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 […]
Sorry I got so tardy last week about posting. Elba was a bit all-consuming, and I don’t just mean in the mountains of food that Italy seemed fit to provide. We started each day at 8:30, with sessions ranging on topics from the rarest of CP violations in B decay […]
Two plane trips, two trains, one bus, one boat, one cab, and 30 hour without sleep, and it was all worth it. I’m currently on the island of Elba, off the west coast of Italy. The BaBar collaboration is meeting here, perhaps for the last time in this locale, to […]
The tumultuous Iraq War Supplemental lumbers forward [1]. Despite the President’s threat to veto the bill if it contains domestic spending, about half the Senate Republicans voted to include domestic spending in the bill. Whew. This one gets thicker every day. The AIP has highlighted the money proposed for NSF […]
It’s easy to forget that until the famous case in Dover, PA in 2006, the Discovery Institute and its passionate fight for the right to have intelligent design taught alongside evolution was succeeding in a number of test cases. The wedge strategy, a strategy to make intelligent design an equal […]
It’s unbelievable. I had my popcorn, a nice cold beer, and a stats sheet. I was all fired up to watch the unfolding grudge match of the Iraq War Supplemental. Now, I’m just tired of it. Who can keep track of it all? Democrats bypass the appropriators in the House. […]
This is going to be a stressful week. Deadlines for my research are starting to approach, and this coming weekend I fly to Italy for the last of the Elba BaBar collaboration meetings. Every four years, BaBar has convened in the spring in Elba to discuss the work that is […]
With all the disagreement about how to proceed on global climate change, you begin to forget that not that long ago energy companies were paying scientists to go out in public and speak against the science of climate change. We have gone from an era where scientists themselves were issue […]
I found this interesting article on the whole ecosystem of the innovation crisis: the “Gathering Storm” report, the America COMPETES act, the failure to fund all of this last year, the efforts to get science into the supplemental, and the connections between science and the economy. Science Magazine’s article [1] […]
As many programs on TV and radio – both humorous and not humorous – have noted, whether you call the state of the economy in “recession” or “slow-down”, people are generally unhappy with the financial state of the nation. Making things frustrating for the high-tech sectors of the economy critical […]