Life as a Physicist

Sigh. I hate these blog games. Tommaso tagged me — the game is:

So the game is, take the closest book to you right now, go to the fifth sentence on page 123, write the following three sentences in the blog, and tag three people.

My difficulty is I’ve stopped reading books — and I definitely don’t carry them with me when I travel (I’m currently sitting in a hotel room). The best I have is a tiny little comic book that I’ve been reading on and off called Lone Wolf and Cub. On page 123 there aren’t enough sentences to accomplish the directions, so I’ll just improvise:

Bad Guy, holding sword: “He’ll whine that he’s innocent, but who’ll listen to some scruffy ronin? Yes… A deranged ronin assassinates Princess Aya, then kills our Metsuke. Both Han suffer, and it all evens out… Heh heh heh..”

Of course, bad guy doesn’t know what is coming! Ha Ha Ha back at him!

Well. That was only a little bit embarassing.

Who shall I tag? This is the part I hate; I hope they don’t mind…

David Bacon

Simona

Angry Physics

I just realized that the 1/4 bottle of wine each member of our team (”Team of Six”) won last night — I can’t take back with me: I have no checked luggage. And it is definately more than 3 oz. I’m going to have to drink it. Bummer.

It is because we shop at places like CostCo! Holy cow! Today was my first visit ever. It is a warehouse. And really really huge. You can’t see one end of the building from the other. And you can’t buy anything in a quantity smaller than 100: the idea being bulk is cheaper than individual item. You end up walking out of there with so many large boxes it is not possible to fit your loot in a small four door car with a kid to boot! Need to upgrade to a minivan! (I did not just say that!).

A few price comparisons: diapers 50% less than other places; Champaign one penny more expensive than Whole Foods for the good stuff.

I’m not sure what the deal is with the Seattle weather, but it has been gorgeous. We returned to Seattle last Sunday and it was bright and sunny all week long. Yesterday was the first gray day, and today was only partly cloudy — with a brilliant sunset. By this time of the year Seattle is usually all gray all the time.

Don’t you wish you lived here? Whatever is going on (global warming!) I’ll take it.

The Ottawa Citizen had a brilliant headline on the 6th.

On the 5th the latest 5 Canadians killed in Afghanistan were flown home (1 friendly fire from the good old USA and others due to insurgent attacks). Here they let the press see all the coffins going onto and coming off the plane (much more civilized, as my mother-in-law likes to say).

On the front page, above the fold was the picture of the coffins being carried off the plane, and above that was an article on Bush’s latest set of speeches with the title:

‘New Enemy’ lives among us: Bush

Brilliant!

I guess that showtime series, sleeper cell, is going to be even more relevant this season.

I mentioned earlier that I felt left out of D0 recently. Most of the summer has been spent in Seattle or in Ottawa — but not in Seattle. And I’m missing the yearly workshop — in Manchester England. This is a huge retreat, and a week of all D0 all the time. In fact, I’m so out of touch I didn’t even realize it was time to roll-over the list of conveners in D0 — these are the people that run the physics groups, algorithm groups. I used to be one — I used to run the B-quark identification group. But I’m now so out of it I didn’t even realize the conversation about who should replace whom was going on; I’m usually around D0 enough that I’m part of that conversation.

Ah well. There is only one way to get back into that conversation… This, I suppose, is one of the constant pressures of this job. There are lots of things to do and how you choose…

Congratulations to all the new conveners, and thanks for an amazing job to all the outgoing conveners! Being a convener (as I know) is a huge time commitment and often means putting your own physics goals — or life goals — on hold.

As a side note: I’m not sure I should have been part of that conversation: I’ve not been around enough to know who the upcoming good people are and the ones that I do know are easy; everyone knows they are good.

Walking around the halls of the UW physics department you can tell it is that time of the year again… time for the Qualifying Exam!

This is the big exam we give to all of our physics graduate students. They all have to pass this exam. The exam is two days long. See that strip of paper on the right hand side of the picture there? That is a list of all the topics they can be tested on. A full year of physics graduate courses and all of their undergraduate courses. Our department will administer the next round of this test mid September of this year. Four students from our particle experiment group will be taking the exam. Good luck!

The common saying is “You’ll never know more physics than you do for this test.” It is totally correct. Henry, Toby, and I tried to help two students working on a qual problem from several years ago. Toby and Henry are senior professors. I’m getting up there. None of us (except maybe Toby) could look at the problem and solve it right off.

I took my qual 15 years ago or so, at the University of Rochester. The thing that motivated me to study was knowing that if I didn’t do so well I’d get an oral exam. I’ve never done well on oral exams, so I studied like heck to make sure I wouldn’t get one!

I remember sitting down to take the test. I looked through all the problems than thought “Holy ****, there is no way!” It felt like I didn’t recognize a thing. I was just about ready to get up and walk out of the room — I think I’d already starting thinking about other career paths. I looked around the room at the other students. Mark Johnson, probably the best student in our class, was right across from me. He’d also just finished looking through the test. His hands were shaking so bad that he could barely write his name on the test. That, I thought, means I have a chance. I managed to pass — without an oral. Later I found out that the shaking in Mark’s had was most likely due to the excessive number of chocolate covered espresso beans he had consumed…

Good luck everyone!

I’m back in Seattle.I flew here last Wednsday. I’ve been here less than a week and I already miss Julia. Paula has been sending me little videos on my phone of Julia’s progress. Today it was her lifting up her neck while on her stomach. This is a big milestone for a baby — getting control of their heads. I return to Ottawa this Sunday.

So, why come back to Seattle? About the same time that we figured out we were going to have a child, I agreed to host the Open Science Grid Consortium meeting here, in Seattle.

The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a loose collection of universities and national labs, all of whom contribute resources to a GRID. The OSG folks provide a software package that each site downloads and uses to configure their site. After that anyone submitting jobs to OSG will can have them run on any number of sites. It isn’t perfect, but it is getting closer to the idea of computing being like the power grid: you submit a job and you don’t care, and the results come back.

One of the big reasons I agreed to have it here is that I would like to see UW more involved in the GRID as a service, rather than the GRID as an intellectual exercise. CHEP, a conference I attended in February, has a huge number of talks concerning the GRID and how to get it to work. This is tough stuff and there are plenty of computer science research careers to be made in getting it right. But there is another side to GRID work: just having access to a large amount of computing on which to do calculations. QCD lattice simulations. LHC Event Reconstruction. Protein Folding. Gene Modeling and Discovery. Those of us that want to use this computing power really don’t care very much about how the work gets done: just that it gets done. UW has some investment in the research aspect, but we are behind the times as far as having access to GRID services for non-computer science researchers. This is what OSG is about: providing a service. UW has started to express some interest, and I have heard (grapevine, big-time) that OSG is one of the GRID’s under evaluation currently. That would be fantastic.

The meeting started today, and goes through Weds. All the talks are slowly being posted online. For someone not part of the OSG this morning was the most interesting as it talked about the science that was being done with the OSG as well as science that is done in a GRID like fashion but not on the OSG (yet).

The report The Quantum Universe – The Roll Of Colliders
came out a while back. One of the main goals of the report was to produce a glossy pamphlet that could be left on tables, with text aimed at the non-HEP scientist. If you’ve not looked at it, I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

I just stumbled on the web site version of the report, which is impressively accessible – considering the web sites we physicists usually create. Check it out during your next coffee break!

My heart goes out to people living in Mumbai after these bomb blasts. I was there only a week, but the residents in that city are something else. Flickr already has a series of posts of pictures from the bombing. They are riviting. Strong stomach required in some cases.