Life as a Physicist

Saw this headline on the airplane: “USA might lose good citizens due to immigration process”. Duh. I know quite a few people going through various stages of the immigration process. Most of them are trying to get green cards as possibly a first step towards citizenship. All of them are physicists. They tell stories. I’m not sure I would be willing to put up with what they put up with. The long lines. Getting called on Tuesday and told they need to be 200 miles away to get finger prints the next day — canceling classes or missing presentations they are supposed to do. Apparently the penalty is you go the back of the line when that happens - lines that are often more than a year long. And check this out: there is a certain spot in the process when you can’t leave the country — you are stuck here. If it comes over Christmas or similar important family holiday and you want to go home and visit your family? Tough cookies: better travel under an assumed names.

Anna Gousiou is joining our experimental particle physics group at University of Washington. I’m really looking forward to working with her. I’ve got lots of respect for the rest of the group, don’t get me wrong, but it will be nice to have someone else in the same age at UW! She comes to us from Notre Dame, DZERO, and CMS. I believe her plans are to continue working on DZERO and move over to ATLAS, the LHC experiment our group is a member of. Welcome to Seattle, Anna!

We had a lot of amazing candidates go through the interview process. Once we got to our short list it was very hard to decide which people to give the offers to. And thanks to everyone who came out for an interview. It is a lot of work to prepare for one of these thing! And, thanks much to our Dean who made it possible for us to make three offers this year (three!). Two of them have said yes so far – Nikoli who will work on neutrinos and Anna who will work on experimental particle physics. We have one outstanding in astro — I hope they say yes! That would be three people.

I mentioned that Thomas had recently defended this thesis and his talk was one of the best I’d seen. I’ve now got PDF’s posted of both his talk and thesis. Feel free to check them out! Congrats, again, Thomas! It has been an honor to be your advisor — and good luck at Columbia!

I just finished filing away these last emails from Thomas with the info about the web links for his thesis and talk. I have a folder in my email for each student. These are two of the last emails I’ll get from Thomas as a student so it will soon be time to move his “Thomas Gadfort” folder to the “xx Old” sub-folder for ex-graduate students. Kinda sad!

Someone who recently got hired as a brand new prof (congrats!) wrote back when I sent congratulations:

I’m glad to be done with this business. Maybe I can get some work done now.

Clearly, not everything about being a professor has hit home yet… Good luck!

A recent summary from the US gov’t appropriations bill:

Research and Related Activities: FY08: $5,080 million; FY09: $5,457 million; FY10: $5,863 million. (Current FY07 level: $4,765 million).

Education and Human Resources: FY08: $873 million; FY09: $934 million; FY10: $1,003 million. (Current FY07 level: $698 million).

Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction: FY08: $245 million; FY09: $262 million; FY10: $280 million. (Current FY07 level: $191 million).

NSF TOTAL: FY08: $6,500 million; FY09: $6,980 million; FY10: $7,493 million. (Current FY07 level: $5,916 million).

Note that those are all increases. There is also language in the bill urging the NSF to fund more younger investigators, and even to provide money to people whose grants were rejected, but were thought that they would be accepted with a little further development.

Now, an appropriations bill is just a guideline, not a the law of the land (that comes next). But this does give a sense of the landscape. I can only hope this sticks around!

At the state level, Washington also just passed its budget (and this one is law). Among other things, there were real increases in education. It is too early to tell exactly what this means for the university and for the physics department, but we are all crossing our fingers this means that the tight leash the college has had to keep on positions will be reduced and perhaps we can get some more faculty!! That would help with a lot of shortages.

Thomas defended his Ph.D. last Friday. He nailed it! It was one of the best single top talks I’ve ever seen. He is off to be a post-doc at Columbia now and will continue working on the DZERO experiment as well as start working on the ATLAS experiment. Best of luck, and it was an honor to be your advisor! A few more pictures…

Well, our faculty search isn’t done yet. A few months ago we got Nikolai Tolich to work on neutrino physics. A very cool guy full of lots of energy. But that wasn’t the full story.

There were actually two official searches going on this year at UW. First was the neutrino search. Last year we attempted to hire someone in neutrino physics but couldn’t get the person we wanted. We call that a failed search here at UW. The cool thing about UW is that when a search fails they let you repeat the search the next year. This is particularly important because if you don’t allow for this then a department might be inclined to compromise quality to keep its size (a real worry).

The second search was a joint search. We had one position and we were looking to fill it with either an astrophysics or a particle physics person. A department like ours has two options when in that situation. Internally decide and put forward one candidate. Or think outside the box: find two really outstanding candidates that the university can’t say no to, one from each subfield. We did the second.

Our offers have been outstanding since mid March now. Once you make an offer the candidate holds all the cards: the goal of the physics department is to attract the candidate. The goal of the candidate is to make sure they get enough resources out of the university to make their research program successful. The negotiations are exhausting. And if the candidate comes for an extended visit you end up going out to dinner almost every night! NOT that I’m complaining, but I have had to loosen my belt a notch! The other thing that happens is all other balls are dropped: I’m so far behind now it isn’t even funny.

But our particle physics candidate accepted! Woo hoo! I can’t tell you how much of a relief that was. First of all, someone close to me in age: I was not looking forward to doing all the administrative work on the NSF grant as I got older (somehow we forgot to mention this aspect of the job during the interview process). Second, they are very good so they will make our group stronger. I’m really looking forward to next year!

You want to know who it is? I’ll post their name in the next few days. They wanted some time to tell others they were joining UW rather than having people find out from the blog (a totally reasonable request!).

And we still have an astrophysics offer out. We are doing everything we can to get this person as well. If we were able to land them, that would make for an amazing hiring year. Wow. Ok, I shouldn’t dream too much.

You can watch how the search game at all universities is shaping up, if you would like, on the HEP rumor mill page.

I got a new computer from Dell yesterday, running Microsoft Vista. This was a cheap one - about 500 bucks - meant to run as our entertainment center. And I totally understand why people like Mac’s better - starting up this computer as compared to my wife’s new macbook were… well, worlds apart.

After booting and asking me a few simple questions (i.e. what timezone are you in — why can’t it figure that out?), it told me it “was preparing my desktop.” This is normal the first time you log in to a windows computer and usually takes about 5 or 10 seconds. This took almost 5 minutes. Long enough I started to worry something was wrong and had started to consider pulling the power.

When the desktop finally appear, it became clear why it took all this time: all the software that Dell had installed on the computer was busy updating itself over the network. Indeed, the first dialog box that I saw after logging in was the free virus scanner telling me “hey — I’ve updated myself. Please reboot your computer now.” Sheesh! Fortunately, Vista took advantage of that reboot to gather up all security updates over the network.

This time I was able to quickly log in. But this time a window with a EULA from Google popped up. It took over the whole screen and I couldn’t figure out how to make it go away without agreeing to it. I didn’t want to because first, I wasn’t planning on using the software and second because I think Dell gets some cash from Google everytime someone uses their software on a Dell system: I want to do everything I can to discourage installing all these extras. It took me a while to get around this. Google has gone to enough effort to make sure that their EULA doesn’t show up in the task manager — you have to go find the owning process and kill it directly. Ugh.

Finally, logged in, it was time to take back my computer. I spent the next 2 hours uninstalling almost 27 things from the computer. How much does Dell make from these things? Was it worth my time??? What a fight. I was pretty pissed off by the time I had a nice clean computer: I blame Dell for most of that. Microsoft would have caused me one reboot had none of this extra stuff been installed.

Until a year ago I always built my own machines and installed a raw version of the OS on them. Being raw, I never had to deal with all these things that Dell or other companies put on. My desktop was clean, the system was fast, and memory was little used. Of course, I would spend more than 2 hours getting all the various bits of hardwork to work together. So, timewise, this method is still better.

What would be great is if after the first boot they could present me with a large list of software. I’d check off what I wanted and it would be installed. I would probably not install any of it — but it would remain on my system. Perhaps in several months I would decide that the DVD burner they were including was worth looking at — so I would. As it stands, I’ve uninstalled everything, it has no chance of ever being used, and I’m pissed off at Dell. Sadly, I don’t know where else I could get a better deal.

I suppose one thing to do is find a local small systems builder and use them. They wouldn’t have these large agreements with all these companies…

On the other hand, this computer is sweet. Dual AMD 64 bit with 1 gig of memory for just over 500 bucks. Plays DVDs very fast. Too bad I am to busy working to watch DVDs (ha!). Maybe Julia will like them…

I knew this was going to happen. Wasn’t sure when or who would send it to me… but I got it:

FYI we are all on My Space. You should join.

I’m 40. Now what do I do?

Tonight looking out of our window we saw the first cruise ship of the season heading out to sea… All summer long cruise ships will be coming and going from the water front just down the hill from where I live…