Urban Assault 2011 Chicago

Well, this years Urban Assault ride was a spectacular as the rest! My wife and I didn't have time this year to do the online quiz (really busy with work and thesis stuff) so the bad news is we started in the last wave (5 mins behind the first wave).

However even with this handicap we still managed to finish 11th place for all coeds (Team "Bobby Got Loose") and 38th overall! This is our best finish ever and we had a lot of good luck.


View Urban Assault 2011 in a larger map

First of all Heather did a great job planning out the route (see map above) and choosing the initial path to go clockwise around the circle. Then as we approached the first mystery checkpoint a very kind women was screaming the location (and solution to the anagram) of the second check point (Fat Cat Bar and Grill). This allowed us to spend very little time at the mystery checkpoint and it also happened to be right in our direction as we were heading back to home base!
As always the orgainizers did an outstanding job and the beer and food was ready and waiting for all the riders when we got back. Heather and I didn't do costumes like last year (we had come in banana costumes) but people recognized us and the vibe was quite friendly. This was the first year some Chicago friends did the race as well and they loved it. Granted we smoked their time ;-) so I think we really had the best of times. More pictures from the race to come....

Tevatron still kicking proton/antiproton butt!

I thought I would share this post from the Tevatron's Facebook page (can be found here).
Just in the last week we had 6 of the top 10 initial luminosity stores from the Tevatron and the accelerator delivered 78 pb-1 of data in just the last week!
This is really an amazing accomplishment for this accelerator and with this rate of data delivery we can be sure that both experiments that operate on the Main Ring (CDF and D0) will have lots of data to analyze before the planned shutdown in September.
For those of you that don't exactly know what these numbers mean, this is just a simple way of measuring the amount of interactions (or collisions) that we will get during the operation of the accelerator. The higher the luminosity, the greater chance that the collisions will occur and the more interesting data we have to record. What is truly amazing is after 25 years of operations the Tevatron is performing like never before and delivering data and unprecedented rates! This means that there is a greater chance of catching a glimpse at rare processes in physics that may be buried in our data.
Even more clear explanations and updated numbers for the Tevatron can be found here:
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/now/tevlum.html
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/now/tevlumexp.html

Support your Schools

Very simple, this came across my Facebook news feed  and I think it speaks volumes to the problem with the way education is viewed in the United States.

Quote from the photo:
"School elections and levies today in Helena- this picture was taken by a good friend and school librarian here in Helena. She couldn't help herself, had to go back and add the correction sign under the vote no sign. Poor funding really does have a long term result!"