Life as a Physicist

Graduate student and advisor bonding over Joss Whedon and Buffy.

Having to go from 8pm to the next morning at 9:30am without a portable. Didn’t get to write a talk I was asked at the last minute to talk about and also got a full 8 hours of sleep. Not done that in months.

A less scary moment was getting lost on the streets of Genova, Italy. This city is packed to the gills with buildings - it is impossible to get a lay-of-the-land unless you are on the side of a hill.

I have pictures, as usual. Along with some from a pretty stunning hike.

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.

I visited Lausanne last night to have dinner with some friends. I don’t have a rental car on this trip to CERN. So I had to take public transportation. Round trip that was 6 CHF for the bus/tram and 41 CHF for the train. That comes to 47 CHF - which is about $47 bucks for about 1 hour of being on public transportation (and standing at bus/tram/train stops for about 40 minutes). That is some serious money!

On the way out I ran into a friend that happens to live at CERN. She makes that commute every day - so of course she gets passes to make things cheaper: 10 CHF round trip.

The 5 bottles of wine that were consumed over dinner took some of the edge off, but that was a crazy expensive! It is cheaper to rent a car for one day - about 35 euros!!

Niiice.

After spending a month in the States visiting family, working at Fermilab, attending conferences (well, my wife, at least), we will arrive back in France on the 24th.

What better way to re-integrate ourselves into France than to be at the wrong end of a strike! Yes, our timing is impeccable. The SNCF is on strike again in the continuing battle between Sarkosy, the French president, and workers over benefits, working hours, etc.

The last time I was returning from the Unexpected conference I also got caught. That wasn’t too bad — I did make it back in the end, just late. But I was on my own. This time it will be the two of us, a boat load of luggage and Julia. Wish us luck!

I flew to Chicago today, from Ottawa, and was reminded why taking a train to get from Marseille to CERN is a so much more pleasant experience. First was the 30 minute drive to the airport. Then I stood in line for almost 40 minutes - because the ticket agent for United Express had gone on break. And there was only one ticket agent. I think there were over 50 people queued up by the time she got back (United Express — what were you thinking!?). Indeed, the backup was big enough that our flight was delayed departing. Then there was security - shoes off, portable out, cell phones out. I didn’t get selected for an extra search, including a pat down, but the person behind me did (and it was her first time flying - how do you get to 22 and not fly!?). And then waiting for another 35 minutes to board.

But I’m back in the good old USA. I shouldn’t complain: there is no way to deal with travel any other way but planes and cars. But I can dream…

And I have home made fudge with me… I was going to share it with people on the owl at the Tevatron, but it looks like my shift might be canceled!

I arrived back in Paris yesterday from the USA. That part was easy (thank you, for once, United). Getting from Paris to Marseille came close to being a disaster because of the strike. The easy train to take was the 1:30pm from the airport - direct to Marseille. Unfortunately, they had no idea if it would run. However, they did know that the 1:40 one from downtown Paris was running. The only trick left then was to get to downtown Paris. I waited over an hour and a half for the Air France bus to arrive at the airport. I gave up when I found out that it was taking over 3 hours to drive to downtown! That is normally a 45 minute trip in heavy traffic.

Fortunately, by the time I figured that out, they knew that the direct train from the airport was going to run, so I switched. Waited outside in the cold and the drizzle for nothing. As I said, if that is the worst I am affected by this strike… that isn’t too much!

The train ride was the slowest I’d ever been on - it was like being back in the USA. There were periods where the TGV was running no faster than running speed. It normally runs at about 186 mph!

BTW, I sat opposite this Finish guy. He had more technology that I did. He seemed to spend the whole train ride trying to get all of his various devices to work with each other. Is there some anti-correlation between number of tools and amount of work you get done? On the same topic, check out this post - it made me laugh out loud (I’ve had the same problems in my house).

As far as I know, the strike is underway. From my trip to the Paris airport, however, you would never have known it. I was a short walk from the Air France airport shuttle near Monteparnasse. It left right on time, and was only about half full. The second pick up point for that bus is Gare de Lyon — it took about 30 minutes to get there; not out of reason for Paris morning traffic. The trip to the Charles de Gaul airport took about 40 minutes — almost the same that it takes on the train. At no place did I see any traffic gridlock, which everyone was predicting (oh, the horror stories).

I’m happy, but a little disappointed in the sense I expected to have an adventure. Of course, there is such a thing as too much adventure, and I still have 2 flights and a 2 hour drive ahead of me…

And the flight to here, Davis, California, was pretty easy too. Just very very long! Good night!

Well, I’ve been caught in one strike. But that was in Italy. Tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll have my first real French Strike experience. Technically, no one is going on strike until tomorrow night, around 8pm. Unfortunately, university students have decided to try to block the train stations tomorrow. No one knows how effective they will be, or if any stations will actually be closed. Thus my carefully laid plans to arrive in Paris tomorrow before the start of the strike…

It gets better. I return to France next Monday. I figured that was enough time for the strike to play itself out. Turns out that all public sector administrative assistants will be going on strike next Tuesday - and the SNCF folks are planning on joining them in a huge rally. So now I have no clue what I’ll do when I get back to France. Of course, it is all uncertain and no one knows what will really happen. At the very least it should be entertaining.

I hope my credit card can buy me out of getting stuck in Paris. Not that Paris is a bad place to be stuck. Hmm…. Hold those horses a minute…

I also found out a bit more about what is motivating the strike. I’ll try to write about that in the next few days. From a USA perspective it is odd.

Finally, having started the process on July 1st, I got my official visa from France stating that I can stay in France for 8 more months. Sadly, I need to stay another 10 months. That may mean that I need to go through this process again. At any rate, it is nice to be official finally!

I spent last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at a really great conference in Grenoble. The topic was top physics, and lessons and techniques at the Tevatron and at ATLAS. I wish I could put my finger on what made it great: it was a small group (less than 50 people, I think), and everyone was willing to talk. The first day we ran about 3 hours over, for example (yes, yes, a good 30 minutes of that was my fault). Both Lorenzo and Harrison gave great talks as well as the others. I took some pictures too.

I have pages of notes from the conference (all stored electronically, of course, despite my busted laptop - which is getting worse). Some tidbits (if you don’t care, skip over to the last paragraph - partly to help me remember):

• At the Tevatron we produced about 8 tops per day, and 4 single tops per day. LHC will be one per second, and a single top 1 ever two seconds. This is a game changer - top becomes a calibration sample, for example (b-tagging, JES…). I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t explored all of its possible uses as a calibration sample yet. Heck, data for 9 hours at low luminosity (but full luminosity) will give you a top mass peak that you can see! And it is going to be exciting to measure that cross section at 14 TeV!! And they really are are going to do everything without b-tagging at the start of the run!
• No one yet talks about doing analysis in such a way to make the eventual combination with CMS easy. I really wish we’d start thinking that way from the beginning.
• I had not fully appreciated the history of the D0 JLIP tagging algorithm — it was nice to see it in action as far back as LEP and also (as I’ve seen) in ATLAS. I’m sure it is in CMS as well.
• During my talk I made the sarcastic comment that one shouldn’t measure things twice - because you are bound to get different answers. I really did mean that sarcastically — but people kept mentioning that I mentioned it thought out the rest of the talks. Sheesh.
• There was a big difference between the ALTAS and D0 talks. In general, the D0 talks talked about one method, and then went into all the details and tricks and the general mess than a proton-proton collider causes. The ATLAS talks were often an overview of techniques. For example, for the Jet Energy Scale ATLAS showed results (but not details) from about 4 different methods. I’m sure this will change when data arrives.
• Harrison made a rather provocative statement fairly early on in the meeting: we spend too much time trying to get the absolute scale of the Jet Energy correct. Instead we should just match the Monte Carlo to the Data and then move on; who cares about the absolute scale. I and others made the obvious point: in order to do the match don’t you end up with the absolute scale. After several goings around (over wine at lunch!), we figured out: he completely agreed that reducing the error on the jet energy was well worth the technique, but he still wonders if we could save time by not developing independent JES for MC and Data.
• I need to start exploring TMVA.
• In general, the D0 analyses are quite sophisticated — using multivariate techniques like decision trees. Most of the ATLAS analyses don’t yet. In fact, there was some scientism from the audience about our use of these techniques. M. Mangano came up to me at one point and asked how we knew that our decision tree analysis had actually seen single top and not something else (MC tests, the Matrix Method also sees it and it isn’t a machine learning, etc.). It sounds to me like this battle isn’t done yet.

There was only one thing I didn’t like about the conference: the agenda page is password protected. Unless you are a member of D0 or ATLAS you aren’t supposed to have the password. The reasoning is as follows: they wanted to have D0 people be able to talk about internal matters — really wanted to know the dirt behind what went wrong and what to try to avoid when working on ATLAS. And the ATLAS folks should talk about anything they wanted to as well - regardless of weather or not it had been approved. It didn’t work out that way: the ATLAS top group reacted saying that they didn’t want preliminary results shown. The result was the page was password protected. This is too bad, and I think, in the end, the password was not required. First of all, ATLAS is only showing Monte Carlo results (though the ATLAS philosophy is different than the D0 one - D0 is quite comfortable with MC results going out without nearly the cross-checks that data results get). Second, as one speaker put it, “new versions of these results will be shown shortly in ATLAS and will improve on these old results” — so the results we were seeing weren’t the preliminary ones in most cases. As for D0, I think all of the D0 speakers got an email from the top group reminding us that only publicly approved plots were allowed to be shown at this conference. Fortunately, it did not limit the discussion and all of us were quite frank in our revealing of faults and other problems. I am in general against external conferences being password protected.