In my continuing quest to bike more, I wanted to go on a ride up our hill today. That sounds lame, but this is a serious hill. We started from our cottage, at about 450 feet. By the time my legs gave out, we’d gone about three miles and up […]
Jodi and I took a break from cleaning paint off old metal funiture (her weekend hobby) and getting the laser printer to work with the upgraded server (my job) to go out to Mountain View tonight. Mountain View has long been our favorite place on the peninsula. As a student, […]
Today, I wanted to try out Skype on Mac OS X 10.3.9. Unfortunately, the newest webcams we own are about 7 years old, and Logitech doesn’t make drivers for Mac. Fortunately, the open-source community does. If you’re in this boat – an old Logitech camera and a Mac – check […]
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 […]