Root Beer Floats

Every now and then each one of us has a bad day. Well for me it was more like a bad evening. I have just learned that I have been inadvertently acting like an asshole to everybody (the people I want to be treating the furthest from an asshole). I realize that this is possibly just a miss-interpretation of a defense mechanism that I have but it is still not good. So if you are reading this and you were involved you should know that I am truly sorry and certainly did not mean to be an asshole to you. I learned a few other things but there is no need to go into those things here. For days I have been thinking to myself, what can I blog about, what should I tell the world? Well, I have decided to tell the world that Ice Cream can in fact make you feel better. That right, it is not just an Urban Legend! A friend and I decided to make a run to Oberweis here in Naperville, il for just such a thing. What a fantastic drink. I am not sure what I like the most about it. Is it the beginning when you can spoon the vanilla out with a hint of root beer or the end when you have root beer with a hint of vanilla. Well, I dont think we should split hairs and just announce it as one of the best drinks ever. Cheers to the first person who decided to combine these two great things. Ok, I know I am rambling… But isn’t that what you do for things like this. So to end I will leave you a picture of this wonderfull drink. If you have never had one, you should spend the next ten minutes asking yourself why you haven’t and then immediately run to the store and get one. You will not be dissapointed.

Photo taken from pintandfork.blogspot.com

When things go right

You have to love that moment when you write some code to look at something physical and it just works. I have been asked to generate some Monte Carlo events for a Tevetron generation and subsequent decay of a Higgs boson plus a W boson. This process involves generating the actual Monte Carlo (which I was using Pythia and EvtGen to decay the B hadrons), simulate the detector responce, and then finally perform the reconstruction of objects from the detector simulation data. Here comes the hard part, can I find the W and the H from the Monte Carlo truth table? Can I find the decay daughters? And most importantly, can I find the reconstructed jets that correspond to the Monte Carlo decay partons? I thought I did, but I had to be sure. So I wrote a simple piece of code that utilized the Visualization Tool Kit (VTK) to have a look see.

So there it is. The objects in red are related to the Higgs particle and the objects in green are from the W boson. The size of the cone does not correspond to the energy but to which particle I am looking at. For instance, the widest is the actual Monte Carlo Higgs or W. The next smaller size cone represents the decay products and the smallest colored cones (barely visable) represent the reconstructed jets that are supposed to correspond to the Monte Carlo decay products. The black very narrow cones are all the reconstructed jets in the event. As you can see this is a pretty one. The medium colored cones have a narrow colored cone in each of them and there is a black cone coincident with this. This means that I was able to find the correct reconstructed jets that point back to the original H and W. Dont ask me about the energy |-)