Airlines have us by the genitals. We pay hundreds of dollars to sit well within accepted standards of personal space, pay $5 more for crappy food, and breathe dry, recycled air. Then the unthinkable happens: they try to sell us a credit card? That’s right. Sitting here, two hours into […]
On my morning flight to Denver, I caught up on some Science Friday podcasts. The one on the Chevy Volt reminded me how crappy American innovation has become. The GM spokeswoman proudly touted that their best offered vehicle will (later this year) be a Saturn Hybrid that gets 28/35 MPG […]
The American Physical Society meeting begins on Saturday morning, and I’m getting ready to hop a super-early flight tomorrow to get to Jacksonville at a reasonable hour. It’s a trade-off, one with which any cross-country business traveler is well acquainted. I intend to keep a record of my adventures at […]
Blinding. It’s a word that is used in funny ways in science. “We performed a blind analysis.” “We blinded the data until we had finished our background studies.” “We fit for the background, extrapolating into the blind region.” “Blind” is used as a verb, adjective, noun, and just about every […]
When I was working at Stanford the other day, something happened which hasn’t happened at SLAC in a long time. Well, to be fair, it hasn’t happened in my office building in a long time. People argued about physics in the hallways, at white boards, over espresso. I hadn’t realized […]
Today, I decided to work from the third floor of the Varian physics building. None of my MIT colleagues are around SLAC, and the office building where I work gets a little lonely between collaboration meetings. Nonetheless, I have no lack of work to do and I find getting away […]
NPR is featuring several stories about the LHC on their programming today. For starters, check out this report from “Morning Edition”, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9433495 Tonight, on “All Things Considered”, they will continue their coverage. Exciting! I like that the report covers all the possibilities, including the possibility that nothing will be found […]
Last year, right-wing pundit and flapping head Ann Coulter published a book entitled “Godless”. In it, she raised yet again the tired accusations that all Democrats are godless politicians, hell-bent (is that the right phrase?) on creating a society that crushes religion out of every private life. Sigh. Of course, […]
There are rumors in the particle physics community: MiniBooNE is releasing its results this week. A lot of people are muttering about it, with both hope and concern. MiniBooNE, the “miniature” version of the Booster Neutrino Experiment (BOONE), is a neutrino experiment based at Fermilab. It takes the low-energy protons […]
The future of U.S. high-energy physics is uncertain, and as a consequence I have had a lot on my mind of late. This entry will be the first in a series of essays on messages: messages to the American people, to the Congress, and to the physics community. This time, […]
It’s conference season again for particle physics. We’ve just passed through the period known as the “Winter Conferences” — Lake Louise, La Thuile, and Moriond are notable highlights from that period. BaBar unveiled the discovery of D-meson matter/antimatter mixing at Moriond, and one can expect many experiments to similarly unveil […]
A few years ago, there was a book that appeared on shelves called the “Poltically Incorrect Guide to Evolution”, which used the very typical tactics of pseudoscience to make it look like the theory of evolution and the untested idea of intelligent design were competing scientific principals in how we […]