Measuring Oscillations of Strange Bottom Mesons Is Hard Work

I read the preprint of CDF’s on the observation of Bs mesons. It took a remarkable amount of work. Large high energy physics collaborations have large author lists due to the large contributions made by many people to operate and calibrate the detector, simulate and process the data. But the analysis described in most [...]

Speeding through Dulles Airport?

I arrived at Dulles Airport today on a United flight from Oakland, CA. I stepped off the plane at 3:10 PM and I left the parking garage at 4:10 PM. The airport was not very crowded. It was much more crowded on Monday when I flew out of town. There was no line today for [...]

Flying without Liquids

I took my first flight in the no carry-on liquid era. It is clear to me that the airlines and the terminal operators have not yet learned how to adjust on the fly to changing regulations. When I arrived at Dulles for my flight, the check-in line for United was badly backed up. I waited [...]

New Dell Battery

The battery for my Dell Inspiron 6000 was recalled, and my new just arrived. The old one had been holding a smaller and smaller charge. It was down to lasting for about 30 minutes when my new finally arrived. The new one one is lasting over 2 hours now. Dell’s loss is my gain, unless [...]

Protecting Privacy

I read Robert Scoble’s blog regularly. I enjoy hearing about new technology, but I almost never blog about it. Today there was a post on why he has been so critical of HP spying on its board of directors.
So, why did I care that HP’s board of directors pushed the boundary of where private information [...]

Tevatron Running Great

Last week Fermilab Today published an article on the recent improvements in Tevatron performance which resulted in the peak luminosity breaking the 2×1032 cm-2s-1 barrier. Well they wrote it too soon since they set a new record this weekend of 2.25×1032 cm-2s-1. The CDF and D-Zero collaborators have had to make changes to their trigger [...]