Back in the beginning of 2006, I constructed my own Mythtv-based digital personal video recorder, or PVR, which Jodi nicknamed “sTeVo”. Many people found this amusing, and some people found it down right cool. Everybody asked me the same question: how much did it cost? It was a $500 up-front […]
The NY Times reported that the results of an extensive study comparing diets found that it was calorie reduction, independent of the means by which calories were reduced, that caused weight loss [1]. Surprise, surprise. As cranky Maryland physicist Bob Park has put it many times before [2], Eighty-five percent […]
President Obama’s address [1] to the two houses of Congress was a fairly predictable survey of the current economic crisis, foreign policy, and a host of other issues. Delivered with his usual eloquence, even garnering a few laughs from both sides of the aisle, a few things jumped out at […]
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 […]