Bryan Dahmes

It's been a whole week!

Well, it's been a while since the last time I managed to get anything down.  I'm amazed at how quickly time moves by, and how much can be done.  Plenty of things happened this week, both at and outside of 'work'.  I'll try to get to both of these.  We'll see how much stamina I have...

Anyway, after getting back from UCSB last Thursday I was able to go to the Stanford-Cal TKD tournament.  Since the big football rivalry is called the 'Big Game', our meet has been dubbed the 'Big Kick'.  Nice, huh?  Our coach is trying to put together a West Coast collegiate TKD league.  Something like 8 schools or so from California, Oregon and Washington.  The goal would be to have a few of these meets every year, so this event was kind of a 'test run'.  The meet was at Berkeley (and let me tell you, trying to get across the bay from Stanford during rush hour is NOT a fun time.  Our trip there took nearly two hours.  Heading back, about 45 minutes.  Sheesh.), and in addition to Stanford and Cal, we also had CSU-Hayward attending.

So...I was lucky enough to be appointed as a corner judge for the matches.  If you managed to see TKD during the olympics, you'll know that there are three judges placed around the ring.  The referee keeps everything fair, but the judges are the ones who award the points.  And two out of three judges have to agree in order for something to be scored as a point.  It's kind of neat.  We use these electronic triggers to 'score' what we think is a point.  It works out pretty well.  Someone kicks to the body, 1 point.  Kick to the head, 2 points.  Hardly anybody ever punches hard enough to score a point to the body, and punching to the head is a no-no.  Pretty simple, really.

The fights were great.  As a judge, I've got a front row seat.  The only downside is I have to pay attention the whole time, and I have to be unbiased.  So...no open cheering for Stanford.  It was a shame, because there were some really awesome fights, and everybody from Stanford did a great job.  I don't want to bore anyone with details, but we had a couple of fights that were real nailbiters.  A few that would literally come down to the last few seconds of the last round.  Someone would mount an amazing comeback to pull even, then a little back and forth.  All the good stuff that you hope for in a competition.

TKD is a big part of what I do outside of work, and I'm going to try to remember to bring my camera to practices, matches, etc.  Hopefully I'll be able to post a few here and there.

So that was Thursday.  The weekend was a lot more workout stuff.  TKD sparring practice in the morning on Saturday, followed by playing (american) football in the afternoon.  It was great to get out and run around outside.  It was beautiful out.  Awesome time, but after a couple of hours of TKD followed by a couple of hours of football, I could barely walk.  My legs eventually just gave up on me.  Couldn't walk on Sunday, but that's a small price to pay for fun, right?

I've gotten this idea into my head that I can get myself into better shape, so I've picked up a few other activities as well.  (By the way, it's probably going to become pretty clear in a very short time that I am an absolute nut when it comes to working out.  I've gotten to the point where if I don't feel sore, I feel guilty).  I've started going to the track on Tuesday and Thursday mornings to run.  Now, normally I hate running.  Generally, I only run when I'm being chased.  Well, this new project started after talking to a girl at the gym.  What can I say?  She's cute.  But that's not the point of the story.

So...I'm talking to her and I find out that she's a runner.  She's actually training with the hopes of competing in the next Olympics.  She currently runs 800m in something close to 2 minutes.  I nod my head, thinking "Hey, that's pretty fast" without really bothering to let the time sink in.  After talking with her, I realize that's 15 seconds for every 100m.  Eight times.  Blew me away.  That is REALLY fast.  It's so fast that I really have no concept of what it means to run like that.  So, I have to find out.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting to go from little old me to olympic-class sprinter.  It'd be nice, but that's not going to happen.  I want to try to bring my time down to what I think is respectable.  Fast even.  And then figure out how far behind I would be if I raced her.  I mean, I turn on the TV and I watch these athletes nearly blow a gasket racing each other at the olympics, and in my most egotistical moments I'll be sitting on the coach, chips in hand, and say "That's not bad".  I realize I have no concept of how hard these athletes work, or how much the human body can do.  So I'm going to try, in my own small way, to find out.

So that's about it for now.  I've got lots more to tell, but this is starting to be a pretty long post.  I'll try to update again soon, so there's not as much of a gap next time.  I'm actually right in the middle of a problem in my analysis, and that's kept me pretty stressed this week.  I'd like to say a little bit about it, just to kind of jot it down.  Next time, k?

I'm back

Okay, so I'm back in the Bay Area.  As near as I can tell, the DOE review went pretty well.  The Babar section of our review wasn't really that long.  We were scheduled for 9-11am on Wednesday.  After a late start, everything started moving along pretty well.  My talk started around 10:30 or so, and this time I managed to keep the reviewer's attention for most of the talk.  This was a big thing for me.

Last year we had the same reviewer.  I think our talks started right after lunch.  Anyway, I was just getting started with my analysis, so most of my talk was filled with stuff that really wasn't too exciting.  "This is the data sample we plan to use".  "These are the cuts that we want to make".  "We expect these many events".  Stuff like that.  Basically, a lot of words, a lot of numbers, and no pictures.  After I was about halfway through I saw his eyelids drooping.  Kinda sucked, but such is life.  After 4 hours of talks and a nice lunch, I'd have fallen asleep too.

This year, my talk was shorter, more polished, and it had pictures.  Good times.  This time, as I gave my talk, I saw him nod his head and make approving noises.  These are the things that I like to see.  So, I got out of things pretty well.

Other than that, the trip down was really nice.  I inherited the laptop I'm using now from one of our post-docs who went on to bigger and better things.  I got a new disk, and all sorts of nifty tools.  I've got so much security installed on this thing (anti-virus, spyware, firewalls, etc) that alarms go off if I sneeze too loud.

So...speaking of having nothing but text with no pictures.  I think I figured out how to get this camera working.  And now that my computer is up and running, let's see if I can actually post something besides my babbling....

Ahhh...here we go.  I now have a picture!  This is an image taken from the 5th floor of the physics building at UCSB, looking out on the water.  I took this in the afternoon on Wednesday, pretty close to when the review was finishing up.  UCSB is an absolutely beautiful campus, provided that none of the views include the physics building.  It is quite possibly the ugliest building I have ever seen.  I think this thing was built in the 50s or 60s, when they just though concrete was all the rage.  Here's a view to the mountains
Again, a really nice view.  When I was still taking classes (before coming up here to work) I would bike to school.  The view of the ocean on my way in and the mountains on my way back did quite a lot for me.  Growing up in the midwest, the biggest hill around was a man-made hump of dirt that was "good" for skiing in the winter.  I guess good is relative, considering it was the only hill above 100 feet for miles.  Growing up in Minnesota, I certainly got to see lots of lakes.  That's what we're known for, isn't it?  Anyway, as great as lakes are, there's something different about the ocean.  It's just so...big.  Yes, I know.  My descriptive powers are legendary.  There's something that I've never really been able to put my finger on, but I miss not seeing the ocean.  When I drive down to UCSB, I get really excited when I get to Pismo Beach, because it's the first time heading south on 101 when the ocean comes into view.  I can't describe it.

That's it for now.  I've got more to say, but lunch is calling.  Maybe tomorrow...

Down at UCSB

Hi everyone!

It feels weird getting back to this after a few days off.  Truth is, I've been more or less offline since mid-Friday.  I think I was starting to go through internet withdrawal.

Friday was mostly preparation for the DOE review that UCSB is going through right now.  I wrote my talk during the morning, and we had a practice talk session at noon.  Despite the pain of writing the talk a whole five days before giving it (I'm used to writing talks no more than 24 hours before presentation.  I would say it's about 20% procrsatination, and 80% getting the last bit of relevant work done.  Maybe I've got that backwards...), the session was actually really useful.  There's a big pressure to keep to the time schedule, as the two days of the review are literally filled with talks for 6-8 hours.  Imagine, as a reviewer, that you're in hour 5 of these talks and some grad student just goes on and on and on...if I were in his position, I'd get peeved.  And a peeved DOE reviewer is NOT a good thing.

So, after fixing my talk on Friday, I tried to have a little fun over the weekend.  I had a really good TKD workout on Saturday.  The Stanford club is getting ready for a competition with Cal on Thursday (In football, Stanford-Cal is the 'Big Game'.  In TKD, it's the 'Big Kick'), so we've got a guest instructor here this week.  He ran the Saturday workout, which was pretty cool.  Got to see a few different stretching and conditioning drills.  Lots of stuff that could be pretty useful if I plan to compete again. 

Sunday was dedicated to football.  It's the NFL playoffs, and my beloved Vikings managed to get themselves past the first round, so I HAD to support them as best as I could.  I've heard a few sportscasters refer to the Vikings as the NFL equivalent of the Red Sox (that is, before the World Series win).  Something always breaks your heart.  Ah well.  They tried, they lost, and there's always next year, right?

So that wraps up the weekend.  Yesterday, I was taking care of a few things at SLAC before heading off to fly down to Santa Barbara for the review.  I found out for whatever reason that my updated talk didn't save (yikes!), so after getting here this morning, I gave it a quick rewrite.  Everything is ready for tomorrow.  I think my talk happens sometime around 10am.  Until then, I'll try to get a little work done, and just enjoy being in Santa Barbara again.  I managed to bring a camera with me, so I'll see if I can manage to take a few pictures while I'm here.

A little this, a little that...

So I'm hoping to make entries a little bit of a regular thing.  I'm not entirely sure if I can keep up with it, but I think some sort of an effort would be helpful.

With that in mind...what's happened since yesterday?  Not a whole heck of a lot.  There's a few things coming up, though.  Next week I'll be back at my home institution (UCSB) for our annual DOE review.  Actually, all the High Energy Physics folks from UCSB will be back in the area (some post-docs and graduate students with different advisors are working at Fermilab, and others pay visits elsewhere, too) to show what they've been doing over the past year.  If all goes well, we'll get the funding we need to get through the next year.  I have to say at this point, I'm glad that I'm more or less sheltered from the stress of having to ask the government for money.  I've heard stories, and I'd rather avoid going through that for a while.

Anyway, while I'm down there I'll be giving a progress report on my own analysis.  Since I work on the BaBar experiment here at SLAC, I work with B mesons.  In my (many) years here, I've slowly started to figure out that there's really a lot of stuff that you can do with the B.  When I started out, I was involved in the original CP Violation studies.  I guess an easy way to describe this analysis would be to try to understand how matter and anti-matter are different.  That they are different is obvious (how much anti-matter do YOU see in a given day?), but the why and how...that's a little trickier.  Since then I've moved on and worked on a couple other things.  My project right now is a test of the factorization model for B decays.  In this case, in order to understand the various decays of the B meson, you have to build a model.  The problem is that there are many models, and many of them work to some degree.  Basically, we're not perfect.  So, someone comes along with an idea that can test a model, or support one model in favor of another.  Sounds sexy, doesn't it?  Anyway, that's the topic of my talk next week.  I'm getting past the more mundane parts of the analysis, and I'm getting ready to jump into the good stuff.  So I'll be able to show that I have a good idea about what I've done already, and I have high hopes for what I'll see in the near future.  Basically, this is a great way to give a talk to the DOE.  At least I hope so!

Anyway, the rest of my life has been a little busy as well.  My Tae Kwon Do (TKD) class at Stanford has started up again.  I'm absolutely amazed how fast I can fall OUT of shape.  I was in good shape in December, and for some reason (like say, sitting on my butt for three weeks), I'm tired in January.  Who'da thought that would happen?  I've got several goals this year.  Graduating is definately #1, but I have a few fitness goals as well.  I want to try to force myself to get outside, see other things, and kind of give my life a little perspective.

That's about it for now.  I'm going to slowly get my feel for this sort of thing.  I haven't really figured out what tone I should take in this blog.  A lot of it will be personal, but I'll try to slip in a little bit of science every now and again.  Who knows?  At the very least, I'll be able to look back at what I wrote and figure out if I really knew what I was talking about. ;)

First post

Hi everyone!

Well, this is my first excursion into the world of blogging.  I've had friends who have done this sort of thing before, and it's been a great way for me to see what's going on with them.  I guess the same will be true here.  Actually, I guess that's kind of the point, isn't it?  With this whole Quantum Diaries thing, the goal is to try and give an accurate picture of what it's like to be a physicist, or something like that.

Well, hopefully I can keep things interesting for people.  I'm trying to wrap up my last research project right now.  With any luck this will be done soon (fingers crossed), and then it will be time to write my thesis, get a job, and live happily ever after.  A friend of mine decided to start a blog when he started writing his thesis.  Sort of a way to track his steady loss of sanity, or something like that.  So, with apologies to tizzed, I will try to follow in his illustious footsteps.  He seemed to get out with only minimal scarring, so I have high hopes for myself.

And off we go...