There are a lot of people in my field who manage to work morning, noon, and night. I’m not sure how they ever manage families, and I’m not sure how they manage to do it for decades at a time. As I’ve gotten older, I find myself increasingly unable to […]
Yesterday, Barry Barish (the head of the International Linear Collider Global Design Effort) came to SLAC to deliver the weekly Monday colloquium. I was very excited about this particular colloquium. It’s the first that Mr. Barish has given at SLAC since the GDE cost estimate was completed and made public […]
A few days ago, I mentioned that there are independent spoofs of the Mac/PC ads on YouTube which involved Linux. This is now my absolute favorite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa1RCg-Ccp0&NR#
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 […]