Gordon Watts

Total Shutdown

I assume my students hate taking tests. We have one in my Mechanics class coming up this Friday. So, I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. I hate writing them.

For copy/production and proof reading reasons I have to have a completed copy of the exam done by Tuesday morning. If I total up the time it actually takes me to write the exam a block of 3-4 hours is probably enough -- inception, writing, proof-reading, writing up solutions, iterating.

It usually takes me about 5 days.

Why so long? Well, I need to surf the web. A lot. And then watch some downloaded TV shows. Perhaps write 3 or more blog entries. Or sleep really late. It is like a physiological block. I've been doing this for 5 years now -- you'd think I'd have this bit down. Bzzz!

OK, I need to get back to writing the test. I've got one problem done, another one to go...

Smile? What smile?

Kristof's NYTimes editorial (fee) today has the following sentence:

First, Democrats should wipe the smiles off their faces. This is a humiliation for the entire country, and their glee is unseemly.

This is something that has been bothering me for a while. All the talk about Fitzmas on the web on the various political blogs. And the seeming sheer joy over the indictment of Libby.

Yes. Be happy that people who lie get caught. But that they were in the US Government in such a high-up position with multiple security clearances? No. I don't like Bush or his policies, but 3 years of a crippled White House will be awful. Special interests will go nuts and fill the power vacuum. Imagine if we had, say, a huge earthquake here in Seattle!?

What we need is more transparency. I don't think there is anything illegal about how this white house has withheld information from the public (there may be, I just don't know). But when you don't know what is going on, how can you trust? And further, people not exposed to light will feel more willing to do something "dark". I understand Bush isn't going to shake up the white house at this point. But the real reform he needs to enact is a more open governing process. I don't see how he can be committed to a government "above reproach" and still claim that closed government is the right thing to do.

Actually, my real fear is that no future presidency will be less open than the current one.

IM Generation Gap

Hey. Would you leave your personal phone number on your web page for anyone to grab and call? I'd never! But I'm behind the times (scroll down on this well known tech-blog and you'll find his cell phone). How about your email address? Or work number? I'll do that no problem. This all seems normal to me, and I don't see too much difference between what I do and what is the norm -- no matter the age group. Ok. Now, how about your IM handle(s)?

Instant Messaging is great. I have colleagues on all 4 of the major networks at this point (ICQ, MSN, AOL, and Yahoo) -- I now use Gaim so I don't have to run all four services. But I've noticed a fundamental difference between how I treat contacts and how, well, my undergraduate students do.

I think this stems from two different aspects of IMing, both privacy related. Theirs and mine.

First, theirs. This is especially true for people that I pay for or are graduate students of mine. I feel extremely awkward asking for their IM -- once I have it I can see when they are online -- when they are working, or when they aren't, etc. That feels like an unhealthy invasion of work-place privacy. Now, personally, I don't care as long as they are producing work, but won't they feel like they are being watched? It feels awfully big-brother to me. On the other hand, having the IM handle makes working with them much easier -- especially when they are 2000 miles away at Fermilab and I'm back at UW.

Second is my own privacy. If I were to give out my IM to everyone, wouldn't they always be contacting me? And I'd never get any work done. I've had friends say they frequently make themselves invisible to deal with just this problem.

As I write this I realize that IM also, for me, confuses the social bits of my life and the work bits. I would never, at a party, ask for someone's IM. Email, sure, but the IM seems so much more personal. In fact, as I look at my contact list I'd say ended up with 100% of the contacts through work. Even though many of my friends (especially out in Chicago) are not work related. Isn't that weird?

Now, I look at the undergraduate students in my class. On a mailing list viewable by anyone in the University of Washington they are posting their IM handles: "Hey, I'd love to be in a study group, just IM me at xxxx".

Maybe I should take the plunge. At work: what if I gave my IM out to all my students -- I'm sure for some of the harder HW problems they'd love to be able to ask a quick question. But what if I wanted to be able to be invisible to my students on, say, a Saturday night, but not some other friends of mine? Ahh! I could get two accounts.

Ok, I'm old. Never looks good when an old guy tries to be young. ;-)

This is Getting out of Hand!

My mother-in-law, wife, and my wife's brother ("This is a blog with no plans for world domination") have all started blogs in the last two weeks. Won't be much there for people that don't know them, I'm afraid, but you know you're in trouble when your mother-in-law is blogging. Wait till I next visit; I can see all the faux-pas I've committed!

UPDATE: Removed links to actual blogs!

Pay Me More. No, maybe not.

Back in 2003 there was a budget crunch in the State of Washington. My salary comes from the State of Washington, and one fall out from that year was that no faculty got their normal merit-based raises (as opposed to the cost-of-living raise). It is written in the faculty code that the university should give this raise, and, indeed, the university was talking about granting it right up to the last minute when the true size of the state budget cuts became apparent.

I didn't realize this, but a number of faculty here got angry and took the university to court. I'm hearing about this because they won.

I have mixed feelings about this. More money is always welcome. After all, I really need that wide screen TV now instead of 6 months from now. And there is a real disparity between what we are paid in education vs what people are paid in the business world. But on the other hand, $$ is very tight in most universities, and UW is no exception. Estimates are that this would cost about $12 million bucks for the university to pay up. I don't know about you, but I usually put these things in terms of # of bottles of beer to make them seem real. That would be about 1.2 million 6-packs of Fat Tire, a really good amber. Hmmm, that is still pretty meaningless (at least, now that I don't drink beer the way I did in college!).

How about putting it in terms of something closer to the university:

1. That is the cost of start up for 12 good new condensed matter/atomic physicists. They need of order 1 million to purchase the equipment to setup their labs.
2. That is about 20 or so new high energy experimentalists. That would make a great group here! We could start a center!
3. That doesn't come close to building a new building on campus.
4. Fund the research for a moderate sized group for 12 years (constant dollars).

I conclude that on the scale of the university 12 million is noticeable and could affect the outcome of a particular department, but it isn't that much money.

Don't Try This At Home

I attended the ATLAS flavor tagging meeting the day before yesterday. It was a 9am meeting and went on for 2-3 hours. It was quite good. b-tagging is something I know quite a bit about and there are a number of experts in the US who are interested in contributing (Meenakshi Narain from BU gave a nice talk on the DZERO experiences). There were people from Marseille there too, and it was nice to hear them talk again!

There was one problem. It was 9am in Geneva, Switzerland. That would be midnight for me here in Seattle. When I finally crawled into bed at about 3:30am I managed to sleep for only three or four hours. I wanted to sleep more, so I didn't end up arriving at work until about 11am. And I spent the rest of the day in a fog.

But it gets worse. At the end of the flavor tagging meeting the person running it said "We should move the time of the meeting to the late afternoon so that our colleagues from the US can join us." For them that means moving the meeting's start time to around 5pm or so. What they really are saying is "We are going to inconvenience ourselves for you, so you'd better damm well step up to the plate and get some work done." :-) Ok. I guess it is time to get to work. Nothing more powerful than guilt!

Random People In A Bar

Last Saturday night, while I was still in Chicago, I managed to make it downtown. I met up with some strangers and friends at a Karaoke bar close to Ashland and Division (Joes??) -- never been before. I ran into someone new here: Megan. What is really weird is it turned out she is getting her Ph.D. in astrophysics at Northwestern. And has developed, along with her adviser, some new techniques to detect and shift/tune the phase of light that don't rely on static phase shifting plates. How weird is that?

Then Elvia, whom I've known for years, was also there. Apparently a few weeks ago she got a call from another friend "Hey -- want to come out tonight?" "No," was the answer, "I'm leaving for Kenya tomorrow." She has always loved traveling, but this was an apparent last minute trip... just because. You gotta love that.

Intelligent America

My friend John forwarded me this compilation of polls in America concerning intelligent design. It is depressing how many people think ID/Creationism is the right way to go. Hopeful, however, was that in some of the polls 50-60% said that the two could coexist peacefully (which I also believe). Still...

Accident At CERN

Building a Collider or a High Energy Experiment is a big operations. The DZERO detector, for example, is a cube, over 4 stories on a side and I think clocks in about 4000 tons or so. As you might imagine, building that isn't left to physicists; we just don't know how to move that kind of stuff around. Not only would we damage the equipment we were putting in place, but we'd probably cause injury. This is why all national labs have a crew of experts around to work on this.

Unfortunately, accidents do happen. About a year ago an electrician was badly hurt (UPDATE: more accurate story) at SLAC. In the end the accelerator was shut down for about 6 months while all safety procedures were checked. I know that the electrician lived, but I don't know much more about his fate.

The worst possible happened at CERN today. From a small press release (and my awful French) it sounds like they were trying to put a large electrical closet on its final mounting when it slid off and crushed one of the people mounting it. He did not survive. My and everyone's thoughts in this field go out to his family, friends, and relatives.

I note that the link I made above to the Stanford Daily said they would be closed for two days. In the end it was a 6 month stand-down for reviews. At CERN a stop was put on further operation for 2 days. I wonder how long it will be in the end. Europe and the US have different attitudes here. An accident like this at a national lab in the US prompts a full governmental review of all aspects of operation. I wonder how this will play out at CERN?

UPDATE: Fixed bad mispelling...

1 fb-1!

Hey. DZERO just passed the 1 fb-1 of data collected. Data is the life-blood of an experiment like DZERO. The more data, the more rare things we can look for. For example, single top in 1 fb-1 will be much more interesting that in 0.242 fb-1. About 4 times more interesting!

This data is the good stuff too -- with our whole detector operating. I can't wait to see the physics results from this data! This is a huge milestone -- this is almost x10 more data than we had in Run 1. Congratulations to everyone who had a part in it -- and to the accelerator division for  making the TeV work!

It is interesting to note that the accelerator division sent us 20% more data than what we recorded. Where did that data go? All sorts of places. 5% was lost by design, and the rest for numerous reasons. A broken section of the detector, for example. Pilot error. ;-)

Day of Nostalgia

Today was the Top Turns 10 celebration. I can't believe it was 10 years ago that the thing was discovered! It was a lot of fun -- mostly because I met up with so many people I'd not seen in so long.

I'm too tired to write anything further now -- some great stuff was said. So I'll write that in the future. But for now, click through to see a bunch of the pictures I took. Enjoy!

Feeling Defensive: The Mac

I feel like a rant.

So. I get constantly teased because I use a Windows machine. Linux is by far the most popular work-horse machine in high energy physics. My post-doc runs it on his portable. I'd say there isn't one person in DZERO who processes data that doesn't use Linux of a fairly regular basis. Everything is built around it. As people climb the career ladder they have to do more and more email. Generally, when enough of your life is occupied by this activity (as mine currently feels) you look for a machine better suited to the task. In the past that usually meant Windows. Now, however, it is more and more Mac.

"Everything is better on the Mac, Gordon". My wife. About half the Mac owners here at DZERO. ;-) So, first of all, I know the Mac. I probably know OS 9 and previous better than most people on this experiment (I'm sure not all). Between E&M homework assignments to blow of steam in graduate school I added hard links to the Mac. I used to run the largest repository of freeware and shareware for the Mac. I do not, however, know OSX very well (I've learned a bit of it from using my wife's machine and it looks good too). I just like Windows better. I really have no other defense! So take that!

An aside: I submit that you can tell what phase a large experiment is in by the popularity of Linux vs Windows/Mac. When building the actives are mostly coordination, drawings, planning and communication. Things that the Mac and Windows machines are very good at. Once data starts to roll in you have to do analysis. Something that Linux is very good at. I've never done a survey to test this out.

Another aside. And if one more person tries to tell me pine is a good enough email client I'll hit them over the head with a 1950's computer that it was designed to run on. IMAP4 is amazing. Pine? No. (and Pine is written at the University of Washington -- so it may be tomorrow my email gets cut off).

Thank goodness this isn't slashdot, or I'd be killed!

P.S. Kevin. My bad spelling has two sources. First is that I am a bad speller. Second is that my eyes are starting to go. Late at night, when I usually write these things, I sometimes get lazy and don't look too carefully.

Serenity: Annoyed.

I managed to see the movie Serenity this evening. When it first came out I learned about the series Firefly. I'd never heard of it before. For those not in the know, it is a western meets science fiction. In the TV series they even play western music. And they shoot guns at each other. They don't exactly shoot bullets, but you can over look that if you want. Firefly refers to the class of spaceship the crew calls home and, as was pointed out to my by Toby the other day, kind-a looks like a horse.

The series was quite good. Done by the same person that put together Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which my wife tells me is the best show _ever_. "Well", she quickly adds, "after the first season"). Unfortunately, firefly, on fox, was canceled after one season (despite a grass roots attempt to save it). As far as I know, no one else picked it up. Too bad. You could see how they were carefully putting together characters and histories that would last several seasons -- besides the weekly adventures stealing, smuggling, etc. This was really evident in the movie. Don't get me wrong; it was a great movie. It is just that you could see how they were squeezing a plot line they had planned to stretch out over 3-4 years into two hours. Such a pity because half the enjoyment is the story line. Movies just can't be as rich in character development as a weekly 1-hour series.

Really too bad. If you've not seen it, you probably will have a tough time seeing it in a good theater after this weekend. At the 10pm show there were 4 people in the theater. See it if you can. And rent the series on DVD (or however you get a hold of these old TV shows).

My Friend Is Famous!

Hey -- my friend, Brigitte, just got written up in a magazine. She is a new professor at McGill (well, she has been there over a year). The article, Einstein's Children, is in french, however. So it took me a while to get through... ;-) There is a picture in the print version of the magazine, but, sadly, they don't have it online (how odd!).

I'd Vote For That Man!

Images and slogans can be powerful. For example, Bush got a lot of press for mentioning the Dred Scott case. The popular conclusion is he was sending a reassuring message to his socially conservative base. That clearly wasn't a message aimed at me, but then again -- what messages could one send.

I'm sure without realizing it, the Bloomberg campaign is sending one. I pulled this picture from a NYTimes article. Look at the picture full view. Sitting there, in the white shirt with tie and on the phone is, according to the caption, Marc V. Shaw, the first deputy mayor. Look carefully at his desk. There is a calculator there. It isn't just any calculator, it is an HP calculator. Note how it is wide instead of tall -- a distinctive sign of an HP. Back in the day everyone who was anyone had an HP calculator. They made two lines -- scientific and business. People were fanatical about them. I owned two. After HP stopped making various versions some people would hang on to them for years, unwilling to upgrade to more powerful ones. My first memory is of my father owning one -- an HP 45 I think -- and you could program it! Wow! The next series (of which the above is one) had a great balance of simplicity and programability. Later versions got too complex.

The fact that that calculator is sitting there on his desk, in a position it looks like it was recently used, and it is an HP says to me this guy knows his facts and this guy is a do-er. Those are the sort of people I want working in my government. That would be a refreshing change!

Disclaimer: I can't vote in NY City. ;-) And I'm sure my sister, who does live in the city, wouldn't totally agree that Bloomberg was a good guy. ;-)

One Of Those Days...

You know the kind. The kind where you are brushing your teeth in the morning about to step out the door and you remember taking a shower, but you aren't 100% sure that you used shampoo? (I did, but I had to think about it!).

Yesterday at about 2pm I decided to create a poster for the Top Turns 10 symposium. The top quark was discovered 10 years ago, and this is a small celebration of that fact. I had to dig around for a few hours to find some pictures from the 1995 era, and then generate the text and layout for a 42x42 inch document. I was up until about 3am doing that. The print dead line for the poster was Friday. Ops. Fortunately, the folks in the print department at Fermilab have been very accommodating.

This poster has no science on it. It is all memories. While there are a number of references to other things going on at the time, I'm pretty sure most non-physicists will be able to get something out of it. You can download the PDF. But be warned -- it is large (about 3 megs). Further, at least on my computer, it takes forever to render.

Depending on the comments I get I may excerpt the text to the blog, which means you'll get everything but the pictures. ;-) Or maybe I'll have to upload those to my flckr account too. ;-)

Not So Good Over Here, Either...

In response to my post on conservatives in Academia Aalu -- who has recently moved from the US to India -- made the following comment:

You have been discussing these subjects directly and even taking sides. This is something totally missing in our society (India) where scientist and intellectuals do not want to takes side or be involved in any debate with political aspects.

He goes on to speculate on the reasons why. I responded a little further down -- and took a wild guess that it was the culture. I used the specific example of religion. That is something that is contentious in both the US and in India. Only in India I remember there being much more violent riots than here recently.

Also, in India my impression is that in many places religion plays a stronger role than here in America (when we have a religious protest march here, no one dies except from heat exhaustion). I'm sure that means that people may be less willing to speak out about religion.

So, reading the paper today, what do I find?

A crowd that gathered to protest a white supremacists' march turned violent on Saturday, throwing baseball-size rocks at the police, vandalizing vehicles and stores, and setting fire to a neighborhood bar, the authorities said.

And that picture at the top of this blog entry is America.

I still stand by my basic thesis, however. If you want to speak out about religion in America you can. It isn't likely you'll get death threats or similar. There are other topics that provoke a huge reaction. Hot-button issues. Some for good reason and others perhaps not-so. I'm willing to guess that every country is the same, though the hot-button issues vary.

Vacation Pictures

Paula is visiting Vancouver for the weekend, leaving me to lick the wounds caused by multiple failing computers. I've been cleaning off my old portable. And I finally got around to uploading a small subset of the pictures I took while Paula and I were traversing France and Germany. Hard to believe this was only 4 weeks ago!! Most of you should steer clear of this -- there aren't many things more boring. Those of you obligated to look should click on the picture to see the album...

Conservitives in Academia

I really don't like the new New York Times Select Policy -- all their columnists are hidden behind a pay-for-view barrier now. Say -- I wonder if anyone has done a #of times mentioned vs time graph? That shouldn't be hard to do.

At any rate, one of the conservative columnists in the NYTimes -- Tierney -- wrote about the liberal bias in academia several days ago. He was specifically talking about journalism and law school. Today he has a follow up column. What I love is how he starts off the column -- a list of reasons that readers sent him:

1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.
2. Conservatives do not care about the social good.
3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages.
4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.

This is intelligent discourse? Please, if you are writing a column in the NYTimes you're going to get all sorts of responses from the totally wacky to the insightful. I would hope that you were hired at the NYTimes because you will filter out the wacky ones and address the insightful ones. In his defense, he does spend the second half of the column discussing things in a little more depth (he mentions group think, etc.). I don't really know the law and the journalism fields. But I do know a bit about physics.

I would like to think that physics doesn't have the bias described, but if I look around the department almost all of us are liberal. There are some unifying factors: we live in Seattle (a very very blue-state city), we are in science and even if you like Bush's conservative policies it is hard to like what is happening to science & research budgets -- which has direct impact on how we do our research.

How about the students -- the next generation of "us"? What is their bias? I have no idea. I've had conversations with so few of them about politics that I really don't know what the average is.

I can't help but wonder if some of it isn't "you do what your friends do". And by-and-in-large the people we choose to be friends with are people that are similar to us. This paves a path of least resistance and we follow that for the most part. Hence, once the liberal tilt has been established...

Or, perhaps you've not made up your mind yet -- you don't really care. But day after day you are working with people that are liberals. Even if you don't talk about it directly, you hear the viewpoint and the things that are taken for granted. I'm sure, for example, that my undergraduate class knows my political leanings even though we've never had a lecture involving them directly.

Is it a problem? I would think that a conservative and a liberal would teach physics the same way. Perhaps they would use different jokes. ;-) I would call it a problem if there were smart people who wanted to do physics but didn't feel welcome because they were conservitive. We've had this problem with women, for example. They were not welcome in this field and have had to fight their way in. This isn't fixed yet, but it is getting better. And physics definately lost a lot out because we ignored half the smart people out there.

I wonder if the research choice would be different between liberals and non-liberals? I'm going to stereotype here: perhaps research and thus funding more from the Department of Defense than the National Science Foundation or the Department of Energy. Hmmm. At UW we have a second physics department -- Applied Physics -- and they tend to have more of this kind of research funding. I wonder if the politics over there is any different?

Fzzzt!

So, yesterday I mentioned I had the third hard disk fail since June. I decided to replace it with one of those new super-cool Serial ATA disks. I plugged everything in, hit the power and fzzzt! Lots of white smoke came pouring out of the computer. Narrowly avoiding setting off the building fire alarm (who knew laundry rooms had special exhaust fans), I discovered... melted plastic and vaporized metal.

It's dead, Jim.

I have no clue how it happened. No evidence of a short. The wiring looks like what I would expect after reading up on it around the net. And these connectors are carefully keyed to prevent me from plugging it in backwards (next time you plug in a SATA connector check out how it is designed; pretty cool!).

Paula wonders if I broke a mirror sometime in June. In which case I've only got 6 years and 8 months to go before this stops happening to me!

Something good did happen today, however. I got my new portable!!! How long will it take me to get it all setup??

Dr. Miller

Erin got her Ph.D. today! Wow did she do a good job! This is a long process -- she got here at 1999 and today she made it through the other end of the process commonly known as the meat grinder. :-)

Ok. That is a bit tongue-in-cheek. When you defend your thesis you have to do it in a public talk. This talk is attended by all interested and also by your committee. I, for example, am a member of Erin's committee. She does condensed matter physics -- studies foams and their properties. I do high energy physics. I was the outsider. One of the things I love about working at a university is just this -- since I'm an outsider much of the material she presents is not familiar to me, so I end up learning a lot.

Erin gave a killer talk. She works with Jerry who is a died-in-the-wool experimentalist. So not only has she done that, but she also went off on her own and learned out to simulate the foams she was measuring in the lab. You don't see that often (and it is also why it took her a little longer than most). She did a great job. And how can you deny a Ph.D. when you have to wear 3-D red-blue glasses during her talk? Or whose husband made these amazing cookies and brownies to bribe the audience. :-)

Congratulations, Erin!

Wait!? How long?

I give a test to my students on Friday. That means by yesterday afternoon -- Wednesday -- I have to have everything prepared. This is the first time this quarter I've felt a little bit relaxed. Paula and I were talking over dinner about how we were already ready for another trip to France and having been back for 6 weeks we were already starting to feel...

It took both of us a few minutes to realize we've not been back 6 weeks yet. We've not even been back a month yet! Closer to 3 weeks! How did the time go so fast??? Besides the research work I was doing in the summer I'm now also teaching and there is committee work too. No wonder I've not been able to breath!

And just to add a little more spice, I decided to add some disks to my home systems last night to take up some of the slack from all those disk failures over the summer. And as soon as I opened up my machine the system disk failed! Sheesh!!!

Bad Demo!

I'm in the full swing of teaching again (which is half the reason my posting rate has dropped so much). But today...

The best demo in intro physics is where the professor sits in a big red wagon with a huge fire extinguisher between their legs and shoots across the lecture hall floor. Believe me when I say there is just no way to look dignified during this demo. But it is a great demo. Newton's third law -- for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And you get to talk about rockets in outer space, etc.

But things didn't go as planned today. I usually leave the wagon sitting outside the entrance to the hall -- it makes a lot of noise so this way you can make a really effective entrance. Scares the crap out of everyone. Perfect. I should have known that something was wrong when I released the valve on the fully charged (with CO2) fire extinguisher and I only started moving slowly.

No matter. I was soon up to speed.

But half way into the room I started feeling like my legs and regions a little north were a might bit cold. I look down. Hmmm. The metal pipe that funnels the compressed CO2 into the rubber pipe (and out the back of the wagon) has fractured just after the fire extinguisher's valve. Since this is highly compressed gas it freezes as it expands to atmospheric pressure. The leak was aimed right at my... lap. And it was getting larger and larger by the second. In fact, it was so big it was spraying everything.

Watching this, I'd not really been watching where I was going. I looked up just in time to crash into a table leg! Finally I released the valve and got up. Looking down the front of my pants were totally covered in frost.

As you might imagine, the students loved it. It wasn't quite as bad as my friend who had to use duck tape to repair his jeans after that demo, but it was pretty darn close! Now. How can I work this into the test I'm supposed to be writing tonight??

Battle Ground: Grand Canyon!?

This article in the New York Times made me smile. It describes two of the many types of rafting trips available in the Grand Canyon:

Two groups examining the same evidence. Traveling nearly identical itineraries, snoozing under the same stars and bathing in the same chocolate-colored river. Yet, standing at opposite ends of the growing creation-evolution debate, they seemed to speak in different tongues.

One group looks at the rocks and formations from the Creationist point of view, and the other from the Evolution point of view. I like that.

It's Amber, Stupid

My brain's wiring isn't always optimal for... well, a lot of things. For example, I've been working with a pretty amazing undergraduate named Amanda since the start of summer. She has even been out to Fermilab for a short stay. Last week I started teaching, and I now also work with a teaching assistant named Amber. Whenever I try to talk to Amanda (or more embarrassingly, introduce her), "Amber" seems to come out of my mouth! One of these days I'll convince my brain to sort it out.

President Bush:

"But when she does it, she performs, see. She's not a person in Texas saying: 'Look at me. Look at how stellar I have been.' She just did it, and quietly, and quietly established an incredibly strong record."

and:

But some of the most important parts of that record might remain largely off-limits, as President Bush indicated that he would probably reject any requests for documents relating to her work as White House counsel.

Emphasis mine. From NYTimes article.

What bothered me most about Brown's appointment at FEMA was that this was an indication of how little merit seemed to play in the appointments. Just think if that spread to all areas of business. Just cronies or loyalists. We'd have a horrible government, and our companies -- engines of our economy -- would fall apart. America was built on social mobility -- on merit. This appointment feels the same. It is as if Bush looked for someone he could trust; someone with some comforting qualities in the storm swirling around him right now. The best person? Actually, it is really hard to tell given that there is almost no record of her doings.

Think about the message here. If you want to make it to the top position in the US you should labor in quiet. Make friends and work for, and above all -- be loyal to -- someone who has the right connections to go places. It is who you know rather than what you know, more than ever.

There is a saying in physics: "Always hire people smarter than you." It works. At the very least people smarter than you end up making you look good. You might even learn from them. And you'll certainly be carried along on their coat tails.

When Bush started it felt like he was doing that. Cheney, Powell, Rice, etc., all seem to be better than Bush. I may not agree with them, but I do have respect for them. But lately that hasn't been the case. Gonzalez, and now the supreme court (I don't count Brown; he was low level enough I'd be surprised if Bush had any direct influence on that -- at least I hope!!).

The Long Lost Art

I can't remember the last time I wrote a real letter. On paper, with a pen. When I was a graduate student and living in Japan I used to look forward to the long letters that my girl friend would write me. And I'd write back (though I was never as good at it as she was). Almost no one sends me real letters now. And I definitely don't send anyone real letters back! It is all email. And I don't think the email's that I send or receive are ever very long.

My friend Kate, living in San Francisco, however, is different. She is very much wired up, but prefers to send letters. These are an art form for her. Always on some interesting paper, the envelope often has pictures on it. Always both a pleasure visually as literally. ;-)

Everyone needs a friend like Kate.

I'm working now!

Robert is still in Marseille. And not much beats a sunset there; he recently took some stunning ones. This evening Seattle provided an opportunity. Rain, clouds, sun, and water all mixed together to produce a small set I've put up at Flickr. If you look carefully you can even see a double rainbow in some of them!

It Isn't A Debate!

OK. I really should be writing up clicker questions, but I couldn't help but scan Google news where I stumbled across this editorial in the LA times: "Let intelligent design and science rumble" by Michael Balter. I welcome a public discussion on what evolution is and what things it can and can't answer and what Intelligent Design/Creationism is and what it can and can't address. But then I read statements like this:

A national debate over how best to explain the complexity of living organisms would better serve our children, and adults too.

What the heck? I read that and what I really read is "The public consensus will decide which is the proper thing to teach our children: ID or Evolution, or a combination of the two."

But he ends on a better note:

The history of the theory of evolution is one of bitter debates between religion and science, and the debates continue today. In "On the Origin of Species," Charles Darwin refuted the arguments for intelligent design put forward by the 18th century English philosopher William Paley, who greatly influenced the evolutionary theorist until Darwin witnessed natural selection at work on the Galapagos Islands. Over the ensuing decades, Darwin's theories were rigorously tested and criticized before they won over the majority of scientists.

The best way to teach the theory of evolution is to teach this contentious history. The most effective way to convince students that the theory is correct is to confront, not avoid, continuing challenges to it.

Given the opportunity to debate, scientists should say: "Bring it on."

Of course, that is fine. Except that in many places what gets into the classroom is a popularity contest -- voters vote in a school board and they decide what to teach (i.e. Kansas). So, I think Balter might be being a little too idealistic here.

This brings up a question I have a lot of trouble with. If you are a parent you want your kid to be taught creationism should that be allowed? The obvious answer is yes. You get to decide how to bring up your kid. The debate about ID/Creationism is almost only about public schools. But what if a whole community felt that. What is wrong with their tax dollars -- that they pay -- being used how they want. It would be a totally different thing if the Federal government mandated teaching of ID as opposed to a community asking for it.

On the other hand, if that happened our school system would be a mess. Take that argument to its logical conclusion and you have all sorts of different standards and all of them applying for a spot at the large universities. Ugh. And I don't relish being made responsible for cleaning up the mess of different standards when the students arrive in their freshman courses!

And what do you do if a minority in the community says "no, I don't want my kid to learn ID/creationism?" Government is supposed to protect the rights of the minorities (same question goes, obviously, where the public sentiment is opposite).

I have no idea how to solve this bit.

Actually (my mind wondering further), history of scientific discovery is pretty fascinating. I'm teaching intro physics. Often the material I cover in a 50 minute lecture was "discovered" over the course of decades. And there were big fights. For example -- does the ether exist? Atoms? When we teach we teach none of that richness. We teach what we know to the best of our knowledge today. A pity. But there is no way there is time to do better in a normal course curriculum.

OK. Need to get back to preparing for my class!

Greek Festival

About 70% done with my lecture notes for this week, I took a short break with my friends Mike & Grace and visited the Seattle Greek Fest. It is a small affair, but the food is great (and there are a lot of people there!). In Chicago I used to go to all these street festivals -- there was one every weekend in the summer. I miss that here in Seattle.

Cool Physics Pictures

Jeff is a graduate student at UW working in our world famous atomic physics labs (this is the physics area that a prof at UW got a Nobel prize for). While the toys I work with make for great pictures, they are huge and off-scale -- often abstract art. Jeff gets to play with things like lasers and ion traps -- stuff that fits in the basement of a physics department. Which make for very cool pictures. And, unlike me, he has been keeping a collection of the pictures on flickr...

Run. Lola. Run.

If you've not seen this classic movie, you must rent it. Paula and I watched it for about the 10th time this evening and it is still great!

When did that happen!?

I swear. I was out of town for 2 months. Paula for one month. And we are totally out of touch already! These two managed to get engaged and married in that time! I've known Jerry since I moved here to Seattle -- he is another physics professor here (hey Jerry -- do you remember the first conversation you had with me!?). Tina I've known for a year. Couldn't happen to a better pair of people. Their wedding sounded pretty nice too -- off on a remote island near Seattle.

Congratulations!

Picnic!

At the start of the year the UW Physics department has a picnic -- yesterday. Mostly to introduce everyone new to everyone old. And to celebrate the fact that we've all made it through the first week of school (so what it if was only 3 days long). Very informal -- but a lot of fun. I managed to get a few pictures. The advertising for this wasn't that good; I know a bunch of profs who thought this was meant only for the graduate students. Ops. I knew I was supposed to go but I'd totally forgotten by the 4pm rolled around (busy working, you know). Only the fact that I looked out of the window and saw people drinking beer and wine made me remember... ;-)

Click through the picture to see a bunch more.

Oil and Viniger

The NYT had a good editorial on Intelligent Design/Creationism today.

The danger in intelligent design is not just that it is bad science, but that it seeks to enlist evidence from science in the service of religious truth while denying evolutionary processes like mutation and natural selection.

The two just don't mix.