Life as a Physicist

My wife attended the March APS meeting and brought back the awards booklet for me to check out. I think because it has a stunning picture of the ATLAS detector on the front of it. Looking through it I realize how small the world of physics is — I have met many of the people who got prizes. Heck, UW has tried to hire a bunch of them in the past: Lisa Randall (Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize), Irfan Siddiqi (George E. Valley, Jr. Prize), and David DeMille (Francis Pipkin Award). Too bad we didn’t manage to land any of them (they went to Harvard, Berkeley, and Yale). I also see that UW Ph.D. student Kathryn Miknaitis got a a thesis award for looking for neutrino oscillations through the earth (as opposed to the neutrinos that come from the sun). There are lots more awards, which you can check out here. Congratulations to everyone!

Hey — our single top evidence paper was accepted for publication in PRL! Now, they may still ask for us to remove a page… but. But it is there! Woo!

I filled out bubble sheets with a #2 pencil! Yay!

It is always the same this time of the school year at the worlds most technologically advanced university. We use top-of-the-line computers and Excel spreadsheets to carefully calculate student’s grades. We make pretty plots to convince ourselves no one is getting cut off below or above. We check our favorite pupils and make sure they do as well as we expect them to. Heck, we even separately curve by TA to make sure students don’t get penalized for having a hard TA. And when it is all done we upload it to the main computer and off the grades go.

Uh, no.

It’s all correct except that last bit. We sit with the spreadsheet and go through, line by line, transcribing the grade we wish to assign onto the bubble sheet. The U has been promising a better system for years now (”yes, two years from now you’ll see a new system come online”). Nope. I swear I feel like I’m taking the SAT’s again (ok, it is easier than the SAT’s).

On the other hand, this little ritual can only mean one thing… Spring Break! Woo!

But not quite yet gone… Julia has started moving around. But she does it by sliding backwards on hardwood floors. The joke goes “we could clean our apartment if we put a swiffer under her.” Sometimes she gets stuck, as in this picture. I don’t always see it happening: if I’m looking the other way when this happens the first indication I have is a klonk and then a few seconds later a bleat of frustration. It is a race to see if she will slide herself all the way under or learn how to crawl first…

I wonder if any health studies have been done of long-term children day-care workers? They must be exposed to every single cold virus on the earth. As far as I can tell they almost never get sick. Do they live longer than the rest of us? Are they never felled by pneumonia? Or do they just never get a cold again in their lives?

Our kid is sick with a nasty cold. It is one of those colds that wakes her up in the middle of the night coughing. I wonder if Julia understands what is going on? Paula, the lucky one, is off in DC on a NSF grant proposal panel and is missing this. Of course, not so lucky, Paula actually caught the cold. So far I’ve missed it, but it has to be coming: I’m traveling to Chicago and Geneva later this week.

“At the airport? They’ve been written up as one of the best breakfast places in Seattle…”

I flew down to SLAC — San Francisco — early this morning. My flight left Seattle at 8:50am. I can’t remember the last time I was in a US airport that early. In the terminal — this is past security — there were long lines of people queued up for breakfast. 20 deep at the least at two breakfast places. Everyone was talking and having a grand old time. I usually depart in the mid-to-late afternoon and everyone is somber and focused on getting there. Not  here. It reminded me a lot of waiting for a commuter train to arrive. Not an airplane…

The other odd thing was the number of pregnant women. I counted 6, and I only started counting after I realized there were way more than I was used to seeing. About half of them were standing in line talking and fiddling with their blackberries. Sadly, I was too embarrassed to whip out my camera.

Unless you live in Seattle, that is. That is a picture of Julia helping me enjoy a plantain cake dinner with kale and avocado sauce. The month of March here is great — all the nice restaurants down here put on a 3 for 25 bucks deal — a three course dinner for 25 dollars. This was at Marjorie’s, right around the corner from where we live.

In case you couldn’t tell — we were sitting outside! That is right. March 6th, and sitting outside! If I’d been able to get away from work earlier I’d have been able to sit outside in sunlight! In case you think I’m faking you — this is Seattle, after all — check out this sunset that I took yesterday.

Having said this, it will probably rain all summer…

BTW, Julia is getting pretty grown up now. She figured out how to unlock my cell phone. And she even figured out the right key sequence to erase all the data on it. At least she didn’t know the password you need to complete that erase command!!

I have made it through the weekend. On Friday night she came along to our physics department recruiting dinner — we invite many of the prospective graduate students to UW to check us out (and hopefully come). That’s a picture of her trying to convince one prospective student to come!

At some point in our future someone is going to create a nanny artificial intelligence machine. I offer a few rules to help them out in their development.

if in rush to leave then poop

if bath then blowout!

if poop then innocent smile.

if unattended bottle feeding then make bottle leak

if left on couch then try to roll off couch (yes, I caught her)

if dad trying to get work done then wake up and cry.

if dad breaks clam shell while eating linguini with clams then grab sharp broken shell and try to put in mouth.

if cell phone near then grab, put in mouth, chew and drool.

There are other rules I’m sure I’ll learn over time. One really cute trick (and a warning to those parents out there that haven’t done this yet): when you shake baby formula to mix it, it foams, and produces pressure. It can then cause the formula to squirt out of the bottle nipple. At first I thought this was cute as Julia was squirting herself — till I realized she was a bit smarter than that — she was squirting the couch cushions…

It sounds like the trade reps in Europe and the US have finally figured out how to do Open Skies. This would be fantastic. There is a flight that leaves from Seattle, stops in Chicago, and then flies to London. It is the same flight number. But in Chicago the plane changes, the crew changes, and usually 99% of the passengers change. Why is it still called the same flight? Because of trade agreements that limit the number of planes that can traverse the Atlantic from any one city to any other city.

Open Skies is the deregulation of trans-atlantic travel. Any airline can travel to and from any city — as long as they can get a spot in the airports busy schedule!

”Any agreement…would provide enormous benefits to airline passengers,” David Stempler, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Air Travelers Association said.

That would be so true! I also hope that prices will drop. This is currently one of the largest expenses for trips of a week to CERN. Trips to Fermilab are equally spread out in housing, car, and air. 

Of course, any drop in price also means that they will stop offering free soda’s on transatlantic flights.

Paula is leaving town for the March APS meeting. Julia is not. Nor am I. Though Paula has spent time alone with Julia a number of times… I have not. 5 days. Will Julia be a lot thinner? Will we end up in the hospital emergency room? Will I get any sleep?