Posted by Dan Hertz on September 26, 2006
Well I didn’t have a meeting with my advisor today because he’s out of town and so I decided to put up a picture of something I’ve been working on on the side instead. I’m putting together a talk about my research which I’ll be giving to some grad students in a few weeks and decided to find some decent-looking pictures of the event display at CLEO-c. This turned out to be rather more difficult than expected, but in the end I did more or less triumph over adversity and ended up coming up with the picture below.
It’s neat because you can see the charged tracks (the green things) and showers in the calorimeter (the blue towers). The reason the tracks are curved is because the whole thing is in a strong magnetic field. The less curved a track is, the more momentum that particle has. If you sort of add up the momenta, you can tell that there’s a lot missing in the downward direction. That means that there’s a neutrino or K-Long which went that way, basically, since they’re the type of particle that don’t get detected by any parts of the detector. So we couldn’t see that it. But you can calculate how much energy and momentum it had by counting up how much everything else had and knowing how much there was to begin with (because we know that we started off with an electron and a positron of a given energy).
Now I haven’t actually analyzed this particular part of our dataset (nor will I be doing so) so I can’t say anything more about the event, and I realize that these pictures are not really as pretty as astronomer’s pictures, but you can’t really blame me for trying.
Posted in Academics | 3 Comments »
Posted by Dan Hertz on September 20, 2006
For those of you who missed it, yesterday was indeed international Talk Like a Pirate Day. I didn’t really get much chance to celebrate it, but Mike did share this fine video with us at gaming last night which people can consider instructional for the purposes of preparing for next year.
I particularly like how there is an entire section devoted to “arrrr”.
Enjoy 
Posted in General | 1 Comment »
Posted by Dan Hertz on September 19, 2006
Just because it’s been a while and I’ve been working hard on my analysis, I decided to put up a new plot from my analysis. Still Monte Carlo (not actual data), hence the ability to tell what’s signal and what’s background, but things are a lot cleaner than they were before. Which is good because it means that my analysis is working better and that I’m getting closer to graduating.
I will soon start doing some actual writing as well but for right now I’m sort of caught up in the analysis because it’s going so well and it’s difficult to tear myself away from it. Yes, I’m turning into one of those people, constantly distracted by my work.
Now I’ve even got it there with the lines showing up so it looks a bit nicer.
Posted in Academics | 1 Comment »
Posted by Dan Hertz on September 19, 2006
This is rather long-overdue as I’d promised it… a long time ago, but I decided to finally post something about the Amber game.
So my character is named Tristifer (another name shamelessly lifted from a GRRM ASOIAF book, of course), hailing from Rebma, being the son of Llewella and a nobleman named Stevron Estermont. He came to Amber shortly after the Patternfall War and has been living there since, serving as the Royal Physician. As such his duties are basically to take care of the King and his family. Which he takes very seriously. He spends most of his time around the castle, of course, but enjoys it when he gets to go on the occasional sea voyage such as when Random has visited the Golden Circle.
Tristifer is generally deferential towards those he considers his betters (his elders, particularly older members of the family) and unfailingly gracious towards those beneath him. His role in life is essentially that of a caretaker and he takes it very seriously. Rather unusually for one of the family, he is never armed with any kind of sword or dagger. One reason for this, of course, is that he doesn’t really need to. It’s not widely known, but Tristifer is in fact capable of changing his body into pretty much anything he needs to. He can survive most extreme conditions, elongate his arms, change his bones into razor-sharp knives and saws, turn himself into a bird or fish. He can even affect other people with his powers, thus allowing him to heal their bodies far more effectively than he would if he were to simply be stitching them together with needle and thread. However, it is generally felt that the fewer people that know about this, the better. Part of his job is actually to go around and fix things when Dworkin has escaped and turned people into… furniture, as he sometimes does.
So far we’ve just done some backstory which has been fun and we’re going to be picking things up with the start of the campaign tonight, I think. It’s just after the end of the Merlin Chronicles and thus Coral had the Jewel of Judgement in her head in place of an eye. But since she wanted to go to Chaos with Merlin, Random felt it would be good if it were removed. So I did that and made her a new eye. Now we’re a little concerned because the JoJ seems to have been growing some weird tendrils that were attaching themselves to different parts of her brain. I didn’t want to leave any of these things in her brain and so cut them away at the brain but we’re kind of worried about what the hell is going on. So Random’s sent me to see Rosarian, the great Pattern Smith, who may be able to understand what has happened. Dominick, son of Caine, is commander of the ship taking me and Martin to him, although he doesn’t know what’s in the package that we’re carrying.
So far it seems like fun. Being in service like this is a very different concept for a character for me, so I hope it works out ok. I guess it depends on how things work in terms of stuff going on in Amber. I do still have my own agenda that I want to pursue even though I’m bound to the Crown. And of course there’s that nagging question of why I have this weird power that I have in any case… I mean, it’s not like Amber is awash with Shapeshifters, after all. But I’ve given some thought to that as well and there are some interesting things that can come of that too, I think.
Posted in Amber, Gaming | 6 Comments »
Posted by Dan Hertz on September 16, 2006
So I’m sort of adapting to the new version of iTunes but so far I’m very pleased with it. The fact that the album artwork is more generally visible makes it seem more like I actually have my cd collection, but on my computer. Which I guess is the idea. Add this to the fact that iTunes will fetch the album cover art for my tracks and it’s a very nice thing There are a few bugs with the album art retrieval, like if you don’t have the artist named in the exact same way that the iTunes store does, or even if you don’t have the track assigned to the same genre. Robin has submitted the latter of these as a bug to Apple so we’ll see how quickly they get around to fixing it. It does seem like a pretty arbitrary thing. But it’s also a little frustrating to have it not produce album art for Hard Promises by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers simply because iTunes lists the band as Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, as far as I can tell. Or I could be suffering from the genre problem.
Oh, and it does bug me that my scrolling mouse doesn’t scroll side to side on my pc in iTunes. I guess Apple and Windows don’t like each other very much or something silly like that? It’s still pretty annoying, though, because it works really nicely on my powerbook.
Posted in Computer, Music | 1 Comment »
Posted by Dan Hertz on September 15, 2006
So last night I was playing ultimate down at Stewart park which is right next to Cayuga Lake, with the result that I got eaten alive by mosquitos. Seriously. My upper arms in particular appear to have each received on the order of five or ten bites and my legs have also been rather heavily hit. So when I got home and was going to bed, I took some Benadryl in order to deal with the itching so I wouldn’t go crazy. This morning I was left with a tough decision. Should I take some more, or should I just deal with feeling incredibly itchy all the time?
I decided to go with option number one but I’m presently regretting it, although that may in part be because I haven’t had any coffee yet. I’m feeling very sleepy and not very alert and really not raring to go. Maybe going with feeling itchy would have been better because that would have served to keep me awake during the boring meetings I should be going to all day. Oh the joy. As it is I can just go to the meetings and quietly doze off. Although it seems that you can only really do that if you’re a tenured faculty member.
Posted in General, Health | 2 Comments »
Posted by Dan Hertz on September 10, 2006
I’ve spent a few hours today listening to This American Life streaming on their website as I’ve been doing some cleaning up of my apartment. I’m always struck by just how good a show it is, by how interesting the people’s stories and by how well they manage to present things.
I was even listening to the very first episode they ever aired (well, actually it was a 10th anniversary re-broadcast of it) and I was very impressed by how consistently good it has managed to be for the eleven years it’s been on the air.
Apparently they’re now offering episodes for 95 cents an episode at the iTunes store, so I may very well end up downloading quite a few episodes there so I can listen to them while walking to and from work and while driving to and from Baltimore. They have yet to change price of all their old episodes to 95 cents, though, so I’m waiting for the price-drop before going on a buying spree
It’s definitely some of the best radio I know of. It’s not good for listening to while working because I really want to give it a lot of attention. While I can sort of half-listen to Science Friday, for instance, or even occasionally to Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, I feel like This American Life sort of demands more of my attention, much like listening to a good audiobook (like George RR Martin, say).
Posted in General | 5 Comments »
Posted by Dan Hertz on September 7, 2006
So yesterday was one of those extremely productive days where I just worked and worked and worked. I was frustrated by a number of problems in making plots but managed to overcome most of the hurdles and ended up making some major progress and didn’t come home from work until around 10 pm or so. So all in all it was an extremely productive day. I would say that I spent about ten hours just writing code and making plots (not counting any time talking to other people and walking around and stuff), fully concentrating, and so I guess that’s my excuse for today. The fact that I’m spending very little time doing things like blogging is indicative of the success I’m having with work, I suppose.
Today is rather less productive. I’m not feeling the vibe and although I have quite a bit of stuff I know I have to do I haven’t really been able to make myself do much of anything. Hopefully tomorrow will be better, but I’m sort of giving up a bit on trying to make much of today. I will probably be going to a class later, and then frisbee, and then some other stuff in the evening, so I’ve got plenty of things to keep me busy for the rest of the day.
Tomorrow is going to be another marathon productivity day, in any case, since I’m covering someone’s physicist shift in the counting room from 4 pm until midnight. Basically I’ll have nothing to do except monitor a few plots every now and then and concentrate on my work. I anticipate getting quite a bit done then as well.
All in all, if days like today are the price to pay for days like yesterday, I don’t really think I will complain.
Posted in Academics | 2 Comments »
