Gordon Watts

Down Under

Yesterday was an amazingly clear day. Mt. Blanc, much like Mt. Rainier in Seattle, doesn't come out often. But it did yesterday:

But the really cool stuff was underground. ATLAS will be 100m below the ground. They have already constructed the cavern where it will be installed -- and an access shaft.

There is a movie of how ATLAS will be built. I definately recommend looking at it. The music is pretty bad, but you really get an appreciation for the complex job putting this experiment together is going to be!

This experiment has been in the planning and construction phase for almost 20 years. It is a huge relief to actually see it coming together as a real experiment in the pit!

The whole experiment will have to be lowered through this hole:

The ATLAS experiment is 100m long, and 40m by 40m! So, it has to be lowered down one bit at a time. We took a tour down to the pit. Here is that access shaft viewed from the cavern:

Those pipes coming down contain all sorts of services. This is the generic word for cooling, liquid He, cables, etc.

Just outside the cavern is the tunnel that contains the LHC accelerator. This is a 27 km long tunnel. The picture below shows the straight section just before the accelerator enters the ATLAS cavern:

When the accelerator is finished this area (and the long straight section at the back of the picture) will be filled with large magnets and pipes. They have a very cool trolley -- which you can see going by in the picture -- designed to carry the dipole magnets to their installation point. The machine runs by tracking a white line painted on the floor. How cool is that!?

The interior of the cavern is huge -- and getting smaller:

In the foreground of that image you see an installed muon torroid. This is a huge super-conducting magnet (the actual magnets are inside those red-striped pipes). At the back of the picture is a blue circle -- that is where the accelerator (from the picture above) will enter the cavern. The platform that is to the right of the muon torroid will eventually be removed, and central tracking and calorimetry will be placed there:

That is a shot from the other end of the cavern -- the large circular shaped object at the end is part of the calorimeter. Andy, a previou sstudent of mine, works on this at Columbia, actually. The group included Aran, who works with me, and Henry, another prof at UW who has done a lot to help build the forward muon chambers for ATLAS:

The construction hasn't been without problems. The muon torroids had a lot of trouble operating at first and threatened to tie up the whole installation schedule. And after the first part of the calorimeter was installed water dripped on it from a huge rain storm (the above ground building wasn't sealed too well).

Update: Fixed 27km diameter -> 27km circumference (!!)

When a Flat Tire Matters

This guy had a great story. His plane was taking off from Buffalo, NY. Everything was smooth until part way through the takeoff there was a bang and the plane started to shake violently. Too late to abort take off they continued up. The shaking ceased as soon as they left the ground -- and the pilot told them they blown a tire. While I imagine planes are designed to deal with that sort of thing, I can't imagine most humans are!

Turns out there is a trick when this happens. You can't retract the landing gear. The bits of tire from the blow out may catch and jam the gear. So all you can do is land the plane and change the tire (I don't think they carry a spare on board).

The plane circles and approaches for the landing. Right at the last minute the landing is aborted. The pilot's calmy explained they had a structural warning light for the landing gear come on. This means there was a chance the landing gear would collapse on landing! Planes are not designed for that!

Did you know the flight attendants have a huge, thick, red book on board full of emergency procedures? Nor did I (or, from the sounds of it, Uli). That red book came out. All watches, earrings, necklaces, and other sharp objects had to be carefully stored: in your socks if you had them (I'm not kidding; this is what he told me). They had to assume the brace positions -- folded over in their seats. The runway was lined with fire trucks and emergency vehicles.

Uli said it was the softest landing he'd ever experienced -- until the flat tire connected with the runway. Whap! boom boom boom boom! The fire trucks raced with the plane down to the end of the runway. After checking for over-heated breaks they then towed the plane back to the terminal and Uli when home for the night.

Throughout the pilot was always calm in making his announcements. Just another day at the flight simulator. Apparently the flight attendents (at least some of them) weren't quite so. At any rate, we are all glad Uli made it here in one bit!

Dinner and Stress!

Going out to eat near CERN is a strange experience -- well, strange for me. I'm used to going into the center of a large-ish town, picking one of several places that are open, walking in and eating. Unless you want to go into downtown Geneva (close, but very $$) that isn't what you do around here. Rather, you drive 15-20 minutes into one of the surrounding villages and find a small restaurant. Typically there are only one or two in each village -- so you have to commit long before you get there. And these are the Swiss (or French, depending which side of the border you are on) equivalent of the country-style checked-table cloth American mid-west place. They are fantastic, and have very much a community feel. For example, another couple was having some car trouble, so one of the women working there drove them home!

Great food, but the conversation wasn't so good. It was one of those discussions -- with lots of wine and the haze of jet-lag -- that seemed fine at the time. But then I woke up at 5am and I couldn't think of anything but. It is the usual question. The HEP world is slowly moving from one lab -- the Tevatron -- to another -- the LHC. And during this transition period we basically have to work on both. But we don't have extra resources (time, people, travel $$, etc.) to do this. On the other hand, if we don't get going on the LHC experiments, then we will be left at the door when first data arrives. And on the other hand if we walk out on the Tevatron we'll miss a mountain of data! Sigh. :-)

On The Way!

My first flight was a puddle-jumper from Seattle to Portland. This was a small prop plane, and the weather cool and the air smooth. We flew right by Mt. St. Helens. I do mean right by. The pilot buzzed the crater -- we were really close. Sadly, I was on the wrong side of the plane and they wouldn't let us get up to check it out. This shot was through a window, across the isle of the plane -- which is why it is so bad. In the lower right hand corner you can see steam venting. Not as good as Toby's picture, but very cool none-the-less.

Now I'm on a Luftansa flight -- with wireless. $30 bucks. This is a 10 hour flight to Germany. Ouch. And it is really bumpy too. When Tommaso flew he was upgraded -- no such luck. But the service was better than the last time I flew (that is, I didn't get bumped from the plane for showing up in Portland less than an hour before flight time). And the wireless is great! I've been ICQ'ing to my wife and other friends. Nice to keep company with people I know while in a metal tube screaming through the sky with ones I don't!

Now the funny part. On the first flight I had a Root Beer I got at the Burger King in SEATAC. I put it on my seat and managed to sit on it. On this flight I opened a plastic bottle of Dr. Pepper I brought along and it fizzed all over me and my seat mate. I have one more flight from Frankfurt to Geneva. I'm sure I'll figure out something to spill there. And my jeans aren't going to be pretty by the time I get there either!

Update: I was able to use Skype to talk (!!!) with a friend and also my wife! This is so cool! Unfortunately, I think I woke up the person next to me!

Update: We've flown so far North that the sun never set!

Don't Say This

Don't say this during an interview: "I notice that you work really hard and are often here during the weekend and late at night. If you hire me, will I have to work that hard?"

Weird Week Ahead

While others often fly back and forth to Europe, I've never done it. I don't think I've been across the drink for less than two weeks before in my life.

Tomorrow I leave for Geneva and CERN, and will return next Sunday. This is my future: as the energy fronteir of high energy physics moves from Fermilab in Illinois to CERN in Geneva over the next few years I will have to do this more and more.

I'm really curious to see if I can get any work done with the hefty jet lag I'll be facing. And I have to teach the day after I get back; I wonder if my students will be able to tell?

The US vs the Rest Of The World

More on the theme of the environment of doing Science in the US vs the rest of the world.

First, during a meeting talking about hiring someone. This person woudl be coming to UW from Europe. Over there this person has been remarkably successful getting funding for their science efforts (millions of pounds; one pound is about $2 US). The question stated to us bluntly was: how is the funding environment for science in the US given the recent cuts, paying for the Iraq war, etc. Now, on one hand, the total $$ spent on science in the US is larger than the UK. But on the other hand, the US spends less per-capita on science research than any other country. The candidate is right to worry about this: we are seeing science budgets shrink.

No big deal, right? Well, this person is at the top of their game. We want them to do their research in the US, right? We want as much of the cutting edge developments to happen here as we can! Funding environment is very much an input into this decision.

The second thing that happened was an email that arrived. Basically, the Dept. of Commerce is considering a new set of regulations that would make the use of any lab equipment by a foreign national the same as exporting that equipment to the national's home country. Take China for example. There are export restrictions in place for highspeed computers to China. If a chinese graduate student is doing research that requires use of a supercomputer they would run afoul of these regulations.

Now, pretend you are a graduate student in China and you want to do research. Do you go to a country like the US that is going to make it difficult for you to work with state-of-the-art tools, or are you going to go to Europe instead? Now, look at it from my point of view. Research is not accomplished without students. Students and post-docs probably account for 80% of the work that occurs in science. If I can't get enough (good) students, my research output will fall rather dramatically.

Bad for everyone. The problem with these sorts of things is they have long term effects, not short term. It feels like the US is slowly closing its doors to outside interaction. The more we seal ourselves off, the more likely we will fall behind. If you follow this argument to its bitter end, there will come a time where a US citizen will have to consider moving abroad to do cutting-edge research. That would be a disaster for this country.

An article on this very topic was recently published in the Christian Science Monitor (not where I was expecting this!). I'm sure there are plenty of other articles out there as well. Scanning the web, I found a different perspective -- talking about something similar in Korea, though for different reasons.

How many votes did I get?

I got a letter from the Alumni at UW association today saying that they'd recently run a populatiry contest amongs the graduating seniors to see who was the best teaching on campus. I didn't win, but apparently I got some "votes". I wonder how many?

I always feel two ways about this sort of thing. It is flattering to think that seniors remember me! I've been teaching courses that freshman and sophmores teach, so they would have had to think I was one of the best for several years running now. That is very cool.

But does "gee, he was a good teacher" have any relationship to "wow, I learned a lot" (as opposed to "wow, I feel like I learned a lot"). My guess is there is no relationship. Indeed, there is some evidence out there that lecturing makes no difference. Active learning is the most powerful tool to teach, and lectures tend to be more passive than active. I've I'd been a real hard-*ss and they hated me, would they have learned more -- but I'd never show up on that list of best teachers?

On the other hand. I had a really hard clicker question today. A clicker question is an attempt to put "active" learning into the passive lecture. I pose a question, the students use an infrared wand to select one of 5 possible answers. They can then see how they did. I gave what was, basically, an easy homework problem. They were more activated by this than by my normal clicker questions. I'll have to do this more often. I wonder if they like that (or not).

Recruit! Recruit!

This has been a week of dinners. Three so far, and I'm out of space for rich food. The physics department is going crazy. This week we had one candidate we'd already made an offer to come by to check out seattle, and another we are thinking of making an offer to. All the people are young, so us young folks in the department have to take them out! (not that I'm complaining!). It has been a lot of fun, but I'm looking forward to sitting at home looking at my toes Friday night!

Another thing: Each night I come home around 9:30, having had a bit too much wine. The upshot is I go almost straight to bed rather than work. I didn't realize how much work I get done at night: I'm so far behind now! Actually, I should have: there are no interruptions or people coming into my office. This weekend is going to be nice and quiet...

He is Gone!

Gone! I'm sure Tommaso is happy too!I'm amazed he hasn't posted on it yet! Perhaps he is out drinking. On the other hand, it isn't over yet; he is going to try to form a new government... So, no singing yet.

Automatic Shutdown

My head has a funny way of letting me know I've been working too much. I realize it is Sunday, dinner time, and I've done nothing. Not gotten ready for class. Not cleaned up thigns from last week. Not prepared for other meetings this week.

When I got in from Seattle last night I had some great ideas on the plane and I set about working on them. I think I was working until about 1am. But between there and two hours ago I've done nothing that could be considered productive towards my day job. :-) But it has been really nice.

I also notice this doesn't happen as much when Paula is in town: her being around forces me to work less!

Of course, that means the rest of tonight is devoted to getting class for this week ready! We have some weird, fun, topics coming up, like relativistic doppler effect.

Hard At Work

Spent a good part of the afternoon working on the Level 3 Trigger and DAQ system with Doug, Yunhe, and Matt. There was a very odd behavior we had to track down. The system is distributed, network, and heavily multi-threaded: it has a personality of its own. It was funny if you were watching us -- the supposed experts guessing what was causing a particular behavior. We solved it in the end, but it required looking in the strangest places...

Now back in Seattle. The town is jumping. Tired of sitting for 4 hours straight on the plane I went for a walk around down-town. The place is packed. The art meusum is having a fasion show and has packed the place. The sidewalk outside is also packed with people looking in. :-)

If you have to work on a Saturday...

Then this is the way to do it (ok, that is a really bad picture! I look so unhappy! Not true!). This is the farmhouse porch where UW rents a room so we can stay cheaply; it is located onsite at Fermilab (cool google-maps satalite view of fermi, DZERO, and the farm house). It is very warm here; warmer than in Seattle right now. Seattle has plenty of moments, but Chicago is right now in that glorious point between freezing winters and broiling humid summers.

Of course, I realized after coming inside that I'd forgotten about alergies! My eyes itch like crazy now.

And another depressing thing. I'm sure most of you reading this have noticed that I tend to work a lot. Heck, I like what I do, so I guess that is what I end up doing. But I got a text message from my sister today and she is working today too! I wonder if we got this from our parents? I can blame them, right? Tonight she is going out with my parents to celebrate birthday's. My mother's was just two days ago, and my father's is coming up (he is going to be 70! Big party in May).

I just googled my sister's name; the top results are from my sister, but back in 1999. How weird is google!?

April 15, 2004: A 22 Hour Day

And considering I had only 2 hours of sleep, I'm very happy. There are a bunch of us who documented a day in the life of for a scientist (ha!)with pictures. Here is my day. This was a particuarly harsh day. I did my best, but there wasn't much material to work with! I hope your's was better!

April 15

12:00 am. Seat would not stay upright. We had pulled away from the gate when this was discovered. Apparently, this is a FAA regulation and the plane turned right around and this poor mechanic had to come on board. Talk about working under pressure: a plane full of passengers who want to get into the air and asleep and you have to fix a stuid airplane seat. Everyone was watching him. We clapped for him when he was done. Left seattle just a bit after midnight, 35 minutes late (in picture mechanic is guy 2 rows in front, you can just see his face).

5:21AM (chicago Time): Final approach to Chicago. There was almost no turbulence, but I still didn't sleep. Rather worked almost the whole way. I'm supposed to give a few talks today and I'm still doing some of the calculations that will go into the talks. I sat in the gate area before the flight left and downloaded most of the data I needed. I was able to make most of my plots; unfortunately several of them were obviously incorrect and I needed access to the network to regenerate the data! I also had an outline of the talks I was going to give. I, along with everyone else on that plane, is pretty ripe: the heat was up the whole time. Desperately need a shower!

This is a shot from the airplane window (you can see the engine). Landing in Chicago is amazingly beutiful (like landing in NYCity). To get the exposure the camera had to be left open for a while of course, which gives the below effect.

5:40AM: Sun rising, and like snow, it makes everything look amazing -- even the terminal where I wait for the ACE rental pickup truck. I rent from ACE a lot, and I've gotten to know them pretty well. Sometimes I order an economy car and they upgrade me... like with this new Mustang. :-) If only this was a longer trip and I could go down town and hang out with firends with this car! Darn!

7:00AM Arrive at Fermilab, and the farm house where I have a bed. My first meeting is at 8am. My plan is to sleep 30 minutes, and take a shower. This is going to be a beutiful day - clear and warm. Most of Fermilab is a wide open plains -- this is a willow tree which the rising sun hit just right.

9:35AM: In my first meeting. I missed the 8am meeting because I (apparently) didn't set my alarm clock correctly. No clue. But the shower felt good! This is the All DZERO Meeting; results about to go public and other items of broad interest to the experiment are discussed here.

10:30AM: I and Herb and running the b-ID meeting. This is one of two reasons I flew out here. Ariel, a post-doc from Princeton, is presenting some new results here on a new vertex finding algorithm he is working on. This is what most of our meetings look like: one person up front presenting and then the rest of us asking questions, learning, and (perhaps) giving advice.

If you look at the upper right of that picture you'll see a small TV. The person on that picture is Frank, who is video conferencing in from the Netherlands. We also have people connected from Boston (and were supposed to from Seattle).

Towards the end of the meeting Andy is scheduled to speek. It is cool, because he is in Seattle, and I'm here in Chicago (usually the opposite). But for some reason he hasn't connected via video yet. I call him on his cell phone and wake him up. I had dinner with him last night out in Seattle and when we parted company he was on his way into a bar. He claims to be sick and isn't going to be able to give his talk. Hmmm...

Around noon my post-doc leaves to get himself some lunch (we both have 12:30 meetings), and gets me a subway sandwhitch. I'm desperate for something with a little caffeine in it: Dr. Pepper! But the Subway machine is broken and he comes back with mild-flavored seltzer water. Ugh. 'Dew from the vending machines. Ahhh, green death.

12:00PM The bID meeting ends a little early because Andy has canceled his talk! I rush back to my office area in the Outback building to work on the talk I'm going to give at the next meeting. During the meetings this morning I've been running small jobs trying to get final numbers for the talk.

12:30 The Single Top Analysis meeting starts (in a smaller meeting room). It is very depressing: to get there I we walk outside and it is such a warm and sunny day and we are stuck inside these buildings. And the AC has started up -- which means the air is extra dry. Ugh. During the first set of talks I'm still writing my talk.

Benoit is here, from France. Watching him do analysis from France gives me a hint what it is going to be like like the ATLAS experiment starts running and I'm over here in the US and the experiment is over in Europe.

This meeting is nice; it is more of a working meeting than the previous ones. I give a talk and managed to generate a lot of discussion. Learned a bit and I hope that others did as well. Sadly, I can't answer all my questions: more work in my future.

Paula is flying from Seattle to Tampa today for the April American Physical Society meeting. During my talk she is at the Denver airport waiting for her connecting flight. She keeps text messaging me, and I keep having to shut my phone up while I'm talking because I've forgotten to put it in silent mode. :-) The rest of the people in the meeting got a chuckle out of that.

2:00PM The Single Top Meeting ends and the Operations meeting starts (you getting the feeling there is a pattern here??). All the previous meetings have been mostly concerned with physics analysis. The process of taking already collected data and turning it into results and numbers. This meeting is concerned with the collection of the data. We talk about efficiency, how much data we've collected, what problems came up last week. I help lead the Level 3 DAQ system (a distributed system that is single-board computers in VME crates feeding data to a farm of 150 Linux dual processor nodes). A component of our system is causing some downtime for the experiment; a bunch of us decide to meet tomorrow to figure out what should be done to fix it.

3:30PM The operations meeting ends, and I'm reminded that a friend of mine, Avto, is giving the big Fermilab Wine & Cheese seminar this week. He is talking about recent Higgs results and will mention Andy's new result (that, in particular, he talked about just the day before in Seattle). I'm off to that. It was an excellent talk. You can just see Avto just at the front through all the people (there were probably about 100 people there). These two characters sitting in front of us provided a bit of entertainment. Even though I am running low on sleep I manage to only sort-of drift off once.

I watched the talk with a friend of my, on CDF, at UC Davis. It was good becasue he is working on some of the same stuff in CDF that Avto was presenting so he kept asking me questions.

5:30PM Done! No more meetings! I'm sitting at my desk working! I'm trying to find all the notes I took during the day, and remember the things in meetings I said I would do but forgot to write down. Answering email (well, not too much of it). I'm finally finished around 7PM. I discovered that Paula's and my tax return, submitted elctronically, has been accepted by the IRS. This is a big deal for weird reasons.

7:30PM As much as I'd really like to go downtown and have fun, I'm too tired to go anywhere and drink a beer. So, to celebrate a nasty day I by myself a good dinner and a replacement bluetooth headset for my phone. I like the soft blue glow.

12:00PM Finish up this entry (it has taken close to an hour to write and upload pictures). At the same time I'm also working on something fun. I'm finally really tired. Time to go back to the farmhouse and crash! At least one meeting tomorrow.

I hope you enjoyed my day!!

Good Talk

Andy (seated in the foreground here) gave a great talk (even if he didn't know how b-tagging efficiency was determined for his updated analysis, grrr!). It was really nice to see him back. I had some fun at his expense in the introduction: I've known him since he was an undergraduate at Brown.

I'll update this blog entry with his talk as soon as he forwards it. I'm now off to the airport for my flight to Chicago. Joy.

All nighter coming up...

Today is going to be a very long day. In fact, I will probably end up pulling an all nighter to night.

Andy will be here to talk about his recently submitted paper. Andy was my first graduate student and a real help to me getting tenure. He has taken his thesis work, improved on it, and has now submitted it for publication! You don't get to submit papers very often; so this is truely awsome. Congradulations to Andy! Hey -- it looks like Andy is a music star too!

Unfortunately, I need to be in Chicago for a meeting I'm running tomorrow. The only flight that allows me to see Andy's talk and be in Chicago tomorrow leaves seattle at... 11:20pm. It arrives in Chicago at about 5am. And then I have an 8am meeting I need to attend. I might get an hour of sleep...

The rest of today will be filled with getting several talks ready for tomorrow (and finishing up the research required to get those talks ready). I have a day off from lecturing: my class has its first midterm tomorrow. This one is hard. Of course, the last time I said that, they scored an average of 73 (which is high). Smart students. I guess that is why it is the honors section! Good luck to them!

For Every Conference, a Dinner

At the end of the first day of the Top Quark Symposium we had a really nice dinner (last conference dinner). Ann Arbor seems to have an amazing number of really good restaurants considering it is mostly a college town. Despite the expressions on some people's faces, it was a really good dinner. I was seated at the near end of the table, but at the far end a conversation went on for the whole 1.5 hours we were there eating discussing how to best measure and understand backgrounds in our W boson + 1 jet. I was both envious and glad not to be at the other end of the table! Thomas, a graduate student at UW, seated one from the far end on the right side, seemed particularly happy to be in that conversation: he has been away from Fermilab for a while and I think misses that sort of intense interaction.

If you can't join 'em

Schwinger was, apparently, unsatisfied with the way Quantum Field Theory was being developed back in the 70's. He struck out on a new path and wrote and published a three volume text book on the topic (could only find one on Amazon). The dedication in the front of the book contained the below quote.

If you can't join 'em, beat 'em!

This was mentioned during the last talk at the Top Quark Symposium -- which was a bit of a history lesson (and fun). Also in the middle of the book, at random points, Schwinger would have the quote:

Harold has a question.

Harold was a mythical student. We guess he put those in there where he wanted to write something down, but didn't want to come out and say the obvious thing because it was "too obvious".

An Earthquake is Scheduled for April 21st

After the big earthquake a few years ago (one of the scariest experiences I've been through) they schedule a regular earthquake drill here at UW. This year it will be on the 21st; I've never been in town for one of these drills before.

The cool thing is we have a visitor here that day. Wouldn't it be cool if the drill happened in the middle of his talk?? NOT!

My Birthday isn't July 22!

I've known this for years, but never done anything about it. The social security administration has 7/7/1966 on file as my birthday. It should be 7/22/1966. I'd never noticed it until about three years ago I tried to file electronically. Suprise! It was rejected because of this. So I've always had to file by paper. This year I'm changing the entered birthdate to get around this annoyance.

I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad that I'm actually 15 days older than I thought...

Picture for Tommaso

On the way up to Vancover the other week, Toby and I stopped in this great little place by the side of I5. As we were seated, I noticed a piano, with a small little saying. And I could only think of Tommaso's posting... :-)

"Please Do Not Play Piano"

I hate taxes

I don't hate them because of the $$ I have to pay to the government. I hate them because of the organization it requires of the last year's worth of papers. Because of the time it will take me to figure out what I need to do (this is the first year we are filing jointly). Because of the time it will take me to find all my documents. In the end I always miss some deductions because I can't find the paper work. And Paula is now talking about visiting me in federal prison. Sigh. :-)

Hard Work in Vancouver

We did a lot of work during the roadtrip to Vancouver (this is lunch)! Since I was away from my office the whole day there were almost no interuptions. I should have been working on my talk for the Top Symposium -- indeed, I'd planned to -- but the conversations were just too interesting. I really like it when we get to put together these small working meetings. I think one reason is that I don't feel like I get enough time in my job to think: I just do, do, do. These day long breaks where I have forcefully cleared them of all the little stuff are really productive.

Brunch... now work!

I'm back in Seattle. I got up for the plane flight at 4:30 am Seattle time, but was back nice and early. I'd hoped to get a head start on preparing for next week, but I was so exhausted I kept falling asleep! Paula's brother, Nick, is down visiting and during a 30 minute drive to a computer store I kept dozing off in the passenger seat -- sometimes right in the middle of a conversation. The problem was the hotel room at Ann Arbor had a TV!!

Paula, Nick, and I went to a really nice lunch at Lula's this morning. They have these made-on-the-spot doughnuts -- They are amazing. And I'm learning new things about Paula's family all the time. For example: they really really like mascarpone -- which was served with the doughnuts (here is Nick showing exactly how fanatical they are).

Today is mostly preparing for class this week. I'm giving a test on Friday, which means I need a draft by tomorrow evening of the test (writing tests is the most difficult part of teaching for me). I also have lectures to prepare, homework solutions. On the research half I have to get together some information for a friend that wants to present it at a review committee meeting last this week. And I have a fewl letters of recommendation to author. Paula and Nick are out shopping...

Ask The Right Questions

In Saturday's NYTimes there is an article on tinkering with Hybrid-Cars. There are a bunch of reasons to do this -- for example, it is just cool. But the article appears in the bussiness section, and contains numerous references like the following:

But the idea of making hybrid cars that have the option of being plugged in is supported by a diverse group of interests, from neoconservatives who support greater fuel efficiency to utilities salivating at the chance to supplant oil with electricity.

A reader should look at this and immediately ask several questions. The big one should be "What's the cost?" And since this is meant to be a green car cost in terms of both electricity and pollution.

It isn't until the every end of the article it finally gets around to addressing the question of pollution:

"Coal is more polluting than gasoline, and nearly 60 percent of U.S. electricity is generated by burning coal"

In short, perhaps it is advantagous up here in Seattle, where much of our power is hydro-electric, but not in upper state New York where it is coal burning.

How about cost in pennies per mile? I couldn't find it addressed in the article.

Without this information, the article becomes a bit more than an advertisment for something that entrepenuers are doing. There is no way to evaluate how close this technology is to being practicle -- even if it represents an evolution or a revolution.

[N.B. I'm arm-chair quarterbacking here: I'm sure if I was the reporter, operating on deadlines that they deal with, I'd leave things out all the time]

Hot Spot!

Coffee houses have long had wireless. Now bars are adding them! Not only do I get to have tea and coffee stains on my portable, but I can add pizza and beer to the colleciton!

Something I've noticed over the last month is that bars are starting to add these free hot spots. There was one near Fermilab, in the town of Geneva that I spent a very nice evening eating dinner, drinking beer, and writing email.

Noticing that the Big Time Brewery, a traditional Seattle microbrew bar near the university, had a free hot spot is what prompted this posting. This is where I usually go when my normal lunch partner is out of town (they have amazing veggie pizza-by-the-slice and some pretty good rootbeer on tap).

Whew!

I just finished giving my talk about 15 minutes ago. This is the audience right at the start of the talk (I told them it was for a picture in Fermilab Today). The talk went well. At least half the people seemed to laugh at my jokes, even. The first talk of the conference discussed the results I was going to discuss; and I had enough time to alter my talk to build on this (and add a few jokes at his expense :-)).

I even got a bunch of questions. Some good. This is what you want when you give the talk. The better (and harder) the questions, the better the talk was. I always feel a little like I've failed if I don't get questions!

If you want to check it out, you can find a copy of my talk on my web pages. There is a draft version of the talk with audio (if you have power point); be warned: I did that at 4am last night. That face on the title slide is the first speaker. His joke was that all future analyses will look like this analysis. If that is true, that will be a lot of work!!! The conference agenda contains a copy of all the talks, if you are interested.

It is great to give the talk early in the conference: now I can relax tonight, have a few beers, go out a bit, and not have to worry about being ready to give the talk tomorrow. Because, fankly, I could work on that talk for 6 more hours improving it. Easily.

Update: My friend Florencia was watching the conference over streaming video, and manged to catch me during my talk! Wow, she has a really nice web page!

A Really Nice Dinner

Last Friday Paula and I went out for her birthday dinner. Happy birthday Paula!

We went to Lampreia. This is our favorite restaurant in Seattle. We both had the tasting menu: every dish involved asparagus (no menu online, unfortunately). Especially interesting was the desert: stuffed straberries with asparagus. We were really curious to see how the chef (Carsberg) would make it work. He did. Subtle and just right to complement the sweet in the strawberry.

At the end of the meal we were trying to figure out exactly why we didn't come more often: it was so good! It was right about then the bill was brought to our table. Oh, right. :-) But definitely worth it!

Road Trip!

Toby and I drove up to Simon Fraser University last night to spend a day with Dugan and Yann (lame web site!) and Dag working on the Single Top Analysis and decision Trees and "CAF". Get togethers like these are great because it is a small number of people working on a single topic. DZERO has 700 people on its author list, but no one does a physics analysis that uses 700 people!

We spent the night in downtown Vancouver after a drive up from Seattle. We rented a car from the UW moter pool. A Toyota Prius (those yellow "E" stars in the display signify getting energy back from the braking). The car is brilliant. I think it really improves your fuel efficiency by getting you to drive differently, not using technology. :-) It makes you very aware of how much gas you burn when you floor it off a red light going green. :-)

In the middle of the drive we stopped in Mt. Vernon (in Skagit Country). Toby and knew of a great BBQ restaurant there -- which brewed its own beer (bumblebee pale ale was fantastic). Here is a picture of Toby standing near a typical car parked on the town streets. Guess if this county was red or blue in the last election!

The Dr. Pepper up here tastes different than down in the US!

It is my turn now

Both Ursula (here) and Tommaso (here -- but he does a great job blogging the actual conference, so read it, and I will not be trying what he has did with the panio!!) recently gave conference talks. By the end of this week I will have done it as well. I'm off to the Top Quark Symposium in Michigan (no skiing for me!).

So this is my Sunday. Write the first draft of the talk, practice it, write up lectures for the week, write up HW solutions for last week, assign new HW for next week. It is 3pm already. The day did start with a great brunch with some new friends. Now time to work.

Also I really messed up the internet in our house; for a while this morning we couldn't see the outside world (I write about this when I have more time).

Weird Weather

We've had summer early this year. The weather has returned to something more normal for Seattle now. It is both warm and cold, and it rains for at least part of the day. But this has generated some spectacular light and clouds. It is almost impossible to do this justice with a camera, but I gave it a try. I don't think camera's have dynamic range to really capture the moment (or I the skill).

That one is outside the physics building on a Friday evening.

This was up north of campus (near Whole Foods!).

And that is very close to the previous picture. It has been a pretty amazing few weeks. One minute pouring rain, the other bright sun. My office window looks over the physics building courtyard; students between classes have been caught in these suprise downpours several times... :-)

The Cost

The hiring process is on-going. For obvious reasons, there is a lot I can't write about now, and also a lot that I can't write out ever (though I wish I could!). But a lot has happened since I last wrote!

By this time of year, most universities have made there offers to their top candidates. There are a few late universities still hunting, but most are done. At this point, the universities have have put all their cards on the table. Now, the nervous waiting begins. The candidates must now decide which offer is best for them. This is a complex decision: these people are being asked to join a department for potentially 30 years. Do they like the other people in the department? Is the location some place they would like to live? If a spouse or children are involved will they like the move? What is the physics potential? How highly ranked is the university? What are the funding chances? And each candidate is bound to weight these questions differently. I wish them luck and I'm sure that the decision they make, no matter what, will be a good one.

Of course, these are the lucky ones. Many people didn't get offers. I know a number that didn't and should have. There are a variety of reasons why they didn't, some of them not necessarily their fault.

By the way, Karsten Heeger, another Quantum Diarist, is going through this process from the other side: he is a candiate. Check out his blog to see some comments on the view of the process from the other side. He is right about rumors; it is fascinating to watch.

Update: I just realized that another QD, Stephon Alexander, is also going through the search. He got a position (congradulations). But he won't say where yet. Wait, he does in the comments: Penn State! Fantastic!

Sloppy Science

Yesterday's paper had an article on what sounds like some sloppy science done in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility study (and there are lots more articles on the web!). Here is one quote:

One analyst wrote that a computer program had generated data he could not explain, so he withheld it from the quality assurance department, known as QA.

"Don't look at the last 4 lines. Those are a mystery," wrote the scientist, who the subcommittee said was an employee of the United States Geological Survey, a part of the Interior Department. "I've deleted the lines from the 'official' QA version of the files."

That on its own doesn't seem so bad to me. When I'm doing research the programs that I write often do many things, and calculate a number of results all at once. Sometimes, after I've updated part of the program, the second part fails -- and starts giving bogus results. But I'm not really interested in those results, so I ignore them. And if I give the program to someone else I tell them they have some bug fixing to do if they want that second set of numbers to be meaningful.

However, the quoted email goes on to say the following:

"In the end I keep track of 2 sets of files, the ones that will keep QA happy and the ones that were actually used," he wrote. The message was dated November 1999.

Now that sounds really bad. Keeping two sets of books is the classic smoking gun for bad science.

I wonder what the environment was like that the folks doing the research felt so rushed or pressured to produce a set of results. The Yucca Mountain project is amazingly politically sensitive. I know there are laws about when the Dept. Of Energy has to start disposing of nuclear waste, but it seems like rushing a study like this is bound to cause problems in the end. I'd really like to know more details about what happened here.

Then there are statements like the following:

In an e-mail message in March 2000, a government worker wrote that he did not know when software he had used had been installed. "So I've made up the dates and names," he wrote. "If they need more proof I will be happy to make up more stuff, as long as its not a video recording of the software being installed."

Ummmm... Why on earth is it so important to know when a program was installed? Isn't the "version" number or input data what really matters??

At any rate, I hope that this will slowly work its way into the public eye over the next few weeks.

There is another aspect of this mess. The Department of Energy runs this effort, and is putting together plan for the nation's nuclear waste disposal. It has had a number of scandals and is already not well trusted in Congress. This adds to the difficulty. The problem for Particle Physics is that buried in The DOE is the Office of Science, which funds most of the Nuclear and Particle physics in the US. The funding for the waste program far outstrips the science funding, and if you ask the average congress person about the Office of Science they will give you a blank look. :(

Double Rainbow!

A huge storm at Fermilab the other day. Matt, a graduate student at UW (living out at Fermilab), caught a picture of a double rainbow over the DZERO Assembly building (see his web site for some great cloud pictures and other interesting stuff).

The Wrong Plan

The NYTimes has an article describing a recent change of focus for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA):

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon - which has long underwritten open-ended "blue sky" research by the nation's best computer scientists - is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.

So. What has DARPA, with its previous blue-sky, not sure of immediate-payoff, outlook funded? How about the basics underlying the Internet? Email? When these were first funded no one had a clue, let alone a vision of what they would become (at least that was listened to!). I wonder how many people thought funding that sort of thing was a bad idea back then?

If the government doesn't fund this long term research, who is going to? Companies don't have nearly the incentive to do this type of work. Universities do -- but guess were some of that funding was coming from? DARPA!

No country can have a complete and healthy research program without funding all aspects: far reaching blue-sky and near term bound-to-work projects. How will America maintain its status as a world-class scientific country?? And I see this shift in government funding not just from DARPA, but it feels like it is the general case as the Administration funnels more funding to defense and security related projects -- projects that are less about the future and more about the here-and-now.

April Fools!

This paper appeared on the hep-th posting today. It is a great paper ("Split Supersymmetry"), and I even know some of the folks on the author list. The abstract is classic, including a line like the following:

"cures some ills of traditional weak-scale supersymmetry by raising the masses of scalar superpartners significantly above a TeV"

Which basically says: So? Problem particles, well, make their masses so heavy that those pesky experimenters can't ever find them and prove us wrong!

The kicker comes at the end of the article, however:

"Note Added: While this work was being completed, we became aware of [18, 19,20], a series of conference talks where a similar model was considered. While there are some similarities (specifically, field content and interactions), the philosophy is completely unrelated."

First of all, there isn't much beyond field content and interactions to be different! Second, those refereces (check 'em out) are all famous guys like Salam, Weinberg, and Glashow and the conference talks were given in the late 70's! :-)

This is an April fools paper! Serious physics humor, much needed at the end of a really difficult day. Good job! And thanks to Larry Yaffe for pointing this paper out (I don't normally read hep-th).

Late to work...

We were late because as we tried to pull out of our underground garage we found this blocking the entrance. They had to let the air out of the rear tires and put extra weight in the back of the truck to get it unstuck. :-)

Reviewed!

My record of activities (ROA) was 17 pages long. That handed in I had a review meeting. Yesterday I had the review meeting with two senior professors. That done, the chair of the committee will write up a report on my ROA and our meeting and submit it to the faculty in general. This is discussed in a faculty meeting in a month or so, and the faculty decides if I need "feedback" -- or if I should get a raise this year.

This year it is pretty easy. I was just promoted last year, which means nothing significant is likely to happen for next 3 or 4 years (then I'll be going to make the full professor grade -- I'm associate at the moment). I think we thus expected the meeting to last only about 10 or 15 minutes. It turned out to be about an hour.

My committee was by two of the best known profs in our department -- Ann Nelson (particle physics theory) and Eric Adelberger (gravity). They, of course, wanted to know exactly why what I was doing was important. What frontiers of physics was it pushing? And could I explain that?

Working day-to-day on various things -- like attending these 6am meetings -- trying to sort out weird effects -- I tend to loose sight of the big picture. I frequently feel like I don't have enough time to think; as if I'm only doing: An email arrives, I do some work, and I send another email. But there isn't much room for original thought in that schedule!

Update: For some odd reason this entry got published about 9 times. I've removed all but this one.

West Coast Time

The problem is the DZERO experiment is at Fermilab. So... when they schedule an 8 am meeting, this means 6 am for me! The only one that I'm willing to get up for is the one that happens every Friday morning: the convener's meeting. What is even more painful is that I miss breakfast -- they have donuts brought in (pretty tasty ones too).

We are currently in the middle of a discussion about where to publically post our conference results: Our Web Page, Fermilab Conference database, or hep-ex. That was a spirited 20 minute discussion!

Update: Fixed spelling of donuts! Yikes!