You will find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek. But first... you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril. ... And, oh, so many startlements. I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your ... Continue reading
Going all in
October 27, 2011 By 3 Comments
If you fly with any regularity, even if you aren't a pilot, you know the routines that every flight follows. The plane is pushed out from the gate. The pilots start the engines. The aircraft lumbers slowly down the taxiway behind a long line of other flights, all waiting their turn on the main ... Continue reading
Faith, physics and the Higgs boson
September 4, 2011 By 3 Comments
Physicists love carnage. At Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, they are smashing streams of protons into each other at terrifying velocities and using powerful computers to examine the wreckage. It's a bit like filming the collision of two logging ... Continue reading
A free man in Paris
August 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment
I was a free man in Paris; I felt unfettered and alive. There was nobody calling me up for favors and no one's future to decide. You know I'd go back there tomorrow but for the work I've taken on, stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular song. — Free Man in Paris, Joni Mitchell, ... Continue reading
Broken cisterns
August 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment
My people have committed a compound sin: they've walked out on me, the fountain of fresh flowing waters, and then dug cisterns — cisterns that leak, cisterns that are no better than sieves. — Jeremiah 2:13, The MessageThe hills and valleys of southern Mexico had turned the color of café con ... Continue reading
An uncertain reality
November 30, 2010 By 3 Comments
In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from "normal" positions, and taking risks by departing from reality. The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist ... Continue reading
Underwater Thanksgiving
November 25, 2009 By
The headlines don't seem to offer much reason for being thankful this Thanksgiving.My home state of Arizona is second in the nation for "underwater" mortgages, according to a Wall Street Journal report. 48% of all homeowners here owe the bank more than their homes are worth. Nationally, 23% of ... Continue reading
It is well with my soul
November 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds writes: [Tomorrow] in history, 1873, the steamship Ville du Havre was struck by an iron sailing vessel while crossing the Atlantic. 246 people died, including the four daughters of Chicago lawyer Horatio Spafford. His wife Anna survived. Just two years earlier ... Continue reading
