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 […]
Dirac matrices. Spinors. Matrix elements. Trace rules. These are just a few phrases describing how I spent my Sunday. You see, on Friday when I gave an overview of my recent work to one of the SLAC research groups, I got a question early on that I could not answer. […]
This has been a long couple of weeks. I feel better today, because the smell of spring is lingering in the air. The temperature has been climbing upward in the past week, taking us to very pleasant springtime weather in the Bay Area. Today, the neighbors have mowed their lawn, […]
Food safety is one of the most pressing challenges facing the overall security of the United States. Jodi’s recent trip to India gave me a new appreciation for the safeguards already in place in this country. Outbreaks of E. Coli, as happened last year in spinach, remind us that a […]