You know you work with geeks . . .

. . . when after having walked into a glass door on your vacation and garlanding your nose with a most interesting set of cuts and bruises, none of your colleagues mention it. All week. Not one.


The guy at the bus-stop, but not the people sharing your office space.

My nose is much better now, thanks.

Physicist-isms

It is a truth that should be universally acknowledged that scientist and engineer types talk funny. Particle physics is no exception. Not only does this apply to us discussing physics, but it carries into normal conversation as well. My friends and I used to make a game to see who could throw the geekiest physics reference into a discussion; the more advanced the topic referenced the more bragging rights. I mean, anyone can throw a reference to momentum or velocity into a conversation, but it takes creativity to get quantum field theory worked in there.

Anyway, a few of my favorite phrases and buzz-words that have been adapted to other uses.

Critical mass: This isn't exactly a particle physics term, but particle physics once was nuclear physics so it work. In order for a nuclear chain reaction to take place, the decay products of one reaction must be able to set off a second reaction. The decay products of the second set off a third, and the reaction perpetuates itself. For this to happen, however, the decay products need to be able to reach fresh material; if the stuff is too spread out or there isn't enough of it, the reaction will fizzle and die out. The critical mass is the amount of stuff necessary to get a self-sustaining chain reaction started.

We use it to mean the amount of something that must accumulate before something begins. The party is just waiting to reach critical mass before starting the games.

Collaboration: An Example

Set-up: I spent much of July working on a particular project in the hopes it would included in the results sent to a conference at the end of August by one of the groups at CERN. Several other students from different universities did the same. We were all given the outline of the analysis, and then wrote our own code, adding in our particular methods to calculate the results. When the editor began pulling things together for this note, my project had insufficient statistics for the results to be included, but I was asked to make some of the plots used to describe the part of the analysis we all had in common. I made very nice versions of the plots and submitted them to the editor on a Friday, thinking that beyond cosmetic changes I was more or less done with the note.

Monday evening, 6 p.m.: editor calls a meeting with me and two other students to say that our results don't match. Namely, student X who made the table has selected a different number of events than I did for the plots that are supposed to go with the table. We are told to figure out the difference and resolve it as soon as possible.

So much for French class that night. Instead I park myself at my computer to start figuring out exactly which events are in which plots and comparing this to similar lists produced by X for his tables. This is made more difficult that my work computer has started randomly freezing and crashing, and managed to corrupt a chunk of the datasets I had set up in the process. So I am trying to compare numbers piecemeal with X using the uncorrupted datasets while reproducing those that got messed up. My computer continues to freeze throughout this process. We eventually reach the point where no further comparisons can be made without a more methodical comparison, and sign off Skype chat. I set up my computer to clean-up the last five corrupted files, submit all the analysis jobs to the cluster, and catch the last bus home at 12:40.

Adventures of Mint

If I were to assign personalities to my plants, most of them would be accepting, contented, decorous, forgiving, homebody-type souls. Plants by their very nature find their little plot of dirt and stay there, doing their own thing in as much as wind and sun and rain and stupid people allow. In fact, one almost gets the feeling of smugness from plants, because regardless of any pleading, begging, bribing, or opportuning on the part the gardener, plants are going to do things their way. It normally takes shears and twine to dictate otherwise. Needless to say, one would not normally claim a spirit of adventure for one's plants. Plants are stationary.

However, just about every family has its sheep of other colors, and I have discovered that plants are no exception. Amongst my little brood, it is the mint.

I adopted the mint at the same time I adopted my parsley and cilantro, and with some trepidation I put all three tiny plants in the same planter. The trepidation comes because I'd heard of mint being somewhat invasive. But the three were tiny and I didn't have another pot and herbs earn the right to be herbs by being just about indestructible, so it was possible they could coexist.

But the mint rapidly got ideas and by the time I was starting to see some disturbingly runner-like shoots heading towards the mint's boxmates, I decided something needed to be done. The mint got confined to its only little pot and got the freedom to do what it pleased there.

The parsley seems to have gotten its own delusions of conquest from the mint, but parsley doesn't send out runners. Crossing borders is therefore more difficult.

How to fix a blown fuse

Reason 1,483 that Europe is not like the US: the electricity is different.

The physicist in me protested it should be something like 'the way electricity is distributed is different' but it's a weekend, that wording destroys any snap to the phrase and was edited out.

There are three aspects to this difference, ranging from obvious (the plugs aren't shaped the same) to subtle (the frequency is different). However, I would say that the potentially most damaging is that the voltages are different. European electric circuits run at twice the voltage of their American counterparts (220V instead of 110V). Voltage is the potential energy per unit charge, so you can think of it roughly as the energy available to the charged particles in the current, and begin to see why this may be a problem. Too much energy in a circuit = things melting.

Electronic equipment is protected against this sort of thing, since it runs on DC current and already needs to convert the AC power that comes from the wall. Anything that draws a lot of current, though (curlers, hair-blow dryers), is going to pick up four times as much power.

Voltage = Resistance * Current
Power = Voltage * Current

This is how foreign hair-blow dryers turn into circuit-blowing monsters when taken over seas. However, you can also blow fuses by plugging in American power-strips into European outlets. I know. I've done it.

I've also fixed it, at least from the apartment-renter's perspective on fixing. No soldering required.

1. Find the circuit box. Mine hides in the closet closest to the door, but I've also seen them on the wall in the corner.
2. Open it and see what's going on. When I blew fuses in the US, the blown fuse would be the only one flipped to an off position (as compared to everything else) and flipping it back would fix the problem.
3. If no switches are visible, find the fuses themselves. They look like little clear cylinders with metal ends. Unless they have some plastic bracket or other insulation, do turn off the master power switch (should be right next to them) before pulling things out.
4. Figure out which fuse you need to change. I do this by turning off the power, removing a fuse, turning the power back on, and running around my apartment flipping switches until I figure out what I disconnected.
5. Replace the fuse. The previous tenant of my apartment kept a little bag of fuses for different currents (it's the number followed by an 'A'), and I plan to continue his example. Pick a new one that's for the same current as the old one.
6. Add fuses for that current to your shopping list for the next time you pass by a hardware store. Find a different outlet to charge your camera battery so you don't actually need the power strip.