Dear Physics Community
Any WordPress experts around? I need to update the code that runs this site and the “simple” method is not working. Other things don’t work. If you know anything about WordPress, please send me an email.
Time is passing strangely – busier in some ways, but being forced to say home has allowed some other things. I’ve started reading, for the second or third time, “Mason & Dixon” by Thomas Pynchon. With several hundred characters and 800 pages long, it is just the kind of book I like. Much of the action is historically accurate – Mason & Dixon did observe the transit of Venus before getting the commission to solve the land dispute between the Calverts and Penns. I finally understand how the Delaware Wedge came about.
- Wednesday, April 8, 4-5 pm – Office Hours for Graduate Students with Peter Fisher and Nergis Mavalvala
- Thursday, April 9, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Faculty-Staff-Student lunch, “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing”, David Kaiser and Julie Shah
- Thursday, April 16, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – “Grading and Exam Guidelines for the Spring Term”, Nergis Mavalvala
- Thursday, April 23, 2020, 12-1:30 pm – Nikta Fakhri
Advisories of interest
- Online conduct – just be cool…
- Virtual career fair – April 8
No Academic Continuity Meetings this weekend.
There is one place that the coronavirus has missed – Okinawa. My friend Neil Calder lives them. Neil, a Scot, we the press officer at CERN in the 1990’s and reinvented the press office there. He went on to work at SLAC and ITER, before ending up in San Francisco without a job, living with his son. While there, he started a blog “The Quiet Ripple Defines the Pond” under the name Spike Kalashnikov. Then Jonathon Dorfan, former Director of SLAC, recruited Neil to go to Okinawa as VP for Public Relations at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, OIST. Neil did that for ten years and then was mandatorily retired. He splits his time between Okinawa, SF, and bumming around the West Coast. Neil is an adventurer, photographer, birder, and yachtsman. He’s also a menace.
Okinawa is quite isolated and somehow they have managed to keep the impact of the pandemic at a fairly low level. From his blog, if looks like he is just going about his business: eating drinking, fixing his sailboat, going sailing in bad weather, etc.
I love having people like Neil in my life.
Peter
P.S. I am posting these messages in my blog roll here.
Thanks to Physics Council, Cathy Modica, Vicky Metternich and Christina Andujar for input and comments on these messages.
Professor of Physics
26-541
MIT
Email: fisherp@mit.edu
Phone: 617-253-8561
AIM Name: fisherp@mit.edu
Webpage:
http://web.mit.edu/physics/facultyandstaff/faculty/peter_fisher.html
The Fisher Files PodCast:
http://scripts.mit.edu/~podcast/wordpress/