August Tour

I'm writing this post from the comfort of a Canadian railroad car, beginning the last leg of my August tour.  In mid-July I was asked by the collaboration to give a talk in Boston on August 11th and present a poster in Toronto on August 22nd.  It seemed silly to go back to Geneva in between the two conferences, so I threw in visits to Berkeley, Naperville and Ann Arbor in between them.  It's been exhausting and I'm happy to say that I will be in Toronto for nearly a week.  I may even get to unpack my suitcase.

Getting asked by the collaboration to go to these conferences may sound like a big deal, but, in reality it is quite normal.  In our field collaborations rather than people are asked to give talks, and we use our favorite tool, committees, to divy up the engagements.  Talks are assigned to young people on the job market or to senior people as a reward for their service to the collaboration.  There is a priority list which makes sure that the talks are evenly divided so that no one gets overlooked.  Its a quirk of our system that often the presenter gives talks on analyses he or she has not worked on.  Its a legitimate method because each of us are authors on all of the analyses so we should be able to talk about any of them, but in reality the speaker has to do quite a bit of homework to put together the talk.  Half of my talk at the MIT concerned an analysis I didn't work on; it was useful to learn about it so that I could present the material in a coherent way.

Two days before I left Geneva I made a tomato tarte that was as good as it was simple.  It comes from David Leibovitz's blog, with very minor modifications.  David's recipes are always excellent, and this one is no exception.  I used an assortment of heirloom tomatoes of different colors which had a very pretty effect.  Its a very buttery crust, so you might want to try something a bit healthier, like this one.

Heirloom Tomato Tarte

4 or 5 medium sized heirloom tomatoes, sliced 1/2 inch thick

1/2 a small onion sliced as thinly as possible

A few tablespoons of dijon mustard (I used the unground à l'ancienne style)

plenty of fresh thyme, leaves only

salt and pepper 

olive oil

8 oz goat cheese; it's best to use one with a rind of some sort.  mine was very slightly aged so had a thin rind. 

tart dough:

1 1/2 cups  flour
4 1/2 ounces unsalted butter, chilled, cut into cubes
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 large egg
2-3 tablespoons cold water

First make the tart dough.  Mix the flour and salt in a bowl.  In a food processor, stand mixer or using your hands, mix or pulse the butter into the flour until the mixture has a crumbly texture and there are no large pieces of butter left.

Mix the egg and 2 tablespoons of water in a bowl.  Add to the food processer and pulse until the liquid is  incorporated and the dough holds together.  Add the extra water if needed.

 On a floured surface, roll the dough into a ball.  Roll until it is about 1/4 -1/2 in thick.  You can get it into the tart pan with an ingenious (and probably standard) method that David outlines: you flour the rolling pin and roll the dough up around the pin to transfer it to the pan. 

Press the dough into the pan and dock it with a fork.  Preheat the oven to 425F.  

Smear the bottom of the crust with the mustard.  You can put a nice thick layer on if you like mustard.  Then spread the onion on top, followed by half of the thyme.  

Arrange the tomatoes on top in concentric circles.  Mine didn't overlap, but they probably could without too much trouble.  Arrange the cheese on top and sprinkle with the rest of the thyme.  Add salt and pepper to taste and then drizzle with olive oil.

Bake for 30 minutes or so.  Be careful to check that it doesn't burn--as you can see from the picture below, mine was a bit charred.  Serve hot or warm.  I had leftovers on the plane and they were nearly as good as when it was fresh!

  

A winner and loser on the NYTimes

Denis Overbye, number one science writer for the New York Times, has to be one of my least favorite science writers. Well, let's face it, I don't know very many science writers by name, but if I come across an article about the physical sciences in the New York Times and it makes me groan, it was usually written by David Overbye. He got a lot of mileage out of the black hole LHC hysteria, and more recently, propagated unfounded rumors from a known rumor monger blogger of a Fermilab Higgs discovery. He has a penchant for sensationalism, and when he covers topics which delve into the 'mysteries of the universe' he likes to milk them for anything he can get, imagined or not.

He recently published an essay titled, "Rumors in Astrophysics Spread at Light Speed", which discusses the role of rumors in the physical sciences. It starts off pretty badly with an anecdote about an astronomer who said something at a public outreach talk that was misconstrued. Overbye calls this "2 sigma blues" which has nothing to do with the anecdote.  A 2 sigma result means something very precise, statistically, it is certainly not related to poor word choice.  What he really wants to talk about is a rumor that was started about a month ago by a physics-blogger-trouble-maker-rumor-monger, who said there might be a hint of the Higgs at FermiLab. This little rumor flared up all over the internet and generally pissed the FermiLab scientists off because they didn't want to be seen as crying wolf.  Overbye then philosophizes about why he thinks rumors like this get started.  Its certainly not his worst article, but it still makes me groan.  I just wanted to complain for a bit.

On a positive NY Times note, I found an excellent recipe for a provençal style potato and tomato gratin. I was shocked at how well it came out.  I made a few slight modifications, so I rewrote the recipe here.  You should use good tomatoes and good potatoes--preferably not the baked potato type.  I used some fingerlings and some other random variety I found at the market.

Provençal Tomato-Potato Gratin

2 garlic cloves

Olive oil

2.5 pounds tomatoes, sliced 1/2-1/4 inch thick
1.5 Tbsp fresh thyme leaves
Salt and pepper to taste
2 pounds potatoes, sliced about 1/4 inch thick
1 tsp herbs de provence 
.5-1 cup of grated gruyère



1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Cut one of the garlic cloves in half, and rub a 3-quart gratin or baking dish with the cut half. Oil the dish with olive oil. Mince the remaining garlic, along with the one you used to rub the dish and toss them in with the tomatoes. Add the thyme, and season to taste with salt and freshly ground pepper.
2. Make a layer of half the potato slices.  Mine were all different sizes, so it was a bit of a mess, but I tried to make it in more or less one slice thick.   Then season very generously with salt and pepper. I'm not kidding, you really want to salt it.  Sprinkle with half of the herbs de provence.  
3. Layer half the tomatoes over the potatoes.  I had them all overlap a bit.
4. Repeat the layers with the remaining potatoes and tomatoes. Make sure you salt and pepper the second layer of potatoes. Pour any juices left in the tomato bowl over the vegetables.
5. Pour 3/4 cup of hot water onto the vegetables. Bake 45 minutes.  The recipe recommends pressing the potatoes down into the liquid after 30 minutes, I didn't find this necessary. After the 45 min is up, sprinkle on the cheese. Bake another 30 to 45 minutes, until most of the liquid has been absorbed by the potatoes and the gratin is lightly browned. Or really browned, as in my case.  Serve hot or warm.

How an Analysis Becomes Official

In my last post I alluded to the fact that it is no trivial matter to take an analysis from a bunch of plots that I have made to an official statement of scientific fact put out by the collaboration. The road to approval is so long because in high energy physics, all members of the collaboration publish a result, not individuals. In fact, from outside of the collaboration you have no way of knowing who performed which analysis by reading the documentation. Most other scientists find this arrangement very strange since generally papers are very explicit about the level of involvement each name on the paper had in its production. High energy physicists take the egalitarian view that since our experiments are so large and complex, they cannot function without all of the members, and that the contribution of the person running the pixel detector is no less important that the person who is searching for the Higgs. Therefore, every name (all 3000 of them!) gets put on all papers in alphabetical order. The approval process is designed so that all collaborators can have their say about each analysis, which generally means that any result coming out of a HEP collaboration has gone through much stricter peer review than the average journal article. It also results in a lot of headaches for the person trying to get the analysis approved.


To explain the process, I'm going to employ School House Rock's awesome and educational, "How a a bill becomes a law". Rewatch it if you haven't seen it in a while. It's pretty great.



The Bill in question is my analysis and I play the part of the congresman who proposes it. My advisor is represented by the people who ask for the law, because she came up with the analysis concept. The drafting of the law, i.e. the dirty work of the analysis, kept me at CERN until obscene hours of the night for days on end in May and June. The committee fits best into the role of the Analysis Reviewers and Editorial Board, to which each analysis is assigned. These people look at the analysis in detail and typically ask you good question which drive you back to your computer to investigate, and in the end produce a better paper.

Once the board and reviewers deem the analysis mature enough, the paper (which, in this case, is not destined for a journal, but will be made public) is sent out to the collaboration and they are given a week to comment on it. This stage is equivalent to the Bill going to the House and Senate (imagine we have a single legislative body). At the end of the comment period the analyzer gives a talk about it, which would be equivalent to a floor debate. This part of the process involved me flying to Copenhagen to give a talk at our Collaboration meeting to a room of about 300 people. It was a little intimidating, but also fun because I got to use a nifty nearly invisible microphone that went over my ear and an enormous screen (12 ft tall, maybe?). My talk went smoothly, with no interjections or grumbling when the Physics convenor spoke the magic words, "Does anyone object to this continuing to the next stage?". Some of the analyses were contentious and forced to revise before coming up for a approval again. In most cases I agreed that the analysis wasn't quite ready and felt that the approval procedure had done its job.

Sadly, once ATLAS approves my analysis it does not go to Obama's desk. It instead goes to two of the three heads of management of the experiment: the Publication Committee chair, the Physics convenor and the Spokesperson. The first two read my analysis, and this is where it stalled a bit. I won't go into the details, but it was very confusing and frustrating. However, once those two "sign-off" on the analysis it is ready to go to the public and the long, arduous journey is over! The analysis now has the ATLAS stamp of approval.

I'm going to two conferences this August to present my work (and the work of others). Its quite exciting to know that for almost the first time I'll be showing plots that were made by me!