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 […]
What a couple of weeks. I’ve been pretty lax about keeping the blog, but I’ll try to make up for some of that. My attention was first distracted by the winter Babar collaboration meeting, a four-day morning-to-night affair that was draining and exhilarating. I got to catch up on a […]
As a physicist, I do a lot of flying. Many physicists do a hell of a lot more, and many do less. I get to conferences and workshops, or join my wife at her experiment, four to five times a year. Throwing in family visits, unexpected life events, and vacations, […]
My good friend Eric posted a piece in his blog today about “Connecticut seeking to ban violent songs from being taken into school”:http://blogs.courant.com/eric_danton_sound_check/2007/02/bombs_bursting_.html. This got me thinking, and I posted my thoughts as a (yet to be moderated) comment in his blog. I reproduce them here: At last, we can […]
Physics can be busy, especially physics on a big collaboration at a very active national laboratory. This week has been a real highlight for me, mainly because for over half of it I have been in a meeting from first thing in the morning until the last hour of the […]
As I mentioned a few days ago, the smells and sights of spring are returning to the Bay Area. It cooled off a bit today, but that didn’t seem to stop some of the wildlife from making appearances. Our cats have noticed the sudden boom in birds in the last […]
Over a year ago, The State Board of Education of Kansas revised science education standards, and admitted supernatural causation as part of science. This was part of a concerted effort by so-called socially conservative members of the board to revise science standards to make them more religiously correct. Science is […]