This week begins the 34th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). The conference is being held in Philadelphia. While this presents much less of an interesting travel story [1], this conference may prove to be quite interesting. The LHC has not yet started operations, so this will be the […]
When I was in college, I decided to try something. I changed my name. Well, I went by a different name – my middle name. I bear my maternal grandfather’s name as my middle name, and for I time I decided to alter my life a little and go by […]
I’ve been running silent these past few weeks, getting ready for the ICHEP conference next week. However, a pair of headlines today was just too much to ignore. When I scanned the AP stories listed on Yahoo News, these caught my eye: Obama urges Germans to work with US to […]
The press release about the ηb discovery went out earlier this week, accompanied in SLAC Today with a very nice photo of the primary physics researchers working on the search. Looking back to the “winter of insanity” that started in December, I find it incredible that in such a short […]
This has been an exciting week. My own work may be soon coming to fruition, and I’m starting to the “pre-unblinding jitters”. I even took a walk from my office to the BaBar detector today, even in the oppressive heat, to relax. But what are “pre-unblnding jitters”? This is a […]
I’m pleased to announce that BaBar has submitted for publication its first paper detailing results from the dataset we secured on the Y(3S) resonance. It’s a doozy – nothing like finding the ground state of bottomonium 31 years after the discovery of the bottom quark! I’ve written up a short […]
As inspired by the comment from ChemMan, here are the relevant excerpts from HR2642 for science: “National Science Foundation research and related activities For an additional amount for `Research and RelatedActivities’, $22,500,000, of which $5,000,000 shall be available solelyfor activities authorized by section 7002(b)(2)(A)(iv) of Public Law110-69. education and human […]
It was a long road, but the Congress has now approved the Iraq war spending bill. Both houses have now approved the final version of the spending bill, which presumably goes to the President for either a veto or a signature. News sources [1] [2] report that the bill contains […]
Recently, SLAC cleaned out its library and moved to new digs in a nearby building. I walked past the old space today while working with some colleagues in the same building. At first, I turned past the old library space and headed for the exit. The emptiness of the space […]
Firefox 3 is officially released today (get your copy at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/). To top it, Mozilla is going for a Guinness record on the most downloads of a single piece of software in one day. You can pledge to participate in this and then download a copy; you have until about […]
This was a pretty exciting week. It peaked on Wednesday when the GLAST satellite, a space-based gamma ray observatory, was launched into orbit. I was sitting the in weekly BaBar physics meeting, and unable to go watch the launch with my GLAST colleagues in the main auditorium I pulled up […]
With the primary season drawing to a close, I decided to try to subscribe to both John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s blogs tonight. I like to use the RSS feeds, since any open-source reader can use them. Obama was a snap; his RSS feed was right there at the top […]