Life as a Physicist

Check that out. That is a real honest-to-goodness paper ticket! That ticket (was) worth real money. I could have gone and cashed it in for, uh, cash! Who knew those things still existed! Not I. So, you might wonder, how did I end up in possession of not one of those, but three!?

That is easy. We flew in Italy. Ok, that isn’t fair. The real reason is we flew on Al Italia. The day after they released a new business plan. A business plan that called for the laying off of some workers in Al Italia Express — the small airline partner to the big Al Italia. Indeed folks: a strike! Had all gone well, we would have been flying for a bit over 2 hours from Trieste to Marseille. Instead it was 15 and a half hours of busses, sitting in airports, waiting, lines, etc., before we finally made it home at 2 in the morning.

The day was full of little annecdotes. We met Marco, a computer programming consultant that was trying to go home for the weekend. After lots of delays and transfers, his last flight from Milan was canceled. Since he was going to have to come back for his job the next day he demanded Al Italia fly him back to where he started and refund the complete cost of the ticket - basically erasing the whole nightmare (I never found out if he got it).

In Trieste, we were put on a bus to Venice in hopes that things would be better. The trip is about 120 km, but in the middle of it he hit a traffic jam that went on forever! It was stop and go the whole way. No one (at least the Italians) seemed to care much. Paula is convinced that the real cause was space aliens, because my proffered explanation was too ridiculous to be true: a very poorly designed toll booth.

And after being put on a bus in Trieste they said “we can get you to Venice, and they can get you to Milan, but because of the strike there may not be a flight from Milan to Marseille). When we got to Venice the ticket agent said, “yes, I heard you had some problems in Trieste, but not here. You will be fine now.” As if the problems were only in Trieste.

And Paula called this beer the best beer she had ever had! That is saying something for Paula.

I’ve read so much about Croatia in the news — especially through the Clinton years. I always wanted to visit. Well, I’m here, and this is not the Croatia I read about. That would be a different section of the country.

I’m just finishing a week of vacation in the western resort town of Opatija. I am the spouse. That is — my wife is here attending a Physics Education conference and I am along to take care of Julia (I find it ironic that Paula is always complaining that HEP conferences are in much more beautiful places…). As far as a job, it isn’t that bad: I wake up around 9am or so, get Julia up and dressed and then we eat breakfast. Julia, being a girl of just over 1 year old, is a hit in the dining room (well, wherever we go). So I get lots of help from the staff. In fact, I’m reminded of that cartoon of a person making their way through a cocktail party full of people as an example of the Higgs boson: getting from the breakfast buffet back to the table with Juila in tow is slow going as everyone wants to stop her and say hi. And Julia is more than happy to do that. I think she gets that part of her personality from my wife!

Then we got for a long walk. They have a very nice stone pathway along the sea. Just below the pathway are lots of rocks and pebble beaches. Every one sets up a towel and sun bathes and swims. They don’t really have sand beaches here. I walked as far as a small fishing village one way and the other way was prevented from going as far as I wanted by the tourist trap places that were starting to claim parts of the public path as their own. Still, very nice!

Then a nap. Usually for the both of us (see below for why I needed one!). Lunch - and Julia makes it known during lunch who her favorite parent is: Paula. Then a swim, another nap, and then walk around town trying to find a good dinner. The food is a bit bland for my tastes in this section of the world — however there are some sausages that are really good and have just the right amount of kick. There is no way I can spell the name on the menu, however. I initially asked about them because they were one of the only dishes that was listed using the same Croatian word in four languages.

And finally to bed. At that point, I drag my portable outside onto the balcony, and get to work on my poster and talk I’m giving next week at the CHEP conference (so much for a real vacation).

And continuing the saga of bad Internet connections. The policy of the hotel we are in is a bit backward - free Internet in the rooms. You have to get a password from the front desk to access it. And get this — the password expires after about 3 hours. So you are supposed to keep going down there to get new passwords. At any rate, I work until about 3 in the morning.

The thunderstorms here are amazing. They are about every other day, and the sky is totally sunny until about 10 minutes before they start. The win picks up — it really picks up, and clouds rush in, and it pours. Sometimes hail. Then about 30 minutes later it is sunny again. The beaches and pools clear — but not for very long.

I’ve got lots of nice pictures, but given the awful state of the Internet back in Marseille (trust me, this will be an entertaining post when I finally have an ending - one way or the other) and the awful state of my talk & poster, I’ve not had time to upload them. My talk is in the afternoon of the first day (yay!) so I’m looking forward to being able to really relax at CHEP.

We travel a lot as experimental high energy phycisits. Not only is there the travel to the experiment locations, like CERN and Fermilab, but there is travel to all the labs that build the bits of the experiment (which are scattered far and wide), and finally, of course, travel to conferences. And all these places have wireless. So everyone’s email keeps flowing just as if they had never left the office. And usually you can’t tell that the person is traveling either, other than they might cancel a meeting or two.

This past week, however, has been different. The big Lepton-Photon conference took place in Daegu, Korea. And every time I get an email from someone who is there it starts with a phrase like “hello from Daegu” or “hello from the Daegu train station”, etc. The town must have made quite an impression on people! I’m sorry I missed the conference!

I woke up this morning, on a short trip to CERN, rolled over to turn off the alarm in my cell phone. There was a problem: there were 3 of them; it took me a minute to figure out which one I needed to shut up.

I’ve had a US cell phone and a Swiss cell phone for a while now. Yesterday, I added a French one for my stay in France. I’ve got way to many phone numbers. I’ve got a Skype-in number, a UW office number, and a US home phone number. That is 6 phone numbers. There is probably a better way to deal with this situation!

As I mentioned, it has been almost 10 years since I’ve gone this long without Internet. I’m still alive.

I really miss being able to talk to my wife or see our kid via Skype. Sadly, Skype is outlawed in the laboratory I work.

The other thing is I now usually waste the first 45 minutes when I get to work doing dumb things that I’d normally do at home. This includes catching up on newspapers.

And I’ve started reading a book, something I’ve not done in a long long time!

Another 2-3 weeks to go!

The central question about air travel boils down to: Do commercial airline mechanics ever fly in commercial jets?

This question occurred to me while waiting for a plane to be repaired in O’Hare a few months ago. The flight from France was a bit early, and so I rushed to get an early plane to Seattle. It was delayed by 10 minutes when I got through immigration, so I sprinted. This was a real score because it was scheduled to leave a full 3 hours before the flight I had a booking on. Had it left on time I wouldn’t have made it.

Only once I’d moved my reservation over did I realized the departure time had been moved from “10 minute delay” to “no estimate.” Hmm… That is never a good sign! In response to “What’s wrong?” I got back “The pilot noticed a bent turbine blade. They are just making sure that it is bent, not broken.” That didn’t sound too bad.

I walked around to the windows and I could see the engine being worked on. There was a guy, perhaps in his 50’s, standing inside the engine. He would brace the turbine with by jamming his foot between the blades. This kept it from turning. He would then saw away at one of the blades with what looked like a regular metal file. Every now and then he would pull out some sand paper and give it a rapid sand. All the while people - managers?? - kept wandering up to him and asking him questions. All, I imagine, that boiled down to “How much longer?” They would do this every 5 minutes. Eventually he turned around and gave some sort of long lecture to one guy — no idea, but I’d like to think it went something like “I’d have already been done if you guys didn’t keep interrupting me!” He looked like that kind of guy.

Eventually one of the managers came in to update the ground crew on what was going on. As he was walking away from the desk I asked him what was up. “Well, on the pilot’s walk around inspection he discovered one of the turbine blades was bent. The engine had probably sucked something in, like a big rock. The worry is that there is now a fracture in the blade, and through the course of running the vibrations will grow the fracture until it hits the hub of the engine. Then foom! the engine will come apart.” He paused. “And that is why a pilot has so much training. For those 10 seconds.” And then he walked away.

I looked back at the engine and the fellow now sanding away at the blade. He was soon finished and we boarded and I arrived two hours earlier than my original schedule.

It is nice to know that a machine as large and complex as a Boeing 757 can still be fixed by one guy with a file. On the other hand, I’m not sure they should have let that mechanic talk to me. I was sitting right next to that engine.

Update: Check out this comment left by a retired 757/767 pilot on another post. Especially the pictures of the Chinese jet engine and youtube video of a bird strike (i wish I could have seen what that engine looked like afterwards).

I finally finished uploading my pictures from the Glasgow ATLAS Overview week trip. Including the one extra day I took to look around (mostly ended up sleeping, taking a train to Edenborough, and then a train back for a very good dinner with Hal).

I learned a lot at that meeting. This shouldn’t surprise me any more, but as usual only about 1/2 of what I learned was at the sessions themselves and the other half was over dinner. I didn’t learn as much as I thought during the coffee breaks: but that is because I was almost always last in line and thus spent almost the whole coffee break in line (20 minutes, and 400 people, and 2 lines. ;-)).

The setting was quite stunning. Glasgow university is a beautiful place. The conference was very well run. My only difficulty was the networking — which was awful. So many ports were blocked I couldn’t use VPN to get a good connection back to University of Washington. At the dorm room they had blocked the ports that my online music service uses to play music.

One of the social programs was a short talk by a university professor whose hobby was… wait for it… scotch. And then a short tasting (graciously funded by the various manufacturers). I know some people have a huge passion for this stuff, but I just don’t get it. I can taste the differences, but… well… I didn’t purchase any to bring back with me — lets leave it at that.

I’ve had this trait in my personality since childhood: don’t spend money. And when I do I often have a tough time enjoying it.

The plane trips of the last few weeks have been pretty bad. But for the first time in a long long time (more than a year, I think) I really missed a connection yesterday on my trip from Glasgow back to Marseille - and got stuck in Paris. My flight arrived more than 30 minutes after the last train to Marseille had left (the flight, out of Heathrow, was delayed by more than 2 hours due to weather and other things). So I had to find a hotel. It was close to 9pm when I came to this conclusion, so I walked into the Paris airport Sheraton. At that point they were almost out of rooms and had only the “Club” room. By the time I signed out it was a touch over 300 euros. With the very very very weak dollar that isn’t 500 bucks, but is is darn close. So I took it, not willing to spend another hour getting off site to another airport.

I’m pretty sure that is the first time I’ve ever paid that much for a hotel room.

I did my best to enjoy it. Really. I ordered the free breakfast (it was good, but the fresh OJ was amazing). Stole most of the bathroom soap thing-ys. Tried to use each bit of furniture in the room. Enjoyed the view of the planes pulling out and in from my window. Sat in the bar downstairs and had a very expensive beer. I didn’t use the internet: it was 10% the cost of the room for 24 hours of use! For that cost they should have a fiber connection directly to my brain!

Being able to walk down an escalator and climb on a train, about 10 minutes, including checkout, after I walked out of my hotel room? Priceless.

What burns me about this is that after I made the decision to stay there, and had paid, and had checked in, I kept thinking about it. At that point it was too late: time to move on. Enjoy the room! Nope, instead it festered. Even after I checked out this morning and was standing on the train platform thinking that I’d spent too much (well, it is true, I had, but it was a little late at that point!).

I’ve often complained to people that we don’t get paid enough in this job. True only so far as I look around at what others in the business world with similar skills and training get. But I obviously get paid enough to be able to do this in an emergency. And it is very nice not having to worry about this sort of thing.

I get on a plane to return to Marseille in a few hours. Last night Hal and I managed to get a seat at a place called Gandolfi Fish. When we stumbled on it walking around the night before, we knew it was crowded. But last night we found out it had been opened only 4 weeks and was one of the hotter places in town. The only reason we were able to get a table, I think, was we some how befriended the bar-tender who was also in charge of the reservation list (and sitting at the bar for 1.5 hours). After two bottles of a very good Sauvignon Blanc, Hal and I decided the lesson here was the same as in asking for money from the NSF: always better to do it in person than not. Someone that had made their reservation a week or so ago got bumped in favor of us because they were waiting at another bar down the street and couldn’t be contacted. I think they got in eventually, but it was after the kitchen started to run out of food.

At any rate, the Glasgow conference was good. I’ve got some pictures posted, but the network connection has been so awful I’ve not been able to organize them. I’ll do that tomorrow when I’ve got a decent net connection back in Marseille.

Well, now that my flight to Glasgow from Manchester has been canceled, I’ve been on the road more than 24 hours (I think I’m above 26 now). This trip will take me through 5 airports. In each of the middle three I’ve now had a layover of longer than 3 hours.

When I checked in they told me the Glasgow flight was canceled because there wasn’t the crew. They have a cool thing in this airport: if your flight is delayed more than 2 hours you get free drink tickets. Sadly, I was delayed only 1:55 minutes, so they didn’t give it to me (!). Better yet was the check-in woman’s opening statement to her manager on the phone when trying to see if I might possibly qualify: “Hey! Guess what! The one guy on the Glasgow flight showed up!”. Crew now around, eh?