Quickly, is IS used too much?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.