Gordon Watts

End Of A Year

Wow. I wrote a blog for a whole year. And I wrote a lot. And I hope you enjoyed it! I managed to get several big things done -- two papers I worked on came out last year. Some things never got done: cleaning my office (ok, I did manage to get rid of one box).

When I started I had no idea if I could maintain the writing. And I really had no idea what I would write about, or if I could come up with enough topics to write about. I look back at some of my initial posts and I can see my writing style has changed. I'd like to think it got better of the time (practice??). My spelling has entertained at least a few of you, I know.

For those of you considering starting a blog, I encourage it! It turns out we all have about 1000 ideas a day that we think of and forget. The blog is a perfect place to write some of them down. And sometimes it turns out to be a perfect place to vent (e.g. the whole Intelligent Design/Creationism thing -- when I first posted that I had no idea I felt that strongly about it at all!).

I will certainly continue to blog. It isn't clear to me yet if I will be using this address or forced to move to some other address. If I have to move, I will certainly leave a pointer in this blog!

Now, some thanks. First, thanks to everyone who read this blog! And especially to those who left comments! And thanks to my extended family for giving me encouragement, and thanks to my wife for, well, being my wife and also pointing out when I made a really bad spelling mistake. ;-) Thanks to all the other Quantum Diarists; it was a lot of fun -- especially running into each other at conferences, etc. And especially thanks to everyone back at Fermilab who organized this (and kept the front page of the QD up to date!). I know it was a lot of work keeping us all in line and "doing the right thing" -- but it was worth it!

Everyone have a fantastic New Year!

1 Day!

In the past it has taken my Spanish post-doc, Aran, up to 9 weeks to get his visa renewed. Not this time. It took one day! That is what I like. A lot of people are involved with getting this done -- both in the government and in the university. Fantastic! And thanks to everyone that worked on this! And thanks to the people that streamlined the procedures we have to go through to get the Visa renewed (I'm hoping this is one of the main reasons it went so quickly this time)!

Back in the Saddle

I'm back at Fermilab. My Christmas break was fantastic -- thanks to everyone who came from hundreds or thousands of miles! This was the first time that both the Heron and Watts/Chalmers families celebrated together. The collision of family customs (the crackers from Canada, the flaming plum pudding from, well, us) was great; mixed things up a bit!

For those willing to endure it, I've uploaded about 1 million photos to my flickr account. My family made a big mistake: they gave me a bigger memory card for my camera. This is the result.

One of my favorite pictures is of our local Tommy's Pond that I caught at the end of our after Christmas dinner walk (click the above picture for a larger version). There are also lots of pictures walking about New York City as well.

Hey -- I tried out Flickr's new print service (I think they use Target). I have a 7 megapixel camera and printed up two 20x30 inch posters (10 bucks each). They were incredible. Because the 7 megapixel camera isn't quite good enough the colors are a touch washed out (so saturate them a little bit if you have the chance), but wow. I'm going to have to print one or two for my office and for our house!

I'm on owl shift. I have 450 mail messages. A boat load of dead Level 3 nodes. Work. It was a great holiday.

It's Coming Sooner Than We Thnik...

From a NYTimes article:

"How could this happen?" Ms. Brown asked Representative Gibson C. Armstrong two summers ago, complaining about a physics professor at the York campus of Pennsylvania State University who she said routinely used class time to belittle President Bush and the war in Iraq.

This has turned into a "legislative inquiry" at the state level. I'm not going to defend this guy's actions; I do believe that we should use class to teach our subjects, but I'm totally against restrictions on what we (I) can say in class. I'm really worried that people will over-react to this sort of thing.

The key is that if a professor is expressing a point of view they don't like, they have to be able to respond (i.e. intimidation by the prof is worse than the prof doing something like above). A physics class is, admittedly, the wrong place for a discussion like this. But once a professor has opened that can of worms... I think that, more than anything else, keeps my political jokes to a minimum in classes.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are limits. For example, there are people who believe that Quantum Mechanics is false, and it is possible to build a theory of everything without the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I would not tolerate slowing down class for a lengthy discussion on that; a certain amount of discussion is illuminating, but...

And those of you that read this and say, "Hey -- but there are already restrictions" -- yes, you are right. There are plenty of things I can say in class and get fired for them. But what is going on here is the legislature is really saying is "I don't trust you teachers, so I'm going to impose restrictions on what you can say." Then figure out how to trust the professors. The more state controls there are on education, the worse the education is going to get. And good people are going to decide they don't want to teach any more.

There is some hope, at least. The Republican chairman of the committee is quoted as the end of the article as saying:

"If our report were issued today," Mr. Stevenson said, "I'd say our institutions of higher education are doing a fine job."

ROOT/SQL Smackdown!

I've always wanted to put "Smackdown" in the title of a blog entry. Just no excuse till now. Guess I shouldn't let that stop me!

This entry is a bit technical. Sorry! Every Christmas I try to do something short and quick that has no real relationship to what I need to do to get my work done, but some off-the-wall idea that I've had over the past year.

I've always been annoyed at how hard it was to ask a question like "how often does a b quark decay to a muon?" of the Monte Carlo truth. The truth is stored in ROOT format (in DZERO), but of course, asking a question similar to the above involves writing code -- or at the very least, writing some sort of a complex TTree::Draw method call. Nothing that is really conducive to quick back-of-the envelope questions.

About a week ago I started wondering why you couldn't draw out what you wanted to know and have the computer generate the code to actually determine the answer.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, this got perverted further to "wonder how well a database does for this sort of thing as compared to ROOT??".

Ahem.

So, this was about 3 days of work to get it going, another day trying to compare to ROOT and write it up, and another day to upload the zip files (Home upload connection slooow!).

The GUI summary: the GUI was way simpler to ask questions of -- intuitive, dare I say (something I definitely do not find using ROOT - but it depends on how you work!). On the other hand, it is easy to understand how the GUI restricts flexibility (at least as I've written it). For example as soon as I wrote this I wanted to ask "how many times does the b decay to a muon with at least pt of 1 GeV". Once I'd finally written the ROOT code to do the first question, adding the pT question is trivial. No so with the GUI (current version does not do that).

The performance summary: ROOT wins big on disk space and consistency (no matter what I asked, it always took 20-30 seconds to answer). The database's first query would take about 30 seconds, but after that it was running in 2-5 seconds for each query.

You can see details of all of this over at another web page.

I can't believe Christmas is almost over!

Camera Lust

It wasn't 30 minutes after I got into the house that my mother was showing off her new Camera -- the Casio EX-Z750. As it happens, this is the next generation version of my camera. It is smaller, faster, bigger LCD, etc. The only thing my camera has over it is the lens. Did I mention it is smaller? Less than half the thickness.

She pointed me to the review that convinced her to buy the camera. It is a serious review, as evidenced by the following:

There is a bright orange AF assist beam LED, so you're OK in the pitch black. These annoy the heck out of people being photographed and mark you for sniper fire. Turn off the AF assist beam in combat areas.

Combat areas!? Ack!

I hope everyone is having a great holiday!

The Trouble With the iPod

I find the iPod an amazingly frustrating machine. So good, but...

At the mall yesterday doing some last minute shopping (!!) I wandered into the packed Apple store. They had the nano up through the video iPod on display. The video iPod was better than I expected -- Jay Leno was playing on it and it was remarkably clear and smooth. The display is bright, and easy to read. All the iPods now do pictures as well. You can rotate through them quickly just by slinging your thumb around the dial. The machine and the interface are works of art.

But then there are the guts. Battery life sucks in comparison to other machines out there. They play only MP3's, and to get high quality MP3's requires quite a bit of space -- though this doesn't really matter for most people when the disk size is 30Gb. And you are locked into the iTunes store and the $0.99/song charge -- in particular, these new subscription services aren't available.

This later one I'm particularly interested in. I still hear lots of new music on the radio that I want to listen to -- but based on one song I'm unwilling to spend real money. Having constant access to one of these services would mean the cost of trying out a new album or band would be nothing.

On the other hand, that black iPod just looks so much better than anything else!

Grrr!

Overheard At the Table...

Names change to protect the... ugh.

A: Why is that carrot sitting on the place mat?

B: It fell on the floor

A: Oh, but the floor is clean! [Pops carrot into mouth to prove a point.]

B: I used my sock-clad foot to roll the carrot back to me...

A: Yes. That would explain the funny taste...

Ah, to be home with family. ;-)

Worse Than an HMO

I have an old ATT cell phone, and have to change providers. I've been reading a Consumer Reports article here at home and they compare average industry customer satisfaction surveys: Cell phone providers are worse on average than HMO's!!! I also learned that my current provider is rated at the bottom of the stack. :(

Just Not Cool Enough

I'm sitting in a coffee shop called The Mule (in Park Slope, I guess) waiting for my sister to finish laundry and finish up a proposal for work before we depart Brooklyn and head home to New Jersey.

They are playing old Talking Heads and everyone dances as they put sugar in their Eggnog Lattes (not kidding).

The couple sitting next to me was reading through the New York Times trying to see where their activist organization had managed to get into the paper.

And looking at everyone else's portable... mine is boring. There are some pretty amazing backgrounds. I've had mine for almost 3 months now and it still has the Toshiba default background.

Is there some program I can install that will make me look cooler?