a new folk idiom

"As conflicted as a cat in a sushi restaurant full of rocking chairs."

Use it wisely.

article title

"Particle Emission in the Light Heavy-Ion Fusion Reactions."

um. So these are light heavy ions you're talking about...and they're fusion reactions but you're studying the particle emission....riiiiight.

And people say physics is logical.

...ooo, here's a good one. "Broken Symmetries and Chaotic Behavior in 26Al." It's a soap opera in the making.

heh. this one just sounds dirty. "Forbidden (p, d) Pickup to Stretched States of 26Al."

I am having way too much fun with this literature search.

Wow. A typo in the indexed categories means that this article is about not shell model calculations but smell model calculations. How come I've never gotten to do smell model calculations?

"Study of the Hard Part of Neutron Spectra in (p, n) Reactions." I guess someone already published on the easy part. Huh. Sucks to be them.

movie

Go see Hotel Rwanda.

I went to see it last night with some friends. I brought a bunch of Kleenexes because (a) it's about genocide and (b) I cry even at phone commercials. I barely needed them. Instead, half an hour in, I started shaking, and didn't stop until an hour after the movie was over.

By a wonderful coincidence, Paul Rusesabagina, the man on whose experiences the movie is based, is coming to speak here tomorrow. Can't wait.

And online-friend-of-online-friends Quinn has spent time at the tribunal that is trying to sort out this whole mess. Read her story.

Bodhisattva vow

The passions of delusion are inexhaustible. I vow to extinguish them.

The number of beings is endless. I vow to save them.

The Truth cannot be told. I vow to tell it.

The Way which cannot be followed is unattainable. I vow to attain it.

We do stuff.

...and speaking of consulting....

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.

eeeurgh

How to make Haystacks

2 c white sugar
1/2 c butter
1/2 c milk
1/2 c cocoa

Boil, stirring, for 5 minutes (or 3 minutes for gooey cookies).

Add

1 T vanilla
1/2 t salt
3 c oats
1 c coconut

Mix well. Drop by the teaspoon onto waxed paper. Cool. Eat. Eat more. Put in an airtight container before you eat yourself sick. Try not to lick out the pot while it's still hot--that stuff is sticky and can really burn.

How to make disgusting, vile, horrifyingly, traumatically nasty Haystacks

substitute Splenda for as little as half of the sugar.

shudder

"Hmm. I'm almost out of sugar," I think. "But here's some Splenda. They talk up how good this stuff is for baking," I think. "How bad can it be?" I think.

You'd think I'd have learned from my brother's Tequila Suicide experience (I'll tell you about it some other time) that if you find yourself asking "How bad can it be?" you usually don't want to know the answer.

gender gap in science, take two

At coffee today I counted the faces around the table and realized there was a huge gender imbalance. There were fifteen women there and only five men. If you count all of the academics (i.e. leave out the support staff, who are all male, but count faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergrad students) who work in this building (three research groups), there are 16 men and 20 women. If you count only the people under 40, we're even more woman-dominated.

This is something of an anomaly. Another group at another lab, the one I'm considering working with when I start my post-doc, has only two women, a grad student and an undergrad, among 16. But it's not completely unheard-of. Nuclear physics and astronomy have historically had higher proportions of women than many other sub-fields in physics.

Still, pretty cool, eh? And even cooler, of course, is the fact that most of the women in my lab are smokin'-hot babes. Who says all scientists are homely and geeky?

The purpose of Lent is not only expiation, to satisfy the divine justice, but above all a preparation to rejoice in God's love. And this preparation consists in receiving the gift of God's mercy - a gift which we receive in so far as we open our hearts to it, casting out what cannot remain in the same room with mercy.

Now one of the things we must cast out first of all is fear. Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves. If we were terrified of God as an inexorable judge, we would not confidently await God's mercy, or approach God trustfully in prayer. Our peace, our joy in Lent are a guarantee of grace.

- Thomas Merton, in "Seasons of Celebration"

(lifted from this week's "Sojourners" e-mail newsletter)

experiment

This week we're doing our first experiment in a few months. It was the first "hard" setup we'd had to do in 16 months--this was the first time since then that we'd used more than one detector at a time, and I'm the only one who remembers how to set up the silicon detectors. And by "remember" I mean "have a vague inkling of what to do most of the time" combined with "have the new home phone number of the post-doc who designed the system".

The setup was labour-intensive. We started installing and testing stuff last Wednesday, worked all day Thursday and Friday, and did some stuff Saturday afternoon. The other students then decided that they would rather watch the Super Bowl than finish the setup before we got beam on Monday, and it was maybe not smart of me to let them get away with that...what that meant was eighteen hours straight on Monday, debugging and making phone calls and bringing the lab sysadmin back to the lab after he'd gone home for dinner.

The whole thing was a lot of fun, though. I realized that, yeah, I have picked up a few things in the past ...oh dear... six and a half years. And that's one of my favourite feelings. This is work that I find interesting, and I'm pretty good at it, and that's a good thing. For another thing, it's nice to do something other than stare at my computer all day, for a change. Putting things together is fun. Figuring things out in groups is fun, as long as the group members are people I respect, and in this case the group is my fellow grad students, all of whom are smart and congenial, so that's another good thing. And taking the lead in a group is something that actually comes pretty naturally, once I think I know what I'm doing. And of course the thing that made the setup most pleasant is that it's not my own experiment that I'm working on, so it's easier for me to stay equanimous when we hit snags. (There's a lesson there, somewhere, I just know it...something about non-self and impermanence and dukkha. I know I've heard something like that somewhere before.....)

Oh, and of course there's another good thing: working for twenty out of twenty-six hours makes me feel incredibly tough. I like feeling tough.