Yesterday, I had the great pleasure and privelege of presenting BaBar’s recent work on the bottomonium system to an audience at the MIT Lab for Nuclear Science Colloquium. This was my first colloquium, and I’m told it went quite well. I got some great questions afterward, which I intend to […]
travel
My next stop in the seminar tour is my previous workplace, MIT. I left yesterday evening for Boston, arriving around sunset. Traffic getting into the city was basically what I remembered, at least between I-84 and I-90 up by Worchester. I’ll be giving the Lab for Nuclear Science Colloquium today, […]
This is going to be a stressful week. Deadlines for my research are starting to approach, and this coming weekend I fly to Italy for the last of the Elba BaBar collaboration meetings. Every four years, BaBar has convened in the spring in Elba to discuss the work that is […]
I just got my new U.S. passport today, after only sending the paperwork in about 1.5 weeks ago. Crazy. A little brochure came with the passport, its cover reading “With Your U.S. Passport, the World is Yours!” I’m writing an open letter to the U.S. State Department in response to […]
This morning’s plenaries have been great. We got a look at just how concordant the concordance model of cosmology. The amount of different information – supernovae, relic elemental abundances, CMB, and galactic clusters – that can be explained by dark matter, dark energy, and inflation is remarkable. Steven Chu’s talk […]
I haven’t been back to Naperville since I last attended a Braidwood collaboration meeting, a few months before the project was canceled by the Department of Energy without peer review. Yeah, I’m still harping on that, but it’s a point worth making (over and over). I’m here now to present […]
On the last night of the parallel sessions at ICHEP, a group of us went out for dinner. We were under the leadership of one of our Russian BaBar colleagues, Dmitriy, who wanted to do something a little “touristy” and go to a tram restaurant – a restaurant on rails. […]
Our trip to Soudan began in San Francisco, hours after the TSA changed the carry-on rules for domestic and international flights. The arrest of 21 (now 24) suspects in and around London, England ignited a knee-jerk blanket ban on all liquids and gels on flights. People who didn’t wake up […]
I’ve avoided the blog for the last few weeks, pretty much on purpose. The March 7-9 trip to Washington D.C. was one of the most singular and draining experiences of my life. It was terribly stressful and exhilarating, all at the same time. All in all, 29 of us spent […]
Despite the bad winter storm that dumped upwards of 35 inches of snow in New England, I was able to get back to Boston yesterday with few flight delays. After an uneventful first leg of the trip from San Fran to Chicago (Midway), we were delayed by a half-hour. We […]