Life as a Physicist

I don’t have Internet — so this is a forward post. But I just realized that today is my Birthday (Sunday)! 41 years old. Actually, I have to do this to remind myself: Julia’s birthday is the 18th and so she totally eclipses my birthday now. And rightly so — she is a lot cuter than I am!

I finally finished uploading my pictures from the Glasgow ATLAS Overview week trip. Including the one extra day I took to look around (mostly ended up sleeping, taking a train to Edenborough, and then a train back for a very good dinner with Hal).

I learned a lot at that meeting. This shouldn’t surprise me any more, but as usual only about 1/2 of what I learned was at the sessions themselves and the other half was over dinner. I didn’t learn as much as I thought during the coffee breaks: but that is because I was almost always last in line and thus spent almost the whole coffee break in line (20 minutes, and 400 people, and 2 lines. ;-)).

The setting was quite stunning. Glasgow university is a beautiful place. The conference was very well run. My only difficulty was the networking — which was awful. So many ports were blocked I couldn’t use VPN to get a good connection back to University of Washington. At the dorm room they had blocked the ports that my online music service uses to play music.

One of the social programs was a short talk by a university professor whose hobby was… wait for it… scotch. And then a short tasting (graciously funded by the various manufacturers). I know some people have a huge passion for this stuff, but I just don’t get it. I can taste the differences, but… well… I didn’t purchase any to bring back with me — lets leave it at that.

Remember those people in High School that couldn’t go camping because there was no place to plug in their hair dryer (hey — I grew up in New Jersey)? Well, the modern day equivalent, I suppose, is living without Internet.

I’m doing it. I’m proud to say that I’ve not cracked yet. But so far it is a study in deprivation. I only have Internet at work - so I tend to be focused a bit more on work when I’m there than normal. When I’m home, I have on Internet, so I either read (!!) or I work on something I’ve downloaded to the computer. The up shot is I’ve stopped doing most of the fun things on the Internet — like reading other people’s blogs, looking at the flickr site, or, generally, relaxing. It has only been about 3 or 4 days so I’ve not gone around the bend yet — but I can feel it coming. I might have to go out an do something fun - like take a boat to an island or something!

P.S. Fortunately, my blog writing tool will let me compose most of these while I’m offline!

I’m not sure if there was something in the air 9 months ago, but all my friends seem to be having babies. There are lots of new potential physicists running around out there — so watch out! At any rate, congratulations to all of you! Having been a Dad for a year I can say it is a lot of fun, and it only gets better as they grow older. But the mess…

I’ve had this trait in my personality since childhood: don’t spend money. And when I do I often have a tough time enjoying it.

The plane trips of the last few weeks have been pretty bad. But for the first time in a long long time (more than a year, I think) I really missed a connection yesterday on my trip from Glasgow back to Marseille - and got stuck in Paris. My flight arrived more than 30 minutes after the last train to Marseille had left (the flight, out of Heathrow, was delayed by more than 2 hours due to weather and other things). So I had to find a hotel. It was close to 9pm when I came to this conclusion, so I walked into the Paris airport Sheraton. At that point they were almost out of rooms and had only the “Club” room. By the time I signed out it was a touch over 300 euros. With the very very very weak dollar that isn’t 500 bucks, but is is darn close. So I took it, not willing to spend another hour getting off site to another airport.

I’m pretty sure that is the first time I’ve ever paid that much for a hotel room.

I did my best to enjoy it. Really. I ordered the free breakfast (it was good, but the fresh OJ was amazing). Stole most of the bathroom soap thing-ys. Tried to use each bit of furniture in the room. Enjoyed the view of the planes pulling out and in from my window. Sat in the bar downstairs and had a very expensive beer. I didn’t use the internet: it was 10% the cost of the room for 24 hours of use! For that cost they should have a fiber connection directly to my brain!

Being able to walk down an escalator and climb on a train, about 10 minutes, including checkout, after I walked out of my hotel room? Priceless.

What burns me about this is that after I made the decision to stay there, and had paid, and had checked in, I kept thinking about it. At that point it was too late: time to move on. Enjoy the room! Nope, instead it festered. Even after I checked out this morning and was standing on the train platform thinking that I’d spent too much (well, it is true, I had, but it was a little late at that point!).

I’ve often complained to people that we don’t get paid enough in this job. True only so far as I look around at what others in the business world with similar skills and training get. But I obviously get paid enough to be able to do this in an emergency. And it is very nice not having to worry about this sort of thing.

I’m impressed. I’m now sitting in Terminal 4 of Heathrow waiting for my short flight to Paris. And I’ve zipped through this airport — no delays moving about. This is better than the stories I heard from some people arriving last week at Glasgow who’d gone through Heathrow: waits of up to 2 hours to change terminals. Sweet!

I get on a plane to return to Marseille in a few hours. Last night Hal and I managed to get a seat at a place called Gandolfi Fish. When we stumbled on it walking around the night before, we knew it was crowded. But last night we found out it had been opened only 4 weeks and was one of the hotter places in town. The only reason we were able to get a table, I think, was we some how befriended the bar-tender who was also in charge of the reservation list (and sitting at the bar for 1.5 hours). After two bottles of a very good Sauvignon Blanc, Hal and I decided the lesson here was the same as in asking for money from the NSF: always better to do it in person than not. Someone that had made their reservation a week or so ago got bumped in favor of us because they were waiting at another bar down the street and couldn’t be contacted. I think they got in eventually, but it was after the kitchen started to run out of food.

At any rate, the Glasgow conference was good. I’ve got some pictures posted, but the network connection has been so awful I’ve not been able to organize them. I’ll do that tomorrow when I’ve got a decent net connection back in Marseille.

So ATLAS has also developed a blog policy. It looks like just about every other experiments — what you can write on a blog is mostly common sense. I know that both D0 and CDF also have a blogging policy. I am willing to bet every other large experiment does as well. The recent rumors have really gotten all the experiments onto the same page!

The policy is exactly what you would imagine: don’t divulge private information about your collaborators or internal meetings, don’t talk about results that haven’t been officially announced by the experiments, etc.

Discussion during coffee break after this was presented in the ATLAS plenary session today made me feel a bit awkward. There is clearly a lot of disdain for people associated with the rumors. Awkward for me because I made a comment about it and even though I’d like to think that I’ve not helped the spread I still might get splashed with some of the fallout (and there is quite a bit).

Basically, I think it is safe to say that we and particle physics collaborations are all feeling our way through this…

It is everywhere. While waiting in the airport (another posting) I saw constant adds for it. I am here in Glasgow, Scotland now, and I can’t escape it. Jim got one (I should have known he would get one). And while I was in a bar my cell phone buzzed with a message from my Dad: “Activated my iPhone!” My Dad has a cooler toy than I! How did that happen!?!?

At any rate, I’ve had some time to play with Jim’s. it feels like it is half baked — or perhaps like a google application roll out. That is, as it has come out of the oven it isn’t all that impressive, but wait until you see what they add to it. As Jim points out in this brilliant picture, there still isn’t one phone/pda/whatever that gets it right. 

First off — the user interface that you are faced with on the home screen is brilliant. No one has gotten it as right as this. I’ve used all sorts of cell phones up to now and nothing is as well thought out as this. But I also realized, in the end, that part of the reason is that the number of apps, etc., on this phone are fairly limited, so having a single screen of 16 buttons work (what you see is what you get — there aren’t more things hidden).

They have nailed the camera and image viewing interface. All other phone manufactures should hurry up and copy Apple on this one (not that patents will allow them to do this). Hands down the best.

The other thing I think they got right that everyone will soon copy: may the LCD display as big as friggn’ possible. That makes a huge difference on the phone. Going back to using my phone after using the iPhone for 10 minutes made me wince a bit.

I played a bit with the other apps. We didn’t turn on the network here in Glasgow — Cingular’s international roaming rates are criminally high. I have to say that the way the phone asked you to go online was also great (something I really wish my phone did: I’ve got to take it on faith some program isn’t accessing the internet behind my back and charging me crazy rates). It is clear that Apple has paid attention to lots of small details.

But I was underwelmed by the other programs. The email on my Windows Mobile phone is much better organized: the user interface isn’t nearly as slick, but it is much more functional. There is no to-do task list (or perhaps I missed it). My Dad claims the data rate is ok (he is in the US) and Jim claims it is ok as well. But watching the performance of a web page loading on my phone with 3G vs with EDGE I’m not so sure. The camera quality is pretty low (I think this is a hardware problem, not a software problem). I didn’t experience any crashes, but the review (see below) talks about a number of them (I wasn’t able to play with the programs they claim crashed below due to the lack of network connection).

In short, this version isn’t for me. I think Apple managed to convince Cingular to allow them to update the Phone’s software at will. This is not something that Microsoft was able to swing. This is a pain. I once found a bug in my older phone, complained to Microsoft. They had a bug fix for me — indeed, it had been out in the wild for a few months. But Cingular had locked the phone down so tight I wasn’t allowed to install the update without violating their terms of service. I really really hope this changes. Then bugs and other feature upgrades could be pushed out to older hardware. Of course, the cell phone companies don’t want to become just a data provider that disappears into the background.

I get back from France in one year. Perhaps by then a new iPhone will be out with 3G and I’ll be able to install some other interesting programs on it. Then I will be seriously tempted to get it. If they can get all the app developers for the iPhone to follow their interface that phone will just sing.

This endgadget review, pointed out in a comment to my previous iPhone post by redbeanjon, is a great read and seems to hit its ups and downs is about right.

I’m listening to the last day of talks at the ATLAS Overview week. A talk just pointed out that we expect about one top quark to be produced in ATLAS (and CMS) every second. At the Tevatron, on a very good day the rate is closer to 1 every couple of minutes! A 1 fb-1 sample of data at the LHC is going to be worth so much more than the Tevatron when it comes to this high-pT physics. Of course, this is the reason we built the machine!