Life as a Physicist

By this point in the year I usually fear Jingle Bells. Deck the halls causes headaches. But not this year: stores in France don’t play the music incessantly. We’ve been trolling around town purchasing (small) gifts and narry a Christmas tune is to be found.

What a pleasant change from the USA! Perhaps when I return there three days from now I can enjoy one or two days of Christmas music without the ill side effects!

Articles like this one in Ars-Technica always fascinate me: Internet Archive to store researchers’ notes, raw data. The idea is to collect everything an academic does — web pages, notes, local files, etc. Then they get uploaded to the Internet Archive. Check out the article for more details.

They fascinate me because there is a good part of me that is a***-retentive — I want to keep track of everything I do. For example, I use Onenote as my electronic logbook (along with a Tablet PC so I can write in it). I keep a huge amount in there — gigabytes - plots, notes I’ve proof-read, etc. All of it searchable (it is pretty cool — it will OCR any PDF’s I put in there, so they become searchable; and my handwriting too — something my second grade teacher could never do).

Would it be useful? Timmer, who wrote the Ars article, took a stab:

Will the material that’s uploaded be of any value? Based on my personal experience, the answer here will be mixed. I’ve taken notes and made annotations for everything from peer-reviewed publications to articles for Ars, but only a fraction of the ideas ever make it into the publication. Within the remainder, there are some genuine insights that don’t make the cut due to a lack of direct relevance or space constraints. But there are also a lot of spur-of-the-moment thoughts that I later reject due to further reading or analysis. Unless all contributors are careful about what they upload, this effort may produce a storehouse of bad ideas.

Let me go further: No. It will not be very useful. At least, not my research notes. I make so many mistakes, try out so many ideas that are just plain dumb in retrospect (and many that were dumb in the first place - I just missed that fact). And I can’t spell.

There is also the issue of unpublished data. My logbook contains a great deal of D0 (and hopefully soon, ATLAS) data that has never been published. Plots with unrefined selection cuts (with interesting bumps!). Items that have not been vetted by the collaboration for publish release. Perhaps after some statute of limitations one could release this into the public, but certainly not immediately.

On the other hand, this is personally incredibly useful. Further, it is available on all the computers I use (well, the Windows ones), sync-ed across the net automatically, and so much lighter to carry around than a real logbook. So, while I’m 100% behind logbooks, mine will remain private for the near future.

I guess the biggest question I have is: what would this be useful for? I don’t see it other than as a way to save for posterity (can you say “information overload”)? What am I missing here?

This is getting a little crazy. About two years ago I got a small wifi bunny - the Nazbatag (warning: sound at that link). Nazbatag means “rabbit” in Armenian, which is the native language of the guy behind the thing. It has ears, lights across its belly, and talks with the Internet. It even runs a small virtual machine to process instructions (which you can modify).

This thing has been around for years. Their most recent update even smells things. But I always thought it was a nerd thing.

Not so clear.

First, earlier this year, there was a big display in one of the high-end department stores here in Marseille - Galeries Lafayette. Then on the plane flight back from Italy, Paula read an Italian magazine that claimed the rabbit was the hot gift this Christmas for the tech-savy guy (note: not the nerd guy).

Hey! I’m a head of the fashion curve!! That is, well, the first time that has ever happened!

Sadly, that is only luck…

Apparently mine is not very good. Julia was given pasta a vegetables (all sorts, including apple bits) tonight. Home cooked, even! She very carefully picked the pasta out and ate only that. However, that wasn’t enough, so she grabbed my paper napkin (when I wasn’t looking) and proceeded to eat that as well. She’d rather eat that than her veggies!

Guess my cooking isn’t all that good! Looking forward to Paula getting back tomorrow!

We have to replace our video camera. And, as Paula just pointed out, we need to do it before Christmas so we can video Christmas! So much for waiting to see how much insurance is going to give us!

This turns out to be a real problem. I like the Sony SR7. We will arrive from France in Ottawa on Dec 22nd, so we need to have it starting then. Here is a break down of the cost in all countries I’m going to be in or around over the holidays.

Cost in the USA: $1045 (pre-tax).

Cost in France: 1200 euros (with taxes) ==> $1760 US

Cost in Ottawa: $1400 Canadian (pre-tax) ==> $1381 US

Further — when I order from Amazon, I was charged no tax. That is a huge difference in cost - especially to Europe. I don’t get it either — the dollar is so weak. It has been declining for a while - why are items made outside the US still so cheap inside? Is the mark up that big? And in Europe the taxes are larger than the US, but not that much — especially when you take the conversion rate into account.

How do Europeans buy enough gadgets!? 

From the legal point of view, this camera spend the first week of its life in Canada, then move to the USA for 3 weeks, and then over to France for about 7 months, and will then remain in the USA for the rest of its life (assuming it isn’t stolen). So ordering it from the USA should be no problem — and it is, by far, the cheapest.

Julia is about 16 months old now. She, however, still likes to mimic the things we do. For example, if you clap your hands she will usually copy you.

During an ATLAS analysis model meeting last night I discovered something else she likes to copy: talking! When I’d lean forward to talk into the microphone she would too: “babababababababa”. I’m not sure what the rest of the people in the meeting thought. Suffice it to say I was muted if I wasn’t talking!

I’m looking forward to Paula getting back from her trip!

But mine knows how to unplug the telephone cable from the wall. You know - the one that brings the DSL signal into the house. And - and this is the kicker - she knows when to do it: when her dad is using IP conferencing!

How smart is that!?

Orin, my graduate student, was visiting Marseille for two days yesterday. We went to a nicer place for lunch:

Us: We have 6 people

Them: oh. We are quite full, let me check.

Them: … Sorry, we are full.

Us: How long is the wait?

Them: Over 30 minutes. Very sorry!

Us: <discuss options…>

Them: Unless you’d like to sit in non-smoking?

The room they led us to was in the same area as the smoking room. And was totally empty — they must have had over 30 seats available there!

While waiting my turn in a police station to report our robbery, I was reading a City Magazine, A Nous. I found the following:

C’est cette ubiquite et flexibilite qui font que certains ont deja declare que Facebook serait le future systeme d’operation - le Windows, si vous voulez - de tous nos ordinateurs de surcoit en ligne.

I’m not 100% positive of the translation, but I’ll take a stab here:

This flexibility and ubiquity is what has cause certain people to declare that Facebook will be the future operation system — the Windows if you will — of all online computers.

Even if I got the words wrong, I don’t think I’ve gotten the sense wrong.

Think about what this is saying: a social networking application will be the next bit OS. We will live in Facebook. The first thing you do when you log in will be to bring up Facebook. And you will then spend most of your time there, and then you will switch off your computer when you are done.

I’ve seen lots of comments to this effect around the web. It was Google a while back, and before that it was the web browser as an OS.

This boggles my mind. I think it would be horrible if we spent all our time confined in one of these walls. Won’t anyone spend anytime creating anything new? New tools and toys either on the web or local to your computer? I can’t imagine my life without doing that. We will never see the end of Windows, Linux, or even the Mac - the general purpose operating system. If all you want to do is read email and surf the web, sure. But, seriously folks, can you imagine the generation coming up now - who have computers in their blood - being content to be just users? I hope not, or we are in trouble!

When I first read about Texas sacking its science education official because she sent an email around about a talk that was pro-evolution, I picked up on this line:

But now Ms. Comer, 56, of Austin, is out of a job, after forwarding an e-mail message on a talk about evolution and creationism — “a subject on which the agency must remain neutral,” according to a dismissal letter last month that accused her of various instances of “misconduct and insubordination” and of siding against creationism and the doctrine that life is the product of “intelligent design.”

My first thought was “well, yeah, for someone to make an informed decision you would want them to be unbiased.” I stared off into space for about 10 seconds, and then my brain BROKE.

This is crazy!! This neutral thing implies that you have to compare evolution and creationism. What the heck!? How can you? It’s worse than apples and oranges! Teach evolution in a science course. Teach creationism in a religion course. The two should not be mixed!

The insanity must stop!

Actually, I don’t think, as some are predicting, that Texas will become the next battle front in the evolution vs creationism. I was in Austin for 5 years for my undergraduate work. Austin is quite progressive and has become a huge tech town. Something like this is bound to get many of the large urban centers in Texas up in arms.

Seriously, I wonder if children are as confused as we worry they will be? By the time they hit 5 or 6th grade and are starting to learn some of these complex theories they are pretty smart. Further (gasp) they talk to each other. I would expect any attempt to shove something down their throat (evolution or creationism) would be met with a fair amount of resistance. And, I hope, awkward questions to the teachers - best way to learn, after all, is by doing and asking questions. But thing I do worry about is that as you erode boundaries to science you allow more and more non-science into the realm of science. We are already doing it in public health (specifically, how we deal with birth control). Where next?

P.S. The title is from a bumper sticker found in many blue states: “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing it’s idiot.” — because the idiot is currently inhabiting the White House.