I’m sitting in my living room watching Mike Rowe fix a bridge, and recovering from the two week physics boot camp that is the United States Particle Accelerator School. It was fun, I met some really cool people, and I learned a lot about accelerators.
I have to say, though, that two weeks is a very short time for a full semester of course material, homework, and a final exam. I almost wish the school had a more complete meet-and-greet component, since I met some people that I might be working with in the future, and there’s no telling how many more I would meet if there was a full venue.
But I’m back home, and I watched Germany play poorly and Spain play well with the Germans in the department. Disappointed is a good adjective. And I’m back in New York, back to Aikido and home, to BNL and work, friends. It’s good to be home.
I’m currently sitting in an hotel room at the Doubletree in Annapolis, MD, smack dab in the middle of week one of the United States Particle Accelerator School, where I’m learning about my future Ph.D field from Todd Satogata and Waldo MacKay (pronounced Mac-EYE, as he insisted on the first day). But first, I had to get there, and that meant driving.
I could have flown, but then I wouldn’t have a car that I don’t have time to use, nor would I have gotten to drive for five hours through two of my favorite places in the world: Long Island and New Jersey.
Driving in Long Island, particularly on the LIE, is an interesting activity. You never quite know how fast you’ll be able to get away with, and you see a fascinating mixture of busted ass ‘85 Daewoos and brand new Rolls-Royces or BMWs. Then you hit Manhattan, and your speed question is abruptly shifted to watching your speedo sit just below the 10 mark until you pay about $400 in tolls and cross the George Washington Bridge. Read more »
From May 30 to June 5, I and my comrades from Stony Brook ventured to Colorado to bear witness to the wedding of Regina and Richard. But first, we had to get there.
Day 1 — Heavy Drinking Ahoy!
Five of us set out on the same flight from podunk Long Island MacArthur Airport to the giant airport in Denver. The inside of the building was nice and modern-looking, but the outside was supposed to look like the Rocky Mountains. It looked more like the world’s largest tent.
The real misadventures began when we arrived at the rental car place. We were going to rent a conversion van, but these things won’t seat more than seven with no luggage, and we were eight with luggage. So we got upgraded to a Chevy Suburban. I don’t think I fathomed how big it was until we got up next to a minivan and dwarfed it. Think Canyonero.
None of this was as difficult as finding somewhere to eat in Denver with my friends Charity and Daniel. Bombing around the local mall, with great difficulty we managed to find a Mexican place staffed predominately by young attractive blonde women.
However, this Mexican food was malicious, and would strain the ties of our party, as I developed horrible, horrible gas that everyone in the car had to suffer through for hours until we got to the hotel, and beyond.
That night we arrived we discovered that the Howard Johnson’s at Nevada Avenue and 25 is the nicest hotel on that stretch. Given that the competition was the 4U Motel, which looked abandoned but definitely was not, this is not fierce competition. There were two noteworthy things about this hotel that came up that night: the first was that on our trip to the liquor store to load up, I’m pretty sure I saw a hooker get hired, and then in some of the rooms people in our crew got an hospitality package of men and women’s deodorant, a small bottle of K-Y massage and personal lubricant, and two samples of Neosporin oral herpes treatment. We were living in class here. But, the night ended and we went on to
Day 2 — The Wedding & Reception
After a night of heavy drinking, we awoke to our mediocre continental breakfast, and the day of the wedding. Looking dapper, we arrived to the local Catholic church to watch a fire and brimstone Irish Catholic who apparently got exported directly to Colorado purely to make Richard uncomfortable preside over the ceremony and a Mass that followed. Having never seen I Catholic ceremony before, I was impressed by the pageantry and ceremony of it all. After the wedding, we were confused for a bunch of high school graduates by the local CVS people, and began day 2 of Jan and my quest to find flasks for the wedding.
Oddly enough, family values oriented Wal-Mart was the place to go to find the alcohol paraphernalia. Succeeding at this, we embarked to the site of the reception in Manitou Springs.
Manitou Springs reminds me strongly of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in that it’s a tourist trap set against a beautiful mountain backdrop. Continue after the bump. Read more »
Today I met up with Aakash in NYC to hang out, since he’s starting his lawyerin’ internship tomorrow. I learned a few interesting things today: Read more »
Bryce DeWitt was a theorist that developed an early form of quantum gravity in an effort to bypass the infinite number of counterterms it seems to require, and, with John Wheeler, wrote down what amounts to the wave function of the universe. That said, a talk he gave entitled “Quantum Gravity, Yesterday and Today”, has appeared on arXiv:
I think my favorite part of this article isn’t his remarkable role in the history of the development of a very difficult field, but rather his anecdote about Wolfgang Pauli:
I was hoping to spend some time as a postdoc at the ETH, so Pauli asked me what I was working on. I said I was trying to quantize the gravitational field. For many seconds he sat silent, alternately shaking and nodding his head (a nervous habit he had, affectionately known as die Paulibewegung). He finally said “That is a very important problem - but it will take someone really smart!”
My friend Shae linked me to this article at Inside Higher Ed about a professor, Steven D. Aird, who was fired for failing too many students. At first glance, that looks about reasonable. A Professor failing 90% of his students might be a little harsh. But read on — you find a duplicitous administration that ignores the results of its own policies, and a professor who wants to hold his students to *gasp* standards. Thank God for professors like Dr. Aird, who are willing to do what is necessary and proper to insure that a college degree still means something. As for me, if I see a diploma from Norfolk State University come across my desk for a job or summer internship, I think I might just have to keep sliding it along…
I thought I’d share something the professor I’m teaching for shared with the class. His basic comment was that the writing of the class was full of flowery prose, but very few substantive statements; something I’d noticed all semester in their lab reports. To illustrate his point, he linked them to a George Orwell essay and I thought it would be worth sharing with others. It goes along with my wish that I could demand that all of my students read Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style before writing their lab reports, but unfortunately I couldn’t.
