A work-related gripe: There are three things a physicist will never do: Go faster than the speed of light. Make two electrons occupy the same quantum state. Put something back where they found it. There's substantial experimental evidence for all three of these statements.
Today, a student comes into my office. This is one of the physics summer students who are here as a result of a nation-wide selection for the brightest. Here's the exchange: "I can't run GIMP on the server." "Did you try typing 'gimp' on the command line?" "I did, and it didn't work." I sigh, and start…
Nevis Laboratories, the physics lab where I work, is setting up an outreach program. The goal is to give the general public an idea of the work we do here. I’ve become the “social media coordinator” for the lab. Nevis now has a presence on three social-media sites: Facebook 
, Twitter 
, and Instagram 
.
As a member of a nature religion, I’m supposed to be familiar with the plants and animals in the neighborhoods in which I live and work.
In my previous post, I mentioned that I was working on a talk about the history of Nevis. I presented that talk yesterday. I'd been worried about how the talk would be received. I focused more on the history of the Nevis estate and on the construction of the Nevis synchrocyclotron than the research we've done in…
I recently picked up Playing at the World by Jon Peterson. This book is a history of the game Dungeon & Dragons.
Since many of my readers are Wiccan, I’ll use an analogy that will make sense to them: Playing at the World does for D&D what Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon did for Wicca. It explores the different elements and influences that resulted in D&D, and follows the chain of influence forward as D&D affected the world around it. [1] [2]
Two additional items about my previous post: - It looks like power will probably not be restored at work until Tuesday afternoon at the earliest. Keep those cards and letters going to my g-mail address. - It was not a woodchuck that got into the transformer. It was a raccoon. Mrs. Bucktooth is relieved and overjoyed, but…
My work e-mail address isn't working. Please use one of my g-mail addresses (William, then a dot, then Seligman) or the Acorn Garden one (again, with a dot). The reason why the work e-mail address is down is that power is out at the lab. There was a serious transformer breakdown because a woodchuck crawled inside. Funeral…
Once every two years, the Particle Data Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories publishes their Review of Particle Physics. This is both a web site and thick magazine, about the size of the New York telephone directory. The production issues associated with such a volume are so complex that, even though it’s only published biennially, publication is distributed among several physics journal publishers; in 2010 it was published by Journal of Physics; this year it was published by Physical Review D.
In other words, it’s a big deal.