Life as a Physicist

Scott was just elected an American Physical Society Fellow:

Willenbrock, Scott
University of Illinois
Citation: For pioneering work in the understanding of single top quark production at hadron colliders, and for contributions to the understanding of associated production of Higgs and vector bosons as a discovery channel at the Tevatron and LHC.

Scott, who has worked on the theory end of single top production for years was at our little party. I caught him on video talking about his initial work on single top while there (sorry the sound sucks).

Grrr. They sent the announcement out by email before they posted the information to the web site. So I can’t point you to the official web site announcement of the award. I assume a link will appear to the list of fellowship awardees on this page (in the fellowships section). But I can point you to a University of Illinois Cham-bana press release. I like how they waited until we found evidence for single top before they gave him the award.

Today’s physics department colloquia was on the physics of gravitational waves and, specifically, the Lisa experiment. It was a masterful talk put together by Craig Hogan, a joint member of our physics and astronomy departments. He did an excellent job of motivating Lisa and gravity wave experiments in general. I’m a skeptic when it comes to this field but Craig went a long way towards convincing me that good, fundamental, physics may come out of this experiment. As I walked out I found myself thinking “we need to give talks that are more like that.” We here are particle physicists in general.

And then I got stopped by another member of our department, who is a good friend of particle physics, and she said basically the same thing: all particle physics talks look the same. Some of the comments: Two slides on the detector. Some pictures of quarks, and then some hard-to-understand plots. Where is the story? I only know how hard it is to do this sort of thing because I know you guys: I’d never guess how hard it is from your talks. It is the same plots over and over!

Ya. Well. She is right. When I gave a seminar at SLAC about the single top result I did my best to talk about some of the things that disappear in an analysis presentation. But it was one or two slides. I think I had one slide on the detector. I’ve spent years working on the data acquisition system - I never talk about that. If you go to an astrophysics talk they will spend nearly half the talk discussing their hardware. And we do have some cool hardware in particle physics.

Ok. Have to do better. Of course, if tried something like this in front of a particle physics audience it might not work. They already know the detector and software and don’t really care. Or is that an assumption on my part? Doesn’t CDF want to know some hardware details about what we did differently? Or is the problem we’ve not split ourselves into two (sometimes, but not often enough, overlapping) classes: those who build the detector and those who write the software and those that do the analysis. Uh, three classes. So we go to separate conferences and just talk about the particular topic there. The talks that we should be giving in front of general physics audiences then should be some combination of these three themes.

But usually we just give the physics talk.

I’ve been using Photoshop Elements for several years now. I’m not a pro, but it gets the job done. I’m starting to move over to the Vista version of Windows I’ve discovered that Elements 3.0 doesn’t install. Well, the base version does, but none of the updates (why did you do that Adobe!?). I would guess the things I need the most are:

• Must be comfortable with 25,000 and growing pictures (about 45 gigabytes of image files).
• Tag my photos, and the ability to store that tag info directly in the JPG for uploading to Flicker. I would not be such a big user of Flickr without this program.
• Cropping the photos
• Being able to drag a photo from the interface directly onto another application or an explorer window to copy the photos.
• Minor adjustments to the photo (adjusting contrast, etc.).
• Last is using the reduced version of photo shop for read image editing. But I’ve done that only about 4 times in the 2 or 3 years I’ve had this program.

There are lots of improvements I’d like to see, however. Among them are the way you apply tags. I have almost 1000 tags. Also, my tags are big things (like names of people, places). I really like Flickr’s trend of tagging smaller things (like “wood table”, etc.) — the effort required to create a new tag “on-the-fly” is too much for that in Adobe’s 3.0 version.

On top of all of that, I’ve gotten a bit annoyed at Adobe for there Acrobat package (version 7.0’s license terms were such that if I were to legally buy it for all of the places I use it, it would cost over $1000 bucks, which is crazy when I just need to reorganize pages, add, remove, from a pre-existing PDF and create new PDF’s from postscript). So I thought I’d look around.

I know about the following

• Elements 5.0 — I’ll probably go back to this
• Picasa — Google’s image. Looks like it doesn’t do tagging from the stuff on the net.
• Adobe Lightroom — looks interesting, but probably more $$ than I’m willing to pay and its workflow isn’t really focused on someone like me.

All of them seem to have demo or are free, so I can try them out (in a virtual machine with horrible performance!). Anything else I’m missing or should try out?

I found a mail message with this subject in my Inbox today:

The new Raman spectroscopic procedure allows scientists to measure the collagen, which also affects bone strength by eliminating the spectral components of overlying tissues.

Emails like this are one reason I no longer have time to read the comics. I get all my entertainment from subject headings like this. Wow!

I just don’t get the day-trader crowd. Do these spams work? I guess I could try to follow one of these companies to see if they experience a rise because of this. If they do, does anyone else who doesn’t trust these spams take advantage of them? And are the sources of the spam just people you are trying to manipulate the stock? It must suck for the companies.

The body of the mail message, btw, is nonsensical. It talks mostly about herbal remedies. It is as if a program tried to stitch together a few paragraphs. Garbage in, garbage out.

On Feb 6 Seattle will have a special election. I’m not sure what first motivated it, but, well, there it is. Currently there are (I think) two school-board related propositions on it. Until the Seattle city council went a little nuts.

What a stinkin’ mess. The Seattle City Council’s Friday meeting, when it voted on the language of the advisory ballot for how the Alaskan Way Viaduct should be replaced, was emblematic of just how badly this city is flailing.

Indeed. Here is the deal. Once in a great while we have earthquakes up in this corner of the world. We are on the ring of fire, afterall. This means all our buildings have to be built to withstand earthquakes. That includes bridges and other things. After the last big earthquake Seattle discovered the downtown viaduct was not safe and had to be replaced.

The viaduct is ugly (I hope that link works). That is the water front along there. Lots of tourist stuff, lots of people. Cruise ships. And the viaduct makes everything dark and scary. It effectively draws a line there — on the water side everything is people oriented. Piers for sitting and hanging out, small museums, etc. On the other side warehouses, depots, and trash. Tearing down the viaduct would completely remains the area; Seattle would have a rare chance that a city hardly ever does to remake itself.

But where to put all that traffic? 99 is a major thru route. And as any of you who live here in Seattle know, traffic is a real problem. Removing it and having all the traffic over on Interstate 5 would make an already intolerable situation worse. Burry it in a tunnel!

That would be great, but there is one problem with that: it is expensive. $3.5 billion bucks is the estimation. To just replace the viaduct would cost $2.5 billion. And there is the problem that the $3.5 billion won’t be as large. I’m a firm believer that good roads are needed for a city to grow (which Seattle is!).

What an awful choice! Get back what you had, with its evils (perhaps they can design it a bit better), or constrict another roadway (with years before a light rail system is in place). On the other hand, I love walking down along the water and I really hate the noise of the highway above, and the way it seals off the city. So, even though it costs more and won’t help with Seattle’s traffic problems, I’m for the tunnel.

The Governor of the State of Washington, who is eminently sensible, is not. Given the trade offs I wouldn’t be either if I was in her office. The mayor of Seattle is in favor of the tunnel. To put pressure on the state the mayor decided to add to the ballot a question on which version of the replacement we would prefer. But… here is the crazy part, somehow it came out to be two questions: 1) Would you like to see the viaduct replaced with another viaduct? 2) Would you like to see the viaduct replaced by a tunnel? You can answer yes to both, or no to both, or whatever! And further, since the governor holds the biggest purse strings here, it isn’t likely to matter.

And walking around Seattle today I overheard a few conversations along the lines of “can you believe what the city council did!?”.

But I’m going to show my support anyway. I’ll vote yes on the tunnel and no on the bridge. I won’t matter: almost no one will show up for this ballot.

The Department of Energy has published a short impact statment on what would happen if the continuing resolution is passed as-is — with no increase in science funding.

• 1 month furlough of all Fermilab employees
• 1 month less in Tevatron operations
• 120 RIF’s from SLAC and universities funding by the DOE (what is an RIF!?).
• Linear Collider research will grind to a halt.
• Loss of technical staff which will be difficult to hire back in the future.

The document put out by the DOE also lists impacts to other prorams (nuclear physics, biological physics, basic energy research, etc.).

Ever felt a burning need to run ROOT 5.14 and Python 2.5 together on a windows machine? Well, you can now. I know some people were interested in this, so I thought I’d post it here.

Guess what comes up if you search Google for “hate root“? Me! Interestingly, Microsoft’s live search doesn’t. Google wins this round!

Our department is involved in a debate over the course content of our undergraduate program. We have one of the largest physics undergraduate programs in the country — I think we and University of Maryland keep trading off for most number of BS degrees each year.

The problem comes from several sources. First, the physics program here at UW looks very different from the one that many of us experienced as undergraduates. Many of our graduates are not planning to go on into graduate school. Many will be moving off into other jobs that require some sort of scientific background. Management in a tech company, for example. The fact that we have courses that cater to them means we have a much larger program than we might otherwise.

However, not all is well. The biggest complaint I hear over and over is that we aren’t teaching enough modern physics to our students. By modern I don’t mean quantum mechanics (which is typically called modern physics), but, rather, I mean recent discoveries. Dark matter/energy. Applications in condensed matter. Materials. Basically, the stuff we do for research, or did perhaps 20 years ago (and so is well established at this point). I think everyone agrees with this basic idea.

Here is the rub: if you want to teach more of something new, you’ll have to teach less of something old. One group pushing for this upgrade points out we have some redundancies on our program. People who argue that you can’t do the advanced stuff before you do the basic stuff say that without repetition the students don’t really learn the material.

I find myself on the outside of this argument. I’ve not taken an undergraduate course in a long time. I’ve only taught the introductory courses here at UW. I’m 100% sure that the honors folks could do with an upgrade. Part of the reason is almost everyone in the honors program has already seen the material once in a great high school. The regular course is already packed to the gills and many people there are seeing the stuff for the first time. I’m not 100% sure they can absorb everything. Or if they do, their understanding of it will be less than it might otherwise. Finally, there is the part of me that mutters: “it doesn’t matter anyway. The only time you’ll ever really learn any of this is when you have to use it for something you want; school is just building an index.” That would be the cynic in me.

I think the department is leaning towards revamping the curriculum. I’m glad I won’t be doing much teaching next year: the first person to teach after a change like this always has the most work. The rest of us can copy them…

My wife gave me a Bluepom for Christmas. It is currently providing some much needed character in my new office (which is barren otherwise). You tap the top of the thing to adjust the light — it is a dimmer! My wife met someone at a pre-Christmas party that works for International Fashion Machines — they specialize in combining various fabrics with technology. You can’t see it, but there is a very small, single wire that is attached to the top of the blue-pom (close-up picture), exits on the bottom, and is connected to a small wall-plug socket. The lamp is connected to that.

Sometimes, when I’m frustrated, I like to hit the top of the bluepom repeatedly… Usually better than hitting what I’m frustrated at!

And we have no idea what we are doing! But, heck. It has been fun!