Food fight in the Nobel Cafeteria January 20, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in politics.add a comment
I’ve really been enjoying reading Paul Krugman’s blog:
Urp. Gack. Glug. If even Nobel laureates misunderstand the issue this badly…
Both Krugman and Becker, who he is taking a shot at, have won the Nobel prize in Economics.
So happy Gore invented this series of series of tubes!
It is just wrong! January 20, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life.7 comments
You see me there holding the old 2006 Particle Data Book on the left, and the new 2008/9 one on the right. This is the bible for the field of particle physics. The small book contains just about everything you might want to quickly look up – particle masses, decays, lifetimes, status of searches, etc. The big version contains everything, including reviews of just about every relevant topic in the field (not shown, it is over 2000 full size pages of small print).
But look at these two guys carefully. Note how small the blue 2008 version is. That will actually fit in your pocket. Or a small pocket in your book bag. The orange one – quite a bit bigger (and thicker), and has a spiral binding. Has the knowledge of the field really increased that much over the past two years?
While the spiral binding is good – the old version of mine has never made it through two years without the binding splitting – the size is not. It won’t fit in a pocket, and it won’t fit in a book bag pocket either. The upshot is it sits out in a larger pocket. After having had this for only 3 weeks the pages are already more beat up than my two year old old version.
I wish they would bring back the old version!
In this day and age, however, it isn’t clear this matters any more. Versions of the book are available for almost all mobile platforms now. And the full version is less than 100 megs – so easily fits on your portable’s hard disk (or a USB key for that matter). Maybe the printed material just doesn’t matter any more!
Thank you, J-mo! January 19, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in DOE, NSF, politics.add a comment
The Obama stimulus package is taking shape. From the point of view of science, it looks rather good:
- Extra 3 billion for the NSF
- Extra 2 billion for the DOE’s Office of Science
- Funds to help states cover some education costs
The first two are a big boon to research grants – like the one that supports me and my students. The last won’t totally cover the 10% cut that UW is currently facing from state funds, but it will help!
The overall proposal is breath taking in size. The question is… who will pay for it in the end? My guess is the young folk… 
The New Cup January 17, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in University of Washington, university.4 comments
I eat lunch almost every day at a cafeteria near by my office. UW has made a big effort in the last two years to make all the garbage that comes out of their cafeteria’s compostable. I met one of the guys who works on that at a party a few months ago. At the time he told me that almost 90% of all the garbage that comes out of the cafeteria is compostable. If they could do soda cups they would be at 95%.
Compostable has a very specific definition. 60 days in a heap and it has to have broken down. One of the out growths of this is “silverware” made out of corn starch. It works great – until you put it in hot soup. The spoons have this very odd behavior of curling up, which makes it difficult to fit in your mouth (or hold soup).
Apparently cups that hold cold liquids are the hardest to make compostable. Hot liquids are easy – you coat the inside of the cup with something, and the cup is good to go. Cold cups, however, have to be coated both inside and outside. The reason is condensation! If the outside isn’t coated, and the cold liquid causes condensation, then the water droplets that form on the outside of the cup will cause the paper part of the cup to disintegrate. Not so good! The fellow at the party told me he had found cups that would be compostable under a 90 day definition, but the UW composting contractor didn’t do 90 days.
Apparently they have solve the problem. Above is the cup. There is a twist, however. I tend to bring these cups back from lunch with some rootbeer in them. After that is gone I fill them with water and use them until the next day. If I eat lunch in my office the next day, the cup will remain in active duty. Sometimes for several days.
No more. These new cups make it almost 48 hours. At that point I noticed a ring of water forming around the cup. Still, it is very cool to see UW have such a high rate of compostable material coming from its cafeterias. The fellow I was talking to said that the next step was to tackle the office work areas. He said this was going to be much more difficult because he had much less control over them. I would imagine so, just looking at all the stuff we throw out! I’m waiting to see!
Higgs Properties Micro Workshop January 15, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in Conference.4 comments
There is a micro workshop going on at the UW this week: Higgs properties. The web site contains links to the talks and we are also uploading video of the formal discussions (sorry, it is in EVO format).
This is the first in a series of Joint Theoretical-Experimental workshops run jointly by the University of Washington Physics Department and the University of Oregon Physics Department. The idea is that everyone has been spending all of their time at the LHC working on the Higgs discovery (as we should be). But once the Higgs is discovered – then what? The most important question, perhaps, is “What kind of Higgs is it?” Is it a Standard Model Higgs? Or is it something more exciting – a Higgs that looks like it better matches a particle in another theory?
Actually, this question is the age old one in particle physics. As soon as a new particle is discovered one must measure everything about it to make sure it is the particle we think it is. We think we have a duck, now, listen to its quack and make sure it is a duck! We did this with the top quark discovery back in 1995. As soon as we had it, we started measuring its properties (for current results see the Other Properties section of our current Top Results).
Of course, if we are do this this properly, we need to know what numbers are expected within the theory of the Standard Model – so we can look for deviations. And with the Higgs this is just getting started. Experimental and Theoretical concerns come together here: some things are hard to measure and others are hard to calculate. The point is to find the numbers that need a bit more calculation or slightly better measurement techniques. This is best done when you have a group of experimenters and theorists sitting around a table hashing things out. We can then all go back to our offices and our experiments and try out our new ideas over the next year. I suppose one can think of these workshops as a jumping off point for new investigations. The biggest surprise for me is how theoretically unstable the jet-veto cut is. I don’t really understand enough of the issues yet to write about it, however.
I really like this format of workshop. I attended something similar in at Davis back in 2007 on really crazy (unexpected) theories. This one is organized around a one or two talks in the morning and afternoon, and the rest of the time is spent in discussion in smaller groups. The result is people like me, who are lucky enough to be local and perhaps don’t know so much about Higgs properties, are learning a lot, and the experts are getting to talk about the things that need to be done for the next year. There is one major downside to this however: it is at my home institution. That means I’m still preparing lecture for classes, attending department meetings, and coming home every evening to be a Dad. The result is the workshop doesn’t get as much time as it should! Or I’m just not getting the sleep I should be getting!
The series is supported by the DOE – they gave us enough money for this idea that we can fly participants to Seattle. This makes a huge difference as to whom we can invite: it is much easier to pull people from Europe, and in a world of tight science budgets this is hugely appreciated!
UPDATE: Ann Heinson pointed out I should really be linking to a much nicer web page with top quark results on it.
Making Bread January 15, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in Food, life.2 comments
This was a New Year’s resolution. I would make bread this year. I used to do it all the time – I would make sandwiches for work on my bread, for example. But as I grew older I fell out of the habit. Too much work to do, is what I told myself. For the same reason I stopped cooking for myself and started eating out all the time.
I thought I’d start simple – French bread. This is single rise, so it is easy and doesn’t take that long. Less than two hours start to finish, and it can be ignored for about an hour and a half of that two hours. I also had some help, which made it go faster.
In the end it came out looking very good:
But there was a problem. Just before New Years I slipped and fell on some ice in a hotel parking lot near Fermilab. I fell and a rib or two absorbed the full force of my fall when I hit a curb. It didn’t break – the emergency room called it “Skeletal stress.” Whatever, the upshot is it is still too painful to do something like knead the bread. So I had to use one of those MixMaster 5000 things to do most of the kneading.
Paula pretty much had it: “It is like the French Bread you buy in a French Supermarket.” The bread is still good, but it has a level of uniformity, and it isn’t chewy enough either. Darn. Hopefully I’ll try this again next week and my back will be in good shape.
Crazy Weather – Marseille Edition January 12, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in Snow, life.3 comments
The French city of Marseille is not one you would normally think of being under snow. After all, it is right on the Med. But a lot of places are getting hit by snow that don’t normally get hit by snow. We lived there for a year last year and we never saw snow. I think we may have seen a few flakes… but nothing actually hit ground. As one of my friends there put it:
Snow in Marseille. Has not happened in at least the last four years. Nobody has snow tires and the city says they cannot find the salt truck (seriously).
Another friend of ours put it thus: “Great for the kids, sucks for the adults.”
Here is a picture I took from the apartment balcony last year when we were in Marseille:
and here is what it looks like now (taken by the current residents of the appartment):
The images from flickr are impressive. My friend has been walking around the city taking pictures, and just the general pictures posted all over flickr.
And Marseille isn’t the only place that has been crazy. For a little while last week Seattle was cut off from the rest of the country. Both of the big interstates out of town were cut off – I5 and I90. Water and snow was closing them!
What Nest Egg? January 10, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in life.1 comment so far
End of year tax documents are starting to arrive. A long time ago I opened a Roth IRA. It has never been above water, but this year it really fell. It started the year at about 1700.00 bucks and ended the year at 1040 bucks. Wow. I’m scared to look at my actual retirement account!
Happy New Year!
That Is A Lot Of Work! January 6, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in ATLAS.6 comments
The thing I spent half my sabbatical on is finally public. It started as an ATLAS wide exercise to make sure our computing environment could handle physics analysis. What better way than to actually do a “dry” run of physics analysis. It grew from there. So much work was invested in it (years, by some peoples account) that it seemed crazy not to make the results public. That took a year: I and my colleagues stopped doing real analysis work for this note over a year ago.
Well, today it was put out on arXiv: Expected Performance of the ATLAS Experiment – Detector, Trigger, and Physics. It is 1852 pages long, so I can’t exactly see everyone rushing to print this out for bedtime reading. No fears; I won’t be disappointed. But it is the PDF to download if you want to know what ATLAS thinks it will be able to do. We even do our best to simulate initial data conditions (misalignment, small data sets). It has chapters on all the big physics topics (Higgs, Top, Exotics, Standard Model, B, etc.) and performance expectations too (electron, muon, tau, b-tagging, etc.).
2009. Ready or not January 2, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in ATLAS, CERN, D0, Fermilab, LHC, politics, science.4 comments
We’ve made it through the first day of 2009. I have mixed feelings about this coming year.
- Federal Science Funding Levels. The economy is crashing down around our ears. Business responds quickly (layoffs
) – government is a bit slower. If things followed their natural course of action that would mean science funding, along with everything else, will take yet another hit. However, the incoming Obama administration seems to be committed to spending the USA’s way out of this recession, so in the end funding might not change very much. I am hopeful that hard sciences funding will remain at least stable. - Federal Science Funding Directions. Climate change is what the Obama administration is focused on. There is a good chance that if you are researching something connected with climate change you may have access to increased funding opportunities. I would expect a funding profile similar to NIH’s funding during its years of increase. I would like to think that funding will spill over into the physical sciences – it should because there are connections between the physical sciences and clean air technologies. All of this is applied scientific research. I hope that the pure research funding gets an increase as well, as an investment in this countries future (particle physics is pure research, of course). I’m feeling neutral here.
- Federal Science. Obama’s science team is just a BLAST of fresh air when compared to the current administration’s. After all, his DOE nominee is a Nobel prize winning experimental physicist. Even if the science advisor isn’t elevated to a cabinet position (PDF), there will be someone in the room that knows a great deal about science, research, and how it is done. Even if there are cuts to science funding, I’m very hopeful there will be intelligent cuts rather that unscientifically motivated cuts. I’m very hopeful in this respect.
- State Universities. The economy in states is depressing. Some states, like my own (Washington) that rely on sales tax are being hit hard and very fast. State universities can’t escape that, obviously, and my university is no exception. Unfortunately, this usually translates to reduced raises, inability to counter offers from outside, reduced support for research, etc. In our own department I wouldn’t be surprised if some people left for other universities that, for whatever reason, were able to make good offers in this awful climate. There is, in fact, already evidence this is happening. The only consolation is most universities are in the same boat, and so most of them are having similar problems. I know less about private universities, but I do know the endowments of many of them are also having difficulty. I’m very downbeat about this: it will be a rough two years at least, I think.
- My Science. When it comes to the Tevatron and the LHC… Well, I see no reason that the Tevatron shouldn’t continue to break records in luminosity (they just broke one earlier this week). And the experiments will continue to be flooded with data. While it is possible for one experiment or the other to have a catastrophic failure, I doubt that will happen. And they should continue to produce papers and science at a furious rate. I also am looking forward to real LHC collision data this year. While I hope it will be at the full 14 TeV, I suspect it is more likely to be at 2 TeV, just a hair above the Tevatron’s luminosity. We’ll hopefully know what the machine scientists think about that sometime in February. I’m really hopeful about this.
- New Years Resolutions. Well, I made only one. That way I have a hope of keeping it: make bread more often. I think there is a chance that I will keep this one. Especially now that I’ve said it publically.
Of course, this should also be a fun year, as noted by the Beacon News:
Frustrated with their failed attempt to destroy the world in 2008, the scientists at Fermilab and their counterparts at Switzerland’s CERN physics lab resolve to perfect their new device, the Large Planet-Sucking Black-Hole-o-Tron.
Here is to another great year of data collection and science at the Tevatron and first collision data at the LHC!
