Peter Steinberg

Three Days

Too much going on to blog about, so here's a mere list.  They don't call it Quantum *Diaries* for nothin', folks:

1. Thanksgiving dinner at my mom's with family and friends
2. Exploring the limits of American capitalism on Black Friday, followed by a mini-reunion of people from my high-school.  Imagine meeting the 35 year old version of people you haven't seen since you were 18 -- it's great.
3. Seafood with my 91-year old grandmother, followed by a spontaneous rendezvous with physicist/friends on a cross-country from Minnesota to New York, only to have them invited up to meet said grandmother.  Grandma also liked the DVD of my interview with Voice of America TV (don't ask...)
4. Finally saw a real movie, The Ice Harvest, featuring John Cusack, Hollywood's favorite Chicagoan.  I've never seen so much corrupt behavior between adults, even in the NY Times.
5. Moved operations to an office at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), hosted by my PHOBOS colleagues there.  Finishing up several papers and grinding away at an upcoming Brookhaven Lecture which I'll be delivering next month.  Daunting, but I'll make it work (especially if I can come up with an efficient and completely self-explanatory discussion of length contraction -- any ideas?).  Then drinks with my next door neighbor from years ago, followed by dinner at my aunt's.
6. Back to UIC for more finishing and grinding, although a little more of the latter.  Then (after an emergency run to replace the pants I managed to rip with an unfortunate encounter with a metal door) dinner at a high school friend's place on the west side of Chicago, with the (more and more common) swirl of food, drink, memories, and people.

So, yes, no time to think and figure out what's actually happening.  In any case, T-minus 3 days until Einstein day...

Phil and Albert @ Mo Pitkin's

  Phil and Albert, Peanuts Style @ Mo Pitkin's NYC 
  Originally uploaded by entropybound.

And Lo, another dinner I can blog about, this one at Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction! in the East Village, NYC. Latino-Judeo cuisine, with more chopped liver than you can imagine, sometimes even on a hamburger, with fried egg (ok, one of my friends had that...i felt a heart murmur just thinking about it.).  I had lamb rack on potato latkes, but heck -- you only get one chance to vote twice (bonus points for anyone who gets that).

And a great mural, including our man Albert...so Ding (physics connection)!

Old School

Interesting, all this talk of "graying" this week and I forgot to mention that it's my 36th today.  Thanks to the QD universe for making my 36th year so interesting -- but we still have 5 weeks and 2 major holidays to go...AND I'm speaking next week at a WYOP event on December 2-3 at my old high school.  This would be amazing in itself, but it happens that I'm on the same program as various luminaries: Leon Lederman, Michael Turner, and physics super-blogger Sean Carroll.  Who'd have thunk it?: Cosmic Variance meets Quantum Diaries at my high school...and I never even took physics there!

The Dangers of Legal Music

Now you know that the world has gone completely insane when the Brookhaven Cybersecurity team is telling me which CDs I shouldn't be playing:

From:   cyberinfo@bnl.gov
Subject: [SysAdmin-l] ***CIAC HEADS-UP***: Sony-BMG Copy PRotection Rootkit
Date: November 21, 2005 4:27:00 PM EST
To:   sysadmin-l@lists.bnl.gov

As some of you may have heard, some of the Sony-BMG Music CD's marked "Content/Copy Protected" install rootkit like software on Windows systems.  The software is installed in the background when you look at the EULA whether you accept it or not and patches the operating system to hide software related to the copy protection scheme.

Please refrain from playing any of the following CD's on any DOE system: http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/titles.html

People may have heard that Sony-BMG CDs are now installing copy-protection software that hides itself, and now serves as a backdoor for hackers into your PC.  As one of the PHOBOS students just commented to me: "way to be a jerk to the few people left who actually buy your CDs".  I can live without the Neil Diamond and Celine Dion, but I really like the Bad Plus...

Six Degrees of Dinner

Here I go: just yesterday I claimed that my "real life" was intrinsically "unbloggable", and now I'm posting a photo of a dinner party I attended last night, with the guests actually looking at the camera and smiling (both anomalous for my photos, but that's a different discussion). 

I've always reassured my friends and family that I have quite rigorously obeyed a carefully-designed set of rules.  My "business, not personal" rule has been in effect since day-1 of WYOP, forcing me to require that anything I post relates in some way to work or physics (which, as you may have realized by now, aren't always connected, even for me).  And even colleagues are protected by the "no names, unless on the record" rule.  Still, any and all my rules can be circumvented by a simple request: "I want to see this on the blog" (e.g. the "existential nihilist" email last week).   Of course, I should add a no-alchohol clause, but I haven't yet, so why start now?

That said, despite the explicit request (which I verified), I realized just now that I have no reason to worry.  Among other things, my friends the hosts are an journalist/academic and an  lawyer/journalist/political blogger (thus the guests were lawyers, journalists, a rabbi, and a scientist -- several of us doing blogger duty as well).  But they are also theater-goers who saw Einstein's Gift a few weeks back, fully unaware of my involvement, and noticed me in the program.  Ding - physics connection, so all bets are off! 

Life in NYC is chaotic, so it gives one a sense of good karma to see how people's lives can intersect in unexpected ways, and at unexpected times.  I could also muse about six degrees of separation, to bring in a little network theory, but we covered that one already last night.  In any case, dinner was fantastic.  Thanks again, guys.

Reaching Out

But I almost forgot another thing I did last week (almost 10 days ago now!): I was given a great opportunity to speak to the Brookhaven Community Advisory Council.  This group consists of representatives from various organizations in the BNL area, covering areas such as environment, health, education, politics, and business (you can see a full list here).  As with my visit to the library the week before, I was given the task of trying to explain the physics we do at RHIC, and I hope this talk was up to the task.  I can say that I received a very warm reaction, which makes me even more hopeful in these uncertain times that people are deeply and intensely interested in fundamental science, and eventually more the politicians in Washington will realize that!

A PHOBOS Retreat

Sorry to have been out of the loop for the last week, folks.  Last weekend, the PHOBOS collaboration (smiling in the bright sunshine, at right) decamped to a converted mansion overlooking the Susquehanna river in eastern Maryland, for a three-day meeting.  We've been having our collaboration meetings in this location (organized flawlessly by our Maryland colleagues)about once every 18 months for the last few years, and every time I arrive, it's easy to remember why.  Have a look at a few of my photos see for yourself!

Since then, it's been the usual chaos of meetings, papers, candidate interviews, and (somewhat bleak) discussions of the final 2006 budget.  We're still smarting over the surprise reallocation of our funding elsewhere in the country, but we're not sitting on our hands either.  More on this later.

I've also been finding the time to catch up w/ friends and enjoy NYC a bit.  But could anything be more unbloggable than that?

School Daze

Gee this sounds familiar.  Dave Barry (a guy I don't usually read, but bear with me) posted an amusing rant about those crazy ideas his son is receiving at college:

And now he's calling me from college and telling me that the universe is NOTHING like my concept of it. The stuff he talks about is pretty complex, but I will try to summarize the main points, as I understand them:

Point One: Whatever you think about anything is wrong.

Point Two: There is no such thing as Point One. You THINK there is a Point One, but that just shows what a physics moron you are.

Point Three: If there are two identical twins, and one of them gets on a spacecraft going at nearly the speed of light, then one of them will grow old much faster than the other one, and that one will retire to Miami.

Point Three: There are an infinite number of possible Point Threes, and they are all equally true, and you will never understand ANY of them.

Welcome to the world year, Dave.  But I'm a little mystified.  Barry writes:

I blame college. That's where Rob is getting these ideas, which have to do with the Theory of Relativity and something called "quantum physics." Rob and his roommate, Hal, stay up all night figuring out the universe, and when they have it nailed down Rob calls me up, all excited, and starts talking about time travel, the Fifth Dimension, the Big Bang, etc.

But where does one learn this kind of thing?  Relativity I can believe, but is the 5th dimension sneaking into freshman physics by now?  Up, up, and away indeed.

Budget Woes, Redux

To some, it might have looked like Congress was finally getting its act together and passing a budget.  And I'm not going to comment on the wider debates about just how Congress managed to trim $54 billion off of the budget.  To us at RHIC, however, it was this summer's nightmare back in full force, as the promised increases over the president's catastrophic budget request were revoked suddenly, without warning, and now leaves us with potentially *no* running this year.

This kind of news often starts out as whispering, as a few people mentioned that there was bad news being talked about on Tuesday night.  However, by the time I had chased down some people who would know (and boned up a bit on the budget process, which is seriously arcane), an offical word came out of the BNL directorate yesterday around noon:

* * *
Budget News from Praveen Chaudhari

Yesterday we received some very unfortunate news that I must share with all of you. The 2006 Federal budget looks bleak for Brookhaven. We worked very hard this year and were successful in having Laboratory funding restored to both the House and Senate appropriations bills. In the conference negotiations that were completed yesterday, however, that money was reallocated to "member items" -- money earmarked for the needs of individual House and Senate members. This was totally unexpected. In a typical federal budget process, when a program has funding in both bills, it is almost a certainty that the money will survive the conference.

While the conference bill must still go before the full Congress for an up or down vote, that vote is expected as early as today. One possibility is that Congress will give DOE the authorization to reprogram funds within DOE, which could help the Laboratory.

Based on the information we have at this time, we are facing a significant budget shortfall for FY06, potentially exceeding $20 million. The impact on the Laboratory will be immediate:

- We are again facing significant layoffs, comparable to what we saw in FY05.

- The 2006 RHIC run, originally scheduled to begin in December, will be delayed until late in FY06. This will allow us to plan a combined run based on the proposed FY07 budget.

I will continue to share information with you as we move forward.

- Praveen Chaudhari
Laboratory Director

In other words, our money has been redirected to various congressmen to spend in their states while our program is essentially cut for the year, and most importantly, people here at the lab will have to be laid off, making future years for them and for us even more difficult. 

Not cool.  I hope to have better news in the next few days.

Game Over

Forget Avian Flu: I certainly hope this isn't the real epidemic about to attack millions of people across the United States, if not the world:

November 9, 2005
Kansas Board Approves Challenges to Evolution

By JODI WILGOREN
TOPEKA, Kan., Nov. 8 - The fiercely split Kansas Board of Education voted 6 to 4 on Tuesday to adopt new science standards that are the most far-reaching in the nation in requiring that Darwin's theory of evolution be challenged in the classroom.

The standards press beyond the broad mandate for critical analysis of evolution that four other states have established in recent years, by recommending that schools teach specific points that doubters of evolution use to undermine its primacy in science education.

Among the most controversial changes was a redefinition of science itself, so that it would not be explicitly limited to natural explanations.

The vote was a watershed victory for the emerging movement of intelligent design, which posits that nature alone cannot explain life's complexity. John G. West of the Discovery Institute, a conservative research organization that promotes intelligent design, said Kansas now had "the best science standards in the nation."

A leading defender of evolution, Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education, said she feared that the new Kansas standards would serve as a "playbook for creationism."

"Redefinition of science" leading to "the best science standards in the nation"?  Natural science not limited to natural explanations?  "Playbook for creationism"?  Game over, Charlie Brown.  All I can say is that when i'm 45, I'm going to be watching out for any doctor, much less any grad student or postdoc candidate, hailing from Kansas.  Maybe I'm being intolerant -- but I didn't start this.