Life as a Physicist

A student of mine, Jenne, won a Goldwater scholarship (that is her in the middle, in green). She was a introductory honors student of mine a few years ago. She is one of 317 people to win this award from across all of the USA. The winners get tuition, fees, books, room and board. Sweet! Congratulations!

What game is Iran playing? Up to now, at least in the public eye, Iran could have accidentally captured these guys. They could even have released them without admitting any guilt. Perhaps a over zealous patrol boat went after them. But now, by demanding the British government state publicly they made a mistake before Iran returns the hostages, they have made if a full blown state vs. state. What possible good outcome does this have for Iran?

Are they just playing to a local audience? Look, we stood up to a major Western power! We are the power broker in the middle east now! I think they could have done that had they released the sailors already. But not now. Now one side is going to be forced to publicly say “Ops.” Is this the start of another hostage crisis (a.k.a. the one that happened under Carter’s administration)?

What have I missed? Local politics? What??

P.S. The quote from the article:

The Iranian Mehr news agency quoted a military commander, Alireza Afshar, as saying the release of Ms. Turney, had been suspended because of the “wrong behavior” of the British government.

makes me think of North Korea.

Heard in a meeting today. Names changed to protect the future academics.

“You know, right, that Dan is never on time!”

“Right. Clearly a future faculty member.”

My timezone thing is all mixed up since getting back from Europe. For example, I took a nap at 4pm on Sunday afternoon. Woke up at 2pm. Didn’t go to bed until 8pm Monday. I am also waking up very early. Around 5am. This morning I decided to get an early OJ and Top Pot at the local star bucks before heading in. At 7am the place is packed! Who knew there were so many people out and about at that hour! I felt like I was in another country observing a culture totally different from mine… On the other hand, I got a lot done before my portable battery died on me.

The NYTimes has an article on our ability to do multiple things at once.

The researchers said that they did not see a delay if the participants were given the tasks one at a time. But the researchers found that response to the second task was delayed by up to a second when the study participants were given the two tasks at about the same time.

No big deal unless you are driving (or typing a SMS on a bike!).

Further, there is an extra cost to an interruption:

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

That is one I’m familiar with! I wonder if there is a similar cost to interrupting work to write a blog post?

They also have an interesting discussion on the number of long term (different) projects that a person can take on efficiently. This is something directly relevant to this field. We all juggle multiple balls at once. Indeed, to get to be a professor in this field you have to be running or an important part of several major projects. The research shows what we all know (but don’t always pay attention to): you can’t tackle too many at once!

They also recommend listening to relaxing quiet music to help with concentration. So much for Moby. I know I’ve got some Enya around here somewhere…

So, I’m keeping the email off!

It turns out CERN has a small thief. Building 180 is a huge building where most of the muon detector construction was done (I’ll have pictures posted when I get back to the US). Apparently the first stole a saw. This was a nice saw. But they didn’t try to sell it. The next thing they did was use the saw to cut through the restraining bolts holding down the nice coffee machines (this is Europe: people spend a lot on those). They kept coming back. A few computers. Tools — lots of tools. CERN added security. The problem is building 180 is huge, so as long as you hear them coming it is easy to hid. One guy got so pissed off he decided to catch the guy by spending the night. Unfortunately, security did find him (apparently drunk). Someone else had the bright idea of putting up a small webcam and attaching to a computer. They got the thief… stealing the webcam (no, I’m not joking).

Though they know who he is, they can’t use that evidence to get rid of him because the area was not clearly demarked as an area under surveillance. Small items continue to disappear…

I wish I could see the video of the hand leaning over to grab the camera.

As usual, I’m only just figuring this out. SPIRES, one of the main citation resources for particle physics, will now issue citations in RSS format. So you can subscribe your RSS feed reader and it will pick up new papers that fit your search criteria. How cool is that??

• All papers with me as author
• All papers with Higgs in the title

If you want to build your own RSS feed you can start with the general search page, create a search, and then when you view the results select the RSS option. The URL can then be given to your RSS feed reader. Because of the length of time to do these searches, and the fact that the data changes very slowly, I’d strongly recommend that you tell your RSS feed reader to update at most once a day!

Another feature I didn’t know about is the citation summary. This tells you how many renowned papers you have (>500 citations) – I’ve got three. The top quark discovery papers. And it goes down the list a bit from there in citation catagories. A little ego surfing!

On a break — like this spring break right now — I often try to do some small “fun” project. Over Christmas I put together a small application for my mobile phone which downloads images from Flickr and caches them (I’ve got a source forge setup for it, but I’ve not actually put the installer up there yet). One thing I’d been curious about doing was having some program that changed my desktop background. Should be easy to write? Thank goodness I searched Flickr for one first: there are several. This one I like a lot. It has a simple interface, you can specify an account, tags, etc., and it will download the pictures one after the other and swap out your background. When I feel I need to procrastinate (often) I just hid all my windows and check out what is on my desktop top. We all need a few more pictures in our lives!

P.S. This is a picture I found on my desktop by closing all my windows…

I’m sitting in the Top Quark meeting for CERN. A few things:

• They are studying more systematic errors on their MC than we have on our data.
• The room is packed. I think the number of people here is about equivalent to the combined total in the D0 physics groups.
• I can’t see a single Apple computer. This is very odd as just about everyone I know is switching to the Apple.
• I’m surrounded by students. And they are all switching between taking notes in Word (I kid you not) and using face book and using IM. All at once!
• It is kind-a cool to see ATLAS reference Tevatron results.
• The fraction of women over here is much higher than in the US.
• I’m seeing about half of the people I saw last week at Fermilab here.
• My email is full of emails from D0 people. It is odd looking around here and seeing some of them here.

That is a stack of calculus based text books waiting for me when I return to UW week after next. And that is just the start of the stack. I’m sure there will be more added to it by the time I return. It is the end of the year, and the committee that coordinates the large calculus based physics courses is going to, perhaps, change from the Knight book. And guess who is a member of this committee?

Why can’t we settle on a book? Well, the basic problem is that we don’t uncover lots of the problems until we use the book. Knight, for example, was a book we thought was very neat when we first saw it. Now that we have used it for 2 years  we are seriously considering other text books.

Deciding is hard. The books are very similar. You can look for obvious quality problems (rotational motion is a good one — hard to get right). Then there is the books philosophy — how they approach the topic. Most are mainstream, but sometimes you get something radical.

I personally have a tough time with this: it is boring reading how reference frames are taught in 7 different text books, comparing the difficulty of home work problems, trying to guess if the students will find the figures in book A better than book B. But we have to do it — besides paying for the course credits/tuition, this is the single largest expense the students have for our course.