The Media and the Energy Department

It would seem that CNN has very little faith in the new DOE leader, recently appointed by President Bush and confirmed earlier this week by the Senate. After a mainly boilerplate article about how the leader of my funding agency wants to drill for oil in wildlife preserves, you get this great explanation about the DOE:

"The Energy Department, with a $23 billion budget, runs a network of nuclear weapons research laboratories and has over 100,000 employees and contractors." (True; the lions share goes to maintaining the nuclear stockpile.)

In the 'Your E-Mail Alerts' section, there's a nice reminder on the topic of 'Nuclear Warfare!' Yikes! ;)

The First Amendment and High Schoolers

Well, I happened across this alarming article on CNN from Slashdot today. It would seem that a growing and non-trivial percentage of the high school population does not understand nor particularly endorse the First Amendment.

Some of the misconceptions involve believing flag burning is illegal, that the government has the ability to (legally) censor Internet sites, and that it's worthwhile to give up freedoms for security.

Two comments:
1) "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
2) When I was in high school, I had a civics course. While taught by the football coach, it actually required some study of the Constitution and a basic comprehension of the US government. Perhaps civics education should be beefed up a bit? What were your experiences like in this regard?

Certainly, having a populace that doesn't understand their Constitutional rights makes it easier for the government to take them away. Witness the PATRIOT Act, which is getting knocked down bit-by-bit in the courts... Remember the massive protests, and the razor-thin vote to pass it? Oh, wait...

At least my senator cast the lone vote against it! Thank goodness he's back for another 6 years.

Freaking Jackson

No, not the child molesting pop singer that everyone likes to ridicule. (It'd be great to see him behind bars IMHO -- seducing young boys is NOT cool, even when you pay millions of dollars for it later to keep the family quiet.)

My bane of the past four days has been J. D. Jackson, author of Classical Electrodynamics, the physics/engineering student's dreaded book. Not only did it cost a lot (although not nearly as much as the book Tokamaks for my magnetic plasma confinement class), but it's more of a reference for people who already know the material, as opposed to being a book read for actually picking it up in the first place. Now, the book has a very lofty reputation amongst physicists and engineers, because practically everyone these days holding professorships took "the Jackson" course, suffered greatly, and, more often than not, is happy to see other students go though the same pain. Combine that with the fact that the book is outdated, inconsistent in notation with today's standards (and even itself at times), and that my class is starting at the end of the book instead of the beginning: not fun times for me.

I have begun to see why everyone dreads Jackson; this weeks assignment (4 problems) took me a little over 22 hours to do, with the assistance of available online solutions proffered by good-hearted souls who've been there before. (As my advisor quipped, "those problems are good for your health," followed by general shock when he learned about starting at the end of the book. "F------ physicists!" was his next exclamation. :))

If this is what graduate school for physicists is like, then boy I'm glad I'm in plasma physics -- in the good old department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics. (Somehow, classes about building giant magnetic traps and confining stuff that's 100,000 times hotter than the temperature of tungsten [the best material at withstanding heat as a solid] is more interesting than doing abstract algebra and tensor manipulations. :))

BTW the Pegasus Group got together for a group photo! I've got one of them hosted here for those of you who haven't seen the scale of the machine I work on!

A Classic Simpsons Ripoff?

One of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons is where Homer becomes Public Sanitation Comissioner and sings "The Garbage Man Can," with a guest appearance of U2.

Well, in reading my daily dose of Bloom County, this cartoon showed up:



Could this be what sparked the writers' interests? It certainly is similar!

Phan-tastic

I was able to catch a showing of Phantom of the Opera this evening. What a show! I highly recommend it to anybody who gets the chance. The neat thing is that despite being on Broadway for n years, this month was Madison's premiere debut of the show. In our brand new Overture Center for the Performing Arts, it found a good home.

Of course, whenever you make plans for a big night more than a month in advance, Murphy's law has to kick in somehow. Much like my last major musical attendance (Mozart's The Magic Flute in May) my date wasn't feeling well. :( Fortunately, she was well enough to enjoy dinner and the show, even if there was the occasional cough or sniffle.

Now, I get to pay for the night -- graduate students don't get 'free evenings' to go on 'dates.' No, they have to work in 'labs' and do mountains of homework. Oh well -- it was worth it. Relatavistic electrodynamics, here I come!

A Victory Against the Creationists

In Georgia today a federal judge forced school districts to remove stickers that were being placed on biology textbooks that WARNED students that evolution was discussed inside, and was "a theory, not a fact."

Now, in my book, the warning was clearly written in a manner that used 'theory' in a manner unbefitting that of evolution or the Standard Model of physics; that is, one that can explain phenomena, make predictions, is self-consistent, and explains available data sets. (Both of these theories are so resoundingly successful that any replacement to them will have to incorporate the existing theory as a subset!) Instead, the warning cast evolution as something that we should be very, very skeptical of; a sham.

It's good to see that our judicial system is still capable of respecting the Constitutional separation of Church and State in all its forms. That separation is a Good Idea. Besides, when it comes to science, phenomena must be accounted for without resorting to God or other supernatural effects. Sheer ignorance of this concept is demonstrated by an attorney for the school district, who said "[s]cience and religion are related and they're not mutually exclusive."

Nope, sorry, they are. That said, it doesn't overturn religion; science simply cannot confront God by definition. Good for the justice system today; hopefully this can be seen as a precedent for other states that are battling fundamentalist Creationist (or the modern-day Intelligent Design) influence in our public schools.

... And the Shoe Drops

Well, I had a bit of a revelation today at work. I've been given the not-so-fun task of renovating and updating my research group's website. Since the URL for the site had changed, I found ways to redirect traffic from the old site(s) that were pointing to the old location. However, there were several human-edited databases that also needed updating, ranging from the Open Directory to the Internet Directory of Nuclear Resources, run by none other than the IAEA.

These are the nuclear watchdogs that you keep reading about on CNN. (They do lots of other nuclear physics things, too; but the non-proliferation activities are what most people hear about.)

Now that's cool. I don't think I've ever had a direct link to one of my websites from a UN agency! Now then, perhaps I should be hacking together a bit of a better-looking website! (I like the Fusion Portal that my advisor provided some of the text for and I whipped together a bit earlier...) With my attention increasingly focusing on a plasma control system for PEGASUS, a spiffy new website will probably languish. At least I gave it a facelift after 2+ years!

An Amazing Day

Well, a cold wind must be blowing through Hell right about now, because the Minnesota Vikings trounced the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau, in the playoffs!

I must admit, I was going into the game thinking that the Pack would win once again, but boy, today is a Good Day for all Vikings believers!

Tomorrow, I will be wearing Vikings purple into work and downtown Madison to flaunt the in-your-face-Farve victory. With luck, I'll survive. It'll be worth it!

A Handy Guide to Migrate from Evolution to Thunderbird

After making the plunge to Linux earlier this year, I also decided (for good or ill) to migrate to Ximian (later Novell) Evolution, the integrated Outlook clone that is now even more tightly bound to GNOME. With Fedora Core 3, I even got an upgrade to the latest 2.0 branch.

Unfortunately, the results were not too spectacular. Common features such as saving images in emails were absent. (I even filed a bug report on the issue!) Evolution wouldn't play nice with email servers that were being accessed by multiple clients simultaneously, causing me untold grief when I would forget to close my email client at work! Add random crashes to the mix (I even wrote a little script to kill all the miscellaneous Evolution processes) and that was enough for me to dump it.

Hello, Thunderbird! Being a big fan of the Mozilla suite, it's nice to be working with the latest standalone client. (I also use it at work.) Migrating from Evolution to Thunderbird wasn't the easiest, but I succeeded. Here's how:

Mail messages: Evolution and Thunderbird both save their local mail in a common format; a simple copy operation is then all that is neded. (They're located in ~/.evolution/local/*; look for files without file extensions.) Copy them to your new Thunderbird profile, at ~.thunderbird/*random dir name*/Mail/Local Folders, and restart Thunderbird. They're all there, albeit unread. A small price to pay, and easily remedied with a click of the mouse. :)

The address book is somewhat more tricky, since there's no common format that Evolution and Thunderbird share between the numerous export/import filters available. Here's how I got my Evolution Contacts ported over into the Thunderbird Address book. First, export all the Contacts by selecting all of them within Evolution with CTRL+A and a right-click popup menu option 'Save as VCard...' Then, with the help of a little perl script, the exported VCF file can be turned into an LDIF file that Thunderbird can then import.

Nifty, huh?