Its been a while

Dear LazyWeb,

A lot of things have happened since my last posting, which regrettably was too far back.  I have now gone back to Fermilab for about a month to work here at the D0 experiment.  I have started to dabble in the world of online dating.  I have decided to play with www.plentyoffish.com, my profile is here, mainly due to the fact that it is free and I think the other sites out there are just money hungry.  I must say that I am in general disappointed with the online women.  They say that they are looking for this great guy, which I think that I am, and yet I get no response, or even worse, read and then deleted.  Some women state they are looking to just hang out or looking for friends, but when I message them they seem not to respond.  It really makes you start to wander if you were not all that great.  Now, I am not giving up, I think that I am just venting.  It seems ironic that the reason I am posting here to the blog is because somebody very important to me told me that she misses reading my blog and for me to continue but this is the only topic on my mind right now.  Seems like the last thing that I would write about.  (as a side note the new interface for wordpress is quite nice, a definite upgrade)

Apart from my dating woe’s I have a new interest, reading philosophy…  Now if only I could find one to read.  I did some looking and I think that I am going to start with David Hume, unless a luck commenter has a better author for me.  I am not sure where this interest came from but we will see where it goes.  I have been doing some caving (not as much as I should) and I have also been playing with my new snowboard.  Since I am here near Chicago I plan to go up to Wisconsin to do some boarding in preparation for the spring break trip to CO this year.  Hopefully I will be able to find some friends here to go with me.  Ok, enough for now.  Mabey that I have posted here now I will get back to it again later this week. (lets keep our fingers crossed)

Justace

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 |-)