A call from the unknown

This morning and this afternoon, someone called to leave a message on my answering machine. They wouldn't say what they were calling about, just that needed to speak with me and get an "interview." They asked me to call them back, and left their number. They were calling from a cell phone, and the quality of recording…

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Improving our language, one punctuation mark at a time.

Not only is it National Talk Like A Pirate Day (which ye'd already know if ye not be a scurvy dog of a landlubber) but it's also the 29th anniversary of invention of smiley emoticon :-) To celebrate, write something humorous that's constructed well enough to make it obvious that it's a joke, and doesn't require an…

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Ancestry

There's a database of high-energy physics papers called SPIRES. If you click on the HEPNAMES section and type "find seligman, william" you'll see my entry; it can lead you to the physics papers with my name on it (only one of which I wrote).What's interesting is that you'll also see my thesis advisor. Click on his name,…

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Power and Powerfulness

OK, last night I whined.If you're one of my LJ friends, you saw the post. If you're not, it's not worth becoming one just to see it. Believe me.One of my personal rules is: It's OK to whine once in a while, as long as you offer something to the universe to make it worth tolerating the…

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Investing in our future

I was asked to repost this Facebook status as a blog post, so that others could share it. When someone asks what good the space program ever did, I have to point out: The sky is blue and the sun is shining, yet we know that a potentially devastating hurricane is coming due to weather satellites. Thousands…

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