Fermilab's Tevatron Shutdown Event

So this Friday is the shutdown of Fermilab's Proton/Anti-Proton Collider the Tevatron. After almost 30 years of service and numerous discoveries the collider has run her course and is scheduled to be turned off.
Instead of this being a sad event Fermilab is going to let the old girl go out with a bang! A celebration is planned and I hope to be able to blog about it and bring pictures and thoughts about the days activities.

CDF has their experiments collaboration meeting going on over the next few days (at which I am giving a talk on my own analysis) and then a big celebration planned on Friday when they finally shut down the detector and the accelerator.
Live streaming media from both the Main Control room as well as CDF and D0 control rooms will be provided by Fermilab Visual Media Services.

Additionally, Chicago's own National Public Radio WBEZ did a show about the Tevatron that can be found here

The festivities and physics to come are sure to be exciting. So instead of being sad about the end of one of the most ground breaking experiments in science...here is a picture of a Corgi in a swing....adorable!

Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam

Here is the article on the anomaly being reported for the speed of neutrinos from CERN to the OPERA detector in Italy

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v1

Good read and helps deal with the first set of questions I had about this phenomenon. (Accuracy of the position measurement for one)

Now time to digest and see before we turn the world of physics on its head!

Neutrinos going faster than the speed of light?

All the buzz is there...did experimentalists observe neutrinos going faster than the speed of light?

To be honest I don't know and am still gathering information. I'll bet many of my friends and colleagues are in the same boat as me being asked questions through the many channels available to us (Facebook, Twitter, etc...)  to weigh in when we are just finding out ourselves.

There will be a webcast of a talk by the collaborators from OPERA tomorrow and here is the link
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=155620

Hope this helps everyone in figuring out if this is real...I will have more to say on this in the coming days!

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.