I've got the time

Hello, all

I want to make a prediction: A couple weeks from now, after a few weeks of apparent indecision about Guantanamo Bay ("Gitmo"), President Obama will give a forceful speech saying that he still plans on closing the facility and relocating the inhabitants elsewhere, perhaps in Supermax prisons in the U.S. Almost immediately after that speech the former VP Dick Cheney will give what appears to be a counter-speech criticizing the President for his decisions about national security. The whole thing will further stoke a firestorm of controversy that already started between the two.

I predict also that within the same time frame the dollar will tumble to its lowest level in 2009 against other international currencies on fears rising from the increasing national debt that the U.S. will lose it's AAA rating.

I also already know in advance what you're going to say in response: So what's the big deal you're going to say: these things already happened, how can you 'predict' them? - But wait, did you look at the date on this blog entry? Yes, it's me, P.D. I've traveled back in time to write this blog entry. Yeah, sure, you will not have read this blog entry until after all of these occurrences, but obviously I must have written it before them, right?

And anyway: who's better positioned to make that kind of thing happen, but a physicist who works on a time machine as powerful as the LHC? Bwa-ha-ha-ha, fear me! I have special knowledge you'll never understand! You think we're just trying to altruistically advance the cause of all human knowledge, when in fact it's a cleverly devised plot to control the fate of mankind - oops, I wasn't supposed to tell you. Now the Illuminati will be out to get me, thanks a lot! Or is it the Catholic Church that'll be hunting me down? I've been all confused since I saw Angels and Demons last Monday (the movie, that is) ...

Anyway, I wish. If movie classics like "Back to the Future" and sequels - gems of wisdom, I tell you, gems! - are at all to be believed (and I think they are), a guy could make a lot of money using knowledge of the future to "predict" it.

But I couldn't fool you - or maybe I did, so go ahead and admit it in the comments section! - you're too smart for that. What's closer to the truth is that I've been rather busy - on what exactly I cannot yet reveal to you, but yes, it's been more than a whole month again, a rather intense one at that. So I started a blog entry a couple weeks ago and never got to finish it until now. But fortunately this blog site uses the date of initial creation to date the blog entry. I could have a lot of fun with this! Or could have had if I hadn't given the whole dastardly scheme away! Thanks a lot!

So I was going to tell you: you probably wouldn't believe it, but they're finally going to fix the water damage in our apartment! Starting tomorrow for three days. This Mother's Day (Hi, Ma! Love you!) K and I emptied out the kitchen/dining room to prepare for the workers. We shall have to be elsewhere during the day each of the three days. Check out the video:

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

Except that it's already done. Mostly. Happened last 12th and 13th. Check out the results.


Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

K remembers actually that the day they flooded the apartment upstairs there was water dripping down outside the kitchen window, so it's probable that the paint chipping they didn't fix was also caused by the water damage. So still the dispute between our landlord and the "copropriete" of the building remains unresolved for the present.

But probably that will all be in our past, hopefully sooner rather than later, because we shall have to move. Yep, got too expensive for us. I explained to some family members what happened: our finances got squeezed on both ends and stretched in the middle, and my sister-in-law, K, aptly picked up on it: "It sounds like your finances...have been caught in the vortex of a black hole"! Score, exactly right! :) Wish I'd thought of it. I'm so proud of my family. :) In science, we produce financial black holes before we produce actual black holes...

Mainly the incident at the LHC has forced my graduation out by at least another year-and-a-half, just a bit longer than we were anticipating needing to finance our excellent little mid-life adventure. We have some prospects we are checking into.

The kids are doing well. They're getting bigger as is the way with things (I haven't shrunk them yet, but we're working on that too - wsht! Don't tell anyone). Lots of new cutenesses uploaded to our dropshots website. We try to keep B busy, but it's a challenge.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

Likewise G is giving B and all of us a run for our money.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing
He frequently has to take refuge on the couch.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing
And G has just learned to give raspberries.

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

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Yes, it's true. I did see Angels and Demons. I was curious about it mainly because CERN figures in no small way in the plot of the story. And CERN also was visited by a few of the muckety-mucks surrounding the film, like Ron Howard and Tom Hanks. Check it out.

But then I heard some less than stellar reviews about the film and started doubting whether I should go - until I got invited. If there's one thing I like more than going to a theater to see a movie (I like movies, in case you couldn't tell), it's going to a theater movie with someone else, so we can enjoy it together and then argue about (er, I mean discuss) it later.

And this seems true regardless of the caliber of the film. Even if it's a bad film I love trashing it. Most of the time the film has fatal flaws and also intriguing ideas and I love taking the time afterward to tease the two apart.

So I got invited by some friends from church, some men who attend a Friday morning Bible study regularly. We went to the local mall, the Balexert, and had pizza (tuna on mine) before the movie. In the concession line inside the theater one of the guys, who's college-aged and goes to a Jesuit school in the Bronx, said, "What is it with you Americans and butter on your popcorn?" Well another American with us (retired from the oil industry) quickly agreed. I had to say, hey: real butter is just fine, but who's to say what that stuff is they serve you in the theaters? "Butter flavored product." In Switzerland you can get your popcorn "salé" or "sucre" - salty or sweet!

The movie itself? Well. Like I said, intriguing ideas and fatal flaws. So if you think anything I have to say might spoil your enjoyment of the movie, skip down to the next horizontal marker. You have been warned. I don't spell out the gory details, but perhaps worse, I discuss the real underlying trajectory of the movie's themes, and you might have complained if I hadn't warned you. You might still complain for all I know. We're still working on the future travel.... -d'ohh!!

Re: the science, the CERN bit all happens at the beginning. They show scientists starting up the LHC, they have a few quick shots of the detectors, just ATLAS actually, I think. Whatever room they use for the control room in the movie actually looks more cramped and cluttered and "garage-shop" than the real control room, surprisingly, which is quite spacious and clean and modern-looking. And while the jargon is more or less right, they get the sequence all wrong.

Then there's this bit of some "secret" project to collect anti-matter from the LHC for energy research, and a battery-powered container of it gets stolen. All that has to happen for this thing to explode is for the battery to run out! So many things wrong with this, where to begin...

1. Trust me, despite what I said above, doing high energy particle physics in secret is nigh unto impossible, at least in the West. Elsewhere I wouldn't know about.
   
2. The strength of the magnetic field necessary to contain the amount of anti-matter shown exceeds our capabilities and certainly wouldn't fit into something you can put in your pocket!
3. A scientist collects antimatter in a bottle and all that has to happen is for a battery to go out and a whole city could get leveled!? No way the DOE or any European equivalent would approve funding for such a thing...now the DOD on the other hand...in any case, no scientist I know would be willing to to be so reckless with his own life - not on the job, anyway.
4. and on and on...

As for the rest: be prepared for some pretty gruesome deaths. The plot kept reminding me of a Monty Python skit. ("We was too late!" Monty Python has probably ruined more movies...)

(Final warning: if you're a real movie buff and can tolerate what I've described so far for the sake of the suspense and intrigue, stop reading and go see it.)

Still I was willing to suspend the disbelief until the final plot twist, the one that reveals that one major character is in fact almost exactly the opposite of what you've been led to believe up to that point. And able to pull off some pretty unbelievable stunts. That one broke the camel's back.

Not only that, but the twist also turned the movie from an intriguing conflict between science and religion, one of my favorite topics, to a much more cliched one of the church against itself and all modernity. They seem to be saying that the hostility is coming entirely from one direction, a statement that is itself invalidated by the rest of the movie!

So during the movie perhaps you can tell the anti-Catholic bias is fairly thick, but ironically, however, the Church in the very end doesn't come out quite as badly as I expected, at least. You just can't get a sense as to whether Dan Brown or the movie makers even had a coherent thing to say about the Catholic Church one way or the other. Did they just want to make a few vague and base allegations, draw some cheap and twisted stereotypes, and then patch it over with a weak capitulation at the end?

The Bronx Jesuit college student hated it, flat out. I, as usual, enjoyed the process of teasing apart the enjoyable from the crud. So if your movies have to make some kind of sense, if for you they must touch base with some kind of reality, don't bother; but if you're like me, and you can overlook the grotesque, and tolerate the nonsensical just because you like the intrigue and suspense, then give it a try. The coolest thing about the movie is that it follows Shakespeare's ancient principle of drama: if in the first act of a play you show a vial of antimatter, it must blow up by the end of the play or else your play sucks.

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The time has now come for me to reveal what it is I've been working on. I've become a Time Lord, I guess. After I get my degree you can call me Dr. Who - right now it's just "Who?" (I have the scarf already, my high-school buddy's mother made it for me. Yeah, all those high-school bullies who thought I'd never get anywhere. Not only am I in graduate school, but I have a wife and two kids! Hah! Just wait till they see me at the next high school reunion...they'll be sorry they voted for the other guy as most likely to succeed...)

Seriously: A couple years ago I worked on a paper about precise timing of energy deposits (or "hits") in HCAL, the hadron calorimeter component of CMS. The paper was released inside the collaboration as an "Internal Note". I didn't think that it would necessarily go farther than that.

Now it turns out that timing and synchronization have become more or less the centerpiece of both my service work and also my physics analysis. I've been complimented about how nicely that came together, and I have to admit, it wasn't really even partly my plan, but in fact it is nice. As they say, nothing is wasted in God's economy.

So I believe now I've given at least five talks in the last month or two that have had timing and synchronization as its major focus. The Torino talk was the first. Over the Mayday weekend I was also feverishly preparing a talk about a paper I've been assigned to edit that is all about HCAL timing, particularly from last fall's beam and CRAFT run data. I contribute several components to the paper and also bring together the contributions of several other people on the HCAL team.

The talk/paper combination led to more than a few very late nights. Here's a plot I made for one of them. Kind of looks like an event horizon with teeth. I call it Cujo.

I'm in one of those slow "comin' down off the high" modes. You know how the Old Testament would say "and they fought until their hands cleaved to their swords." Nowadays its until your eyes flicker in sync with the computer monitor and your fingers twitch when they get within poking distance of a keyboard...let go P, there's a whole green world out there, and something called exercise...and a life...

In fact, on Friday, May 1 when all the rest of both France and Switzerland were taking their Labor Day rest, I volunteered to be "on-call" while I was working on the paper, saying "No communist, I! I celebrate Labor Day in the fall." Interestingly, Paolo responded:

And the funny thing is that labor day on May 1st in communist Europe (such as Italy, France, Germany) was mainly set to commemorate a Chicago riot in ~1880.

So what is it with Chicago and communists anyway??

The s.i.l. gave me permission to get snarky :) And that's what you call low hangin' fruit!

Anyway, seems like I'm working through most of the holidays, and only this last weekend have I been able to knock off the work - after my talk on Ascension Thursday - so that I can concentrate on catching up on the piddly stuff like French taxes, U.S. taxes, family budget,insurance claims,pictures, etc. etc. etc.


Anyway, since we aren't able to, greet one another on our behalf. Shake their hands and say "swine flu to you!" K thought of that one.

Take care,
-PKBGD