Pay The Man: ATT 1 Gordon 0 April 8, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life, travel.2 comments
I got lost in Prague. My hotel was very near a central transportation hub with two very large tram stops on opposite sides of a corner. Instead of walking I decided to be clever and hope on a tram to my destination. About 20 minutes later I was totally lost. I got off the tram but I could see no land marks. The obvious thing was to get back on the tram, but what would have been even better would have been to look at a map. Of course, I was far enough out of the central tourist area that there were no maps on the tram stops.
Ah! I have a smart phone. It has a GPS chip. A few minutes later I knew where I was – not that far from where I wanted to be, just on the wrong side of a hill. How awesome is that?
It was pretty awesome until I checked my cell phone bill online. That quick fix required about 0.9 megabytes of data. And cost me close to 20 bucks!! Yikes! Imagine what would have happened if I’d actually left the cell phone going, receiving emails, etc.
I’ve been resisting paying an extra 25 bucks a month for cheap (limited) data access over in Europe. But modern smart phones are just too useful. The question is – will the limited amount of data (20 MB) be enough for one week of travel? Time will tell…
Wu-ki Tung April 2, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life, university.3 comments
Wu-Ki Tung just passed away.
![tungBanner2[1]](http://gordonwatts.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/tungbanner21.jpg "tungBanner2[1]")
Wu-Ki is famous for his work on parton distribution functions (PDFs). I’ve known of him for years – but after retiring from MSU he moved to Seattle to be near his kids. Once here he joined the department of physics as an affiliate. That was when I got to know him personally. He attended many of our joint theory-experiment meetings. He helped me out a bit when I was teaching my graduate particle physics course (he wrote a book related to the topic). He smart and knowledgeable and always helpful. He will be missed.
I stole the picture from his retirement symposium page.
They Really Did Dress Like That March 15, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life.4 comments
My Dad is also an experimental particle physicist. Here is a picture from 1961 – about 5 years before I was born – when he was a graduate student at Yale:
![3353983261_14a9a7904d_d[1]](http://gordonwatts.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/3353983261-14a9a7904d-d1.jpg?w=587&h=484 "3353983261_14a9a7904d_d[1]")
My dad is the guy in the middle. Check out the lack of tie! That is like going to work in a tee shirt these days! And that was a complete experiment – a small scattering chamber (on the left), a pumping station with sample collector (middle, Dad built that), and then the controls on the right. Nice dial.
If you look around the flickr stream that clicking on that picture above sends you to you’ll see several other pictures like that from the time (along with ones of me when I was really young!). The look so NASA, don’t they? The other thing that impresses you (or me) is how small the experiments are. For scale, here is one of my current ones:
![atlas_600[1]](http://gordonwatts.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/atlas-6001.jpg "atlas_600[1]")
Note the tiny little person standing in the middle there. Of course there is no way I could every have built 1/3 of the experiment there!
The Good Olde Days!
Free My Text Books! March 2, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life, university.11 comments
![the_raw_feed_on_kindle-BIG[1]](http://gordonwatts.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/the-raw-feed-on-kindlebig1.jpg "the_raw_feed_on_kindle-BIG[1]")
I love the idea behind the Kindle. I don’t own one and I’m not planning on owning one anytime soon… unless…
As I’ve gotten older my eyes have followed my father’s: fantastic until 40, and then fall off a cliff. It won’t be long till I’m wearing trifocals. 
But the more rest I give my eyes – or, the more exercise I give them by looking around at objects at different distances – the better they feel. I stare at computers and books all day long. And so I don’t read much in the way of books at night. A few magazines perhaps, but not often enough to warrant the $360 dollar price of the Kindle.
But what I really want are my text books in electronic form. There is nothing like a well written text book to learn from. The web just doesn’t hack it (yet?) in this department. I can find little nuggets of information but there is almost never any context. But if I want to be taken from basic lagrangians, through group theory, to the Higgs mechanism in some detail… well, I a text book is my best source for that.
I’ve got some 80 of them, taking up a significant bit of my shelf space. They almost never leave my office here at work. The furthest they sometimes make it is home and back. And they are much less useful because of that. There is only one reason for this: they are heavy!
Wouldn’t it be great if they were electronic? I’d be happy to pay the same price for them, so long as I could put them on my various computers. I could display them on my big computer screen, and use my Tablet to take notes or create a lecture. Or even better, if they were in some sort of PDF format (or similar) I could write on them on my tablet and leave myself little margin notes! I’d be quite willing to put up with some DRM as long as it didn’t prevent me from reading it on my various computers.
Scanning through Amazon’s library of text books (as you might expect, I can find almost all the textbooks I need there) I’ve yet to see even one that I could get in electronic form – in any electronic form. What a pity!
Eventually this will happen – I just wish it was faster. And when it does I suspect it will be something like the folks older enough to own vinyl or VHS. Everyone will be forced to re-purchase the books in electronic form. Good thing these text books can be put down as tax write-offs!
Your CV is boring February 14, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in life, physics life.11 comments
My brother-in-law forwarded us an image of someone’s CV:
![resume-infographic[1]](http://gordonwatts.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/resumeinfographic1.jpg "resume-infographic[1]")
For comparison, here is what mine looks like:
Who would you hire!?
Da Vinci’s Take on the LHC February 9, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in LHC, physics life.3 comments
This is old news, but I stumbled across this for the first time. Check out this drawing:
![PWnew2_11-08[1]](http://gordonwatts.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pwnew2-11081.jpg "PWnew2_11-08[1]")
That is the CMS detector, taken apart. Stunning, huh?
Obviously, Da Vinci didn’t draw that – rather a member of the CMS collaboration, Sergio Cittolin, did. He is the project leader for the trigger and data acquisition systems for CMS. Apparently they are on the cover of the CMS physics Technical Design Reports (TDRs). Sadly, as I have only the electronic version, I never caught this! The drawings are beautiful. I want some large poster size ones to hang up outside my office at UW!
I found this in a Physics World article.
Trailer Park Physics Humor February 2, 2009
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life.1 comment so far
The Hidden Valley model is all shiny and new now. But that is because we’ve not introduced it to data yet! Who knows, after that it might look more like this:
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!
English Language Summaries December 19, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in D0, physics, physics life.add a comment
This is pretty neat. The RNA Biology journal is now requiring a Wikipedia article along with every submitted paper. The guidance from the journal is as follows:
At least one stub article (essentially an extended abstract) for the paper should be added to either an author’s userspace at Wikipedia (preferred route) or added directly to the main Wikipedia space (be sure to add literature references to avoid speedy deletion). This article will be reviewed alongside the manuscript and may require revision before acceptance. Upon acceptance the former articles can easily be exported to the main Wikipedia space.
Keep in mind that Wikipedia articles are to be targeted at a level that an undergraduate could comprehend. Try to avoid jargon and do provide links to other Wikipedia articles at the first use of specific terms, e.g. [[RNA]]. Also the title of the page should appear in bold at the first use of the text of the article, e.g. "eRNA."
This is fantastic. For a long time here at DZERO we were trying to write English Language Summaries (or Plain English Summaries) of all of our papers. For example, here is one for an old Z+b analysis. These were aimed at people who weren’t particle physicists, but had some real interest in the science – the general interested public. We have mostly given up on this, however (I haven’t followed why). Currently the best summaries of this nature I know about are on a blog – Tomasso’s, specifically (e.g. here and here for recent examples).
But Wikipedia is a great idea! It is an increasingly popular search destination. And it is, supposedly, better organized than a blog. And more permanent. Writing the results up there I think would be a great idea. The only thing thing that this doesn’t address is a central pillar of the power of Wikipedia: inter linking. For these articles to really fit in they have to be linked. And if similar results (for example, measurements by both CDF and DZERO of the same thing) are presented then pages would have to be combined or correctly linked. Perhaps a page a paper and then other pages that discuss the specific pages? The experiments could appoint topical editors (i.e. service work) that maintains all the W/Z results, all the Higgs results, etc. Ok, now this is starting to sound like lots of work!
A neat idea, however!
Remember… There is no Tevatron December 5, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life.2 comments
I’ve sat through two talks at this ATLAS Week Collaboration meeting where the history of various topics has been described. The modern era usually starts with LEP, then LEP finishes. There there is a period of stagnation, and poof! There is the LHC!
What pisses me off about this is the huge body of work done at the Tevatron. But it feels like tilting windmills to keep bring it up…
