This morning I had a short chat with a student at SLAC. During the chat, it was mentioned that certain Presidential candidates didn’t event vote on the omnibus bill. This got me thinking about who did and who did not vote for it, and about who voted for and agaist. […]
One day ago, the unthinkable happened: Congress abandoned all signs of reason and passed an omnibus spending bill that gutted science in this nation. Much is clear, and much is not. What’s clear are the facts. The Office of Science was appropriated $4.05 billion, and then asked to apply a […]
Since the Congress was unable to complete, or get the President to sign, appropriations bills by October 1, the U.S. has been living under what is called a “continuing resolution”. That means that every now and then, the Congress votes to fund the government at last year’s levels while they […]
This Sunday, “Meet the Press” spent the whole hour with Mitt Romney. The opening question was about his statement during his speech on religion and government. He was asked about his assertion that “Freedom requires Religion, and Religion requires Freedom.” I certainly agree with the latter sentiment. As is clearly […]
This is an exciting time for the BaBar experiment. We have just completed our last shutdown between run periods, where we performed a series of maintenance tasks and small upgrades and the accelerator performed a series of engineering upgrades. This three month down-time was the last chance to make major […]
OK, maybe it’s a little much. But, I have to say that this collaboration meeting has been a real high when it comes to physics. Not only is BaBar in the first stages of Run 7, a solid 10-month run from now until next October, but there is so much […]
Today, as I was thinking more about my undergraduate experience in physics, I recalled that I had a photo of my advisor, Michael, floating around on my home computer. What made me think of it was the laugh I had when I first found the picture. In one of my […]
I thought there might be some Zope folks out there who would find the following useful. Below is the code for my DTML method, wordpress_xml, that converts COREBlog posts to WordPress XML. If you want to export your entire blog to WordPress, make sure to change the visible days’ worth […]
Today, some very painful news reached me. My father informed me of the death of my undergraduate mentor in physics, Dr. Michael Schmidt. After a long battle with cancer, he passed on November 18. Michael was one of the reasons I survived my time as an undergrad at Yale. Without […]
The last few weeks have been quite something. If I’ve been brief – administrative, even – it’s only because I’ve been caught up with home life, work life, and linux life. I ran my first road race a couple of weeks ago, the SLAC annual run/walk. It’s a four mile […]
Sitting in the Kavli lounge, chatting with a friend of mine, I mentioned that I had finally gotten around to setting up a professional blog. He responded with, “What’s a professional blog?” Hmm. When I set the darn thing up, I didn’t really think about what it meant. Well, that’s […]
Well, friends, it was inevitable. I hate static situations. Very soon, I’ll be moving this blog to “WordPress”, the excellent and highly-maintained blogging platform that is open-source and free for distribution and usage. For this blog, ever since its inception, I’ve used “COREBlog”, a plugin for the Zope webserver. It […]