Elliott's Personal Observations on Life, the Universe and Everything

More faster-than-light neutrino speculation

2011-10-04T17:08:00.000-05:00

Continuing perusal of the arxiv.org papers,

In http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.5917v1, say that tachyonic neutrinos are positively ruled out because it would also require a violation of the conservation of energy, "a tachyonic interpretation is not only hardly reconciled with OPERA data on energy dependence, but that it clashes with neutrino production from pion and with neutrino oscillations." They further explore some papers from the 90s by Coleman and Glashow that suggest test for the Lorentz equations in cosmic rays and accelerators. Their basic suggestion is that neutrinos have their own limiting velocity that is different from (and possibly greater than) the speed of light. This hypothesis is contradicted by neutrino oscillation experiments. Oh well.

In http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.6641v1.pdf, the authors work very hard to reconcile the SN1987a neutrino results with the OPERA results. To review, the supernova neutrinos arrived 4 hours earlier than the light from the supernova (over 160,000 years--2 parts in a billion deviation). Of course, the OPERA neutrinos are faster than light by 50 parts in a million. Their main assertion is, obviously, neutrinos travel faster in Earth than in inter-galactic space. OK. Right.

In http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.6282v1.pdf, the authors suggest, "the existence of light sterile neutrinos which can propagate in a higher dimensional bulk and achieve apparent superluminal velocities when measured by an observer confined to the 4D brane of the standard model." That is, they find a shortcut in the extra dimensions (needed by many versions of String Theory) of space. But only "sterile" neutrinos can do this, as "fertile" ("dirty"?) neutrinos are confined to be in our regular old four-dimensional space. But OPERA measures muon neutrinos--they aren't sterile.

In "Superluminal Neutrinos without Revolution" by Susan Gardner of the University of Kentucky, she speculates that neutrinos are unique in that they do not interact with the "dark universe" like the rest of the particles. Regular particles are slowed down by this interaction.

None of these are at all satisfying.

What are people speculating is the reason for the Faster-than-light neutrinos?

2011-10-04T15:48:00.000-05:00

I have done a simple survey of papers from arxiv.org that match the search criteria "neutrino" and "opera". At this moment, there are over 100 such papers. Here is a summary.

In "New Constraints on Neutrino Velocities" by Andrew G. Cohen and Sheldon L. Glashow of Boston University (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.6562), they claim "that such superluminal neutrinos would lose energy rapidly via the bremsstrahlung of electron-positron pairs" and thus refute this discovery.

Walter Winter of Institut fur Theoretische Physik und Astrophysik, Universitat Wurzburg, suggests that maybe not all of the neutrinos are faster than light. But he says that this does not particularly lead to any "reasonable" explanation.

Markus G. Kuhn of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge calculates that the Coriolis Effect of the south-eastward travelling neutrinos would only account for 2.2 nsec. Oh well.

Shi-Yuan Li, School of Physics, Shandong University, Jinan, PRC says that all OPERA has done is "measured the phase speed of the neutrino wave function." How boring. He says, "velocity is too complex and case-dependent, generally can not be taken as basic observable related to some kind of space-time symmetry, but as a quantity deﬁned by others, depending on the concrete cases." Tell that to the police officer the next time you are pulled over for speeding.

E. Canessa, Science & Technology Collaborium, Italy, says "We pinpoint how a subatomic particle with non-zero mass may attain, in principle, velocities faster-than-light by travelling in helical motion in the limit of very large momentum." He does a lot of hand-waving (and shows very little of his work) to conclude that the apparent velocity of a helically-moving neutrino is equal to the opening angle (in radians) of the helix, which can be greater than one.

Rafael S. Torrealba, Departamento de F´ısica.Universidad Centro Occidental ”Lisandro Alvarado”, suggest that "These puzzling result could be explained by stimulated emission of neutrinos in the decay tunnel, in close analogy with the ampliﬁcation of a LASER pulse." I don't get it. I don't even know where this guy is (this seems to be Spanish, but maybe it is Italian).

G. Henri, Institut de Planetologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG), Grenoble, France says, "it is enough that the beam composition varies during the leading and the trailing edges to explain an apparent time shift in the detected neutrinos." I think the OPERA folks addressed this particular problem quite well.

Jerrold Franklin of the Department of Physics at Temple (Philadelphia, PA), says "The superluminal propagation of neutrinos observed by the OPERA collaboration is shown to be due to an imaginary ‘optical’ potential for the attenuation of the neutrino beam in passage through the Earth." The heart of this one is the assumption that the mass of the neutrino has an imaginary component related to its attenuation. He goes on to say that this accounts for the fact that the neutrinos in the SN1987a arrived in coincidence with the light from that event--there is no attenuation in space. I don't buy it.

How can OPERA's faster-than-light neutrino results make sense?

2011-09-29T12:55:00.002-05:00

In my opinion, they can't make sense--I strongly favor the outcome that they made a mistake somewhere. But for the sake of arguments, what *could* this result be saying? There are a lot of loonies out there who are starting to stand up to say, "See, I told you so! I've been saying Einstein was wrong for decades." How long before we hear someone say, "This proves that you have to shut down the LHC!" but I digress.

1. Neutrinos really do travel faster than light
Well, that would be something! The Lorentz Transformations were derived towards the end of the 19th century in order to make sense of the Maxwell Equations of electricity and magnetism. Our whole technological world is built on these equations, so anything that would allow the neutrino to go faster than light would have to be a small (very, very, very small) correction on these robust equations. We would have seen this somewhere else by now, I think.

One way to keep everything in tact is to say that the neutrino has an imaginary mass. (What is an imaginary mass? How much would imaginary mass weigh in a gravity field? Negative weight? I have no idea.) Then according to Lorentz, the faster the neutrino goes (beyond the speed of light), the lower its energy gets. So infinitely fast neutrinos would have no energy. But they would have infinite imaginary mass. Is this dark energy?

2. Neutrinos fake going faster than light
This is the non-mistake outcome that I favor. Let's say that the momentum of the neutrino is very well known. Then the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that the position of the neutrino is uncertain. What if there was some effect that enhanced the neutrino's position uncertainty in its direction of motion? Then it would arrive slightly before it got there all along its direction of motion. Maybe it has to do with the neutrinos' interesting spin signature. We know that there is only one spin-type for the neutrino: left-handed spins for neutrinos and right-handed spin for antineutrinos. Maybe the left-handed spin pushes the uncertainty forward a little bit, and the right-handed spin pushes it back. This is easy (enough) to test at OPERA or here at MINOS.

This is, sort of, a combination of the Star Trek warp drive and the Hitchhiker's Guide infinite improbability drive. I like it.

Neutrinos are weird, and wonderful

2011-09-23T15:28:00.004-05:00

Actually, this astounding result is very good news for Fermilab! We have committed to studying neutrinos for the next 10-20 years. So when somebody asks, "Why should we care about neutrinos," the answer is easy!

If neutrinos can travel faster than light, this contradicts one of the very foundations of physics as we know it. Therefore, we need to understand how:

neutrinos can have this ability when no other matter in the universe does.
the equations of electricity and magnetism can include this result.
our understanding of Einstein's Relativity Theories ("Special" and "General") is affected, and neutrinos seem to be our way to do this.

And lastly, how come the Swiss are are so damn good at telling time? :-)

Observations of OPERA presentation

2011-09-23T10:04:00.002-05:00

They have been sitting on this hyper-luminal neutrino for six months.

They initially did the analysis with intentionally inaccurate assumptions, while the various groups in OPERA made improvements on these aspects. For example, the biggest factors are

The distance between CERN and the experiment ("geodesy")
The measurement of the time the protons hit the target at CERN
The synchronization of the clocks between CERN and the experiment.
eight or ten other smaller effects

The thorough analysis with bad assumption led to neutrinos that were 1048 nanoseconds too fast. Then they "opened the box" on the more accurate systematic measurements. The corrections to the accurate results were 988 nanoseconds, leading to the 60 nanosecond too-fast result.

They "opened the box" six months ago, and they were clearly stunned. This collaboration of hundreds of scientists have considered possible mistakes in the analysis for this time.

An aside on the distance between the source and the experiment: They show a huge step function at the time of the Italian earthquake in 2009. This huge change in the distance was 7 centimeters!

This is an uncomfortably reasonable result--very precisely determined.

Neutrinos faster than light???

2011-09-23T06:36:00.002-05:00

I've thought a lot about the CERN result that the neutrinos in the OPERA experiment travel slightly faster than the speed of light. This result is truly earth-shattering. A result is a result--first we have to see if there are any holes in it. The press reports say it is sound.

Here is what I know.

They see that the distance between CERN and the experiment in Italy is about 60 feet shorter, out of about 2.4 million feet (730 km) (or one part in 40,000), for neutrinos than what they measure it to be. (The result is that the neutrinos get there 60 nanoseconds early--I translated this into something more understandable). Their error-bars are 10 nanoseconds, which makes this a 6-sigma effect--quite believable.

The speed of light "speed limit" is not something to giggle at. A huge percentage of the understanding we have in the physical world would be toppled if this result is real.

Einstein came up with the "speed limit" after examining Lorentz's observation of the symmetries of the equations of electromagnetism (Maxwell's equations). Lorentz's work was in the 19th century. The constancy of the speed of light, and the inability of an object with mass to obtain the speed of light, is a consequence of the validity of the theories of electricity and magnetism. The fact that we are communicating by electronic computer is a pretty good testament to the validity of our understanding of E&M. Making Lortentz's equations invalid would mean that our understanding of E&M is wrong.

We measure the "speed limit" at Fermilab (and at CERN) every day. I could go on and on about this.

The normalized speed of a particle, beta, is equal to the square-root of (one minus the (the mass-squared over the energy-squared)). For beta to be greater than one would require an "imaginary" energy or mass (but not both). This is the definition of the hypothetical "tachion". An imaginary mass for the neutrino would be very interesting!

So, there are a few possible explanations for this results that I can think of, in order of plausibility (IMHO):

The result is wrong, and there are several ways to satisfy this explanation.
A neutrino has imaginary mass.
There is some time/space/dimensional anomaly between CERN and the experiment, making the distance slightly shorter than it should be.
Our understanding of physics is wrong

(Imaginary energy is what is required to create a stable wormhole, by the way.)

How could the result be wrong? We'll see what they have accounted for in their measurement.

Measuring the precise distance is very tricky. They are shooting the neutrinos through the earth, so this requires very precise knowledge of the shape of the Earth and the location of the source and the experiment.
Measuring the precise time is also very tricky. This, in particular, is what interests me. How do two places that are 730 km apart synchronize their clocks to this level of precision? Can GPS do that? (Of course, GPS technology RELIES on our understanding of E&M and the constancy of the speed of light. Ironic, eh?)
Exactly when and where are the neutrinos created? We think we understand the particle beam and its properties, but if this result is correct, then clearly we don't. (Another irony.)

In my lifetime, there have been two other times when there was a result of earth-shattering proportions:

I believe it is accurate to say that both of these were considered to be good experiments, but no one else has been able to verify the results. Thus, the community has considered these results to be flukes.

It is too hot to run!

2011-06-17T12:38:00.006-05:00

Sheese!

I tried to run around the Fermilab Main Ring Road (3.7 miles). My goal was to run very slowly for 60 minutes--this should have been about 4.3 miles at a little over 13:00/mile--quite slow. (The Ring Road is split into 6 equal sectors, so that would be one full circuit, plus one extra sector.)

It was very sunny. The starting temperature was 78F--warm, but (I thought) not hot. The temperature at the end was about 83F.

Boy, was I wrong, and did I overestimate what I could do!

I got about half way around the ring (about 1.8 miles), running at the desired 13:00/mile pace, and I was exhausted! I then walked for exactly 3 minutes, thinking I could possible make it the rest of the way (or at least to the 5K/3.11 mile mark), but I could only muster a 3 minute jog at that slow pace. I finished the 5K in just over 40 minutes--I'd say I walked for 10 minutes. I pushed it a bit to end the 5K, and that was too much. I walked the rest of the way: total time--55 minutes.

My medium-green nylon shirt was too dark, as were my black shorts. The sun was unbearable. I wore a white, nylon baseball cap--I think that was OK, but it could have been better. I was very hungry by the end--a half-cup of Gatorade at the mid-way point would have been nice!

Overall, I did a workout, but not quite the one I planned. I was moving for 60 minutes, so I sort of met one of my goals. I did not over do it, which is a fundamental goal for a man my age, I think.

I sure hope that the 5K next Saturday (at 4PM) has cool and cloudy weather! I think I'll go buy a white nylon running shirt.

Support me at my donations web site. The event web site is here.

Addendum, Saturday June 18.

Based on suggestions from my coach/son (Marty), I adjusted my technique for the Heat-Of-The-Day run today.

Arranged for lower temperatures (78F instead of 83F)--that was the hardest part.
Drank a 20 oz Gatorade T-minus-100 minutes from the start of the workout
Bought a white nylon shirt ($12 at MC Sports)
Had my associate (that is, my wife Joanne) wait at the 2-mile mark with 2 liters of water--one to dump on my head and one to drink (I only had 4 sips).

It was MUCH better: Ran 3.25 miles and only walked for 3 minutes while taking the water from my associate. Then, when I arrived home, my associate was watering her garden, and she watered my head and neck some more. That felt goooooooooood!

Quickly, is IS used too much?

2011-06-16T06:28:00.002-05:00

A couple of pet peeves about the way people speak.

Is is

"What I want to say is, is that OK?"

In spoken English these days, running together two "is"'s happens all the time and it bugs me. You'd never write it that way. Everybody does it--I've even heard President Obama do it.

Quick

"Let's get a quick check of traffic."

I hear this on the radio and on TV all the time. Is it really any quicker than if you left out the word "quick?" I think it is just a signal that the speaker is making to himself (herself) that s/he is under time pressure.

I'm glad I don't have to speak publicly for a living--I'd make these mistakes, and a LOT more!

Girls in Science?

2011-05-19T09:58:00.003-05:00

I was walking down the Linac Gallery hallway, as I do many times every day, and there was a tour group of high school kids blocking the way. This also happens a lot. As I approached the group, I slowed down and said, with great cheer in my heart, "Excuse me." I love seeing these kids near my office. Actually, I love kids.

At the moment I spoke, the Grumpy Old Guy who was bringing up the rear of the group grumped,"Move it!" A split second later, he added, "Betsy, MOVE IT!" The poor girl did not have any time between my (hopefully) friendly greeting and Grumpy Old Guy's admonition.

Is this why there are no (few) women in science?

Ugh.

From 2008: First LHC Circulating beam

2011-04-07T12:10:00.002-05:00

I wrote this essay Sept 11, 2008: the day after first beam at the LHC.

Reflections on a great day

Wednesday [September 10, 2008] was a remarkable day for the accelerator-based physics programs of the world. Certainly, CERN is the primary beneficiary, but every other facility that has accelerators benefits enormously, too. Fermilab, Brookhaven, Thomas Jefferson Accelerator Facility (a.k.a.CEBAF) in the US; KEK in Japan, etcetra, etcetra.

CERN proved (and is continuing to prove) that big, complicated, new physics programs can work if you have the right mixture of engineers, physicists, politicians and support people, who are willing to work hard, and to work well, together. The complexity of the LHC is, by any measure, truly astounding. I would love to write many pages about some of these complexities, but I am having too much fun on my little bit of completxity right now. That they/we have begun to show that this is really possible is so much fun!

The feeling in the CCC at CERN is euphoric. No one was really sure that we could actually pull this off. The Director General of CERN had great khutspa to invite the media of the world to CERN to watch us succeed. It is not like we were launching a space ship, where its success or failure is obvious to anyone. He trusted us, and the fabulous media people at CERN and elsewhere (especially Fermilab) to get the message out in a way that people can understand.

As an example, when I got to my Swiss apartment on Wednesday evening, there was a report on the Swiss/German station on the LHC success. One of the German-speaking physicists I know gave the interview. I couldn't understand any of it (aside from the occasional word or two), but it was clear that it was a glowing report! Then we changed the station to the Swiss/French station and saw a different group of reporters and a different group of (French-speaking) physicists extoling the achievements of the day. (I understood a bit more of that one.) Then we changed to the Swiss/Italian station--same thing/different folks! Wow! When we sat down to supper, #3 son suggested we turn on the TV to see if other coverage was on,and there on CNN was the American report!

And the hits just keep on coming. The achievements of Wednesday were well documented. But the progress made yesterday and today were (to the experienced observer) equally (if not more) significant. They went from having the protons go around three times to "100+" times to having them stay in with essentially no losses for 10 minutes (early this (Friday) morning). No losses!! This is amazing! The number of pieces that have had to work to make this happen is huge--some people estimate that there are around 100,000 components that all have to work for the system to work. For example, we were all worried about the RF systems, but they stepped up to the plate and connected--they captured the beam in the RF today, a critical part of the 10-minute proton storage.

By the time I got in for the scheduling meeting this morning, they had even tried to scan the wires (my little bit of complexity). Fortunately, it didn't work, since I was not there. :-) We got the wire scanning in short order.

At this meeting, one of the scientists pointed out that they could not measure the lifetime of the stored beam since it didn't last long enough to let the beam diminish enough to get that measurement. That brought a euphoric chuckle from the other folks in the meeting!

The international nature of this effort is wonderful, and it is the only way any sort of big science can be done from now on. Germans, Italians, French, Spanish, British, Polish, Russian, Austrian, American, Canadian, Indian and Belgian scientist and engineers working together, usually in (not quite) perfect harmony. Our fathers and grandfathers were killing each other, damnit!! Now we sharing a coffee or a beer, and joking about our national character (Americans are cowboys, Germans are engineering geeks, French demand that we have 2-hour lunches every day, the Brits can't stand talking about football any more, and the Swiss are gun-toting, organizing, clean-freaks).

Fermilab Director, Pier Oddone, spoke elequently about this international cooperation in his remarks during the Fermilab "Pajama Party" Wednesday morning. Oddone pushed for the LHC@FNAL Operations Center to be a centerpiece of this philosophy. They tell me that 400 people were at that party--wow!

Silent Armageddon

2011-03-19T07:04:00.002-05:00

There a many lessons to learn from the nuclear catastrophe in Japan: Everything breaks; people are only human; heroes exist; radiation is analogous to poop; and reactors need active attention to stay safe. I think we knew the last one, but it is worth some further reflection.

How long will our technically-competent society last? Maybe thousands of years? If our technical society fails in the next, oh, ten thousand years, hundreds (thousands?) of nuclear power plants can turn into Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi. Without a constant flow of cooling water, even the spent fuel rods can explode and spread their radiation into the surrounding regions.

I believe that this society needs nuclear power. But we also need to come up with a solution for storing nuclear waste in a way that does not require active systems to maintain its quiesence

Distribution of wealth in the US

2011-03-12T20:35:00.003-06:00

How many people hold half of the wealth in the US?

This is a little difficult to extract from a simple Google search. But I found out these interesting things:

There are several articles in the Wikipedia on this, notably Wealth in The United States. From this, one gets this interesting graph:

From this, I calculate that half of the total wealth in the US is held by approximately the top 5% of the people in 2007, and approximately the top 6% in 1992.

Other interesting findings: The Gini Coefficient, which is a measure of the statistical dispersion of the population distribution of a system: a value of 0 means a completely equal distribution; a value of 1 means the maximally unequal distribution. The US (according to this Wikipedia article) has a Gini of 46.8 in 2009 (up from 36.8 in 1968). Some have estimated the Gini coefficient in the US to be as high as 0.82.

Another fine article, with more charts and graphs, can be found here. I need to study this detailed article!

It is worth repeating:

Half of the wealth in the United States is held by the richest 5% of the people.

In other words,

15.6 million people have half the wealth of the US, and

292.6 million people hold the other half of the wealth.

And, as I expected, the relative wealth of the richest people in the US is increasing.

Engineering Open House at University of Illinois, March 11, 2011

2011-03-12T06:55:00.004-06:00

I offer my thoughts on the EOH at UIUC yesterday. Overall, it was a great day!

First off, the bus service from lot E-14 (at the basketball arena) was poorly executed. We waited 20 minutes for the coach that was supposed to come at most every 10 minutes. That was not so bad except (a) the people were getting pretty grumpy, and (b) when the bus arrived, the driver was a real prick. He kept whining about how there could only be one person per seat, "Federal law! I'm the one who goes to jail!" Sheese! By the end of the day, there were two coaches running, which I'm sure solved the problem. Also, the promised "tour guide" during the short trip to the engineering area had very little to say.

That's essentially all the bad news.

They couldn't have asked for nicer weather! There were several no-so-smart girls in sockless sandals. One poor girl had toes about the color of her toenail polish. But that's what kids do when Mom (or Dad) is not there to dress them.

The exhibits were awesome. In hindsight, the most impressive part may have been that there was not a faculty member to be seen anywhere! Get too close to a display and a student would ask, "Do you want to hear about my project?" Love it!

Our two favorite displays were the UIUC Formula car entry, outside of the Mechanical Engineering building (picture here)

And the Ford corporate display, featuring a 1998 ME graduate who is now an engineer at Ford in Dearborn, MI. What a nice fellow!

There was a great session with one of the Deans of the Engineering College, Michael C. Hirschi. He answered all kinds of questions with insight and patience. Of course, he was a bit distracted at first when Northwestern was about to beat Ohio State. (But, unfortunately for the State of Illinois sports enthusiast and Buckeye haters, Ohio State pulled it out in OT.) I was particularly impressed with the questions Sterling asked about the student-run clubs and the answers he gave.

Another high point was the demo staged by the UIUC fire department (or was it the Fire Protection Department at UIUC?) They had set up some boxes in the quad about the size of a small dorm room (8x8x8), furnished with dorm-like furnishings. One end of the box, facing the crowd, was open. They lit a small fire in a trash can in the mocked-up room and started a timer. Within 5 seconds, the smoke alarm started beeping--"This is your warning to get out!" said the emcee. Within a few more seconds, the fire was visible, and smoke was starting to fill the "room". At about the one minute mark, they stated that the ceiling temperature was 180F and the floor temp was still the ambient 50F--still clear to crawl out safely. One minute later, the room was actually engulfed in flames! Somewhere in that minute, the smoke detector melted and stopped beeping. They always say that you don't have much time to react to a fire in your home. This was incredibly vivid proof of that.

Finally, let me say that I love driving to Champaign/Urbana! The country road are so peaceful and pretty. I especially like the sunsets!

Utilizing the Focus Micro-adjust of the Canon 7D

2011-01-08T16:42:00.008-06:00

I have attempted to utilize the micro-adjust on my Canon 7D for the four lenses I own. I was not quite sure how do do this, so I just made it up.

My technique was to stretch a tape measure along the dining room table, and put a high-contrast card vertical to the table next to a specific mark on the tape measure (e.g., the 16-inch mark, which is red on my tape).

Then I put the camera on a tripod, set it to ASA 100, and set the camera to "A" mode with the widest aperture possible. Finally, I set it up to do a mirror lockup and a 10 second delay.

Examining each picture, I look for the shot with the card in focus, along with the "16" mark on the tape. And also the "15" and the "17" on the tape needs to be the same amount of out of focus. (For the 11-16 Tokina, the widest aperture kept at least four inch marks in color. The Canon 50 was the most dramatic, of course.)

I have created a Picasa web album of the final set of photos, and you can find it here.

Canon7D Micro Focus Adjust

Here are some typical pictures from this process.

The final setting for the 55-250mm lens (+10)

My 50mm f1.8 set to +20

My 50mm f1.8 set to +15

My 50mm f1.8 set to +10

The final result I record here, as much for my own benefit as anything else.

Canon EF-S 18-55 -- +8

Canon EF-S 55-250 -- +10

Canon EF 50mm f1.8 -- +19 (!!!)

Tokina 11-16 f2.8 -- +10

So, every lens is off in the same direction. These numbers mean that the camera will make the focus point too close to the camera. Moving the adjustment positive moves the focus point towards infinity (away from the camera).

I really do not know if this is a function of the lens or to camera or both. But I am astounded that all of my lenses are so far off from what I presumed (being "Canon quality" (whatever)) they would be: a value of zero.

Race Report, Naperville Turkey Trot; November 25, 2010

2010-11-27T10:04:00.001-06:00

Naperville Lion's Club Turkey Trot, November 25, 2010: 08:00

Conditions: Low clouds and mist, 38F (3C)

There were 6131 people who completed the Turkey Trot, with a best time of 14:54 and the slowest time of 1:06:12. The complete results can be found here.

With so many people, the start was quite slow. They asked the runners to self-sort themselves into groups based on their expected pace, from 6:00/mi to 12:00/mi in 1:00 steps. This stretched out for about 3oo yards down the road! I decided to take a spot about 200 yards from the starting line, just behind the group at the 10:00/mi placard. My goal was to get close to 12:00/mi for the entire race--a very aggressive goal!

The gun sounded at 8:00 sharp, and we all tried to move forward, to no avail. Slowly, slowly we sauntered to the starting line. Oh, so slowly! It took me approximately 8 minutes to reach the starting line!

My initial pace was just over 10:00/mile, as I expected it would be (adrinaline and all that). This quickly came down to a more sustainable 11:30/mile. There was a lot of weaving--it seems that 10% of the folks decided to run for long enough to be able to say that they "ran the Turkey Trot," and then walk, side by side with 5 of their closest friends and talk about life, the universe and everything. These barriers kept appearing over and over again--it was very frustrating for me.

I had my Garmin GPS/HRM set to auto-lap at 0.5 mile increments so I could keep track of my average pace in a meaningful way. I was able to maintain the sub-12:00/mi pace for the first 1.5 miles!

For some reason, my legs felt very heavy this morning. I tried not to think about it too much.

On Marty's advice, I also tried not to think about my heart rate, but rather focus on my pace (only). I was keenly aware of my heart pumping, but it never seemed to be stressing out. So I perserveered!

Aurora Special Olympics Run for the Athletes 5K, Saturday November 6, 2010

2010-11-06T11:09:00.005-05:00

I completed this race in good condition! Final time: 39:50 (according to the timing) or 39:41 (according to my Garmin Forerunner).

Best part: I won first prize in the raffle!

Here are the data from the Forerunner, first the heart rate and pace:

And the summary information:

2010-10-16T10:30:00.000-05:00

I ran for 60 minutes this morning on this route (including 2 minutes of wal at the outset and 4 minutes at the end). West Aurora High School is at the upper edge, left of center, of this image.

First Friday?

2010-10-15T12:31:00.002-05:00

I have a question.

If one were to count backwards in seven day increments from today, how many increments would it take to find a day that was not called "Friday?"

I have done a little reading on the Wikipedia, Week, and see that there were interruptions in the sequence of continuous weeks (officially, at least) in France between 1973 and 1801 (they tried a 10-day week (oy! the French are so silly sometimes!), in the Soviet Union (they tried 5 and 6 day weeks from 1929-1940), and China and Japan (which have a specific time that they adopted the 7-day week, around 1000 AD).

This article indicates that the Jews had the 7-day week no later than the 6th centurty BC.

I'm curious.

Comparing Canon Cameras: SD200, XSi/450D and 7D

2010-10-02T08:32:00.008-05:00

In my family, we own three Canon camera at this moment, the ancient but incredible SD200 (3.2 MegaPixels, point-&-shoot), the Canon XSi (450D in Europe; 12.1 MP Digital SLR) and my recently-acquired 7d (18.1 MP DSLR).

There are gazillions of side-by-side comparisons of digital cameras on the "Internets", so my contribution is not going to be profound. But it is interesting to me because I feel that our SD200 is WAY better than it should be, and my XSi is worse than it should be.

So here is the first A-B-C comparison. This morning (at 8:30 AM CDT), I took a shady picture of the deck in our back yard with each camera set to automatic, flash off, on a tripod. Here is the un-processed result from, first, the SD200:

(Click on the image to see the full res version.)

Now the XSi.

(For the XSi and the 7D, I used the exact same lens: The Canon EF 50mm f1.8.)

The automatic image from teh 7D is 9.2 MB, and this blog has a limit of 8 MB per image, so I resized it from 5184x3456 to the same size as the XSi image, 4272x2848. Here it is:

For the final stage of this little test, I ran the "I'm feeling lucky" process from Picasa on each image, and then exported them to 1600 pixels. SD200:

The XSi processed image:

And the 7D processed image:

Conclusions for this subject: The SD200 has significant "bluing" around the edges. There is not a lot of difference between the XSi and the 7d, but there may be a small improvement in the sharpness from the 7D: look at the grass blades in front of the step.

More later

Photos from Japan's J-PARC Accelerator Complex

2010-09-26T08:49:00.002-05:00

I took a bunch of pictures during the tour of the J-PARC facility in central Japan, north of Tokyo, on the Pacific coast. You can see the pix at my Picasa site:

J-PARC, LINAC10, September 17, 2010

Misinformation about CERN and the LHC

2010-08-25T14:30:00.006-05:00

For sure, CERN's LHC is making great progress. But they have not overtaken Fermilab's Tevatron in the amount of "physics" that has been delivered so far.

So it burns my butt when reporters get this fact wrong! In this article from Yahoo!, the author says this:

After a shaky start, experiments at the LHC have in a few months replicated discoveries that took decades to complete at the rival Tevatron accelerator in the United States.

The true fact is that the plan for the LHC is to run through 2011 so that, by that time, they will have replicated the data that the Tevatron has taken decades to produce.

They have not replicated the Tevatron data!

Yet.

As of now, the experiments at the LHC have accumulated approximately one-twenty-thousandths (0.00005 or 0.05%) of the Tevatron data.

(Because the LHC operates at a higher energy than the Tevatron (3.5 TeV compared to 0.98 TeV), the "effectiveness" of these data is improved by between 2 and 5 times.)

And to say that they "replicated the discoveries" is also misleading: The Tevatron discoveries show them precisely where to look! Anyway, these discoveries at the Tevatron were made with equivalent amount of data, several decades ago.

This sort of mistake unnecessarily makes the Tevatron and Fermilab seem meaningless in the context of CERN and the LHC. This is just not true (and it is not fair). The point of this article, that CERN is bracing for budget cuts, makes Fermilab even more relevant, especially if we decide to extend the Tevatron run through 2012 (which, IHMO, we should).

Pretty image from LHC Beam Dump

2010-08-18T14:19:00.004-05:00

This is an image of the beam at the Large Hadron Collider ("LHC," at CERN) as it is ejected from the ring and hits the beam dump. The redder the color, the more protons have hit the detector.

There are 25 individual bunches of protons, with about 80 billion (8E10) protons in each bunch. They are in a sprial because the beam dump cannot dissipate the enbergy of the beam unless they specifically and carefully spread out the individual bunches like this.

The beam dump system is one of the more elegant systems in the LHC. An overview can be found here.

Can you identify this quote?

2010-08-16T17:08:00.003-05:00

I have removed the elements of this article that would give away the speaker. I did not eliminate much.

[..] talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.
It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.
We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.
We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.
[..] the alternative may be a national catastrophe. Further delay [in acting] can affect our strength and our power as a nation.
Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war" -- except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.
I know that some of you may doubt that we face real energy shortages. The 1973 gasoline lines are gone, and our homes are warm again. But our energy problem is worse tonight than it was in 1973 or a few weeks ago in the dead of winter. It is worse because more waste has occurred, and more time has passed by without our planning for the future. And it will get worse every day until we act.
The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year. Imports have doubled in the last five years. Our nation's independence of economic and political action is becoming increasingly constrained. Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the [specific decade quoted here] the world will be demanding more oil that it can produce.
The world now uses about [number removed] million barrels of oil a day and demand increases each year about 5 percent. This means that just to stay even we need the production of a new Texas every year, an Alaskan North Slope every nine months, or a new Saudi Arabia every three years. Obviously, this cannot continue.
We must look back in history to understand our energy problem. Twice in the last several hundred years there has been a transition in the way people use energy.
The first was about 200 years ago, away from wood -- which had provided about 90 percent of all fuel -- to coal, which was more efficient. This change became the basis of the Industrial Revolution.
The second change took place in [the 20th century], with the growing use of oil and natural gas. They were more convenient and cheaper than coal, and the supply seemed to be almost without limit. They made possible the age of automobile and airplane travel. [...]
Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.
The world has not prepared for the future. During the 1950s, people used twice as much oil as during the 1940s. During the 1960s, we used twice as much as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind's previous history.
World consumption of oil is still going up. If it were possible to keep it rising during [...], we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.
I know that many of you have suspected that some supplies of oil and gas are being withheld. You may be right, but suspicions about oil companies cannot change the fact that we are running out of petroleum.
All of us have heard about the large oil fields on Alaska's North Slope. In a few years when the North Slope is producing fully, its total output will be just about equal to two years' increase in our nation's energy demand.
Each new inventory of world oil reserves has been more disturbing than the last. World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the [decade] it can't go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.
But we do have a choice about how we will spend the next few years. Each American uses the energy equivalent of 60 barrels of oil per person each year. Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden.
One choice is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years.
Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person -- the driver -- while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our houses, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste.
We can continue using scarce oil and natural to generate electricity, and continue wasting two-thirds of their fuel value in the process.
If we do not act, then by [specific year] we will be using 33 percent more energy than we do today.
We can't substantially increase our domestic production, so we would need to import twice as much oil as we do now. Supplies will be uncertain. The cost will keep going up. [A few] years ago, we paid $3.7 billion for imported oil. [...]
Unless we act, we will spend more than $550 billion for imported oil by [specific future year]-- more than $2,500 a year for every man, woman, and child in America. Along with that money we will continue losing American jobs and becoming increasingly vulnerable to supply interruptions.
Now we have a choice. But if we wait, we will live in fear of embargoes. We could endanger our freedom as a sovereign nation to act in foreign affairs. Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil -- from any country, at any acceptable price.
If we wait, and do not act, then our factories will not be able to keep our people on the job with reduced supplies of fuel. Too few of our utilities will have switched to coal, our most abundant energy source.
We will not be ready to keep our transportation system running with smaller, more efficient cars and a better network of buses, trains and public transportation.
We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment. We will have a crash program to build more nuclear plants, strip-mine and burn more coal, and drill more offshore wells than we will need if we begin to conserve now. Inflation will soar, production will go down, people will lose their jobs. Intense competition will build up among nations and among the different regions within our own country.
If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.
But we still have another choice. We can begin to prepare right now. We can decide to act while there is time.
[The] plan is based on ten fundamental principles.
The first principle is that we can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices.
The second principle is that healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people at work. An effective conservation program will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
The third principle is that we must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems -- wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both at once.
The fourth principle is that we must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and developing a strategic petroleum reserve.
The fifth principle is that we must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve, just as the consumers will. The energy producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the oil companies profiteer.
The sixth principle, and the cornerstone of our policy, is to reduce the demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way we can buy a barrel of oil for a few dollars. It costs about $13 to waste it.
The seventh principle is that prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.
The eighth principle is that government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead. This is one reason I am working with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy, to replace more than 50 different agencies that now have some control over energy.
The ninth principle is that we must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful. We can't continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption when they make up seven percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy.
The tenth principle is that we must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.
These ten principles have guided the development of the policy I would describe to you and the Congress on Wednesday.
Our energy plan will also include a number of specific goals, to measure our progress toward a stable energy system.
These are the goals we set for [next year]:[omitted for brevity]
We will monitor our progress toward these goals year by year. Our plan will call for stricter conservation measures if we fall behind.
I cant tell you that these measures will be easy, nor will they be popular. But I think most of you realize that a policy which does not ask for changes or sacrifices would not be an effective policy.
This plan is essential to protect our jobs, our environment, our standard of living, and our future.
Whether this plan truly makes a difference will be decided not here in Washington, but in every town and every factory, in every home an don every highway and every farm.
I believe this can be a positive challenge. There is something especially American in the kinds of changes we have to make. We have been proud, through our history of being efficient people.
We have been proud of our leadership in the world. Now we have a chance again to give the world a positive example.
And we have been proud of our vision of the future. We have always wanted to give our children and grandchildren a world richer in possibilities than we've had. They are the ones we must provide for now. They are the ones who will suffer most if we don't act.
I've given you some of the principles of the plan.
I am sure each of you will find something you don't like about the specifics of our proposal. It will demand that we make sacrifices and changes in our lives. To some degree, the sacrifices will be painful -- but so is any meaningful sacrifice. It will lead to some higher costs, and to some greater inconveniences for everyone.
But the sacrifices will be gradual, realistic and necessary. Above all, they will be fair. No one will gain an unfair advantage through this plan. No one will be asked to bear an unfair burden. We will monitor the accuracy of data from the oil and natural gas companies, so that we will know their true production, supplies, reserves, and profits.
The citizens who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must expect to pay more for that luxury.
We can be sure that all the special interest groups in the country will attack the part of this plan that affects them directly. They will say that sacrifice is fine, as long as other people do it, but that their sacrifice is unreasonable, or unfair, or harmful to the country. If they succeed, then the burden on the ordinary citizen, who is not organized into an interest group, would be crushing.
There should be only one test for this program: whether it will help our country.
Other generation of Americans have faced and mastered great challenges. I have faith that meeting this challenge will make our own lives even richer. If you will join me so that we can work together with patriotism and courage, we will again prove that our great nation can lead the world into an age of peace, independence and freedom.

Racing R/C Cars with Sterling

2010-07-10T21:53:00.002-05:00

We went to the R/C cars race track in Joliet today. I took a lot of pictures. I really like this one.

This is not Sterling's car, though.

Fixing Soccer

2010-06-30T11:42:00.002-05:00

As an American sports fan, I feel it is my duty to say how soccer should be changed.

Of course, the primary motivation for any change must be to increase scoring. It is my view, as an American, that increasing the probability of scoring decreases the probability that a bad call or a lucky break will ruin a game. Basketball, (real) football and hockey get it right.

I think there should be two simple rules changes. Both of these changes center around a new line "near" the goal. This could be the inner box, extended, or it could be the outer box, extended, or it could be a new line somewhere in between. I will call this the Near Line.

Elliott's First Rules Change: More Corner Kicks

A ball that is kicked out of bounds by the defense beyond the Near Line (that is, closer to the goal) results in a corner kick by the offense.

Elliott's Second Rules Change: Screw Offsides (sometimes)

Offsides is not called if the ball is kicked from inside the Near Line.

Impact of These Rules Changes

One of the best opportunities for the offense to score is the corner kick. Increasing the number of corner kicks will increase scoring. This rule change will likely lead to an adaptation by the defense to kick the ball well past the Near Line, so it may not have much impact.

Offsides is one of the strangest rules in any sport (aside from some of the rules of baseball, of course). Although the actual intent of the offsides rule is not clearly stated anywhere, it seems to be there to avoid creating a situation where an offensive player stations him/her self near the goal, waiting for the easy tap-in. (This does not seem to be a big problem in, say, basketball--whatever!) But once everybody else is already near the goal, calling offsides is a pretty crazy (and error-prone) bastardization of the (probable) intent of the rule.

If the ball is close to the goal, the defense should be punished! Get rid of offsides near the goal.

As for the position of the Near Line, I think that the small-box-extended is probably too close, and the big-box-extended is definitely too big. Drawing a new line on the field is just (uh) too American. So I think I'd favor that the Near Line be the small-box-extended.

With these simple rules changes, the 0-0 tie, settled by penalty kicks, would become a thing of the past. There would never again be a botched call in a World Cup game, and peace would come to the Middle East. Cats and dogs would sleep together and road construction would be completed in Chicagoland!

Well, maybe not that last one.

Entering the world of Podcasting

2010-05-28T14:42:00.002-05:00

Subject to approval from the Publications Office at Fermilab, I have created a Podcast, available in iTunes or through PodBean.com.

It is called "Fermilab Today Result of the Week." I read the "Result of the Week" that is published on Thursdays in the online news magazine, Fermilab Today.

Quantum Leap

2010-04-26T15:54:00.003-05:00

There are (at least) three terms in common use in English that have come to mean pretty much the opposite of their original meaning.

Quantum Leap (n)

Colloquial meaning: A huge, metaphorical jump from one regime to another. "The consumption of organic foods took a quantum leap when Wal-Mart started selling it."

Actual meaning: The smallest possible step in energy levels that an electron, bound to a nucleus, can make.

Cherry Pick (v)

Colloquial meaning: To select only data that satisfy the conclusion you are trying to make. "Cheney and Bush cherry picked intelligence data on Iraq to justify the 2002 invasion."

Actual meaning: Use a cherry picker to raise yourself high into a cherry tree so you can pick all of the cherries you can see.

Show Stopper (n)

Colloquial meaning: A problem so bad (and usually unanticipated) that you just cannot do what you intended to do. "He wanted to use the computer, but the fact that the disk was corrupt was a real show stopper."

Actual meaning: A performance (usually by a singer in a Broadway Musical) that is so fantastic and wonderful the the audience stops the performance with their applause.

Gold Medal Singers: The results are in

2010-02-28T19:50:00.002-06:00

My prize to the best country in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics goes to: Sweden! With 5 gold medals, all five of them sang their anthem in the gold medal presentation.

Here is the summary in this web page.

The full analysis is seen in this web page.

HD TV Over the Air

2010-02-26T19:28:00.003-06:00

I am opposed to Cable TV on a number of levels (maybe another post...). But with the advent of over-the-air digital TV in my area, it makes even less sense to buy cable.

1. Over the Air HD channels are Numerous and Free!

In our home in the Chicago suburbs, we can get the following stations in High Definition:

Channel 2 (CBS)
Channel 5 (NBC)
Channel 7 (ABC)
Channel 7.2 (Local)
Channel 9 (WGN)
Channel 11 (PBS)
Channel 20 (PBS)
Channel 32 (Fox)
Channel 38 (Ion TV)
Channel 44 (Telemundo)
Channel 50 (UPN)
Channel 56 (PBS, Indiana)

You have to pay extra for HD programming on cable, of course.

2. There are some pretty decent free TV channels now.

We get 54 channels now! Of course, none of them are The Golf Channel, or CNN, or Discovery. But there are some good ones out there, like 5.3 is Universal Sports; 11.3 is The Create Channel; and we get ME-TV and ME-Too (and ME-too has Star Trek TOS and TNG).

3. Digital TV is cool.

The digital TV signal really is excellent. The picture quality is fantastic, and you get meta-data on all the channels (what is on, with a description; what is on next, out to 24 hours from now; what is on the other channels).

There is a down-side: If the signal is weak, you see nothing, not even static. But you rarely notice it because the signal is so good!

Conclusion: Cable TV Sucks

If you have Cable, get rid of it--save money and watch better TV.

Canadians Know How To Sing!

2010-02-23T14:26:00.002-06:00

Special praise to the Gold Medalists for the Ice Dancing, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, for doing a great job of singing O Canada! last night.

For my complete list of singers, criers and idiots (e.g., people who don't sing their national anthem), see my web site, here.

Sing the Damn Anthem!

2010-02-21T22:11:00.007-06:00

For goodness sake, if you win the gold medal at the Olympics, sing your damn national anthem!

I am making a complete list on my web site, here.

Cool people (who sing their anthem) include:

Amy Williams of England, who sang a rousing edition of God Save The Queen, Frenchman Jason Lamy-Chappuis, and most of the Canadians--who could help but sing with the great audiences in Vancouver!

Idiots (who don't sing) include:

Basically all the Americans (except for Seth Wescott). But you gotta hand it to Shaun White, who gave a rousing air-guitar solo at the end of The Star Spangled Banner.

In case you forgot the Star Spangled Banner, you can get the words here. And you folks who put the words on the screen for all the idiots to read, the last punctuation of the first verse is a question mark.

Radio Knobs

2010-02-21T07:52:00.006-06:00

Switzerland is an ordered country: everyone (pretty much) obeys the rule because, well, rules are RULES! The US is also a rules-based country, but our attitude is a little different: "Rules are mostly made to be broken".

One aspect of this I have written about before: That the Swiss public transportation system has no turnstiles. Mostly, people buy a ticket before boarding a train. And if they don't they face, and often receive, a really big fine. Whereas, in the US, the engineering prowess that goes into the design of some turnstiles systems is impressive. It is assumed that most people will obey the rules in Switzerland, but in the US it is assumed that most people will break the rules if they feel like they will not be caught.

Another factet of this difference is in the respective Auto Shows. I loved attending the Geneva Auto Show--the density of Super Cars was impressive! The Chicago auto show, which concludes today, was, uh, not so great.

But the real difference between the Geneva and the Chicago Auto Show is radio knobs: Geneva has then, but Chicago does not.

Virtually every car I sat in yesterday had its radio knobs (and its gear shifter knob, if it was a manual transmission) removed. I am guessing that the auto manufacturer had removed them, but it is also possible that the guests had removed them, one by one.

Folks in Switzerland would never even think of trying to steal a knob! And it kinda makes sense: why would you even WANT a radio know from a Scion Whatchamacallit 1.6L sedan? I know the answer: because we Americans are often drawn to breaking rules when we know we probably won't be caught.

Location of the Old Blog

2010-02-16T12:23:00.001-06:00

FYI, the old blog can still be read at my personal web site.

Welcome

2010-02-15T16:29:00.000-06:00

I have decided to move my personal observations blog from my personal web site to here. It is free, and I don't need to worry about backups and upgrades and stuff like that.