After a farily straight-forward upgrade of the operating system on cooleysekula.net yesterday, I caught up on a few bulletins from Fedora Core regarding changes to Core 6 packages. I noticed this little gem in the update notes to the timezone data (tzdata) package: Mongolia has abolished DST. Good for Mongolia. […]
A lack of ingenuity, running around pretending to be ingenuity, often breeds that quality in other endeavors. The linux and open-source communities are brimming with innovation, something which is reflected every day from tabbed media players like “kaffeine” to sexy window managers like “beryl” and its crazy wobbly windows physics. […]
In the spirit of Senator Inhofe’s definition of alarmists as “scientists who support the evidence for human-induced global climate change”, I propose that physicists who support the Standard Model as an acceptable description of nature be called “alarmists”. That makes string theorists, supersymmetrists, MONDians, “skeptics”. Now, doesn’t that sound silly? […]
Yesterday, former Vice President Al Gore sat before the House Science Committee’s subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, and the Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works, and testified to the importance of takign action against global climate change. The science is clear, and those who would still sow doubt […]
About a week ago, Jodi mentioned that an issue of “Stanford Scientific”, a student-driven science magazine, had hit the market. A few days ago, when I was at the Stanford physics department (while Jodi was at some kind of post-doc survey), I grabbed a copy. You can get the online […]
Jodi and I have a favorite Saturday breakfast place: Stacks, in Menlo Park. Yesterday, we got the corner table on the back terrace, which gave us lots of fresh air and sunshine to enjoy alongside breakfast. Behind us was a father and his little girl. She was probably about 5-7 […]
This morning, as I made my way from the shower to the kitchen (with some steps in between involving a towel and a dresser), my bleary eyes fell on a new fridge magnet. “Quarked!”, it read. I asked Jodi about it, and she responded, “I wondered when you’d see that.” […]
Many years ago, a friend of mine sold me an early tablet PC that he’d picked up at a tag sale. the “ProGear”, as it was called, sported only about 40 MB of RAM and a modest TransMeta processor, not to mention a few gigs of native disk space. Over […]
Last week, the world witnessed a fascinating new discovery. The Babar Collaboration announced the first compelling evidence that the charm quark, like its siblings strange and bottom, plays a role in the mixing of matter and antimatter. What follows is a slightly edited version of a description I sent to […]
Physics pops up everywhere, even in pop culture. My sister’s recent visit to California brought with it some new music. I’ve spent a good deal of time listening to “Muse”, with particular interest in the album “Black Holes and Revelations”. The song “Starlight” has the refrain, Our hopes and expectations […]
I run Fedora Core 6 (FC6) on my laptop. Today, after listening to a podcast featuring commentary on the best blogging software for Apple’s OSX, I went searching in the FC6 package repository for similar software for Linux, and found this – BloGTK. It’s a GNOME-based blogging program that talks, […]
A lot of people get a little time on the radio, or on the internet. In that time, they often pitch a premise, and based on that sell an idea. Much of what is out there is crap. This blog might count. Regardles, when you’re presented with a radical idea […]