Monday, March 29, 2010

Countdown to 7 TeV Collisions

There is a lot of excitement right now at Fermilab and around the particle physics world. The LHC is ramping up for their first 7 TeV collisions.
After much wait time and work the Large Hadron Collider is smash the high energy frontier in two and after testing their two beams at 3.5 TeV each they plan on attempting collisions tonight/tomorrow for the first time at this large center of mass energy.

This is a huge milestone for the world of particle physics and while we may not get collisions or new physics data right away you can be sure it will come along shortly.

Interestingly, you can follow the progress of the LHC and one of the experiments (CMS) on your iPhone, Droid, or other smart phone.

Thanks to Tom McCauley you can now follow CMS TV on the iPhone, to
see LHC Page 1, CMS Page 1, etc. 
    http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/~mccauley/m-cmstv/
 
to save it as a Home icon (with a nice CMS logo):
 -- open the URL in Safari on the iPhone 
 -- click the + sign at the bottom 
 -- Click  "Add to Home Screen"
Sure is amazing to be living in the world where the public will know as quickly
as the experts when collisions occur 
You can learn to decipher this page here

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

"Doing less bad is still doing no good" (Part 2)

A continued update from by adventurers in driving. Summer is coming and the price is creeping up....I saw $2.99 a gallon. Soon it will become more economically advantageous to take the train and ride my bike to the lab (which is what constitutes most of my driving) I might have to start plotting miles biked to see if that is the offset
Anyways, 10 weeks into 2010 and I've got 1,374 some miles driven in my car. Room for improvement...but the trends are starting to look interesting...is a week to week wobble going to continue...stay tuned!

Friday, March 12, 2010

Red River Gorge Climbing

So just recently me and some friends got to travel to Kentucky and experience some great limestone climbing in an area known as Red River Gorge.
This is a picture of me playing around on a 5.13a! Needless to say I never even got close to finishing it...but did manage to get two clips into it and almost had the third...so not bad. It was this amazing crack splitting the inside of a 25 foot cave that then swooped over an overhang to a 30 foot leaning ascension. I didn't have a prayer...but it was super fun to try.

Some friends we went with made a neat video and posted it on YouTube of our first day of climbing and shows me finally getting a 5.11a! Now don't get me wrong...the first part of the climb is a 5.8, then goes to a roof for two bolts and comes over a lip to finish on a pair of chains 15 feet above the roof. I fell about 15 times, had someone else try to finish it, then finally got mad and made the move. Not pretty, but fun!

There was 12 of us and we stayed in this beautiful cabin in the wilderness. It was a bit hard to find, but was super convenient to get to all the climbing we wanted. I did quite a few 5.10's (last one was a 10c that I thought was a 9 going into it and was pissed that I fell twice before finishing it...needless to say I felt better once I heard its rating)

Now I've got the climbing bug again and can't wait to get out there this summer! Climbing trips here we come!

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Working and Playing

So I'm still working hard on trying to get my PhD and answer the big questions in the Delayed Photon Analysis that will be my thesis. However, I couldn't miss the opportunity to go and see my brother who is currently studying at the University of Minnesota, home of the Golden Gophers!

My brother isn't involved in the "hard" sciences...although the subject material he is studying is very difficult and something I could never do. He is in graduate school in the field of Political Science.

I've commented before about the nature of the work I do and the questions I am trying to answer...however the details I have to leave purposefully vague since it is research in progress and quite frankly we don't know the final answer ourselves.

One aspect of my research that I wanted to comment about and is relevant to my travels is the fact that the questions and methods require LONG periods of intense thought and work to produce very simple pictures that "Tell the whole story"

A very good example is this plot just recently finished by Eunsin Lee in the PRL version of his Search for Supersymmetry in the Di-Photon + MET channel. This plot took 2 YEARS to complete and endless nights and days of pouring over ideas, code, and data!
And this is where I am now...trying to put together the few figures that will tell the story of my search for Delayed Photons in the Exclusive Photon + Missing Transverse Energy...and it takes some time.

Now my brother is in his first year of graduate school and still completing course work. Like when I was there, this means he spends endless days and nights in the library and in the office pouring over texts and writing papers. So, I can think of no better place to be for a week to get some intense work time with someone who has the same schedule and time dominated tasks. Not to mention we both share a love of knowledge and will be able to learn and exchange great thoughts. Lets hope that by the end I'll have the answer to the data question and have learned some great political thought from this guy.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Trojan Horse Warning!!

So I recently added a widget to my blog called "Real Time Counter". Supposedly this widget was just suppose to count the number of hits my blog got so I could peak in and see the number of hits I have and if anyone else out there cares about what I'm writing about.

However, after not working at first, then working fine, when I tried to view my blog yesterday "Avast" security warned me that something was trying to load a Trojan Horse on my computer. This happened when a redirect link was sent from the Real Time Counter widget to my browser!

Even worse when I tried to use Google's apps to remove this, it again attempted to load a Trojan Horse, so I had to just view the html code itself and delete the App by hand.

DO NOT USE REAL TIME COUNTER!!!!

Luckily my physics training has me adept at staring at code to try to decipher what it is something really does (even when you wrote it yourself to do something else) so I was able to see and remove this app by hand...but some poor new blog user could lose everything.

Just a friendly hint.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

"Doing less bad is still doing no good" (Part 1)

1134 miles driven by me so far this year. Barely more than 8 weeks into the new year and my hopes of reducing the amount I drive each week is showing little good progress. 
Basically I will keep updating these posts every couple of weeks to monitor how much I am driving and see if I can find a way to reduce my overall strain on our natural resources and general congestion in Chicago.

Now I am inspired not just by environmental reasons because I believe that as quoted in McDonough and Braungar book Cradle to Cradle (highly recommend) that by simply reducing my driving I am still doing no good...so I am not hoping to fix the world by simply "being less evil"

Nor am I truely inspired by monetary reasons...simply because for the commuting that I do back and forth between Fermilab and home is actually more expensive by train and bike in terms of money and time then to simply drive.

No, what I am really doing here is plotting what my tendencies are, how work, weather, and life effect them. Once I have the data, then I can really ask...how do I do some good here.

A caveat: I am only plotting the mileage I put on my car...this doesn't include the miles I drive with people (my fiancee included) nor if I end up flying for physics meetings and so forth. Just a simple plot and something to watch and aim to reduce

Monday, March 1, 2010

Flux Capacitor

My favorite part of this item is in the description from O'Reiley Auto Parts
Time Travel at your Own Risk!!!
 

Still enough of a nerd that I kinda want this