Good Apple — Bad Sticker

Today I was at work, well just now, and I decided to be the healthy person that I am (ahhhem) and eat an apple.  A few days ago I had done some grocery shopping in anticipation of this desire.  The fact that I did my grocery shopping 200 miles away from my destination is worth a whole other post.  So I start to do the standard pull the sticker off the apple so you do not consume things designed for a printer and I discovered, to my horror, that this was a precut sticker.  If you try to pull it off then it starts to rip.  This is not a sticker designed for a passport!  Ohh well.  I will now have to take the next several minutes dislodging this sticker from the apple before I can enjoy.  I thought I would share it with you.  Now for all you non believers out there (you know who you are) I have taken a picture and mocked it up with lines to represent the cuts in the sticker.  Too bad the sticker is fuzzy in the image.

I am actually not sure if I even feel like eating the apple anymore.

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

Dear World….

Today I have been though a gauntlent of dissapointment.  I have received a email from my advisor last week telling me that she wants me to be on my own more and to start looking for a job.  Now, this is a good thing since that means that she is starting to think that I am getting ready for the “real world”.  I have been trying to get stuff to her for the past week and a half and nothing is working correctly.  When I submit jobs to the batch queue’s to get results they just crash.  And on top of that I can not seem to get the corretions into my Monte Carlo all the way due to these batch issues.  Ok, so besides some other dissapointing news I thought that I had this batch issue solved where I come in this morning and find out that I had submitted with the wrong config file last night.  Worthless computing time wasted.  Now I have to resubmit but the computers at the experiment are being upgraded so the batch queue’s are offline.  Now to supliment this…  I have been needing to get some code together to make a plot for my work.  I have been putting it off since it was a hastle.  The other day I finally got around to getting this code written and it was awsome.  It did everything I needed it to, had cross-checks in the code, and the plot was great looking.  Today in an effort to back it up I accedentally removed it!  Now I must start over from scratch.  Now I know that it was only about 400 lines of code but…  Now on top of all this I need to be editing a paper.  I have been trying to get to it but things keep getting in my way.  For one I can not update the efficencies untill I have the corrections in the Monte Carlo (which I am waiting on batch jobs to be available again since they are required to get this to work.)

I dunno World…  Guess I just needed somebody to rant to.  Now to settle down and recover from my morning…  Possibly a trip downtown would help me to recover…

Quarter thiefs…..

Ok, as young growing adults out of the home we have from time to time the lovable task of doing laundry.  Now, I know that there are some that find this to be a fun and exciting task (you are all weird), for me it really is the last thing that I want to be doing.  My post here is not really about the act of doing laundry, but what one has to go though to get it done….  Putting quarters in a machine.  In this day and age it is really rare for me to carry cash, and an even less probability that I will be walking around with the eleven quarters it takes to wash and dry a load of laundry at my apartment complex.  Now, I really am not bent out of shape about the money it is just that I have to have quarters.  Can the companies just not get with the times.  I would be totally cool with switching to laundry tokens and have a token exchanger avail so that I could put 1/5/10 dollar bills into to get the tokens.  Or even better just swipe my credit card and have it issue me x number of tokens.  Really.  This definitely falls into the category of rant.  Lets get on the ball Mr laundry machine coin thief decider person.   (Ok, I think that is out of my system now P-) )…

Taco Hell….. (ohh, I ment Bell)

Today, I will write to you the reader with a new drive, a rejuvenation of desire to spread the silly things that happen to me on a daily basis.  To who do I owe this burst of energy to…  Stacie, the always bubbly and always fun to talk to girl that you wish you had more time with.  So many things have happened since my last posting.  Obviously too many to really talk about.  Now, just in case you thought this post was going nowhere…(and quickly)…  I will turn this around and set the stage at Lawrence’s premier late night restaurant, Taco Hell…  After I had met with some friends for the evening I decided to make a stop at the Taco Bell to grab some late night grub.  If you thought that your evening was entertaining before your stopped at the border, then you have a whole new surprise coming your way.  I have found that sitting in the drive though lane in a college town at 2:00 am in the morning always has its moment where you think to yourself, “Why would he do that…” or more common “What an idiot…”  So, after about 5 minutes in line a very large black pickup truck decided it was time to get out of there and proceeded to drive around the other cars to leave.  What the driver failed to do was realize that truck was not going to fit around all the cars and of course clipped the front end of the car making the order at the super wicked cool display that always shows what you ordered, but not necessarily what you will get.  The person making the order immediately got out of his car to confront the other driver, in a non-aggressive fashion of course, and was welcomed with a driver side window being rolled up as fast as possible.  This is where things started to get a little out of hand.  The guy opens the driver side truck door in an effort to further confront the driver.  I mean wow…  To just open the door of the other vehicle.  I could have sworn that there was going to be a confrontation ending in some form of bloodshed.  Well, at this point the ruck driver pulled away and left nothing behind but an aggravated and taken advantage of soul.

Now being the person that I am, I try to place myself in the other person’s shoes (usually cause they have better shoes, seriously, I need to glue the toe on my Vans back before it gets even worse).  When I do this I normally see some sort of justification for the action, but not this time.  I will go ahead a make the guess that the driver of the truck (who was female) was probably drunk and just could not handle a confrontation with the police, hence the hit and run.  I really hope that somebody got the plate of the truck.  It really sucks when your car is damaged and there is no way to get it fixed (this happened to me years ago in the University of Kansas parking lot).  Well, Mr Angry Damaged Car still kicking tires person, I feel for you.  I wish that I could do more to help but I think this is decidedly out of my hands.  If you were that driver, and you end up reading this post then let me know and I will buy you a drink.

Ok, so what can we all take away from this tale…  When bored and it is 2:00 am, just make a run for the border, there is always drama to be seen in the drive though….   (and yes one night I did see somebody get out of one vehicle in line, walk to another on in line and then piss on the tire.  Again, could have swore that was going to end up with blood there somewhere)…

Public Figures and Science

Now, from time to time I see an article where a public figure decides to talk about science. I found a real nugget today when browsing the web. A blogger by the name of Copache, otherwise known as “The Seeker”, posted an entry related to the Higgs Boson from Rush Limbaugh. Now, I just don’t know what to say after reading the article from Rush, the article can be found here. To begin I should say that I am appalled. There are so many things wrong with his article it is hard to find out where to start. Lets begin with an easy one.

“By the way, it is this vast particle collider at the CERN research centre that they say could replace the Internet, with speeds so fast that you’ll be able to download a high definition movie, a two-hour high definition movie in three seconds.”

Ok, I am not really sure where this came from. Possibly he is spinning a small mis-understood side quote from somebody else, but really, this is bunk. You can’t run the internet with a particle accelerator. Now one of the main points from the article is related to the Higgs Boson, something that Rush obviously knows nothing about. He starts by explaining how we will find the particle:

“They’re going to use a particle accelerator and collider for it”

While this might be a true statement, I think that it is an attempt to trivialize the work that must be done. Sure, the community will be colliding protons on anti-protons at the Tevatron at Fermilab and protons on protons at the LHC in CERN, but we will be carefully looking at the results of these collisions for final state configurations consistent with the theory. It is an extremely difficult process in which a single analysis can take several years. I would just hate for people, namely the Rush Linbaugh followers who would be reading this to think that this process is easy.

Ok, now to the part that really ruffles my feathers (dont ask where the feathers came from).

“In other words, he’s looking for a “God particle.” He’s looking for a particle to prove God. Dr. Higgs, please, just look out the window. You see that tree? You see the grass? Whatever is outside your window, all of it, it’s God particles.”

If Rush Limbaugh had done his research, as he should since he is a public figure, he would know that the Higgs Particle was coined the “God Particle” not from Peter Higgs but from Leon Lederman. Leon Lederman published a book called “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?”. Now Rush seems to think that this is related to religion and that we believe that by finding this particle we will prove the existence of god. There are a few things that are really wrong with this, well two that stand out. The first is that this is related to religion. It is not and I have found that he originally wanted to call it the “goddam” particle. Ok, even I think that is a little off and could be wrong but I will add that disclaimer to it. The second thing is that the search for the Higgs is a little bit different. The current work is to place limits on its possible mass, or masses if you are looking at the MSSM model. By looking hard enough in a particular region of mass space it is possible to state with some certainly that the Higgs particle is not there. So instead of discovering the Higgs particle we are working to disprove it, and then maybe we will find it |-). Ok, so away from that and back to what I really wanted this post to be about. What I hate to see is a public figure take something that he does not know anything about and then through jargon and industry terms around like he has been an integral component of the operation, as if he has any authority to do so.

So, Rush Limbaugh, I would like to first ask you to clarify your statements. It is obvious that we are not trying to prove the existence of God. That was never in the goals of any of the particle accelerator experimental complexes that I have been to. To say so would be preposterous. I would like for the public figures to make sure that they know what they are talking about before spouting something. I know that there are a number of people out there helping the cause, but I fear far more are hurting it. Rush Limbaugh has definitely reduced his credibility even more than it already was.

What was it that he does again… Ohh thats right, he just talks….

Why Not!

A while back I finally got into using iTunes as my way to get music.  While I had an iPod much earlier I had been able to successfully use Amarok to transfer music between my computer and the iPod.  This of course meant that I had to use less than noble ways of acquiring the music files to begin with.  The purchase of my iPhone (which I love and am addicted to) I made the transition.  I find that using iTunes in conjunction with the apple devices that I have to be a pleasure and bordering on addictive.  Here comes my grip and the real reason for this post.  Numerous times I have gone to download (and purchase of course) a song and not been able to find it.  After doing some research on these artists I find out that they oppose the use of iTunes.  Now my friends know that I am no stranger to standing up to the “Man”, I run Linux and basically shun Microsoft products based only on principle.  But lets look at what an artist would want.  I would think that he would want his message and music spread to as many open ears that were possible.  I understand that there are other download services, but, we all know that they all have their own different issues.  I am taken aback that there are artists that would refuse to allow their music to be sold though iTunes.

I do realize that there are also a lot of copyright issues and the such along with a large variety of other things that complicate the whole situation.  But look at the end result, I wanted a song, looked for legal ways to acquire that song and was left wanting.  So until those artists (yes, that is you Bob Seger) finally allow their music to be sold on iTunes I will just have to listen to them on the radio.  Come on people!  It is 2008, I should not have to get in my car to get music anymore.

(and no, that does not mean that I am lazy)