Well congratulations, das_motohead_phd!

Also late to the party, but would like to hear how the prayers were answered. :-) I've got a daughter who will be defending in August (Neuroscience, UWisc).

Observation being an intrusive act, the product is now "not currently available." You can still obtain yellowcake in bulk ...

The flailing of Obama's campaign today is moreso.

... and, anagrammatically, morose.

Besides the not-to-be-missed Flagship, Law Talk, and the languishing Three Amigos (Long-Goldberg-Steyn), there's the Super Feed. That covers it, right? ;-)

The others I enjoy are:

• Cato Daily Podcast, although I find their anti-defense positions less informative than the rest.
• Strategy Talk, an easy corrective to the previous deficit.  Austin Bay was a classmate and not at all understood by us (former) hippies in those waning days of the Vietnam War.
• No Agenda, Adam Curry's (the former MTV VJ) and John C. Dvorak's (the long-lasting tech curmudgeon) show runs the gamut from impressive depth of research to foil-hat alien invasion conspiracies. They reject all corporate sponsorship, but the resulting pleas for donations have been offputting at times, for me. There's a mercurial quality to the show, which can be potty-mouthed and petty one minute and insightful the next. They have killer jingles, like "We listen so you don't have to ... C-SPAN". Their strength is that they apparently do. One example, 8-1/2 min into Episode 297, listen to President Obama's vision of how healthcare should work, from last year at Facebook.

Ah, the title of the play Sty Of The Blind Pig makes a bit more sense now.

First thing comes to mind is a reworking of Cleese's training video, only instead of St Pete explaining to a businessman why he can't enter Heaven, it's for politicians and other Progressivist/Socialist types.

"You'll enjoy the irony in this, I'm quite confident!" he tells them. "It turns out that 'preventing Bad Things from happening', as you saw it, actually causes far worse misery! Isn't that just too perfect? And, of course, you knew it would, didn't you, you naughty bugger!"

"Now, if you would please, kindly follow those helpful signs that read Highway Of Good Intentions. It will take you straight there ..."

... And the sky is gray/grey.

I'd interpreted the comment as ruefully self-referential, hence my use of "curiously," above.  Perhaps I missed some wider context, the only Lileks plumbing story I know not matching the description.  As James pointed out.

Sorry for unwittingly participating in conduct unbecoming ...

History teaches us that men, who are short, learn nothing from history, which is long.

Curiously, James and I shared some Twitter moments a few Saturdays back while repairing/replacing kitchen faucets. Successfully. iPhones figured in the telling of both tales.

I understand that both Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer were known to heave the occasional chair of emphasis, and both were a presence on stage.  I really prefer "One more thing ..." to "Developers!"

RIP, Steve.  You Made (in) California cool again for a while.

As Apple and Exxon/Mobil seesaw at the top of the market-cap charts, with over 70% of a trillion between them, it's noteworthy that Apple's profitability far exceeds the oil giant's. Exxon/Mobil took in well over 4 times the revenue, yet their profit margin is only a third of Apple's 25-1/2%.  So if the occupiers want to complain about "gouging", the nearest target would be in their hands. (Not to mention the 3 Apple devices on the table in front of me.)

In something of a response to HVTs's semi-rant, it's probably most useful to think of Fermilab as an educational institution, a post-grad/post-doc college, for lack of a better word. I'm often asked, ... sometimes asked, ... I have imagined being asked what we make at the Lab. I'd say PhDs. And the benefit for all this effort is 1) really cool knowledge about how the universe is made and works, and 2) attracting really sharp people to the field. Only a small fraction of those folks will end up doing high-energy research, but good physics professors have beneficial effects on educating electrical engineers (and other disciplines), who in turn develop incredible devices like Twitter interfaces for your fridge and cylindrical thin-film solar panels. And important, useful devices, too.

The point is that like research at universities, Fermilab's funding comes through the giant money-laundering operation known as the Federal Government. So does a great deal of medical research. I'd like it to be otherwise, and perhaps there's a better way to fund such things. But as Rob Long has pointed out, this is small beer compared to the entitlement abyss, so we need to prioritize/choose battles wisely.

Hey CJ! Didn't expect a tagteam of Law Talk and the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) would delurk me on Ricochet, but there you are ...

So, thanks for bringing up this story, Troy. I didn't realize the Law Talk Faculty Lounge had copies of symmetry on the coffee table. :-) I do have to give you a quantum of grief, though, for using a picture of a CERN detector, not an FNAL detector. In fact, that's Atlas, and not CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), the detector that was designed and largely made at Fermilab, and monitored in the Remote Operations Center here. FWIW, I expect the Lab to have the video of the shutdown event and Pier Oddone's remarks about the prospects for the future up by early next week. They also have recordings of various lectures that may be of interest, like MIT's Richard Lindzen on The Peculiar Issue Of Global Warming (or warmening/coldening, as some of us call it).

David, I'm not a physicist (see below), but I was educated as a EE sometime back in the last millennium, and my opinion is that fusion is the technology of the future.

And always will be. :-) No matter what breakthroughs are made, commercial viability never gets any closer.

(Actually, the signature I used back in the 90's was "I'm not a real doofus, but I play one at a national laboratory". That wasn't a self-deprecating line, either. I was hired in '91 to set up the D-Zero File Server, AKA D0FS, pronounced doofus. I was the D0FS Manager. That system eventually topped out at 17 racks of DEC VAXes and Alphas, with an astounding 770 GB of disk space. You could fit that in your shirt pocket now. I don't do data wrangling anymore, but the tape robots have nearly 30 petabytes of data stored, and a sizable fraction of that is cached on disk.)