Excess April 29, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in France, life, travel.add a comment
A few weeks ago my Dad visited me here in Marseille and we took a trip along the coast to Nice. We went the slow road – a long the coast – right a long the coast. At one point we got caught in the traffic jam that is St. Tropez. St. Tropez is a playground – made famous by Brigitte Bardot.
The harbor was packed with boats that were… well excessive. Most of them were large motor boats, but there were plenty of sailboats.
However — it was cool to see that it was a sailboat that took the “excess” grand slam gold metal title. That is the picture you see here. The thing is completely computer controlled too. In fair weather I wonder if you could sail it with one person? We also joked that it probably made sail “snapping” and luffing sounds so the captain could hear what was going on — being so far away from the actual sail!
And how deep does the keel go!?!?
I’ve got a few other excessive pictures, including a panorama that shows exactly how out of hand it was in that small port.
English in the Air April 28, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in Marseille, life.2 comments
This weekend, walking down the main drag in Marseille to the old port, I was surprised multiple times to hear conversations in English going on around me.
Summer is coming, and along with it tourists. When I was here first in 2005 it wasn’t so back. Just a few sitting in the bars along the old port. But now lots of people show up – both French and non-French. The town is really changing.
Summer is wonderful in Marseille. Warm, with enough wind to keep you from suffocating, and always sunny. Only one problem. At the end of summer it will be time for Paula, Julia, and I to return to Seattle. And teaching.
Spam Facts April 26, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in computers.add a comment
UW is a big place. And the computing folks there manage a lot of systems. Mail, of course. Our group’s computer guy knows a person involved in C&C’s mail operations and discovered that:
- 95% of all mail that arrives at UW is spam
- The record of the “sender not found” bounce messages into one account (like the ones that were causing me problems the other day) is 40,000!!! So, my problems are minor.
40,000!!! It is no wonder everyone is switching over to instant messaging.
A Little Too Self Involved… April 23, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in computers, physics life.add a comment
An email just went by on a public mailing list that contained the following gem:
I have many users who have no compiler, as they are physicists and have no use for C++.
I forget that in HEP we could not do physics without C++!
Despite its failings April 23, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in physics.4 comments
I was reading an internal note today and stumbled on this great quote:
The success of the standard model (SM) has been quite unexpected, given its shortcomings. The number of free parameters ranging many orders of magnitude, absence of Dark Matter candidates, the hierarchy problem, lack of gauge coupling unification, and no path to incorporate gravity naturally lead to the belief that the SM is but a low-energy approximation of some more general and aesthetically pleasing theory. Yet despite all e orts no significant deviations from the SM predictions have been found to date.
The way that starts is priceless!
Physics Bands: CERN Edition April 21, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in Geneva, band, physics life.add a comment
This month’s Symmetry Magazine has a feature on physics rock and blues bands. Ironically, I was at CERN last week for the ATLAS week and the Canettes played (check out their home page, as of this posting they are using one of my pictures there). I’ve seen them twice now, and they are a lot of fun. And they can pack a pretty large bar too!
P.S. One of their members runs the whole CERN computing department. Another member runs the ATLAS secretariat – which basically means the whole experiment. 
Not Sitting on our Laurels… Wait, we have no Laurels! April 18, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in LHC, physics.add a comment
The LHC hasn’t delivered its first collisions yet. ATLAS and CMS haven’t taken collider data yet. But we already have to plan for the next steps. There was a recent kickoff event at CERN for people working on the upgrade to the LHC – the so-called SLHC (Super Large Hadron Collider).
That picture above is a simulation of what the CMS tracker would look like at a luminosity of 10^35 – that is 4 orders of magnitude greater than what we expect to be running at by the middle of 2009. Being able to reconstruct that many particles is going to require both experiments to replace their tracking detectors with more robust and more accurate detectors. This takes years and years to prepare for – the R&D for much of the replacement is already well underway. They are talking about installing these new detectors in 2013 – 5 years from now.
The accelerator talk is also fascinating — but my favorite talk was from MLM who was summarizing some of the physics possibilities of the SLHC:
While there is no guarantee that any deviation from the Standard Model will be found, the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model will demand and fully justify these studies: we’ll be measuring the properties, however trivial, of something which we know exists, as opposed to blindly looking for “we don’t know what” as we are unfortunately doing today!
Worth a look if you are curious about the next step!
I AM the Margin Lady April 17, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life.4 comments
I have complained about the Margin Lady before:
The Margin Lady occupies a special place in the physics-thesis-writing ethos. … You knew the Margin Lady was on the horizon so you used a document template that was sure to satisfy her: figures just so, page number is the right spot, margins just perfect. It just doesn’t matter. No matter how perfect you will have to make corrections.
I am currently helping to edit some 200 pages of some 2000 or so pages that ATLAS will release at some point in the near (I hope) future. One of the things I’m responsible? Make sure the figures are done right. Make sure everyone uses the same units. Make sure everyone is printing on A4 paper. Make sure the margins are right!
I am the margin lady! Shoot me now!
Is There a Spam Storm? April 17, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in computers.1 comment so far
What is up with the spam today? Usually I have perhaps 5 or 6 spam messages when I first log in. Today I had over 100. And they are coming into my mailbox at the rate of about 2 per minute. This makes email almost totally useless!
Some spammer is using my email address as their fake from address. This is perfect for the spammers – they inflict all the bounce messages on someone else! How cool is that!?
I can see why folks are driven away from email. This is truly awful! I’ll not be answering much email today!
Update: More like 5 or 6 per minute right now!
The 20,000 dollar vacation April 16, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in Taxes, physics life.add a comment
Boy — you could do a lot on that kind of a vacation. You could have a nice house sitting out on the edge of an island… The penthouse for a night in downtown New York (I jest! I jest).
Well. I spent 20,000 on a vacation! Sadly, I just gave the money to Uncle Sam. Yep – Taxes! Isn’t that grand!?
The rules for working out of country are fairly complex. In general, however, our government takes a rather enlightened view towards working abroad: if you get paid out of country they are willing to give you a rather hefty tax break on that money. Which makes sense, really – if you are out of country you aren’t using as many of the services you would normally be if you were working in country. And besides, the more Americans working abroad, the better for our country’s image and also better because they will learn new things and bring them back!
However, while enlightened, they have some rather strict rules about what “out of country” means. And we violated them. If the rules had been for “out of seattle” instead of “out of the USA” then that cool $20,000 would have been sitting in my bank account! It was the Christmas trip back to the USA that did it. We were back in the USA for one full month. Some vacation and a bunch of work for both of us. What is really bad is that most of this is going to hit us on next year’s taxes. That combined with the weak dollar is going to make this year suck!
Actually, given the type of career that Paula and I have I don’t think we could work out of the country and also satisfy these rules – we have to travel back to the USA too frequently. Which is really unfortunate!
