Life as a Physicist

I’ve read so much about Croatia in the news — especially through the Clinton years. I always wanted to visit. Well, I’m here, and this is not the Croatia I read about. That would be a different section of the country.

I’m just finishing a week of vacation in the western resort town of Opatija. I am the spouse. That is — my wife is here attending a Physics Education conference and I am along to take care of Julia (I find it ironic that Paula is always complaining that HEP conferences are in much more beautiful places…). As far as a job, it isn’t that bad: I wake up around 9am or so, get Julia up and dressed and then we eat breakfast. Julia, being a girl of just over 1 year old, is a hit in the dining room (well, wherever we go). So I get lots of help from the staff. In fact, I’m reminded of that cartoon of a person making their way through a cocktail party full of people as an example of the Higgs boson: getting from the breakfast buffet back to the table with Juila in tow is slow going as everyone wants to stop her and say hi. And Julia is more than happy to do that. I think she gets that part of her personality from my wife!

Then we got for a long walk. They have a very nice stone pathway along the sea. Just below the pathway are lots of rocks and pebble beaches. Every one sets up a towel and sun bathes and swims. They don’t really have sand beaches here. I walked as far as a small fishing village one way and the other way was prevented from going as far as I wanted by the tourist trap places that were starting to claim parts of the public path as their own. Still, very nice!

Then a nap. Usually for the both of us (see below for why I needed one!). Lunch - and Julia makes it known during lunch who her favorite parent is: Paula. Then a swim, another nap, and then walk around town trying to find a good dinner. The food is a bit bland for my tastes in this section of the world — however there are some sausages that are really good and have just the right amount of kick. There is no way I can spell the name on the menu, however. I initially asked about them because they were one of the only dishes that was listed using the same Croatian word in four languages.

And finally to bed. At that point, I drag my portable outside onto the balcony, and get to work on my poster and talk I’m giving next week at the CHEP conference (so much for a real vacation).

And continuing the saga of bad Internet connections. The policy of the hotel we are in is a bit backward - free Internet in the rooms. You have to get a password from the front desk to access it. And get this — the password expires after about 3 hours. So you are supposed to keep going down there to get new passwords. At any rate, I work until about 3 in the morning.

The thunderstorms here are amazing. They are about every other day, and the sky is totally sunny until about 10 minutes before they start. The win picks up — it really picks up, and clouds rush in, and it pours. Sometimes hail. Then about 30 minutes later it is sunny again. The beaches and pools clear — but not for very long.

I’ve got lots of nice pictures, but given the awful state of the Internet back in Marseille (trust me, this will be an entertaining post when I finally have an ending - one way or the other) and the awful state of my talk & poster, I’ve not had time to upload them. My talk is in the afternoon of the first day (yay!) so I’m looking forward to being able to really relax at CHEP.

You can’t help but follow the path of your students and feel pretty darn proud of them, no matter how little their current accomplishments actually had to do with you or the (lack of) training you provided as they got their Ph.D. Thomas Gadfort was just appointed co-convener of the D0 b-quark identification group, and Andy Haas will be D0’s new Higgs co-convener! Congratulations to both of you! I expect this is only the beginning…

A new cool bit of software comes along that will help you out at work… and you ask one of the computer people back at your home institution to test it out rather than immediately dropping everything and testing it out yourself. And in the process totally destroying your computer’s setup and then spending a day trying to get everything working back the way it was before. Oh. Wait. Is that just getting wiser? I’m so confused!

Of bliss! My freebox came! I hooked it up and it started working right away! The day before Paula and Julia arrived too! Wow. That was fantastic. An evening gorging on downloads, uploads, web browsing in my PJ’s.

And then 8:40am, the next morning, long after I’d left for a train trip to Paris to pick up Paula and Julia is quit. Nothing will bring it back right now. Nothing. I am so sad! It was so unfair to tease me like that.

We travel a lot as experimental high energy phycisits. Not only is there the travel to the experiment locations, like CERN and Fermilab, but there is travel to all the labs that build the bits of the experiment (which are scattered far and wide), and finally, of course, travel to conferences. And all these places have wireless. So everyone’s email keeps flowing just as if they had never left the office. And usually you can’t tell that the person is traveling either, other than they might cancel a meeting or two.

This past week, however, has been different. The big Lepton-Photon conference took place in Daegu, Korea. And every time I get an email from someone who is there it starts with a phrase like “hello from Daegu” or “hello from the Daegu train station”, etc. The town must have made quite an impression on people! I’m sorry I missed the conference!

I woke up this morning, on a short trip to CERN, rolled over to turn off the alarm in my cell phone. There was a problem: there were 3 of them; it took me a minute to figure out which one I needed to shut up.

I’ve had a US cell phone and a Swiss cell phone for a while now. Yesterday, I added a French one for my stay in France. I’ve got way to many phone numbers. I’ve got a Skype-in number, a UW office number, and a US home phone number. That is 6 phone numbers. There is probably a better way to deal with this situation!

At last Friday’s Fermilab Wine & Cheese CDF showed slides in which they crossed the magical 3 sigma threshold for observation of single top: Evidence! They have two analyses — the Matrix Element and the Likelihood Fit. The Matrix Element is at 3.1 sigma, the Likelihood is at 2.7 sigma. The main change since their last result seems to be a substantial increase in the size of their data set (1.5 fb-1).

That must have been a lot of work! Congrats!

D0 is not updating its results for this round of conferences — so we remain at 3.5 sigma.

The Matrix Element shows a steady increase in sensitivity that is understandable. But I’m curious to know what happened with the likelihood. Back at the end of 2006 it showed no sensitivity in the 1 fb-1 version of the analysis (reported an expected limit, and the observed limit was even tighter than the expected one), but now has almost 3 sigma expected sensitivity. Were they just unlucky before and lucky this time? Or did something fundamental change? Unfortunately, this talk is not the talk to describe this — Mark’s job was to present all the recent new results in 45 minutes; so no time for details!

UPDATE: It was pointed out that we are now at 3.6 sigma, not 3.5 sigma. Ops!

Well. I’m still here. And I still have no Internet. And my kid is growing up back in Canada without me. She has walked her first steps. And apparently, she is said her first word: “uh-oh”. She uses it when she drops her pacifier on the floor when she is standing in the crib. The big pain with the lack of Internet is I can’t Skype to see Julia!

A week and a day before Paula and Julia arrive here in Marseille. I can’t wait!

I’ve used Skype since it started. It runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac so I can talk to my students and my family with ease. But CERN and Marseille (and I think Fermilab, but I’m not sure) all forbid its use. The primary reason is a function of how Skype works: it is a large point-to-point sharing network. If you are on a high speed node anyone’s traffic may flow through your node. This is a big no-no at these large government labs.

Asking around I’ve heard Gizmo mentioned several times. How does it do? Even if I switch, I’ll probably keep using Skype because it does video. And what is this SIP thing? I’ve somehow missed it. Will I see any appreciable benefits from using it instead of Skype (I mean actual benefits — I’m aware it is an open standard vs Skype’s).

Sunday at 1pm, walked down to the beach, sat out, swam several times, read a physics today. Sunday at 4:15pm, boarded a TGB to CERN. Wednesday afternoon at 5:15pm arrived back in Marseille from CERN. By 5:45 I was back at the beach for a quick swim.

The water is cold, by the way.