Life as a Physicist

A long long time ago, when I was working for Dave Cutts, a Brown University professor as a post-doc, he lamented that he couldn’t make it out for a D0 collaboration meeting. These collaboration meetings are just shy of a week long and involve lots of meetings but also a chance to get together with your colleagues — they can be a lot of fun. That was back in the day when I was feeling rather full of myself, so I decided to do something about Dave missing the meeting.

The result was this collaboration picture. If you look near the bottom, near the front, you’ll see me (you might want to click on the hi-res link). I’m holding up a poster of Dave. See — Dave was there! Unfortunately for me, that turned into one of the more popular collaboration photos. It is on the title slide of many D0 talks, it is on a few posters… And there I am holding up a picture of Dave. A little embarrassing!

Needless to say, I’ve not done that again. And I just missed another collaboration meeting — this one was just last week. And there was a collaboration photo - which is pictured above. I mentioned to Aran that I was sad I’d missed it. So, Aran, my post-doc, had a little fun with me. If you look at the high-res version (which takes a while to load), you’ll find the below picture. It turns out that Aran wasn’t the only one having fun — check out the person several rows back.

They got the Physics Nobel prize. Wow! They were the ones that discovered giant magneto-resistance - which is what has enabled a lot of magnetic storage media (like disk drives). The cool thing is that Albert Fert, who is French, is a director of a lab here that is run by CNRS. CNRS are the people that are funding my stay here in France (actually, they fund all of research in France, of all types). See? I must be smart! I’m connected with a Nobel prize winner! Actually, I’m not so smart; I need to go and learn a bit more about this now.

Arriving at work and finishing off all the email in less than 10 minutes instead of 2 hours because you have INTERNET at home and could answer the overnight email at home using the INTERNET at home!

Paula found this article on the BBC that best describes the mood in Marseille this weekend.

Marseille, Monday morning - There’s no two ways about it – that was without doubt the greatest sporting weekend I’ve ever been involved in.

Marseille this weekend has been a city drenched in beer, tension, disbelief, sorrow, happiness and wild, wide-eyed celebration.

It was quite amazing. I didn’t got to any of the games, but I did go down to the Vieux Port to watch France vs New Zealand along with many others. When the game was just about over I took the below video. What an upset!!!

If you look, you can see the England fans are also very happy — that they don’t have to face the All Blacks - who were the favorites going into this tournament and had x2 more points than France!

P.S. Dear Family: I have about 6 gigs of pictures dating back as far as July 1 to upload to Flickr. I promise I’ll get to them. And they even contain some Julia pictures!

So, last Friday Paula went to Orange to order Internet. They said 10 days at most. Having heard the same thing from Free we thought “yeah, right.” Boy were we wrong - Internet arrived today at about 10am! It took them 4 days, two of them weekend days! Holy cow! That is why a monopoly is so good!

Of course, into every silver lining there must be a cloud or two: they port-block! So far I’ve only stumbled one one: my email program doesn’t correctly connect up. I’ve spent no time investigating where this port-blocking occurs yet so perhaps there is a way to turn it off (doubtful). Darn monopolies thinking they know better than I do!

At any rate, it is good to be back!

I was using the Times Reader to read the Opinion page, offline. You can already tell, if you don’t know me, that I’m a liberal. Perhaps not with a capital L (and certainly not over here in France), but definitely a liberal. The NYTimes published a bit by James Dobson (head/founder of evangelical organization Focus on the Family Action) - who was trying to clear up some misconception about a recent meeting of the organization in Colorado Springs.

Second to hit me was this passage:

I [he is speaking for himself at this point, not the organization] firmly believe that the selection of a president should begin with a recommitment to traditional moral values and beliefs. Those include the sanctity of human life, the institution of marriage, and other inviolable pro-family principles. Only after that determination is made can the acceptability of a nominee be assessed.

That is your classic litmus test. Ha! I thought — not even considering the other things candidates might have to offer? Almost confining yourself to one or two issues, are you? You dirty… oh. Wait. I do the same thing. As I recently commented here — the republicans who said they thought we should teach the controversy (evolution) were not fit to lead the United States [I'd provide a link, but I'm writing this offline]. Darn. So I’m not better than he is. But he is right — we all have a certian base-line and if you don’t get past that baseline you don’t get considered. Obviously, my baseline is very different from Dobson’s.

But I also find his line of reasoning interesting. Not doing this leads to compromise of one’s principles. The way our political system is setup — especially now that the country is so evenly divided — compromise is almost the only way to make progress.

The first thing that stuck out was the summary of one of the resolutions they voted on at this meetings:

If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate.

Wow! They are threatening to pull a Ralph Nader. I wonder if this will remain beyond the end of the primaries? I would be willing to bet you good money this will be modified in the end. Obviously, one party (ahem!) puts forward a pro-life candidate then it will remain: that would be the easy way out. But if both parties put forward a pro-choice candidate I wonder what they will do?

The final thing that got to me was in the tag line:

James C. Dobson, founder and chairman of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family Action, is the author of “Bringing Up Boys: Practical Advice and Encouragement for Those Shaping the Next Generation of Men.”

I have not seen this book. I don’t have access to Amazon right now. Has anyone looked at it? Judging by this guys belief system I would… well… all I can say is scary!!!

I don’t know about you guys, but a lot of the news coming out of the US right now is rather depressing. I’m almost glad to be away at the moment. Other than the fact I don’t have internet…

My wife walked into an Orange store today and walked about 30 minutes later with a DSL modem. The claim was we’d have a working phone line in two days and Internet in less than 10 days.

We’ll see. Unfortunately, Free (as in Free sucks) may still prevent this as they may decide to hold onto our line or not release some database lock, or something, and prevent Orange from getting at it.

To truly appreciate what we have just done you have to understand a little be about France, Orange, and Free. In the USA we had Ma Bell. A total monopoly — ran all our local lines. Here in France, the moral equivalent is FranceTelecom (or FT for short). As far as I can tell, they still hold an effective monopoly over local service. Every single wire that goes to every single home goes through their exchanges. FT owns Orange.

A few years ago France passed a law that said that FT must share their lines with other providers. I think this may apply only for DSL service and not voice, but I’m not 100% sure - it certainly does for Internet service. Hence was born companies like Free (and a few others). These companies, of course, must go through FT to get their service to the home.

Now, I’m positive that FT doesn’t make as much money on someone that connects up through Free as they do someone that connects up through their own Orange service. So just imagine the following: some time ago Free sees they are running out of slots for new subscribers in my region of Marseille. So they send a request to FT to create a new group of slots so they can keep up with demand. But FT drags their feet and takes forever to complete the request. As a result, Free runs out of space and this puts a bunch of subscribers (like myself) in limbo. What do these pissed off subscribers do? They cancel with Free and run right into the arms of the other big Internet service provider in town: Orange. Perrrrfect. Of course, you can also blame Free here (as we’ve chosen to do): they should have known it would take FT a long time and should have ordered their slots with enough lead time to not run out!

I’ve been reading about this new WiMax stuff that is coming - sounds like a test run on the Chicago river gave upload/download speeds better than that of a high quality DSL line and much faster than the crazy-expensive cell phone plans like Verizon’s EVDO. Seattle now has ClearWire - which is wireless into your home. When we return to Seattle we are going to investigate these non-wire options. Dealing with these uncomfortable business relationships and ancient wired technology seems to be a recipe for problems. Of course, if it is all that functions…

We finally figured out what was going on with our internet. For your entertainment, here is the history:

Aug 3: Ordered from www.free.fr.
Aug 20: The modem arrives and works. Glorious!!
Aug 21: 10 hours later the modem ceases working.
Aug 22-Sept 2: Repeated calls to their help line. We have to pay for these calls to the tune of 0.35/minute.
Sept 3: Free technician comes out and verifies that, indeed, we have plugged the right cable into the right line. “It is a FranceTelecom problem. We’ll have it resolved in less than two weeks” he says.
Sept 6: Free tells us that they accidentally canceled our subscription, and have reinstated it. It will take 1-3 weeks to get working.
Sept 20: We call and are told it will happen very soon.
Sept 28: We call and are told it will happen very soon.
Oct 3: We bring in the big guns.

There is, thank goodness, someone assigned to help us out-of-towners get started here in Marseille. And she is very good. I wasn’t there when she got in touch with the technical support people (which we’d not been able to get through to), but she found out that the problem is the Free’s “internet cable” is full. They have asked FranceTelecom for a new network, but have no idea how long it will take to get it. I would have loved to have seen that conversation: we pushed pretty hard and never were able to get a straight answer.

How did they not see this coming? They should have known what was happening ahead of time and pre-ordered. And why couldn’t they tell us that? I find it rather aggravating that they kept stringing us along - “it will be very quick! Just sit tight!” When it comes right down to it, it may be that FranceTelecom is dragging its feet doing this work, but Free should have been much better about it.

So, now we will cancel. Of course, to cancel means we have to send a signed letter along with the modem back to Free. That will take at least a week. And then we have to order a new service. And that will probably take 2-3 weeks to get turned on. So, probably another month without internet. What a bother! That is almost a 1/3 of my stay over here without internet.

Free is cheaper, and it gives you more than the others. As everyone around here has said, if you can get it, it is by far the best deal. That if is a might big if, however.

Still no Internet. And Julia has joined in our frustration and pooped in the bathtub. Let me tell you, those internet guys were really afraid after that!

But, just to give you some insight into the Kafkaesque situation we are in, we had an argument with our provider the other day over the definition of three weeks:

Them: This stage takes between one and three weeks.
Us: It was three weeks yesterday!
Them: It can’t be three weeks or you’d have a working line!

Our conversations often start out with:

Us: Hi, our internet hasn’t been working for a month
Them: Can you please check that the black cable is plugged into the left most socket?
Us: Yes, it is <I swear you can’t hear the frustration in our voices>
Them: What does the display say?
Us: It is a slowly turning rectangle
Them: Hmmm, are you sure that cable is plugged in?
Us: Yes.
Them: Did you say a month!? Wow! Maybe I should check your file.
Us: <picture cartoon of person with thunderbolts and lightning shooting out of clouds above their head> Yes, that would be good.

BTW, we have to pay for these conversations at a rate of 0.35 euros/minute. Craziness!