Back in 2005, just after the March Washington lobbying effort by SLAC and Fermilab users, a few of us at SLAC decided to setup a website that could serve as a hub for political action by scientists. It was intended to be a resource more than an organization (unlike SEA, […]
A friend of mine sent along this cartoon. As she said, it’s rare to find politics and particle colliders combined in a single image.
To one of my recent posts, a comment was made by the mysteriously named “The Chemist” criticizing my teaching of special relativity to my nephews as turning them to “the dark side”. That’s nothing. Check out what my wife did. This makes relativity look like . . . well . […]
Plane flights are an interesting way to learn what people think. The proximity of them to us on the plane makes it impossible to ignore conversations. Sometimes I like to introduce myself, if I feel the circumstances or the timing are appropriate. Once, two businessmen sitting next to me on […]
We landed in Portland not that long ago. I’m sitting in a cafe by the main security entrance to the terminals. I haven’t been anywhere near Portland since 2000, when Jodi and I packed my car and headed west from Wisconsin to California. It was almost the same time of […]
Having just returned last night from Wisconsin, I find myself today in the San Jose airport waiting for my flight to the Tri-cities airport in Washington State. I had enough time to placate the cats, clean up the apartment a little (it was in excellent shape, actually, thanks to Roomba […]
This weekend I have been in Wisconsin at the baptisms of my God-children, my sister-in-law’s new twin boys. It’s been a real pleasure to leave work behind in CA this weekend (where things have been going very, very well) and spend time with family I have not seen in quite […]
In my read through the KIMS literature, I realized that while it does indeed use a crystal detector (as DAMA, except CsI instead of NaI), thye do not look for an annual modulation. Instead, they look for recoils of the nuclei against the WIMP, and so their result is in […]
Jodi sent me this interesting tidbit today: Dark Matter announcement sinks like a stone Yikes. I wonder if anyone is going to discuss the KIMS result in contrast to DAMA and DAMA/LIBRA? Follow-up: a response from the scientist quoted in the above article is here: About the DAMA-LIBRA result
As rumor had foretold, the DAMA/LIBRA collaboration released the results of their search for signal modulation in the annual cycle of the earth going around the sun. Both the old DAMA, and the new DAMA/LIBRA datasets are separately convincing that they are observing an annual modulation. Taken together, the datasets […]
As I mentioned earlier today, the rumor is that in the next day the LIBRA experiment will release its first follow-on results to the DAMA experiment. Why is this such news? Let’s review. In 2000, the DAMA experiment published an observation of an annual modulation signal which they interpreted as […]
I stood in the back row of the textbook floor in the Yale Co-op. My summer job as a janitor had given me about $2000 to spend for the two semesters, including book expenses. I had all my class books, but that didn’t matter. The dark beauty standing in front […]