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Random Thoughts

Cosmic Variance
By JoAnne Hewett
Apr 5, 2006 8:46 AMNov 5, 2019 8:08 AM

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It's taking awhile to recover from the big trip to India, and I still don't feel up to writing my usual witty, thoughtful, full of insights, humerous, type of post. Ok, let's just say I'm having trouble putting a coherent string of words of any type together. So here's a list of random thoughts, crossing through my brain this evening. If I cough just one more time, I think my brains will come out through my eyeballs! It's literally to the point where my head hurts from all the coughing. I captured this cough while traveling in India - it's been 4 weeks now and has actually become worse since arriving home. Went to the doctor last week, got good drugs, and the cough got worse. I am forced to cancel a trip I had scheduled later this week for a colloquium and also early next week for a conference talk. Nonetheless, I finally did a little bit of science today. Gosh that felt good! Had a phone meeting with a group of collaborators and made the usual small step forward on a project. We are almost ready to make real progress and push to the finish. Really made my day. Talked to my parents, and got a 5 minute lecture from my conservative father about the good congresswoman from Atlanta who attacked a Capitol Hill guard with her phone. Love my Dad dearly, but no mention of the resignation of the good congressman from Texas. SLAC graduated another PhD student yesterday - Michael Binger. Congratulations to Michael who did a great job defending his thesis (Renormalization within QCD) and held up to the continual barrage of questions from members of the committee! The theory group celebrated with cake afterwards. And then some of us coughed our way through a fabulous dinner. Michael Binger, it turns out, has a fantastic wine collection and brought some special bottles to celebrate the occasion. Only in my dreams do such bottles occupy my wine cellar. Michael will be taking a year off to pursue his hobby/real job (he's a professional poker player and does well enough to buy spectacular wine) before settling into a physics career. I still have weird eating habits after being in India for so long. Last week, I couldn't eat at all. Absolutely no appetite. This week I am eating things in binges. Tonight was brussel sprouts. The entire box. Ok, maybe I shouldn't admit that. Along with the brussel sprouts I forced down an omelette. The most amazing thing was how well it cooked! You see, everybody pitched in and bought me a bunch of really good pans for Christmas. The entire rest of my life, I've used pans that I got with grocery store stamps while I was a graduate student! After the omelette experience, I can now say with all definitity, that really good pans make a difference. I was away for 3 weeks and all sorts of things happened physics-wise. Things like that never happen while I'm home scouring the news! Mixing of what we call the B_sub_s meson was discovered. I've been waiting for that result for , well, 20 years!!! And now that the result is in, it's anti-climatic since the measured value is exactly what the Standard Model of particle physics predicts. yawn.... But, then there's the supposed axion discovery. Now, that's potentially exciting!!! I know little about the experiment, but asked a colleague today for his opinion - he didn't have a good answer, so I have to talk to Helen Quinn tomorrow. She'll know. The owls took advantage of my absence and moved back into my attic. This is an on-going battle, and is most likely the topic of a future post. I am just starting to sort through my pictures of India. My magic camera performed superbly! Aren't you glad you don't have to do this much laundry!

And, how about chicken anyone?

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