Life as a Physicist

For the last two weeks Paula has been back at her mother’s taking care of Julia while I have been off having fun working at Fermilab. This weekend we exchanged places. For the next 1.5 weeks I’ll be taking care of Julia at my parent’s in New Jersey while she is off being a physicist.

It shouldn’t be all that hard, right?

Julia isn’t speaking English or French yet, but apparently she is speaking Japanese. I gave Paula a iPod nano for Christmas and Julia got a hold of it before Paula did and set its language to Japanese. We have no clue how to set it back… Does this mean we should just give it to Julia?

Bob Park, a physicsit from the University of Maryland, releases What’s New every week — a pithy one-pager of the crazy things going on around Washington involving science (well, crazy from a scientist’s point of view). Sort of like a weekly posting blog that started long before blogs (he has been doing this for 20 some-odd years). What he wrote about the budget cuts is exactly correct:

2. BLINDSIDED: APS PRESIDENT ASKS MEMBERS FOR HELP.

Why did the basic science budget, which was sailing smoothly six months ago, hit an iceberg? And why was high-energy physics thrown overboard? We can worry about laying blame later, but nothing is ever quite final in Washington. Right now we have to start swimming. Yesterday, APS President Arthur Bienenstock issued an urgent appeal to members to write to their congressional delegation and to President Bush to urge emergency supplemental appropriations. He included a sample letter making the connection between basic research and economic growth - even as the morning papers were using the word “recession.” My advice is not to agonize over language. Your letter is more likely to be counted than read. Just make it clear what you want in the first sentence.

Have you sent yours yet?

The night before my flight out to New Jersey I woke up at about 3am and couldn’t go back to sleep. I had an idea that wouldn’t let me get back to sleep: send the presidential candidates a list of questions and then post the answers, unedited. This was mostly motivated by a comment left in one of my posts.

AIP beat me to the idea. You can see their list of questions here. I have summarized them here:

• What would you do to improve K-12 science and math education?
• Would you teach evolution in public school classes?
• Discuss the future of our nuclear arsenal
• How would you pay for an increase in funding science
• The future of energy policy - what should the mix be between conventional, new types (solar, etc.), nuclear - and what sorts of investments would you make?
• What would you do to address global warming?

If I didn’t get the tenor of the questions right, that would be my paraphrasing mistake.

First, I’m glad they did this. It is great, and I hope they get good answers back!

But I don’t like some parts of the survey. The way the questions are setup seems to guide the answer. I’d rather give the candidates as much rope as possible so we can see how they would answer. Also, putting the evolution question on there — which is the “pro-life v pro-choice” question for scientists — doesn’t serve any obvious purpose. We already know the answer to that question because of the first republican debate.

I would have also like to have seen some more open ended questions - like “How do you see basic science research fitting into the economic future of the US?” (with examples, etc.).

Now — the answers are in already for most candidates (but not all). And they have a nice page setup - though it means clicking on lots of web pages; it would be nice if you could download them on a single page for each question.

I’m home babysitting my kid. I’ll try to read these over the next two days and summarize, but if someone beats me to it — let me know!

[UPDATE: I mistakenly credited this to the APS, not the AIP. Sorry!]

I’ve been reading various blogs that mention the budget cuts. I’m very happy to see many people complaining about the budget cuts. But all of them are HEP bloggers - and this leaves the impression that only HEP got cut (and I think some people leaving comments picked up on that). This, sadly, is not the case. For example, contained in a letter from the HEP section of the APS is the following paragraph:

Congress wrapped up the Fiscal Year 2008 (FY0 budget just before adjourning for the year. The budget, which wipes out $1 billion in increases approved last summer for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE Science) and the NIST laboratories, does irreparable damage to science and abandons the Innovation/Competitiveness initiatives of Congress and the Administration.

NIST, for example, has little or nothing to do with HEP. This is a global science problem. It is just the set of blogs I tend to watch are HEP oriented (they don’t call the blogo-sphere the echo chamber for nothing!). It is the case, however, the fusion physics and HEP were cut the hardest, however.

And then, there was something I was confused about. I had thought that science funding was cut 1% across the board. Turns out that is incorrect. DOE got a 2.5% increase, but after you factor in inflation that is the same as a 1% cut. The NSF, however, only got a 1.2% increase — so all of it will be hit hard when you factor in inflation.

Another aspect I didn’t even realize was pointed out to me when I visited the Subway sandwich store near Fermilab last week for some owl-shift-snacks. The guy working there said “what if all those people fired eat at Subway?”

There is an ongoing letter writing campaign to get congress to reconsider the science cuts - if you feel so inclined, please send a letter in!

I have a new camera, finally. I drove down Sunday to Chicago’s Millennium park to practice with it - it was a very gray day. But I did get a few pictures in.

This is the largest camera I’ve owned since I had the old film Olympus OM-2S (I loved that thing — 1000’s of pictures with it). Usually I like my digital cameras to fit into my pants pocket - but not this G9. And it has about 1000 controls, which I need to learn. Might take years.

At any rate, enjoy the pictures if you feel like a photo break!

David Pace has an excellent posting on ITER funding. I was going to leave a comment but his comment engine doesn’t want me to “command can’t be processed.”

One thing I would note is that the “don’t re-program” statement sounds like it is in the explanatory language. That would jib with another comment I heard that that fact, plus that the treaty is the law-of-the-land would give the DOE enough lee-way to pay off this years obligation.

David uses logic to follow the sign posts and concludes that the US is out of ITER forever. If that is the case for all the projects that got canceled or zeroed out, then that is a disaster: major science policy decisions were made over the course of several days without any apparent consultation with the scientists. This is a perfect way to run our country’s science program into the ground.

So, I hope many of these projects have been “delayed” for a year rather than de-facto canceled!

As a commenter pointed out, of course, I can’t really know what happened - and the actual  decision process will probably not be known for a long time if ever.

P.S. David — sorry your comment took so long to be posted on my blog: it got marked as spam, and I don’t check the spam bucket often enough!

There is room for two types of distributed computing in particle physics. The first one is boring - large clusters of computers run by laboratories or large universities with 1000’s of CPUs. These are essentially very big batch platforms. There are lots of unsolved problems - for example, how do get the data in and out.

The second type is much smaller. Say a small set of machines you are using to help analyze your 4 TB of ntuple-data for your analysis. While the batch farms are bound to be run by compute professionals, these small clusters are bound to be run by, well, us.

This got me to wondering — in the university environment - why aren’t we using some cross platform tool for running our analysis? For example, at UW we have large collections of Windows machines freely available to us (well, not freely) - the undergraduate lab computers. We also have a small number of dedicated Linux machines. ROOT does hold us back — it is difficult to get the same code running on more than one platform.

I stumbled on this article while trying to track down some other information on distributed computing. It describes using Microsoft’s virtual machine (MS’s answer to Java). Which got me to thinking — why haven’t we seen anything like this in Java? Wikipedia has a few references to projects in Java - but nothing that has crossed over to physics. Is it ROOT that is holding us back? Or something else?

[Update: ROOT developer wrote in to ask if it was ROOT or C++ that was holding things back -- yes, C++, which is of course what ROOT is based on. It should also be noted that we can only do a lot of what is possible now because of ROOT.]

Well, first some facts (and then onto more speculation). As a result of the omnibus budget agreement that cut science hard - and particle physics as well:

• BaBar and the SLAC b-factory will be shutting down early - in February (see video of the all hands meeting where this was discussed). They are basically being sacrificed so that the Tevatron can keep running. I believe their normal shutdown was the end of the year. As a member of an experiment on the Tevatron, all I can say is “thanks” and “sorry”. What a waste.
• SLAC and Fermilab will both have to fire a bunch of people. I’ve heard numbers like 10% and SLAC and similar numbers at Fermilab but I don’t know for sure.
• International Linear Collider accelerator research has been basically zeroed out for this year. Actually, they said we could spend 15 million. The problem was they told us to spend something like 85 million several months ago for the whole year - so we started to burn through it and now we are told we could only spend 15 million. So there is effectively nothing left.
• NOvA was put off at least a year. This is the off axis neutrino experiment that was to measure, among other things, theta13.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Science’s Kovar put it well when discussing the most significant possible impacts of this:

This loss of skilled and highly trained personnel will be difficult for our community and will have impacts beyond the delays in NOvA and ILC R&D since many laboratory staff work on multiple efforts.

What makes this so painful for us is that all signs pointed towards increased funding - and then the rug was pulled out from under us. Indeed, even the direction from the agencies was to increase our funding. Since congress the white house and persons blue and red were all pointing in the same direction we thought we were home safe. Turns out that may have been exactly what got us in the end.

So, the next part is speculation (well, some of it). Some pulled from conversations and also from an email the American Physical Society president sent around (I can’t find a copy of that email online). I think we got screwed because of some stupid high school bathroom brawl. Seriously! These people in Washington are supposed to be professionals and even if one group wants to be a set of idiots the others should rise above it all. As far as I can tell, here is what happened:

• Congress just about finishes the omnibus spending bill. [Snark: exactly how late was this!?]
• At the last minute Bush says he will veto it unless it comes at his number. [Snark: Presumably this is to prove that he is a fiscal conservative.]
• Democrats and Republicans in congress go round and round. They do not have the votes to override a veto in the end.
• Democrats give up and say “he wants it 22 billion cheaper? OK, we’ll do it”. [Snark: how did we not miss this big big warning sign that something bad was about to happen!? 20-20 hindsight!]
• Perhaps 4 days later the bill is ready. They (the democrats or more likely the staffers) when through the bill looking for things that Bush wanted and cut them. ITER, which got nailed, was a presidential initiative. America Competes? Something Bush wanted. I am positive that no one involved would claim this is how it was done, but all fingers I can see point in that direction. [I have no snark here: sad]

What the hell were they thinking? They cut these programs just because they are pissed off at the White House? We elected them there to be intelligent about this. I don’t care that the White House is being a total idiot about this (i.e. not working with congress) — two wrongs don’t make a right!!!

On a more rational note. So, what can we do to prevent this from happening next time? There are several people in congress that are very interested in science, perhaps they need to be closer to the appropriations process? I have no idea. But I’d love to know what we need to do.

I’ll close with a short quote from an APS press release urging a revisit of the bill:

The American Physical Society, representing more than 46,000 physicists in universities, industry and national laboratories, regards the fiscal year 2008 omnibus spending bill as extraordinarily damaging to the nation’s science and technology enterprise. The bill fails to fund appropriately the research and education programs authorized in the bipartisan America COMPETES Act, which President Bush signed into law only four months ago. The consequential layoffs of scientists and engineers throughout the nation will discourage American youth from pursuing these fields, just as the country needs their participation to sustain economic growth and national security.

Ah, those coketards are at it again [obscure "fake" reference].

I mentioned to a friend that I was doing a series of owl shifts. He wrote back: “And remember that Dr Pepper has no genuine medical qualifications.” We got it from this “scholarly” article:

The moral integrity of soft drink giant Schweppes was called into question today after it emerged that Dr Pepper is not a real doctor, has never been to medical school or received any form of health training, and has been using the title under false pretences.

However, I know the Dr. And I know the Dr well. It clearly has medical effects: I’m awake right now because of the Dr. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that article is a sham, and the author isn’t even a real journalist! Or at least a serious one. When will they learn? The Dr. is best.