We’re going to be spending election night hosting friends at our place as we watch the returns come in. I’m making fondue, in honor or the French role in insuring the success of our revolution (and in honor of the awesomeness of cheese), Jodi made desserts, and we’ll see what […]
Did anybody see this? Yikes! http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/36458 Kidding. I had a lot of fun being interviewed for this review. It’s very surreal to be part of something like this. I’m just glad somebody finally asked about the title of the blog so I could explain it. It only took 684 posts!
The past five days have been interesting for the CDF experiment. First, their paper appeared on the arXiv [1] – a voluminous tome – which, if one was patient enough to read carefully, suggested that they have some excess of multi-muon events which appear to initiate far from the collision […]
Today was my favorite day of the year – the day we set our clocks back one hour. Sure, the sun now sets one hour earlier; on the other hand, it’s safer to jog on the road in the morning. Most important of all, it was a chance to steal […]
PCSD is the feeling of accomplishment after a collaboration meeting, accompanied by the tremendous stress of knowing you just got 50 new things to do. I can only imagine what this must be like for a larger experiment, and oddly enough my observations of smaller experiments suggests this effect plateaus, […]
Well, it’s that time again: time to collaborate in person. BaBar has its autumn collaboration meeting this week, starting tomorrow morning. I have so much work to do before I present in a few days. God. That one month trip was great, but things have a tendency to pile up […]
Today’s Science Friday program was super-timely. The second hour of the show contained a discussion of McCain’s reference to money for the Adler Planetarium as a pork-barrel earmark, and a discussion of promoting innovation in America. Here is the audio: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200810244 http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200810246 Regarding the projector, I enjoyed one of the […]
I heard today that Mayor Bloomberg of NY has succeeded in persuading the city council to vote in favor of extending term limits for elected officials [1]. This struck at my moral center for leadership, which I elaborated on a few weeks ago [2] – the Cincinnatus model. Cincinnatus was […]
This morning, I awoke a bit later than usual, went through the morning routine, paid some extra attention to the cats, and then hit the road for Davis, CA. I came here today to give a seminar, just as I had been doing through my 8-state trek in September and […]
The following is imagined, and purely fictional, in the same way that Galileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems” was a work of fiction about actual scientific principles. Some of the text is taken from Ref. [1]. (cue music) Mr. Tom Brokaw: Our issues this Sunday: He is a […]
The sum, 27+1+11, are the number of days that I was away from home while Jodi was here in CA, the number of days we were both home, and the number of days she’s away from home, all for a period of 39 days starting on Sep. 18. Physics can […]
I micro-blogged last night some thoughts I had on the debate. This debate left me with a few questions, which I’ll try to address here. 1. “$3M for an overhead projector in a planetarium? I wonder if he means one of those super-expensive star projectors? Sounds like education.” (http://www.cooleysekula.net/chirp/index.php?action=shownotice¬ice=32) This […]