Who Put the Manhattan in the Manhattan Project?

Speaking of Columbia, check out this article in the Times on the Manhattan history of the Manhattan Project. Quite a bit of it was in fact done downstairs from where the string theory workshop was held, in the basement of Pupin Hall. To be honest, I still don't know if those lower floors are open again; when I was a postdoc there in the late 90's everyone told me they were still "hot" (i.e. activated) and sealed off from normal access. Want. To. Know. More.

First off: that's a huge room and cyclotron. Is that really in Pupin? I'd be surprised...in fact this looks nothing like this photo I found on the Columbia website of I.I. Rabi frying hotdogs on the Pupin cyclotron. Time to write the NY Times another email...

Cosmic Rays in ATLAS

From Monica Dunford's recent post on the US-LHC blogs: a cosmic ray muon read out by the ATLAS muon system and Tile calorimeter in the pit. Reality check, indeed. And a brief meditation on the joys of data, especially poignant in the "LHC generation", which has been living its physics life looking at physics event generators for far too long (spoiler: In my experience they are all wrong, always, to some extent -- even when they're "right" in many respects. But the way they are wrong is almost always more interesting than one expects...)

But let's not forget the bottom line: holy crap, ATLAS is rumbling to life.

Strings@Columbia

Sorry to be non-posting on this blog, but my guilt lies heavy where an editor watches -- i.e. I just posted a long piece about a workshop last friday on the US-LHC page.

How I Spent My Month, Part II

Eleven days in Morocco (Marrakech, Skoura, Fes)

How I Spent My Month

Couldn't imagine a better way.