Random Thoughts

What are the quintessential tools of the writer's trade? Why, a pen and ink, of course. Now, what modern writer in this day and age uses pen and ink? None. We all use keyboards and screens.Where's the romance? The tradition? The glory? It's all held in that unassuming marvel of molluscan engineering, the squid. The squid's pen is his internalized shell, the proteinaceous spear against which his muscles move. The squid's ink is his chemical defense, to be released in a blinding cloud or a deceptive pseudomorph. Thus the squid is a more romantic, a more traditional, and a more glorious specimen…

I  feel the stress creeping in around me as the other postdocs near my desk seem to be frantically writing this and that to get somewhere, to get something. We are all writing papers, grants, reports or even presentations -- to prove our science is worthy. It all makes me wonder why we are not just doing the science.    Most of us are just trying to keep out heads above water. We need the funds and we need the publications, so we write and write in the hopes that someone will think are ideas are worthy. Funding is impossible at the moment. Unfortunately for me, NIH grants are…

Due to the need of optimize my time, in the last couple of years my blogging has evolved to a rather monochromatic kind -physics, physics, physics. But it needs not be so: once in a while, there has to be a post here on personal matters. So here you get to learn personal matters on yours truly. In particular, one bit of information, which by now is public even in my facebook profile so there's no point to avoid mentioning here: my wife and I separated by mutual consent yesterday. After 23 years spent together with her, this sounded a rather striking piece of news to many of my friends.…

The following entries are an exchange between myself and Helen Barratt regarding superluminal neutrinos and related topics.  I have removed them to this archive for anyone that wants to peruse the posts, and to eliminate the distraction from the original article.  They have not been modified in any way, beyond the artifacts of copying them. =======================================================================Interesting research Gerhard, now all we need is a Science20 article describing the unlikely but possible hypothetical causes and effects of CERN and the LHC generating…

Here's a little history, since some of my students are starting to look me up on the web.  It's also a story about how life is so weird that, if you wrote about it in a movie, the audience would say 'no way'.  Ready for some acronym soup? After getting a degree in the US, I was hired to work on a joint US/NASA mission (called ASCA or Asuka, depending on which language you use).  I got to work in Japan at their space agency, called ISAS, for that and, yes, it was as awesome as you might imagine.  Later I returned to the US to work on other missions, then got my PhD, then…

In August of 2010, the nebula known as Ira's Ghost was photographed by the Hubble Telescope within the constellation Taurus. First discovered in 1983, it is a "reflection nebula" lit by an external light source rather than an "emission nebula" lit from within. What is puzzling NASA scientists is that they do not know the source of the light. There should be a bright star nearby, but that is not the case. The image was snapped by the Hubble telescope as part of a "wish list" for the telescope to do when there was spare time. Does anyone know how many light years from Earth that Ira's ghost is…

If you are in the Denver area, I am on KOA 850 radio with Mike Rosen in about one hour - they have an online tool to listen. Edit: I finally got around and looked for the archive.  You can listen to it here by clicking the little arrow thing on the screen.

When Susan Senator asked her facebook friends if any would be interested in reading her new novel, I jumped at the chance. She had me with the title. I love gardening, and it has been my solace, my comfort, my breathing room over the last two decades of parents children with special needs. It's Susan's first novel, and one she's worked on for several years. She gets it all right. The characters breathe, they are all likable, believable people struggling to do the best they can under enormous pressures. It's an interior novel with snippets of action, but its power lies in the opportunity to…

“This place would be in court for a hostile workplace. Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.” A 1960s advertising agency?  No, that is the White House during the Obama administration, according to  former White House communications director Anita Dunn. Yet when interviewed about her own statement later, she said, The White House “was not a hostile environment” and that President Obama “values having strong women around him.” There has been one golf outing that had a female hitting the links with the…

One good comment is worth a thousand readers.  In the past three weeks, as I've been busy with midterms, my Calliope posts have been simply brief blog-entries rather than full articles.  And with that, I've gotten great resources and leads on issues like Cubesat conferences and ganged Cubesat flights. The latter doesn't mean gangs of roving Cubesats builders picking on non-techies, though I admit that could be fun.  Rather, a poster told me about the Cal Poly group that helps broker flights for people who don't have their own rocket. It's always hard to join a group. …