It’s been quite a week for federal funding of science. There has been movement on the energy bill, which is critical to also funding fundamental science. The most news-grabbing event of the week was, of course, the second stem cell bill veto by the President in as many years. I […]
I was recently witness to the kind of modern slight against women in physics that reminds me that while we’ve all come a long was as a field, we have a mighty long way to go to achieve mutual respect. Without going into details, or naming names, the incident can […]
“Marketplace”, a daily show about money, the economy, and the intermingling of business and personal lives, presented a short piece on how the desire for a life of academic pursuit, and the desire for a life together with another, can come into conflict. On tonight’s program, reporter Jane Lyndholm presented […]
A friend of mine recently sent me a summary of a relevant portion of H.R. 2641, the FY2008 House Energy and Water Appropriations bill. In the more common tongue, this is the budget proposal from Congress for the Department of Energy, an agency that funds much of the U.S. basic […]
I’ve been running pretty silent again lately. It’s not like interesting things have stopped happening in the world. About a third of the Republican presidential candidates still don’t believe in evolution, the basis of progress in the entire modern medical and social fabrics of our world (good luck on real […]
Jodi and I went down to Stanford tonight. We do this occasionally, to take a walk and maybe grab a cup of coffee. On our way back to the car, we saw a huge art piece sitting off on the side of the path. It was built from what looked […]
Over coffee at the dining room table this morning, Jodi and I churned out another episode of “The Two-Body Problem”, our (weekly?) netcast. You can grab it from the show’s website: http://twobodyproblem.cooleysekula.net/#%5B%5B3%20June%202007%5D%5D This week, we were particularly interested in the recent immigration bill and the statements by NASA administrator Michael […]
Yesterday was a pretty good day. Jodi, a friend, and I hiked from Portola Road up through the Windy Hill open space preserve to Skyline Drive at the top of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The view from the top was stellar, not only because of the expanse of the Bay […]
I’ve been quiet again lately – take that as a sign that there has been a lot of physics to do. However, I’m compelled to jot a few things down after the barrage of messages coming out of Washington today. One of the first things that we teach each other […]
Well, we finally did it. After making some intro/outro music on Apple’s GarageBand, sitting down at the kitchen table, and talking into a microphone, Jodi and I have finally made our first podcast. You can get it from: http://twobodyproblem.cooleysekula.net/ You can subscribe (using Amarok, iTunes, or a similar program), get […]
Well, it finally happened . . . again! Dell has officially begun shipping several desktop and laptop options with linux pre-installed. Yay! Today, the terrorists have officially lost a battle. <a href=”http://www.ubuntulinux.org/”>Ubuntu Linux</a> is the installation of choice. Based on the huge Debian Linux community, with strong customer support and […]
As promised, here are photos from our time during the Hunt for Dark Matter: http://steve.cooleysekula.net/photos/HuntForDarkMatter/ Here’s another photo from the hunt for dark matter: This photo is the result of more gravitational lensing on colliding galaxy clusters. The blue halo represents the amount of lensing due to non-luminous (dark) matter. […]