Ex-scientist

this rough magic
I here abjure; ...I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

So as of today I am an ex-physicist. I went into the lab for the last time to hand in my dosimeter and my badge. (The sweet receptionist asked if I was quitting physics to become a model. Now, people with family resemblances or ulterior motives will go so far as to say that, in dim light and with selective camera angles, I'm passable, so this is a bit of a surprise. She herself is quite lovely and is always very carefully dressed and made-up, so I wonder if her suggestion reflects her own secret desire?) It feels good to finally be able to let go of this part of my life. I'm sad that people won't say "wow" when I tell them what I do--"nuclear astrophysicist" is a very cool job title--and I'm still feeling apprehensive about having people laugh when I tell them that I'm working at Starbucks--but this is what my life is like right now. This is what I'm doing for myself. I'm not doing work that makes me miserable. I'm asserting that I don't have to be extraordinary in order to have the right to exist. I'm just doing an ordinary job, living an ordinary life--and that will be enough.

I got a right
I got a right
I got a right, Lord, to the tree of life.

teaching joy

So I'm teaching the university's Introduction to Astrophysics class, completely unhindered by any prior knowledge of astrophysics. (I've made up a nifty little webpage for the class, using Google's Page Creator which is sheer joy to use.) It's going well so far. I'm bribing students with chocolate (Mars and Milky Way bars, naturally) to answer questions, and they're proving to be quite responsive. (Also v. young. They're all eighteen, which means...I don't even want to think about what year they were born in.) Also keen. One of them came up to me after class today and said, "I was reading the textbook last night, and I was thinking about some stuff, and I was just wondering,..." --and I had to get him to repeat what he said next because my brain had shorted out. Students. Reading textbooks. Thinking about what they read. Asking teachers interesting questions (it turned out to be, what would happen to the orientation of the Earth if it were to stop spinning on its axis, given its current squashed shape and the pull of the Sun and the Moon?). ...I don't think I can handle this much pedagogical joy all at once.

things I never expected to hear from my boss, part N

Alison is my boss. Alison is a month older than me. Alison first met me when we were roommates at a conference, and a senior professor got us all drunk as skunks and I told her my entire life story. Alison has no illusions about me. Alison hired me anyway (go figure).

We were going to go out with another colleague yesterday evening, and since I still hadn't dried off after my wetting and I didn't have time to go all the way home to change, we stopped off at her place so she could lend me some dry clothes. We were walking down the street afterwards and she said, "You look better in my clothes than I do."

The list of things I never expected to hear from a boss just gets longer and longer.

I screw for a living

So the past couple of days have been busy days at work. We're setting up an experiment, which means I've been running up and down ladders carrying equipment that is some combination of heavy, awkward, expensive, so fragile that it can be broken if you breathe on it, laboriously handmade, or irreplaceable. Oh, or radioactive. (It's somewhat less nerve-wracking carrying these things myself than watching other people carry them.) We've had to make a lot of changes to the set-up, which means I've been putting in and taking out the same twenty or thirty screws over and over again. All of a sudden, in the middle of one of these tasks this afternoon, it hit me: I screw for a living.

...although not perhaps in the way my mother feared I would end up doing back when I was eight and showing a marked preference for barbies and dress-up over trucks and lego.

blogging JOY!!

I've just started a work blog. Like, a blog to help me keep track of my work, and to share my results with my colleagues. Whe I told Corey about it, he said that the only thing that could make it geekier, or less generally comprehensible, is if it were written in Elvish. I know that publishing the link is just going to get me more snide comments, but anyway, it's here.

The name comes from an Eddie Izzard sketch, about how he doesn't have techno-fear, he has technoJOY!!! and will recklessly install computer hardware without ever cracking open the manual. Similarly, I've got simulation JOY and will simulate breakfast cereal, given half a chance.

double structured procrastination

So a while ago I read an article about "structured procrastination"--a technique that helps self-identified procrastinators become hugely productive. See, what you do is, you get some task that's large and daunting and amorphous and indefinitely postponable, and you're so turned off by it that you'll do pretty much anything else in order to avoid it. Your guilt makes you choose productive activities instead of surfing the internet, and so while you're avoiding the task you "should" be doing, you're actually getting a lot of useful stuff done. The down side is that eventually you may have to actually do the "motivator" task, in which case it won't be hanging over your head anymore--but there's always another task to fill its place.
A shorter-term technique that I've accidentally found is to tell myself that first thing in the morning I'm going to go to the bank/gym/whatever, but first I'll just do this one little thing. What inevitably happens is that I get so interested in what I'm doing that I end up working in a quite focussed and productive manner for hours, all the while saying to myself, "just five minutes more and I'll leave."
Right now I'm doing both of these things. I'm supposed to be working on data analysis for an experiment we did last summer, but there's a couple of interesting simulation problems that need my attention too, so I'm working on those instead, AND I meant to leave to go to the bank an hour and a half ago but I just can't tear myself away. There has to be a name for this, and it has to be less awkward-sounding than "double structured procrastination". Any thoughts?

Titles, and countdown

The title of my dissertation, on my first progress report:
Levels in ²⁷Si that are resonances for ²⁶Al + p

My private working title of my dissertation, after I had the first good look at the data:
Levels in ²⁷Si that are NOT resonances for ²⁶Al + p

The title I was considering when I realized that I had 50 figures on 60 pages of text:
Baby's first illustrated guide to explosive nucleosynthesis

The "sexy" title that my supervisor suggested:
²⁶Al^m + p resonances in ²⁷Si

The title that I ended up putting on the title page of the document that got circulated to my committee:
²⁷Al^m + p resonances in ²⁷Si

...you'll notice that that last option involves adding 27 + 1 and getting 27. I'm looking for new and unusual phenomena, but not quite THAT unusual.

So, um, yeah. I'm sitting around, reading papers, going over my slides one last time, and watching the clock until it's time to leave for the airport. My thesis defence is on Tuesday (10 am EDT, if you want to burn a candle for me) and I'm having trouble sitting still. I know there's very little point trying to DO anything more at this point, but still I can't shake the feeling that there's one more paper that I can read that will make all the difference when I get asked a hard question.

tick tock tick tock

ALMOST the perfect man

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Out for dinner just now with K+A+T, the conversation turned to chocolate. A said, "T, you make truffles, don't you?" K chimed in: "Wow, truffles AND your famous margaritas--you're ALMOST the perfect man."

Once she realized exactly how back-handed that compliment was, K was utterly mortified. A and I tried not to laugh too much...we did! we tried! honest!...it might have been hard to tell that we were trying, granted, given that it took us five minutes to stop cackling and wipe away the tears, and that periodically throughout the rest of the meal we'd look at T and start giggling again.

He'd already said that he wasn't going to work on another experiment with A and ML, because of how much whispering and cackling they do, and he's comparing hanging around with K and A and me to being in "Macbeth"...pretty soon he won't be talking to any of us at all, let alone doing night shifts for us. We'd better get back on his good side pronto.

*sigh* Happiness is working with someone who makes you laugh until you cry.

Holiday! Celebrate!

So I started my new job on July 4. Today the contract arrived in the mail. I leafed through it, skimming the bits about how working hours are "to be negotiated with your supervisor", skipping entirely the bits about pensions. What grabbed my attention was this:

"Holiday entitlement:
You are entitled to 38 days' holiday, including 8 statutory holidays, in any one year (commencing with the effective date of your appointment)..."

38 days' holiday, including 8 statutory holidays.

THIRTY-EIGHT DAYS. During a ONE-YEAR CONTRACT.

Having lived in the States for the past 7 years, I'm used to people complaining about how they don't get any paid holidays their first year on the job, and even after that they have to wheel and deal in order to be able to take more than two days off at xmas.

THIRTY-EIGHT DAYS.

Couple that with "working hours are to be negotiated with your supervisor" and I can essentially spend all next summer on the Riviera.

academia: a vignette

After my second year of university, I spent the summer working in a research lab. My friend Tom was doing the same, but instead of sharing an office with other undergrads he shared the office of his supervisor's post-doc Bill. Bill was a curmudgeon-in-training. His favourite rant was about how academia is exploitative and unjust, and he had all these elaborate stories to tell about professors who made their careers out of stealing the research of their students. It was entertaining enough, in its repetitive way, but we generally managed to avoid eating lunch with him.

Well, one day we ran into Bill and he was just glowing. He spontaneously started telling us about how academia is really the only possible career choice for a smart person, because it's the only true meritocracy around. He went on in this vein for several minutes, then floated off, his feet barely touching the ground.

I looked at Tom. I didn't even have to ask the question. He said, "Yeah, Bill just won an award."

today's weirdness

From a nuclear physics paper compiling spectroscopic data:

"This timeline shows the "Rise and Fall" (footnote 1) of the spectroscopy of light nuclei, a narrow peak in the years around 1970 with a height about seven times the 1995 publication rate."

footnote 1: From "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", W.L. Shirer (Secker and Wartburg, London).

uh. what?

committee

So I'm getting together my committee for my thesis defence right now. I've got an off-site reader, a theorist (known for asking soft-ball questions), and a couple of others--and I'm also thinking about asking this one junior (very junior--he makes the transition from post-doc next week) professor to be on the committee, just because he blushes and stammers whenever I make direct eye contact with him. Not only is that very entertaining but it lends itself to certain...abuses.

Scene: the examination after my public talk
Prof: Can you be more specific about the calibration (I show a little leg) meth... er... what?

heh heh heh.

best quotes from the workshop

A rare moment of candour in a talk: "I don't expect you to be able to read all of this--it's just to impress you."

"People build Rayleigh-Taylor unstable stars all the time--until they're told not to."

A: "This is an anomalous nova."
B: "Every well-studied nova is an anomalous nova."

A: "In this class of novae..."
B: "Wait, that's a class?"
A: (pause) "...well, there's more than one of them."

"Here's the effect of metallicity (showing 2 dense pages of tables): there's no effect."

A: "According to 'theory'..."
B: (in his talk, later that day) "According to 'experiment'..."

"'Prompt' for me is less than a billion years."

A: "It's complicated."
B: (dripping with sarcasm) "Really."

and words of wisdom from Stan Woosley:
"We should all be drinking beer instead of doing numerical calculations."
(plaintively) "Why is everything so hard?"

By the end of the first day of talks, we young 'uns were a bit punchy and were tossing around ideas of how to liven things up. The keeper was to have the speakers don those sumo suits and have full-contact debates.
"I disagree with your rate estimate! RAAAH!"
"You've underestimated the impact of the boundary conditions! GAAAARRR!"
"The theory you're quoting is just gossip! OOOFFF!"

word of the day

coeval.

It gives me chills.

Thinking of people I can't do without, my supervisor rocks. Without him I would vanish without a trace. Any prospective grad students out there? Make sure your thesis advisor rocks. No smooth jazz allowed.

I'm having a very educational day. I've learned two ways to make a do-loop NOT run: either you can require 1 to be not equal to 1 before entering the loop, or you can not increment the variable that you're looping over. Fascinating, eh?

cue hysterical laughter

So I thought I'd go back and check a calculation I did a few months ago--I'd use the same procedure, and just confirm that the results made sense.

Before: 25% of the ²⁷Si created decayed to the ground state of ²⁶Al, and 25% to the first excited state. A total of 50% of the ²⁷Si was accounted for; 50% was missing and I wasn't sure whether it was an efficiency problem or just something weird I was doing in the analysis.

After: 75% of the ²⁷Si created decayed to the ground state of ²⁶Al, and 75% to the first excited state, for a total of 150%.

Not, perhaps, the subtle change I was hoping for.

Excuse me for a minute. I think there's a wall that needs me to bash my head against it.

(Edit: just after I finished writing this, someone came home with a whole bouquet of free-range flowers for me. All better.)

Hans Bethe dies

Nature

A sad day. Bethe was one of the giants of 20th-century physics.

Myself, I'm still endlessly delighted by a paper he co-wrote that I sometimes get to cite: authors Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow. In that order. *sigh* It's the simple pleasures, really.

I talked with my supervisor today about my dissertation. I don't think he realizes it, and he'd probably laugh if I pointed this out to him, but he's a Buddhist. Everything he said to me can be summed up as the Three Characteristics:

unsatisfactoriness: There is no way to make this document perfect.

impermanence: No matter how good my measurement, how precise and elaborate my conclusions, someone else--probably, in my case, very soon--will do a better experiment.

non-self: It's not me my committee will be evaluating: it's just this document.

This last Characteristic is in a lot of ways the hardest to get one's head around--but it's liberating. The work I do is not self. The judgements other people pass are not self. The heart that grieves is not self. The body that dies is not self.

The hardest thing I've ever done

A year and a half ago, I went to a job interview.

--and yes, that is what the title of this entry refers to.

The interview was for a professorship at a small college in Halifax. I was one of three on the short list. Each of us spent a couple of days at the department, giving a talk about our research and being grilled by each of the faculty members in turn about our qualifications and interests.

Applying for the job was up there on the list of the hardest things I've ever done. I had to really think about what I was doing with my life and why, and whether this whole physics thing was such a good idea after all. At that time I was also considering applying for a job as a consultant with McKinsey or some other evil company like that. Clearly I eventually decided against that option; but the process of deciding was one of real soul-searching: all the different options I was considering would be very rewarding, but in very different ways, and I had to decide what kinds of rewards I wanted to chase. The conclusion I came to then was along the lines of, "Well, I'm not entirely sure that I'm A Physicist--but I seem to be pretty good at it, and I love the idea of being a professor...and although I have my doubts about this sometimes, there's nothing else that appeals to me in the same way." Maybe not the most ringing endorsement, but it's a lot more clarity than I usually have about most things. So I put together a decent talk, and a plausible line about future research interests, and put all my worldly posessions in a red spotted handkerchief and set out to seek my fortune in Halifax.

I spent the next two days beating my fists against an invisible wall.

I talked to each professor in turn. From all but one of them I got the impression that they weren't even really sure why they were talking to me: that they had already decided that I wasn't who they were looking for. Having convinced myself, at least, that my proposed research nicely filled a gap in their department's offerings, I was baffled. I wanted to reach across the desks and shake them by the shoulders and shout "Why aren't you listening?"--but I ultimately decided that that would be counterproductive. Coming out of yet another office, I would become aware of the contraction between my shoulder blades and spend a minute breathing into it --open, open, open -- before walking into the next office. [side note: is it ludicrous for a would-be physics professor to talk about the heart chakra?]

I'm about to do the same thing again. A similar position is being advertised at a university in Vancouver, and I'm a shoo-in for an interview, if not for the job itself.

I keep coming back to what Georgia O'Keeffe once said: "I've been terrified every single day of my life. And it's never stopped me from doing one goddamn thing I wanted to do."

This is what I have to do. It scares me half to death, and sometimes it takes all my strength to keep putting one foot in front of another. But I'm going to keep on walking until there's a compelling reason to stop.