Muddy Buddy Chicago 2011

Team Bobby Got Loose (that is my wife and I's team name) took 10th place this year in Muddy Buddy in the COed 46-55 division out of 60 teams in our same bracket!

This was a huge improvement over the last year with a finishing time of 46:16.4. This was only 3 seconds behind the # 9 place and 6:45 behind first place.

The course was extra fast this year and my wife really performed well. I kind-of over sprinted the first few legs of the race and ended up walking at least 2 mins of the last run which I think cost us a higher placing. However, we still did pretty well! Combined with our 11th place finish in Chicago's Urban Assault 2011 I'd say we had a good race year thus far.


Links to the Muddy Buddy Results can be found here and Overall results found here
That's right 194th out of 1124 competitors. That is top 17% out of all Muddy Buddies!

Ubuntu One!

So as I might have mentioned in the past I have made a full transition to every computer in my house to Linux (with the exception of my wife's Mac, which she loves). The platform I have chosen after sampling many different releases is Ubuntu 11.04.

After a few hiccups getting important applications installed on my desktop and laptop that I use for particle physics work (Kerberos, ROOT, etc...all of which have now been resolved by either Ubuntu or the respective software release) I have been very impressed by the look and running of this OS. The installation on both my laptop and my desktop with dual screen was the easiest thing I've ever done in Linux. Gone is the day of having to hack away at your video card and wireless card to trick you computer into accepting Linux and letting you move on with your day.

Now Ubuntu has taken the next step and offers cloud storage FOR FREE! They call their service Ubuntu One and as of this last month you get 5 GB of free storage. Additionally they already offer streaming music to you Android mobile device along with the sync of your contacts. They are also developing the platform on the iPhone as well with that expected to come soon.

This feature alone has improved my work life 5 fold. Between going to meeting, traveling to and from the lab, and working from home I was always trying to remember which file on what computer was the most recent version of my thesis paper, analysis nTuple, or even event reduction table. Now I don't have to worry about it, I just end my work session with allowing Ubuntu One to sync anything I chose to drop into the shared folder and then download it when I get home or to my laptop. Also the looming fear of a computer crashing and losing all my work is greatly diminished, a horror story I've heard from too many particle physics people.

The feature is expandable and for a low price they are offering up to 20 GB of cloud and streaming, however I expect that number to rise. If you have been looking to make the jump into Linux world and the world of free software and open source code, this distribution is for you.

Oh yeah, did I mention that they are allowing Ubuntu One to be open source development...so you know the world of users are only going to make this feature even better.

Cosmology with Prof Susskind from Standford

View this movie at cultureunplugged.com

I found this great video on a cosmology lecture given by Prof Leonard Susskind that is one in a 4 part series of Cosmology lectures. 

I think the video is very good and the Q&A session at the very beginning is a great chance to hear some of the most common questions when it comes to Cosmology explained clearly and with a lay-man in mind!

Enjoy

Fermilab Budget Woes Continue

While most labs managed to dodge a bullet (what really looked like a giant bomb) in the 2011 budget. There is still many problems coming. Announced Thursday and reported on the Courier News and this blog that Fermilab will seek to reduce its staff by 5% through a voluntary program.

With the ending of the Tevatron program in September this doesn't come as too much of a surprise, however it doesn't do much to boost moral around the lab. In fact, even though much of the talk is on the future experiments like Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE), Mu2e (website), and the future of Project X (website) there can't help but be a sense of loss for many scientist working there.

For me, trying desperately to finish my thesis on work at CDF and looking for post-docs that might keep me in the Chicago land area, pieces of news about the shrinking of the lab only causes me to take pause and check to see if going down this path is the best for me.

The little support and almost no excitement coming from a budget strapped government towards science makes it hard for a young researcher to keep a stiff upper lip and look to the future with too much optimism .

Oh well, more focus on thesis and hopefully when I lift my head there will be a good position on an interesting and well funded experiment to work on.

DZero Doesn't see the same excess as CDF!

So the physics world is all a buzz with the reported excess in the W+2 Jet channel reported by CDF.

The graph here shows the most recent result released by CDF in the W+ 2 Jet channel for 7.3 fb-1 and shows a clear (and growing) excess in the invariant mass range around 150 GeV. The community has been buzzing with speculation and ideas as to what this phenomenon could be. From mis-modeling to Technicolor (a new model of physics) the result isn't really clear. But something seems to be really there.

The really exciting thing is that CDF's sister experiment at the Tevatron, DZero, has publicly released their findings in the same channel today and they don't seem to see anything. (See the public release by Fermilab here).

So what does it all mean? Well clearly something is happening here. The CDF result has been checked and double checked from within the collaboration (that is really the only way such a result could ever see the light of day) and now you have an independent check by another experiment on the same data and they don't see anything! The fury of discussion as to whether DZero and CDF are doing identical things will launch as well as much debate as to what it means and how to proceed.

To me this is where physics is really interesting! Methods of analysis and meaning and understanding will be hotly debated. DZero will be giving a seminar talk today at 4pm and is webcasted here.

For sure what is to come will be what makes science great. Checks, cross-checks, argument, and ultimately (and probably after many sleepless nights and hurt ego's) agreement to what causes such deviations.

Get Excited!

Fermilab Users Meeting

Today and tomorrow are the 44th annual Fermilab Users Meeting.
This meeting will highlight the many exciting activities that are coming from Fermilab including Collider Physics (like the stuff I work on) as well as Astro-Particle, Neutrino, and future plans for the lab.

The big draw this year seems to be the already "sold out" (I put this in quotes because the tickets were free, but had to be requested) public talk that will be given on Thursday by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. There is some overflow seating that will be made available so even if you don't have tickets it may still be worth the while to come.

So far today there has been many good talks, one I especially liked was given by Brendan Casey of Fermilab on the new g-2 experiment that is slated to begin after the much morned shutdown of the Tevatron. His talk can be found here (https://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=4156). Something that won't come across in the slides (which are very well done!) is the fact that he gave the talk in flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt and said that the exciting part of his experiment is "we get to use helicopters, and everyone knows helicopters are awesome". This eludes to how they will transport part of their experimental set-up from where it is now to Fermilab.

See an overview of the meeting here: http://www.fnal.gov/orgs/fermilab_users_org/users_mtg/2011/

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....