The place where lost socks go...

In Paris now... which makes it pretty obvious that the last minute planning worked out.

Although there is a net connection at my hotel, I do not expect to spend a lot of time on-line in the three days that I am here. Thus, today's update will be at double-speed:

Bell ringing: Last night I rang bells at Mary Mag with the OUSCR. I have paid my dues for this term, so I am officially a member. I rang called changes twice. In between, Claire brought two of us beginners and a couple of experienced ringers downstairs to do an exercise with handbells. It was a very silly exercise which involved lining up in our initial order, then swapping places physically as the changes were called. It was exactly the sort of silly exercise that seems very basic, and you laugh at it... but it teaches you a lot. They also demonstrated Plain Hunt Doubles (five bells) in the same method, for us to watch. As they were putting away the handbells, I asked if us newbies could try. I'm a Hampshire College student -- I don't get along well with just sitting and watching. Besides, as Sophocles said: "One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try." Claire was a bit surprised by my request, since we are still learning called changes, but there was no harm in trying. And it went well.

University stuff: Went to lunch today at Linacre College with SS, who is a theoretical physics professor at Oxford. I met him when I worked on Auger, as he had come to Malargue once or twice. We commiserated on being vegetarians in Argentina. I have seen him a number of times since moving here, but he only just noticed me on Monday. And invited me to come to lunch at his college on Wednesday. Members of a college are entitled to free meals in the common room. Linacre is one of the newest colleges, founded only in 1962. It is also a graduate college -- no undergrad students. So the dining hall was very different than my experience eating in the dining hall of St. Johns College last March. St. Johns is a moderately old college (founded 1455) and the richest of the colleges in the UK. At Linacre, the dining hall looks just like what you would expect of a modern upscale college dining hall. At St. Johns, the dining hall looks like the stuff of legend, with enormous portraits of past masters on the exceedingly high walls. If any of you recall the Hogwarts dining hall from the Harry Potter movies, it looked a lot like that. But not quite... since those scenes were filmed down the road in the dining hall at Christ Church College, not St. Johns. As a post-doc, I do not have a college affiliation... but there are ways to get one. I need to investigate further, because I really would like to be a member of a college. Preferably one of the older ones (16^th century or older).

Travel: Mostly uneventful. Beat world 5 on the New Super Mario Bros. Finished the introduction to the Arden Shakespeare's version of King Richard III and began reading the play proper. Ate a very tasty ploughman's sandwich. For some reason, passport control at Charles De Gaul doesn't ever stamp my passport. Weird. The only real excitement of the trip came at the train station, when some plainclothes French customs officials wanted to inspect my bags. They flashed their badges... but I have no idea what a French customs official's badge looks like. So I wasn't sure if it were legit, or if these were scam artists trying to make off with my stuff. Long story short: It was legit and everything turned out okay. Don't know why they targeted me, though, and in the train station, no less. Doesn't matter what country: I hate cops.

Okay, time to get some rest before the meeting begins tomorrow morning. If I am going to keep attending meetings here, which seems likely as the French IAP (Institut d'Astro-Physique) is based in Montparnasse, I am going to need to make a Paris icon. Maybe one of my photos of either the Eiffel Tower or the Arc du Triomphe will work...

Not really sure if this counts as a meme, since it isn't circulating (yet??) anywhere. But this is the culmination of some ruminating that I was doing recently and it sure seems meme-like, at least in form.

#1) Take your age, in years, and divide by eight.
#2) Round up or down, as appropriate.
#3) Name the top X list of things you are proudest of about yourself, where X is the result from step two. What you are proudest of can be anything: something that you have accomplished, your race, being related to somebody famous, your country... anything! For bonus points, explain why you are proud of each item in the list.

Here is my list:

The Four Thing of Which I am Proudest, by Nomad
#1) My Ph.D. Seemingly simple, this one encompasses a lot. I am proud of having survived the intensity of my first year in graduate school, when all I did was eat, breathe, and sleep physics. I am proud of passing my comprehensive exams with distinction, when I feared I could never pass them at all. I am proud to have worked as a member of the Super-Kamiokande collaboration, including -- but certainly not limited to -- basking in the reflected glory of my collaborator, Koshiba-sensei, when he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics. I am proud to have been first author, out of a collaboration of ~125, on a paper published in Physical Review Letters, the most august journal of our field. And I am proud to have won the 2003 Lee Wilcox Prize for the best experimental dissertation.

#2) My relationship with cheshcat. I am thirty-one years old. In one month and one day, cheshcat and I will celebrate our twelfth anniversary. We have been together for the entirety of my adult life. I know a few other people who have been together from as early an age into their thirties and beyond... but not many. And the things we have endured together in those twelve years! Yet here we are, and still going strong. Less than a month now, too, until she comes back to England to stay.

#3) Being an Anarchist. Shouldn't be too surprising to hear -- it's in my username, right? I am proud to be an Anarchist because I am so disgusted by the current status quo. Everything wrong with the way the world is now... but mirrored about. That's Anarchy. But, even moreso, I am proud to be an Anarchist by the way that I arrived there. When I was as young as eleven, I remember reading the encyclopedia -- which I did regularly as a kid -- and thinking about how to merge the "political freedom" of democracy with the "social equality" of communism. I remember being a misguided twelve year old right-Libertarian, fervently arguing in class debates against government control of business. I didn't know the term "Libertarian" (and certainly not "right-Libertarian") at the time... and neither did my eighth grade history teacher, who saw me as the budding Republican in the class. And it would still be a few more years before I understood that corporate domination is different than government domination... but just as evil. My evolution continued until, in college, I needed a word to describe what I believed... and I chose "Anarchy." At the time, I still suffered from the common delusion equating Anarchists and Nihlists, yet the term also seemed to fit the philosophy that I had worked out for myself. Finally, at the age of twenty-one, angryjim told me: "You're not really an Anarchist; that's just a term you made up." True, but I told him neither of us had ever looked at Anarchist philosophy, so neither of us knew for sure what an Anarchist was. I figured his definition was correct, but I bought a book on Anarchist thought anyway... and was startled to learn that I was actually right. So, yeah, I am proud to have independently re-invented Anarchy.

#4) Surviving my Adolescence. Nearly a decade of depression. Everpresent loneliness and rejection. Trapped in a school that I hated. Inferiority complex. Thrown out of the house more times than I can remember now. Running away from home time and again. Having my mother call the police on me. Being hit by my father -- not often, but still. How I managed to survive without even a serious suicide attempt is beyond me. In retrospect, the number of good times -- and there were plenty, but all isolated islands of fun in a sea of misery -- is a testament to my inherently positive nature. Certainly the darkest period in my life. It coloured my self-outlook for so long that I still thought of myself as being depressed and unstable into my mid-to-late 20s. Until cheshcat mentioned to me one day that I was one of the most mentally balanced people that she knew. That comment startled me as being starkly different than how I thought of myself. So I had to sit back and think about it... and I realized that she was right. At that point, I had been neither depressed nor unstable for quite a number of years... only the labels in my self-impression had remained.

If I had more things to list, there are several runners-up that I would count, like my family-by-choice, my graduation from Hampshire College, my transition from being a carnivore to being a vegetarian, et cetera. But fair's fair -- four is all I get, for now.

Being a physicist, of course, I am trained to think of symmetries and anti-symmetries. So I have also asked myself the question: What four things am I least proud of? I am not going to list the answers here... but I will say that they were all things that happened in a short period of time, generally with no forethought. In contrast, all the things of which I am most proud have taken place over an extended period of years, required large amounts of effort. I think this exemplifies the sort of thing that makes me proud: Accomplishments that I have made by my own choices and efforts over an extended period of time. I am not proud of my gender, my race, my nationality (heck no!), or my relations... or any other quality that I was simply born into.

Anyway, if anybody else chooses to adopt this not-really-a-meme, I would be interested in seeing what y'all decide to brag about. If not, well it wasn't really a meme anyway... just something that I was musing about the other day, looking back on my thirty-one years of life.

I primarily use this journal as a chronicle of my life, filtered for the public domain. As a secondary purpose, I sometimes share musing on various topics. Generally speaking, I do not use it for commentary on the news-worthy happenings of the day, as many on my friends list do.

However, the following snippet, lifted from an Associate Press article, caught my eye and was too good (awful?) to pass over for public comment:

---

NASA to Decide if Gap Fabric Needs Repair
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 9, 2006

The early consensus is that it probably won't pose problems during the shuttle's re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, but engineers pulled an all-nighter to recommend what, if anything, needs to be done, NASA officials said.

---

Right. So NASA wants to reach a decision based on the recommendation of a team of sleep-deprived engineers. Somehow, this seems less than brilliant, and not indicative of a functioning "safety-culture."

As a physicist, I learned a long time ago that working when tired is usually a bad idea. Pulling all-nighters to make progress usually hurts, rather than helps, productivity. For instance, I learned that working through the night coding usually means spending the next two days debugging that code. Mind you, this comes from somebody long entrenched in the culture of all-nighters; at Hampshire College, I never began a paper earlier than 10pm the night before it was due. These days, however, I reserve my all-nighters for working on papers and talks, which require far less consciousness than the actual physics work.

But NASA thinks that working its engineers through the night is the way to decide what is safest for the astronauts? Hoy vey!

1. CRESST Cryostat Wiring Documentation: Done and sent to our German colleagues working at Gran Sasso.
   
2. Curriculum Vitae and cover letter for cheshcat: Done and sent to the potential employer.
   
3. Chapters three and four of a D-Zero dissertation on technicolour: Done and sent to gyades.
   
   
4. Technical paper on the Pierre Auger Central Laser Facility: Done. Attempt to send to the arXiv pre-print server failed, as my file length (originally 2600 kbytes, now down to 1500 kbytes) exceeds their limit of 1000 kbytes. *grumbles loudly* Will attempt to shrink some more figures this weekend and then re-submit. Once successful, will also submit to the Journal of Instrumentation.
   
   
5. Proposal for the EURECA experiment: NEW EDITING PROJECT! Was assigned yesterday; am about to begin; must be finished by tonight. Talk about high turnover! This task has the highest priority for the rest of my day.
   
6. Chapter five of the aforementioned D-Zero dissertation: Will begin reading tonight and editing tomorrow.

It is quite the coincidence that so many editing tasks have converged on me this week. Last night, before bed, I read an on-line article that cheshcat had brought to my attention. The article applies classical myth theory to modern super-hero movies, which is a topic that I have some interest in... having written a Division I paper about a very similar topic (using comic book as my texts instead of movies) when I was at Hampshire College. I mention this article now, though, because I kept wanting to edit it as I was reading the article last night! Whoops...

I spent a fair portion of today wrestling with the K-400 cryostat, which is stubbornly refusing to cool down below 0.470K and reach its base temperature of 0.005K. In between said grappling, I incorporated the last set of comments into the technical paper that I have written on the Central Laser Facility. These comments came from the spokesperson of the collaboration, who had this to say:

I think that this paper is very nicely written and will be a credit to the Collaboration. I liked the style; the short sentences make it easy to follow and I am sure will be appreciated by non-native English speakers. I hope that this style can be taken as a model by the Collaboration and I will include reference to it if/when I produce the next version of the House style.

Now that is nice praise! What can I say? I rock! And so does cheshcat, who edited the manuscript when a complete first draft has been assembled. I am reminded of my doctoral dissertation: Three of my four committee members told me -- on separate occasions -- that it was the best-written dissertation that they had ever read. So, separate from the physics result, which was good enough to win the Lee Wilcox prize for best experimental thesis for that year, the writing kicked proverbial arse. Again, I rock! And, again, so do cheshcat and resourceress, who both edited my [nearly] two hundred page dissertation.

I am rather pleased with my ability to write well. In a recent chat with my graduate advisor, he commented that, amongst scientists, most native English speakers automatically assume that they write well, but many of them do not. Good to know that I am definitely one of those who can indeed write skillfully. Again, I must give due credit to cheshcat! Ever since 1994, when I was a mere undergraduate at Hampshire College, she has edited my writing and, through this process, honed my skills. Many a time did I stay up all night writing a paper that was due the next day. I would generally finish at around 6am, when I would shake cheshcat awake from the bed next to my dorm room desk. Then we would sit down together with the paper and she would turn my sleep-deprived gibberish into something quite coherent and eloquent. Thanks much, Love -- you rock!

So, yes, I am feeling a bit cocky and have something of a swelled head tonight. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. Without a doubt, having the CLF paper so close to completion has something to do with this.

Last Friday, after a two week wait, we finally received a dewar of liquid helium... on the same day that cassiopia arrived for a ten day visit. Between balancing work on the cryostat and taking time off from work to be a tourist, my days have been packed to capacity with no time to spare for LiveJournal. I will catch up on my friends pages, reply to comments, and write about my recent sightseeing travels in England next week, after cassiopia has gone back to the States.

In the meantime, however, today is an important day and, as such, bears noting. One decade ago today, I graduated from Hampshire College. On May 18 1996, I received my Bachelor of the Arts degree and began my Division IV (which is Hampshire-speak for "the rest of your life"). In fact, it is nearly 7am in Massachusetts. Ten years ago right now, I had just held my bell ringing ceremony (Hampshire's tradition for students who are "Div-Free", or ready to graduate) at dawn, after being awake all night, with cheshcat, angryjim, ashnistrike, and adam_goss in attendance. It was a small ceremony with an extremely concise speech by me, then we all headed out to get early-morning bagels before finally going to sleep (as was not uncommon for us back then). Several hours later, somewhat sleep deprived, we would all awake and get ready for the official college commencement.

Ten whole years since I was an undergraduate. My goodness, the time does fly!

Two weeks ago right now, cheshcat and I were on a boat heading from Seattle to Juneau. Two weeks from now, not only will I be finished with my trip to Argentina... but the RNC will be over as well and I will be in Connecticut with resourceress visiting with our friends Furnace & Flameweaver.

In a similar vein, I'll note that one year ago today I turned in my official copies of my dissertation (after a grueling all-nighter wrestling with printer malfunction hell). So one year ago right now, I was visiting pomoloco for the night, before flying back to AZ to help cheshcat pack up our Mesa apartment. Time really does fly...

Time-sense is something that has interested me for a very long, er, time. I think that part of it is being aware of my own mortality, and part of it is knowing that events only matter for a moment if you don't remember them somehow.

My second year at Hampshire College, I took a course called Perspectives on Time. Twas an unusual course. We met once a week, in the evening, for four hours. The first hour was spent preparing dinner. During the second hour, we ate while one of the advanced students in the class (it was designed for people in their final year) spoke about their work. In the final two hours, we discussed the topic of the week. During that semester, we discussed time from a historical perspective (e.g. how clock-making technology had changed our cultural perception of time), a physical perspective (e.g. relativity), a musical perspective, a literature perspective, a cinematic perspective, a kinesthetic perspective, and so on. One perspective per week. Fascinating course...

I took the day off today [mostly] and decompressed from all the activity of the past week (to be described in a future journal entry). After spending the morning whittling away at the barrage of this week's email, I went outside to spend my afternoon reading and enjoying the warm Autumn air. As usual, it was another beautiful clear day. After the never-ending grey skies of Chicago, the vibrant blue -- with an occasional puffy cloud -- is more than welcome.

Outside of comic books and corporate newspapers, I have not read works of fiction since October -- nearly half a year now. Not by design, but all of the books I have read recently have been non-fictional. So I put down Howard Zinn and brought out The Physicists, a short play from the 1960s written by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt. It was given to me in February by cheshcat.

I read through the entire play this afternoon and, I have to say, it was quite strange. The three physicists in the play are all locked up in a madhouse: One thinks he is Newton, one thinks he is Einstein, and one has visions of King Solomon. As the play progresses, murders occur, spies are revealed, and the end does not bode well for the world. The content of physics is deliberately ignored, but the play focuses on the effect of physics research. Besides being a good read, it was especially interesting to me, as I consider a physicist's responsibility for the way their own work is used to be very important. I know that many other physicists disagree, but this view was one of the many valuable things that I picked up in my Hampshire College education.

Lying in bed is a good time to think. Last night, as I lay in bed, it occurred to me that -- as far as I know -- I have never been away from New York City for more than about three months at a time. I mean, I grew up there, I visited frequently when I was at Hampshire College, and I did my graduate work on Lawn Guyland.

The last time I was in NYC was New Years, and the three month mark is rapidly approaching. Meanwhile, I have no plans to return to the city before June, at the earliest. So it occurs to me that I may have finally given up my New Yorker status for good. Not that it was ever as vital a part of my identity the way it is for some. But between ending my job at Stony Brook and moving all my belongings out of my mother's house, there really isn't anything there as an anchor for me anymore. Heck, I even told the post office to forward all the mail from 168, which had always been my most permanent address.

A corollary of all this is that it is going to be some time before I see MarchHare again, because I believe that every one of our dates has taken place in NYC.

The weather in Mexico City has felt a lot like Spring in New England. It has been about 70 degrees (F), not too dry, and smells like things are blooming. Basically, it feels exactly like early May used to back at Hampshire College. As such, we've been walking a lot. Walk from the subway (Metro) station to the University. Walk from the University to town for lunch. It's nice. I'm going to miss it when I go back to Chicago tomorrow. Current temperature in Chicago: 11 degrees, or -1 with the wind chill.

Today, we walked into town and had lunch at a vegetarian restaurant. This was enjoyable, because even though Mexico City seems to be pretty veggie-friendly, it is hard to order correctly when you are only semi-literate. And twice I've ended up ordering dishes that seemed meat-free, only to end up with chicken or ham thrown into the enchiladas. Blech.

Now it is February, which means that I've been completely meat-free for over a month now. It feels good to mean it when I tell somebody that I'm vegetarian, as opposed to last year when it just meant that I wasn't feeling like explaining the definition of "pescetarian" for the umpteenth time. And being vegetarian feels weird whenever I think about it too much. Three years ago, I was barely an omnivore -- much closer to a carnivore -- and Chesh would routinely tease me about being "veggiephobic." I had said for years that I'd become a vegetarian if only I liked vegetables. Well, okay, it finally dawned on me that I couldn't instantly give up my meat addiction, but I could wean myself off of animal flesh... and it worked. Dropping food groups one at a time took longer -- over two years -- and each step was challenging, but it worked. I should publish a book: "From Carnivore to Herbivore in Three [Not So] Easy Steps"