Ursula Bassler

Farewell dinner II

Arnulf leaves D0! Well, no he doesn’t stop working for D0, but during the last three years Arnulf had a Humboldt scholarship for which he had to stay on site at Fermilab. I know Arnulf since the time I worked for the H1 experiment in DESY, Hamburg. We measured both structure functions, yet Arnulf on the other side of the ring for the ZEUS-experiment.

So we headed of to Chicago for another farewell dinner yesterday evening to which Arnulf invited us in an Italian family style restaurant. Luckily the menu stated that the size of a dish is forseen for 2-3 persons. After some discussion we ordered and managed even for everyone to get a share of his favorite dish. And our discussions where certainly less lengthy than those about authorship rules in the Instituional Board meeting scheduled the same evening.

The last three years haven’t been easy for Arnulf: his wife, who is also a physicist has a position in Europe and Arnulf saw his little daughter only on his short trips home. Yet at the same time, I had the impression to see half a tear in his eyes leaving the life on site: having worked very intensively in getting D0’s top-results ready for conferences and publications creates tight links to the people, to the place, to the lifestyle. With lifestyle I rather ment working like hell and loosing the sense of timezones. For Arnulf to get something from the American lifestyle he takes with him a Baseball cap. And to show him a little bit around downtown, the Chicago edition of Monopoly seems very appropriate. Probably Arnulf will visit the Magnificent Mile now more often, than we he lived around in the area.

Whereas France is one of the rare countries where permanent positions are offered at a quite early stage in career, Arnulf goes back to Germany with only a six month teaching contract and a lot of applications running. This certainly does not ease family life, but I am sure Arnulf will find a suitable position. He certainly deserves it! Good luck Arnie from all of us!

Visitor Id

Everyone working at Fermilab knows this person, David L Andersen. Dave gives out the Fermilab-Id and takes the photo of everyone who gets one. Since security has been increased after 9/11, the US fearing terrorist attacks and being on war, I see David much more often than before: Fermilab visitor Id’s are issued only for the duration of a valid US-visa. As we commuting Europeans fly in on Visa waivers, our Id’s are only valid for 90 days, so every time I come out to Fermilab I get a new Id. And as I want security to keep up with my hair cuts and colours, Dave takes each time a new picture of me – for once it was me taking a picture!

Since already some time, also immigrations follows up on how I look like. At each entry to the US, my fingerprints are taken and a photo shot of me smiling after an oversea flights into a webcam. Is this annoying? I don’t know, I don’t care anymore, it’s routine. All of us have also machine readable passports, and lately I heart something about biometrics information to be included into it. Will we have to get a DNA test then every time we enter the US? I’ve also heart about Fermilab having to change the procedures to issue Ids for foreign collaborators, which would include fingerprinting. Hey Dave, not only new photos every time, also new fingerprints!

I’ve never stayed long enough in one stretch in the US to need a visa, however visa-stories are a recurrent subject of dinner discussions and it is certainly annoying to have to go through the constantly changing procedures. Yet the people most annoyed by visa issues, are those not coming from the European Community and stories of students or researches being hampered to come to the US are well know. I don’t know if and how many physicists in our field, do not participate in an experiment in the US because of visa-issues, but it would be nice to have a special “traveling scientist” status. Even if I would miss to go see Dave that often!

Farewell dinner

This collaboration meeting, the changes in convenership became effective, and it has been the first time that I did not participate in the organization of the calorimeter related workshops held the last two days together with a tau-id workshop. Sometime ago I mentioned to my former co-convener (I don’t know actually if he appreciates to be mentioned by his full name, he said something about his parents googeling and finding him in my blog), that I would appreciate a farewell dinner joint with the workshop dinner. In my mind I simply imagined, that in the invitation mail to this dinner, there would be a line like “blah, blah, blah and to thank Ursula” for people to join who worked in this group during the last years. There was nothing like this. So, I thought, well: those guys are just too busy, too hard working, they must have forgotten, they think I am incompetent, they don’t like me, they are inhuman, asocial, coldhearted… physicsts! ;)

Well. Already at the end of the Calorimeter Workshop on Monday, Patrice, who is taking over the convenership, thanked me in public and mentioned the dinner to thank me. I must have blushed and I felt guilty about all my bad thoughts, but I thought, well that’s it. So I went innocently to the dinner yesterday and for the first time in a Calorimeter Dinner, someone raised to give a speech. It was Norm, the head of Calorimeter Operation who initiated the calorimeter part of the workshop. First he was saying a few words about the workshop, thanking everyone who contributed and than thanking me with a bottle of wine! Californian Cabernet Sauvignon Grand Reserve 2002 – sounds wonderful! I think this was a first-timer for a calorimeter convener to get a gift - at least I was so surprised and unprepared that I must have mumbled something horribly incoherent to thank them all. Jerry, one of the D0-spokespersons (trying to hide in this picture) didn’t fail to mention that this does not mean, that I will be off the hook. I don't know if I should listen to him.

The dinner was held in a very nice Argentinean Steak House downtown Naperville (great suggestion Ioannis!) especially impressive this barbecue sampler for two – have you seen Andre’s expression: it’s so big, that it could feed a family of five for about a week! I don't know if they made it through. After we others finished dinner, Abid collected the money looking like holding the bank in a Monopoly game. Yet shame on us – despite being physicists we were unable to get the computing correctly about how much everyone had to pay. How should we, without any grid based reconstruction software? After several attempts and recollections, we left Abid alone with the waitress for the final count, and we were surprised he actually made it out of the restaurant without having to do the dishes. The evening finished joining a party in the Saclay House, but maybe Frederic will write about this one. 

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the calorimeter effort during all this time and good luck to Patrice for his new responsibilities! And be aware: life is never what you imagined in the first place!

Bicycles

Using a bicycle to go from one point to another is mostly convenient, if the distance is not too far, the weather not too bad and the bicycle working well. As long as you do not collide with a car, cycling is rather healthy, ecologically correct and gives you enough time to admire the landscape. Never caught in a traffic jam, no trouble finding parking space (almost) and no need for a drivers license. Maybe having this later point especially on mind, Fermilab lends bicycles for free (that’s great!) mainly used by students without a car and living on site. And I can't tell you how relaxing it is after a boreing shift to relaxe riding around on a bike.

We got one of those bicycles and share it actually not only among people from the lab, but I discovered at lunch that this bike is more widely used by other French colleagues, without me even noticing it - presumably the key was veryr easy to find in our appartment! With Aurelien from Marseille we started sharing our cycling experiences at Fermilab. First, we both agreed that THE bike we use, is THE most uncomfortable bike we’ve ever encountered. Its seat is so hard, that using the bike twice a day is very painful to the behind. Further the seat is inclined backwards, so you have to grip to the bike to fight against slipping down on the back wheel. The bike is too small and my attempt to lift the seat up to a convenient height was too ambitious, such that the seat nearly felt off and me with it. Consequently sitting on that bike curbs the back so much you walk for three days like a 80 year old. To find relieve, we both tried to rule freehanded, but the bike has such a lousy stability. We both found out, that riding on the bike lanes is worse than taking the risk of being hit by a car taking the road: grooves in the road increasing the pain are much more frequent on the bike lanes.

Would we like to exchange it for this one? Have you seen its seat? Looks like an armchair and makes you dream about smoothly riding from the village to D0. Yet, no! No gears!!! No, we wouldn't give up speed and the high end 10 gear technology for disdainful comfort! Maybe just go out and by "our bike" a new seat?

Having children

Starting my shift at 4:00 pm, I crossed Frederic with a bunch of other Frenchies in the control room. We are out at Fermilab for the D0-collaboration meeting next week, so many shifts are taken by French collaborators. We chatted a little bit, about summer and all the changes coming up: no more convenerships, new students, for Frederic teaching a class and overall becoming a father in January.

With all the new babies around, I get sometimes a little sad of not having children myself. I know, that it is not the fact of having children that makes oneself happy or unhappy, that there are many ways to live without having children, that children are never as you expected them to be and that it is not up to children to provide immortality, a sense of life, emotional stability etc. Yet, it looks wonderful to get pregnant, have children, to participate in what will be the next generation, to love them and care for them and see them growing up.

Yes, I do regret not having children. It was so easy to get absorbed in work, unfortunate encounters and mishaps I badly dealt with, while maybe running away from a lasting relationship. Now I am forty, single, and still asking myself if there will be a chance to have children one day or if it is too late. I hate to see advertisements for menopause relief pills on TV “for women from 40 onwards”.

Veronique Boisvert initiated an “Informal discussion on family planning” that will be held on Thursday, September 29^th at Fermilab, noon-1:30 in Wilson Hall 1 East – certainly one of the best ideas that I’ve seen on the women-scientist mailing list. Within the e-mail discussion that followed, Evelyne Thomson pointed to a link to a section of the Chronical of Higher Education dedicated to work and family with contributions also beyond the question of how to deal with children when working in academia. Evelyne pointed out however to take some of these contributions with a grain of salt.

So, good luck and all my best wishes to the new parents!

And it happend!

Before leaving yesterday for Fermilab, I passed by the lab, opened my e-mail (don't ask me why avoided reading my mail coming home Thursday night) and yes, it did happen: just after I left for the Biennale, there was a problem in the code I submitted last week – a circular dependence with another package. Shit. Jan figured it out, and it is also his package that will be modified to accommodate the changes I’ve introduced. Yet I do feel bad about not having been around. And having written about that kind of situation, was (a) a self-fulfilling prophecy (b) a premonition (c) a coincidence or (d) Murphy’s Law?

Biennale

The most important thing during the three days the whole lab spent down at “La Grande Motte” happened in Paris, where Sophie got a new baby-boy, Arthur. Everything went fine, and all four of them are well, happy and tired. I got a phone call from Sophie on Wednesday, and everyone who participated at the Biennale signed a card for Sophie: funnily I had some greeting cards with me, as I wanted to send one to my cousin Martina in Germany who got a baby girl, Klara Rosa, just two weeks earlier and the second time that both of them have a baby close together.

But also the Biennale was very nice, the weather was beautiful, the place was lovely - thanks a lot to Jean-Michel and Isabelle, who organized it! La Grande Motte is a little town on the Mediterranean, mostly built in the sixties, seventies out of concrete with one purpose: to provide accommodations for holidays with a view on the sea. Tastes in architecture have changed since then, yet it is said that every house has a different ornamentation – a little psychedelic. The place where we stayed was a resort, litlle bungalows within pin trees rather than buildings, that we shared with another group: motorcycle cops, who had a meeting there as well – I wonder what they discussed!

The biennale always serves two purposes. First, every group from Atlas, Administration to Thesis committee gives an overview on its activities the last two years, the prospective and plans for the future, its needs in manpower and resources. Even ample time for discussion in the program doesn’t prevent to generally run largely overtime in the schedule and after three days, a pretty global picture of the lab emerges. The second purpose is to simply to spent some quality time with colleagues, to chat informally about everything that comes up, have a couple of beers together and share worries, hopes and rumors. On the way back in the train we discussed extensively a new idea about how to improve the plans for our new lab location – who knows if this would have come up without the long discussion we had on this issue and being together for a couple of days.

Recently I read about management, that rigorous planning is often counterproductive for a group to be successful, as fortuities and limit accuracy in the description of a given situation will always require plans to be changed. Therefore a group is most successful if its members share a common motivation and react to their best to achieve this common goal. Events like the Biennale certainly increase the coherence in the lab and the motivation for everyone – useless to say that I think that these occasions are very important.

What else? Well, the scientific directors for astroparticle and particle physics from IN2P3, Stavros Katsanevas and Francois Le Diberder visited us, hearing our complains, our worries, hopefully also our achievements and Francois gave a very important talk about the consequences of the CNRS reform on the labs. A lot of questions came up and I appreciated Francois' attempt to give us answers. We had an extraordinary meeting of the scientific council of the lab to decide on priorities for new positions next year. Unfortunately our D0 group didn’t make it to the shortlist, even though I half expected it. HESS is the lucky winner: the group in our lab is having a heavy charge in building a new Telescope for this experiment. It was also the first Biennale for Pascal, our new director, and certainly an important occasion to get to know him better and notice how different his style is. And then La Biennale is also the occasion to take some nice pictures of colleagues, like this one!

Another night out with Gordon

I woke up at 6:00 this morning, going to sleep at 1:00 last night: after my Monday dance class, Gordon and me met for dinner on his last night in Paris - definitly another wondefully funny evening, chatting away from Bush's dictatorship to dictatorship in experiments, Germany's trouble to find a new government to the difficulty to govern a collaboration (actualy the last one is not true: we could have talked about that, but we didn't, and I just put it there for style issues! - and anyhow I wouldn't tell you everything we talked about, I hope Gordon will not do this either) In any case we had a couple of beers, some wine for dinner, and I have to leave this morning for the "Biennale", the biannual retreat of our lab: we go to some place far away from Paris (this year it's La Grand Motte, close to Montpellier) with everyone, who wants to come: engineers and techinicians, administrative staff and physicists to discuss about what we've done the last two years, what we would like to do the next two years, what is working well in the lab and what should be changed. It's an important moment in the life of the laboratory. Yet the train leaves at 9:30, I haven't packed yet, I feel like the morning after the night before, I haven't prepared the transparencies of my talk, and I should discuss its content with Pascal, our director, on the train. Well my dear, better get up and move!

Nervousness before opening my e-mail

Yes, I did take Friday afternoon off, and I didn’t check my e-mail since! Saturday night I had a little party in my place to celebrate my 20 years in Paris. I took Friday afternoon to do the shopping and to enjoy preparing the evening without feeling under time pressure. And I did enjoy it: baking little red-berry tartlets and spinach-blue cheese piroggies and coconut-curry chicken skewers and it was a lovely evening. We were about 15 and my living room is not that big actually.

Yesterday I had to take care of my headache, cleaning the place and go out for dinner with Gordon and Paula, who are visiting Paris for a couple days - Gordon took the picture, so he may write more about it. But definitely there was no time to check my e-mail!

And now I fell nervous to open it - when I left Friday, I was running tests of code I’ve written the whole collaboration is waiting for and suddenly we had a power cut in lab. So what to do? I decided after half an hour to leave – yet I hope there is no e-mail this morning about having to fix some disastorous bug to be fixed very urgently.

Without a trace

TV-series are an easy way to share life with imaginary people you like. Wednesday evening, there is “FBI – porte disparu” (Without a trace) on French TV. I really like it. Jack Malone the senior agent played by Anthony La Paglia personifies sincerity, sensibility and intelligence and I appreciate his calm and determination to run an investigation. I looked so much forward to watch the weekly broadcast of two episodes in a row. How big was my disappointment to realize that the second season is over and there was a stupid TV-drama instead.

On top of it, the last episode finished on such a moving moment: Jack came home after his last investigation before moving to Chicago with his family. His wife got a new and very important position there as a lawyer, and it was difficult for Malone to give up his team in New York and go for a less important position in Chicago. Coming home this particular evening, he finds his wife sitting on the couch, with all their stuff packed and ready to move, and she is crying. He asks her what happens. It’s hard for her to speak, but finally she says, that she didn’t want him to come with them to Chicago, she expected him to refuse giving up his job, and she didn’t want to live with him anymore.