This weekend my wife and I drove down to the Monterey area for two reasons. The first was a delayed celebration of our wedding anniversary; I was traveling for my seminar tour during the actual anniversary. The second was so that she could run the Big Sur half-marathon, and I […]
In the last few weeks – and, indeed, years – I am more and more stuck by the fact that physicists are not wide-spread open-source consumers. I’ll give a key example, and then conclude. Microsoft Office. It’s offered for cheap to institutions, especially adademic ones, in order to get people […]
It was clear by 8:05 pm: Barack Obama was to be President. Our cottage erupted in joy, for a the first time it seemed that something went right in national politics in eight years. This is an opportunity not to be wasted. Fellow scientists, this is our chance to showcase […]
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 […]