beginnings

This weblog is not going to be particularly poetic, and it's not going to be a grand exposition of Epicurean philosophy either. When faced with blank spaces for "Username" and "Title", "Lucretius" and "De Rerum Natura" were just the first words that came to mind, and I can't think of anything better at the moment. I'm really only hoping that this will be a journal that anyone can read who is curious about what's going on with me and what I'm currently up to, especially while I'm away from home for a year. Probably the only person looking at this page will be my mom. But with any luck it may also start to become somewhat entertaining after I get back into the habit of writing.

I just upgraded to Blogger Pro software and found that there are some odd issues with the date/time stamp. The only way I can manage to get it to give the right time is if I tell it I'm in Rome. This is wishful thinking on both its part and mine...

cosmological happenings

From today's NY Times, the latest cosmological update:

"Painstaking observations of a kind of subatomic dance suggest that the universe may contain a shadowy form of matter that has never been seen directly and is unexplained by standard physics theories, a team of scientists working at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island announced yesterday...Meanwhile, the experimenters have a more immediate worry: the Bush administration has decided to end their financing after this year."