Wow I’m going to Switzerland in just a few days!

I’ll be staying with Marty’s parents in Nyon, Switzerland and commuting to CERN every day with Marty’s dad.  For the first week, I will attend CMS Physics Week and get settled in and file the proper forms to get started.  Then for three weeks, I will basically shadow a post-doc who works for UF.

I have done as much preparing in advance as possible: provisional user registration, creating a computer account, and bracing myself to format my laptop for Scientific Linux CERN 4.  SLC4 is the operating system used at CERN, but I can’t install it until my laptop is registered on site.   

This list of preparations seems short, but I truly needed two weeks to get it all done.  Afterall, 8am EST is 2pm in Geneva, so our business hours only overlap by 3 hours.  Thankfully my passport is up to date, and I won’t need a Visa, otherwise one should allow two months to prepare for working at CERN.

Goals for this trip:

- Get as much as I can out of the CMS physics week meetings

- Get accustomed to Linux

- Ask a lot of questions

- Meet people

- Learn to run jobs on the lxplus cluster

- Figure out housing options for future vists

I can’t wait to see my lovely McCrorys!

I will be visiting CERN from May 8 – June 7!  I’m not sure yet what my day-to-day activities will be, which is something I need to figure out since I’m going in (yikes!) 3 weeks.  How does that anti-jetlag diet go again?

I’m attending the University of Florida starting in the fall of 2009!  

When visiting the school, I met with most of the HEP professors and a few grad students.  All the feedback was positive:  funding issues are minimal, no scary profs to avoid, and a strong involvement with CMS.  A friend of mine from UIUC is now a second year grad student at Florida, and he is clearly very happy.  Plus Marty and I found a great apartment, so it felt right to accept their offer.  

Once I had enough information to know that Florida was a better fit, I withdrew my application from consideration at my other schools.  There are tons of students being waitlisted at those places, and I didn’t want to clog up the decision-making process any longer.

One year ago, I told Marty that regardless of his plans, I *must* attend graduate school this year.  His response then was, “OK, you should do it!”  Immediately after I was accepted, he came up with a list of apartments for us and submitted job applications in Gainesville.  I am very greatful to have such a supportive partner, and I am so happy he wants to join me in Florida.

I was accepted at the University of Florida!!!  I’m so excited for many reasons:

1.  This school is near my family.

2.  Their physics department is amazing.

3.  Summer all year long.

4.  Great funding.

5.  Health insurance.

6.  World class research.

7.  I know I’m going somewhere.

This is the first school I’ve heard back from, and they’ve accepted me so I can finally relax.  Now I can hear from other schools with the outlook that they have to match what Florida is offering me.  And if they don’t accept me, it’s not a big deal. 

I visited the University of Florida before submitting my application, and they have an impressive group of researchers.  I was told that the Department of Physics only accepts as many students as it can afford to fund completely, paying for tuition, a stipend, and health insurance.  They do this so grad students won’t have to spend time being a T.A. and can focus on their classes instead.  What could be better?

I will visit the department again soon and gather more information while I wait to hear from other schools.

one of the objectives of this blog is to document my progress toward my ultimate goal of becoming a scientist.  in that vein, i’ve had several breakthroughs recently:

1.  i have compiled a list of schools and they are the following:  university of iowa, university of wisconsin-madison, university of california-davis, duke, rochester, and maybe purdue.  i picked many of these schools because i know people who have attended them.

2.  i have signed up to retake the GRE physics subject test twice this fall, and i’ve had a lot of success studying for it.  i reworked a lot of homework problems and reread some of my text books and it makes more sense to me the second time around.  i’m confident i’ll do well on the test and in my coursework as a graduate student.

3.  i have had small victories in making personal contacts with people at these schools who have been very supportive and enthusiastic about my application.  this has generally boosted my confidence and relieved my anxiety over attending a school and getting an advisor that don’t suit me well.

4.  marty said he will follow me wherever i go, and i will be very greatful to have him with me.

i’m glad i took this much-needed time off from school, and i’ll be a better student as a result of it.  i just hope the admissions committees agree because i am so excited to be going back to school.

we test rode a tandem bicycle last week!  marty and i went to bikesmith’s, decked out in cycling clothes, to ride the tandem they had in stock.  we walked the bike to an open street and got on.  i have no idea how we did not fall off in the first 5 minutes.  the bike was very shaky and we had no idea how to balance it.  we rode in a neighborhood with lots of stop signs, so  we had to practice stopping and starting a lot, which can also be scary.

after about 40 minutes of riding, i was much more comfortable.   as captain, marty said it felt like riding a bike with 100 lbs on the rear tire, so the handling was very tricky.  the bike was also too big for him, so we think that was a problem.  being the stoker, i could not see in front of the bicycle, and i had no control over steering or braking which is a really strange feeling.  i’ll have to retrain myself to only worry about pedaling, and i started to get used to this during our short ride.  at one point marty told me to stop pedaling so he could try to pedal by himself.  this proved to be very difficult, and i think he was surprised at how much of the work i had been doing!

anyway, we are really excited about getting a tandem.  the greatest advantage is that we won’t get separated on bicycle rides.   additionally, tandem cycling will give us another activity that we can enjoy together.

i’ve done a few interesting things lately, but i’ll split them up into separate posts.

two weeks ago, marty and i attended a lecture given by the dalai lama, religious leader of tibetan buddhism, at the assembly hall. the dalai lama received the nobel peace prize in 1989 for his persistent message of compassion towards tibet’s greatest threat, china. shortly after WWII, china invaded neighboring tibet, bombing almost 2,000 monestaries, and sent the teenaged dalai lama into exile for the next 60 years. today tibet is included in china’s borders, comprising 1/3 of its land.

at this lecture, the dalai lama gave an unscripted speech about the source of compassion in all people. he believes that anyone who had a mother or caregiver that provided love and affection knows how to be compassionate. he used various philosophical arguments to support this idea as well as scientific research demonstrating that the more a baby is touched and held, the better its neurological development will be. and he makes the jump, the better that person will understand compassion. this combination of science and philosophy is common to the dalai lama’s logic, and i think it’s an interesting way to spread his peaceful message.

recently the chinese government has stated it intends to approve the selection of the next dalai lama (when this dalai lama passes away, tibetan buddists will seek out his reincarnation to be the next dalai lama). from anyone else, i would expect a reaction of outrage and injustice. but the dalai lama calmly explains that it makes no sense for china to select the next dalai lama because as a communist country, by definition their government is not interested in religious practices. he also says that the institution of dalai lama does not absolutely have to continue. if it will prevent conflict, they can simply abstain from selecting a 15th dalai lama altogether.

i am so struck by the logic in his peaceful message and by the conversely illogical nature of hateful messages spread by our president and his allies. i took from this lecture the conclusion that hate of any form can never be justified logically.

oh how i miss illinois! illinois with its 7.50/hr minimum wage, all kids health insurance coverage, and illegality of concealed weapons…

two nights ago, marty and i awoke at 5 a.m. to the sound of gunfire. a guy fired a single gunshot in the parking lot of our apartment complex, 20 yards outside our window. he damaged a car window and injured a girl in the process (not sure if the girl was hit by the bullet, but we know that she was bleeding). after some drunken shouting, he tried to run for it. the police showed up with an ambulance, and we later found out the shooter was eventually picked up. the owner of the gun and the car (not the same guy as the shooter) explained to the police that he had his gun in his car and had given the shooter (a friend of a friend of a friend) a ride home. the gun ended up in the shooter’s hands, words were exchanged, then BANG. it struck me as odd that he openly admitted to the police keeping the gun in his car until i remembered that concealed weapons are legal in indiana.

on a daily basis, it is difficult to ignore how Red this state is. one has the option of getting either the dull yellow and green indiana license plate, or a snazzy red, white, and blue one with the words “IN GOD WE TRUST” stamped on half the plate, leaving room for a 4-digit license plate number. in a college town like bloomington, half the plates read “IN GOD WE TRUST” and half are from out of state.

it doesn’t help that the colors of indiana university are red and white. every sporting event is dripping red. and about two dozen Big Red Liquor stores are scattered around town (they appear to have a monopoly). maybe our shooter got his spirits for the night from such a store.

honestly i don’t see how anyone can rationalize legalization of concealed weapons. republicans and the nra need to get their heads out of the sand because when you legalize concealed weapons, that means any imbecile with a gun can have a concealed gun. sorry, but i just don’t trust in god to protect me from drunken college students who keep a gun in their car and give rides to hotheaded drunken strangers.

this past saturday, marty and i went on tours of the cyclotron (iucf) and the adjoining proton therapy facility (mpri). tours were being given as part of the physics open house taking place at swain hall (the physics lecture building on campus). this tour was amazing for two reasons: we got to see the rooms where proton therapy is administered, and we entered the main cyclotron room as well as the smaller injector cyclotron. all of this was possible because the beam was not running at this time.

first we visited the control room, which is comparable to the control room at cdf, but the equipment is much older. the folks at iucf have proudly hung many nasa banners above the consoles because iucf tests the durability of nasa equipment against radiation (in space, you no longer have the protection of the earth’s atmosphere from many forms of radiation from the sun).

next we entered the proton therapy facility, and it felt like entering a different world. the interior design of mpri is very warm and modern and has every look of a professional medical facility. this is in stark contrast to the rest of iucf’s lower level, which has exposed concrete walls, i-beams, miscellaneous equipment lying around, maze-like doors and hallways, and copious yellow signs reading “RADIATION AREA”.

first a word about proton therapy vs. x-ray therapy. traditional x-ray therapy consists of high energy photons. the photons pass completely through the patient’s body, depositing energy as they go. the pattern in which a beam of x-rays or protons depositing energy at a given depth is shown by the Bragg peak. Unfortunately, with x-rays more energy is deposited at the surface of the skin than on the tumor itself, and a substantial amount of energy is deposited on the tissue behind the tumor as well. doctors counteract this by administering several x-ray doses of short duration from various angles, such that they converge on the tumor. however, the patient may still experience side-effects of burns to the skin or damage to internal organs. conversely, proton therapy makes use of a proton beam (protons can be isolated relatively easily by stripping the electrons from hydrogen). the protons are accelerated in a cyclotron and guided to different treatment rooms with magnets. as you can see from the Bragg peak image, protons will completely stop inside human tissue within about 20 cm, where most of their energy is deposited. so a very high, very lethal dose can be administered to the tumor itself with very little damage to the surrounding tissue (hooray!). a downfall to proton therapy is that some scattered protons will impact other materials in the treatment room, releasing neutrons. children under the age of 8 are most sensitive to the ambient neutrons and have a 3% chance of developing tumors 30-40 years later as a result.

first we were shown the fixed beam room. a clunky beam line juts out from the back wall and takes up half the room. the patient bed is attached to a robot arm, which came from a toyota factory. these robots are very powerful, so they have been reprogrammed to slowly move the patient into position (within 1 mm of precision) in front of the beam line.

then we saw the gantry. this room contains a giant track, like a hamster wheel, on which the beam line can be rotated 360 degrees. this setup is several times more expensive to install than the fixed beam line, but allows one to treat tumors that the fixed beam cannot reach. the patient bed is again attached to a robot arm, as is some of the x-ray equipment. x-rays are used only for positioning a patient prior to treatment.

at the end of the tour i was very impressed, and i can see how this line of work would be very rewarding for scientists and medical personnel. proton therapy is quite painless and brings almost no side effects, since living tissue is hardly damaged. the folks at mpri are working on a way to eliminate the scattered protons to make the procedure even safer for children (though i think it’s already safer than chemotherapy or x-ray therapy). unfortunately there are only a handful of proton therapy facilities in the country, and each one is different, because the technology of a cyclotron is so unique and expensive. whereas every doctor and dentist office in the country has an x-ray machine, so that technology has been standardized for the past 20 years. a company called ProCure was started by former iucf director John Cameron, and their goal is to standardize proton therapy facilities to make them less expensive to build and optimized to treat most patients. so i’m hoping that this form of treatment becomes more standard in coming years.

yesterday the president of iran, mahmoud ahmadenijad visited columbia university and gave a speech there. today i sat down and watched it from youtube, and you can watch it at the following links:

columbia president, bollinger: introduction
ahmadenijad speech: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7

these videos were mislabeled and incomplete on youtube, and i had to combine videos from two different sets to ensure the complete speech would be listed here. if you watch all the videos in order, some information will be reapeated.

i want to comment on this speech, but there is so much to say. i hope anyone reading this will watch and judge for themselves. his most publicized remarks include downplaying the holocaust, defending iran’s “right” to seek nuclear weapons, and denying that there are any homosexuals in iran. he is a fundamentalist in many respects and these views are certainly disturbing, but according to the report on Democracy Now! from Sept. 25, he is not very powerful. he is not commander and chief of iran’s army and he does not choose his own cabinet members, so it seems he has less power in his country than bush has here and bollinger is quite wrong to label him a dictator. i’m not sure whether our country should be scared of iran’s president, but i think all headlines demonizing him only patronize american people.