Charm &c.

To lift a leaf from Tommaso, here we answer questions posed by search engine queries that lead to this blog.

• Some variant of “steely dan review camden“: they were great.
• “latex beamer comic“: I know what you want, you bad bad person you, and I’m not telling you how to do that.  Actually, it’s extremely difficult to properly install TrueType fonts for use in the standard Linux TeX distribution (teTeX), as a couple of wasted afternoons of mine attest.  What is relatively simple, shockingly, is installing Type 1-style OpenType fonts (.otf files, should you have any).  Setting them up to use in teTeX is as simple as installing the LCDF Typetools, installing Fontools, then running the autoinst program.  (Or you can look here for a different route.)  Everything, including ligatures, can then be accessed with a simple \usepackage.
• “asner dalitz“: you may be seeking this.  Or this.  Or maybe neither.

Experimental particle physics is a very social endeavor. We love to see each other so much that we schedule lots of meetings, from small person-to-person get-togethers to huge conferences. It’s just so much fun to sit in windowless rooms!

One common form of assembly is the Collaboration Meeting. Every collaboration has a Meeting. It occurs with some frequency, which is set by the difficulty of getting everyone together in the same place at once. Mega-international collaborations have them relatively infrequently, sometimes in pretty places on different continents from the actual experiment.

The Collaboration Meeting, as a platonic form, is a forum where all the people involved in an experiment get together, catch up with the latest status of everything, plan for the future, and have a jolly good time too. Papers are approved, votes are taken, decisions of far-reaching import are made. The Collaboration is, for a shining instant, realized as a single entity. Needless to say it’s usually less exciting.

CLEOns, being a gregarious bunch, want to have collaboration meetings all the time, sometimes twice in one month. Where other experiments may have three a year, we had eleven in 2005. Since many of us are on-site here in Ithaca, and most of the remainder are in the northeast or midwest, it’s relatively easy for lots of us to come and take part in the excitement. Our meetings are so frequent, in fact, that the physics groups (e.g. bottomonium or hadronic D decays) meet on the same schedule to review the progress of analyses; we don’t hold with this weekly physics meeting nonsense that CDF engages in — once a month’s good enough.

A frequent CLEO meeting scenario goes like this. You are a poor grad student/postdoc, working hard on your analysis, but distracted as always by other responsibilities. A few months/weeks before a meeting, someone (your advisor/the Analysis Coordinator/a random faculty member from another institution) starts dropping broad hints/threats that it would be really nice if, you know, you could have some numbers ready for a conference two months from now, which means you have to have them approved for public release during the next meeting.

So you work really hard and succeed/fail in getting everything ready. If the first, you give a plenary talk (in principle to the whole collaboration) on your work, where you will promptly be asked lots of questions which you may or may not be prepared to answer. The questions need not actually relate to your work, in which case members of the audience will proceed to have irrelevant arguments while you stand in front of everybody, hiding your distress, wishing you were eating one of those nice donuts they provide in the mornings instead. If you didn’t quite make it to plenary talk level, you go through the same thing, except it’s now a parallel-session physics group talk instead. This will all most likely happen on a Friday.

On Saturday, you come in early in the morning and sit in a large room on the 7th floor of a different building. The power outlets are pretty much all in the back of the room. A continuous strip of tables is set up there, in front of the windows; a long row of people sit here, their backs to the outside, facing the speakers but looking intently at their laptop monitors the entire morning. You will listen to talks on the status of the accelerator, detector, and software (useful) and then be asked to vote on papers you haven’t read, didn’t know existed, but have your name on anyway (er…) Then there will be a lunch featuring ice cream sandwiches, in all probability.

On the whole, collaboration meetings are fun if you’re not presenting anything. If you are, they can be stressful deadlines, just another rung in the infinite ladder of similar-yet-not-identical talks one seems to always be giving on the same topic. But, when they’re over, you get to pay attention to other things again, like blogs.

I’m at the APS April meeting in Dallas. I would have posted earlier, but we are staying in the Hyatt Regency, and like many expensive hotels it is simultaneously cheaper and more expensive than it first appears. In particular the wireless costs $10 a day from the rooms, though APS has set up a little isolated network in the lobby for us to use when we happen to be in the lobby. The wireless doesn’t work in the meeting rooms (there went my dreams of snarky live blogging!). Since I haven’t been in the lobby much, I’ve been making do with my cellphone’s EDGE service, which seems a tad slow here and is useless for ssh connections.

The expense of the hotel: apart from the wireless, one of the first things you notice when you enter your room is the $5 bottled water. Also the six pillows on the beds: four normal, one bolster-type object, and a foot-wide round puffball which, as S.S. demonstrated, will not bounce on the floor.

The cheapness of the hotel: it has a severe problem with soundproofing. Our room is right next to the elevator and overlooks the tracks of Dallas’s Union Station, which leads to wheezing noises and low-frequency rumbling at all hours. This might be chalked up to us getting a really lousy room, except that the meeting rooms aren’t much better. The staff wheel unoiled carts around in corridors next to the plenary talks, and a couple of the rooms appear to be right under the train tracks, making the light rail schedules painfully apparent.

Also: convincing them to give us three washcloths was a lot harder than it should have been (surprisingly, since my experience is hotels give double doubles three but not four). Their cable listings have notable lacunae (Comedy Central and Cartoon Network), and at any rate do not correspond to what is actually on the television. And so on…

Maybe next time I’ll actually talk about the physics?

I am a physicist.  A particle experimentalist.  I study the charm quark with data from the CLEO-c experiment at the Cornell Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics.

Why is this blog here?  While theorists and cosmologists slag each other off elsewhere, I thought it would be fun to talk about particle experiment.  And maybe other things.

Thus endeth the mission statement.