stage for a late April trip to Washington DC. We discussed many things; much of the morning was occupied by information intake, while the afternoon was devoted to method, […]
Oh, the sexy life of a physicist. All that thinking, all that writing-some-of-it-down-sometimes, all that travel and big machinery, big ideas and big discoveries. For a human being, doing all that sexiness is also a pain in the ass. This month is a good example; it’s the kind of month […]
In the past month, Energy Secretary Chu and now President Obama have addressed DOE labs. In both cases, the address was announced the morning it happened, essentially at the last minute and out of the e-mail time window of nearly every user I know physically located at SLAC. As a […]