Life as a Physicist

This week is the next step in the battle of the workers v. Sarkozy (the president of France). As usual in this battle it means the nation’s transportation network will shut down. Unlike last time, it sounds like this will go on for longer than one day. Also, unlike last time, this is going to be a major pain for me - and cost me quite a bit of extra money.

It will start on Tuesday evening around 8pm. As far as I know, it will only affect the main train lines and anything else run by the SNCF (which would be just about anything with train wheels in France).

I’m getting caught because I’m attending a cool mini-conference/workshop, Detecting the Unexpected, on Friday and Saturday. My flight to the US is Weds afternoon. So I will travel to Paris a day early. But the train strike is making everything very expensive - there is not a single hotel room to be had near the airport. So I’ll stay in downtown Paris (not cheap!). Normally - this would be great! But transportation to the airport the next day is going to be very messy because of the strike. Initially I though I’d take a plane from Marseille to Paris - but it is going to be over 2000 euros to go! I’m sure that is because lots of people who wanted to travel by train have switched.

So what is the strike over? And what does the French President have to do with train workers? First, I don’t claim to understand what is going on here. But I’ll open my mouth and put my foot in…

Well, just as in the USA, the government sets hiring, firing, and retirements for the public sector workers. Unlike the USA, train workers are part of the public sector. The particular issue last time was a special provision that allowed some workers to retire at 50 on full pensions. As with every government around the world, the French one is trying to trim costs. My impression is that Sarkosy mostly backed down on this one. This time, however, the action targets a broader cross section — something like a 1/2 million that get to put in money 2.5 years less than the other workers. Sarko’s argument is that the pension system is costing too much money and needs reform and cost reduction badly.

At any rate, I’ve been caught in the cross fire to the tune of at least 200 bucks. No telling what shape things will be in when I return on the following Monday.

This anecdote took place, apparently, 5 or 10 years ago.

Advice: Don’t drive your car to Marseille. It will get stolen.

Professor: No problem, it won’t happen.

Professor drives his expensive car to Marseille. Parks it, and take out the expensive car radio. Leaves note in car: This car has no car radio.

Next morning the car is gone. He finds the note he left. Added to it is: “Don’t worry, we’ve already got one.”

A recent write up in the Economist of a recent paper in Psychological Sciences (could not find the original link) hits on several themes I’ve talked about before. Researchers at the University of Toronto looked at the differences between men and woman’s ability to look at 24 objects and quickly identify which one didn’t belong. I think it is common lore that men are better at spatial reasoning and, indeed, they did better on average than women in this test (68% vs 55% success rate).

Given the number of other results around, I don’t think this difference is unexpected. Though there are plenty of arguments as to why it exists!

They went a little further, however. They then split the people who took the test into two groups. The first group they had puzzle game, Ballance, for 10 hours. The other half were asked to play “Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault” — an action-packed first-person-shooter video game. Afterwards they were retested. In group that played Pacific Assault everyone’s success at identifying the odd object increased — though the women increased much more than the men. In fact, the study says that there was no statistical difference between men and women after playing. Relative performance was unchanged for those playing Ballance. Further, they re-tested five months later and the improved performance at identifying the odd-object-out remained!

Which leads one to ask: is there a video game to fix my memory failings (I can’t remember numbers for the life of me)? Or perhaps one to help me learn how to spell!?

All of us old professors like to reminisce about the time we were graduate students or post-docs. How good it was, and how much we’d like to go back to it. I’m not so sure we should.

In general, graduate students and post-docs focus on analysis. They have 24/7 to work on that. Technical problems, physics problems - whatever. And they can play with the data. They make the plots. They see the bumps and get to play the “What the Hell is that!?” and then really get their hands dirty and find the bug, or the new detector feature, or (whatever) that caused it. To me, at least, that sense of discovery was exhilarating.

And I really miss it now that I’m a professor. I have students on two different experiments now, so my time is split at least three ways: D0, ATLAS, and the University of Washington (teaching, department duties, etc.). So, my time to make plots isn’t very much. And it is very fragmented. But I have this desperate need to return to that.

But I’m on sabbatical this year. And I’m returning to being a graduate student. I’ve been making really simple plots — like muon fake rate vs chi2 cut. It is a lot of fun. Only, perhaps a little less fun when I discover that the new bump I’m looking at has already been endlessly discussed on one of ATLAS’s hypernews forums (an internal discussion board like Yahoo groups or USNET). And this is the root of why this perhaps isn’t such a good idea: my students and post-docs can move on this sort of thing much faster than I can. On the other hand, my experience can allow me to look at their work and quickly decided if it is right or wrong (well, mostly). As far as producing physics and getting the experiment running my time would probably be much better spent doing that sort of thing - and learn the experiment through their plots.

But the need is strong. So I continue to make plots on my own…

I think as HEP ages, btw, it is less and less the case that graduate students and post-docs have real time to focus on a single project: graduate students and post-docs are required to multi-task more than I remember having to do when I was a graduate student or post-doc. But this may be me just thinking the old days were better than things are now.

I’ve got a new breakdown of operating systems on ATLAS member’s portables: Old people (like me) use Mac’s. Young people use Linux. And all the CERN presentation computers use Windows. Needless to say, this causes some problems! Need an easy joke? Just mention Windows in your talk.

I’m attending the ATLAS Trigger & Physics week here at CERN. All of yesterday was plenary talks. One thing that happened repeatedly was a slide would show up “Quicktime TIFF required to display” and an empty image. I’ve never seen this happen as often as it did. The consensus, of course, was that Microsoft was at fault.

The weird thing is — it doesn’t happen on every single file. I don’t have a mac handy, so I can’t do any testing, but I did find several postings around the web - this one was the best one. The comments are particularly informative.

Basically, the problem happens because PowerPoint stores the images in the format it was handed. If it was handed a TIFF file, it will store a TIFF file in the PowerPoint file. If it was handed a jpeg, it will store a jpeg. Unfortunately, when it stores a TIFF some weird compression is written out that requires QuickTime to be installed to undo the compression. If your Windows computer doesn’t have QT, then it can’t be uncompressed. Comments to the effect that “windows can’t open TIFF files” are not correct (and that I could test before writing this ;-)).

But it gets weirder, at least, a little. If you have a file on your disk and you use PowerPoint to insert it with the “insert -> File” command then it will work. But if you cut/paste from Safari or something similar, then it won’t work. This turns out to be because you are crossing the Cocca/Carbon boundary and funny things happen to images when that happens. There is one hint: after you do the copy, use something image editing tool to modify the picture. This will force PowerPoint to convert it into a format that can be used on both platforms.

The flip side of this is PowerPoint should convert the image into a cross-platform compatible format. Perhaps the next version of PowerPoint for the Mac??

Of course, the other solution is to just use the PDF to do the presentation. But people do love their animations…

Sorry for the computer support nature of this post, but it was just so common I figured there had to be someone out there that understood this issue better than a room of several hundred physicists!

A long time ago I got a wireless nabaztag rabbit. This is a wireless device, connects to a central server or to your own server. I brought it with me to Marseille. Now that I have internet, I’m slowly getting my “house” wired up. However, I only discovered today that the Rabbit can’t do anything but the very weak WEP wireless security! So, do I down grade the security of my whole apartment or not use the rabbit??

Actually, the Orange wifi I’ve got has a kind-a cool feature: even if you have the password, new devices can only connect to the wifi when you push a button on the wifi router. After that they can connect anytime they like.

So, I’ll probably downgrade. Darn rabbits! Cause all sorts of trouble!