Gordon Watts

Most Active Entry!

The entry on Hot & Not now has more comments than my Women in Physics entry! Benn, who runs a center at AAAS, and who was a fellow in congressional Rep. Markey's office for a year, tells me he would be happy to answer more questions posted to him in that entry or this one. If you don't normally read the comments you should on that post. Otherwise you'll miss gem's like:

have a nano-tech "geek" build a monster truck on TV while fitting in basic research plugins

and

It would be a tragic thing if our scientific experts got backed into a political corner to the extent that they were afraid to speak up when policy based on bad science is being promoted.

How much can an airplane stand?

I hate turbulence in airplanes. A couple of good bumps and I can't concentrate; I have to give up working and watch the movie or listen to music or stare out the window (which, odly, calms me). One of the inane fears is that the plane will shake itself to bits -- so I found the following quote from an article in the NYTimes amusing:

Probably the most unnerving announcement I ever heard came three days after 9/11 on a Delta flight. "I'm Captain Bill and I'm telling you all right now, if you see anything out of the ordinary, or you see anyone near the cockpit, you're going to tackle them," the voice said. "And keep your seat belts fastened tight, because if anything funny goes on, I'm going to throw this plane around in the sky so fiercely that whoever is standing up, bad or good, they're going to be bounced around to the point of incapacitation." That got everybody's attention.

It is all about me

This day has been a complete waste as far as making real progress. Instead, I've been doing a bunch of Yak Shaving.

One of the things I had to do today is fill out my yearly Record of Activities (if I don't, I don't get a raise). This is supposed to list everything I did over the last year: papers published, classes taught, students supervised, talks given, etc. I'm totally disorganized, so I usually do this by looking at all the email I've received over the past year. That would be 33,000 email messages last year (and that doesn't include stuff I've deleted and not saved). That works out to 90 messages a day on average. Freak!

What's Hot & What's Not

A post on TV got a long comment on the state of TV and the US. Just after that, I attended a talk by Benn Tannenbaum (I think video is supposed to be eventually posted). I've known him since he was a post-doc on CDF; he has made a gentle career correction and now works at the American Association for the Advancement of Science -- mostly on science and policy (he has done a lot of work putting together the Center for Science, Technology, and Security Policy).

In his slides he had a good view of how policy in Washington sometimes looks to a scientist. It was his "Hot or Not" slide:

Hot:

• Bankruptcy
• Social Security & Medicare
• Bioshield II
• BRAC
• Veterans
• Budget
• Terry Schiavo
• Steroids in baseball

WARM:

• Reliable Replacement Warheads
• RNEPs
• Cybersecurity
• Boarder Control
• Nuclear Testing
• Intelligence Reform
• Port Security
• Force Protection
• Iraq
• Iran
• North Korea
• Bolton Nomination
• Missile Defense
• Space Weapons
• Expanding CTR
• Biosecurity

Update: Added a link to CSTSP.

Class Tomorrow!

Too much wine, and ready for bed. Spring break is now over. 10 weeks left until the summer. I just got back from a great Easter dinner of lamb, desert and a lot of wine at a friend's house. I've not written up my lecture yet, and I've just finished my class web site. Not sure what tomorrow's lecture will look like; I've not even started and looking at the lesson plan I feel like I'm already behind!

Email Patterns

I've been sending and receiving email for almost 20 years now. BITNET was the first system I used. It has was plain-text back then. No HTML, no fancy graphics. Today, about 90% of the email I send to other physicists still is still plain text.

About 7 or 8 years ago I started using email clients (like Outlook, Apple based mail programs, etc.) that were quite good at sending formatted email. I got so much hate mail I gave it up, and set all these email clients to use plain text.

Most people in physics use the command line to interact with their computers. This is especially true of those on Linux in our field (they don't have to, of course). It turns out most people use a program called pine, written at the University of Washington. This program is the 1950's luxury car of email clients. It started as a test and example program, and somehow everyone adopted it as their mainstream email client. In our field the reason I most often hear for using it is that it requires only a terminal window and so is easy to access from a conference. This email client is missing all sorts of things that no self respecting bussiness would live without (central server storage of email addresses, usable attachment handling, etc.). Mos tweb based emailers are much more capable (even UW's own web based client).

This has really been a case of the email format being dictated by the lowest common denominator.

But something has started to change over the past 3 months. In fact, I've gotten HTML formatted email from at least two of the people that yelled at me to stop sending them the same 3 or 4 years ago. I've been exchanging email with plots and graphics with one of my ex students -- so much nicer to put plots and graphs inline rather than as attachements. I'm not going to turn on HTML for everyone yet, but I'm looking forward to email and particle physics coming out of the 70's!

I can't spend that much...

Paula and I are spending 2 and a half days bumming around San Francisco taking some time off. One of the many little shops we wandered into had a fantastic shirt. Great fabric, nice pattern, and might have even made me look "good". But I just can't bring myself to spend $250 on a shirt! Paula tells me in the land of women's clothes that is no big deal. Sheesh.

Someone Gave Us a Dollar...

There were 7 of us sitting around a table at Panera in Batavia after the big single top analysis meeting. A fellow came up and gave us this dollar. Check out the perfect location of the eye. Amazing. Apparently he will be doing an origami show at Fermilab (part of its art series) in October. I have no idea how he knew we were all phycistists...

Reality TV

One of the bad things about staying in a Hotel is... the TV. I didn't grow up with one, and Paula and I don't own one. When it's on I am totally distracted by it. Some of my friends can study with it on: if there is one on in a bar in the far corner I'll have to constantly fight looking at it to remain in a conversation.

Sometimes when I'm in a hotel I'll turn it on and channel surf for hours. I only do this in a hotel. Last night I was doing this and I landed on a reality TV show called American Chopper. I'd never heard of it before. The premise is simple: a father/son team build custom choppers for shows, competitions, and (I guess) customers. It is all welding and sculpture work -- I've seen most of the basics before: the same skills are used when putting together particle physics detectors. But the outcome is totally different (detector, chopper)! It was a lot of fun watching them putting stuff together; much more my speed that most of the other reality shows I've heard of (but never seen).

A Plot!

This plot marks several milestones.

First, it si the first new plot I've made in almost two months of any data at all. The last two months, when I've not been busy with the hiring, I've been busy trying to make "pretty" plots. This form of Yak Shaving means making the same plot over and over, adjusting a font size, or the position of some text.

Second, my former graduate student told me to make this plot (instead of the other way around). He was reviewing another analysis when he saw something odd in the way we were applying btagging (I'm co-leader of that group at DZERO), and brought it to my attention. What was really special about this was he gave a talk at the btagging meeting -- and used this plot in his talk. It used to be he would do all this great work, and then I'd use his plots to show how much I was doing to the rest of the world. Roll reversal! I suspect it won't be the last time.

Third, and not least, it presents a potential problem. The x axis is the Z coordinate a our proton-anti-proton collision (in centimeters). There are about 1000 of them in this plot. The large spread is expected: it is impressive that the accelerator division can make the the protons and anti-protons collide moving at almost the speed of light at all, let along in a +/- 30cm area. The solid line (we call it a "histogram") represents the number of "taggable jets" found as a function of Z. Loosely, a jet is a stream of particles that deposit energy in a calorimeter (which does just as you'd expect from a "calorie" point of view). A "taggable" jet means we found at least two low pT charged particles (like a pion) near the jet. The crosses represent a prediction using a technique called a Taggable Rate Function. You'll note that the prediction is low in the middle of the plot and high at the edges: in an ideal world they should be identical. Now that we know we have a problem, we have to figure out exactly how big it is? Does it effect anything? BTW, there is another potential problem this plot represents that I'm not discussing here. More on that later if it pans out. That is my goal for this Weds morning -- there is a physics analysis meeting then. And in the afternoon I dissapear off to San Franciso for some vacation (till Saturday, whoo-hoo!).

But instead of working on that right now, I need to finish off the grades for my class!