Well, with all the talk of the terrible weather moving through the central united states I thought now would be a good time to chime in about life at Fermilab during the winter.
Winter weather is a fact of life in the midwest and this terrible storm is no different. Even the Tevatron tweeted some comments about it
Tevatron Store 8465 terminated intentionally – 7900 nb^-1 delivered. Store 8466 initial lumi = 352 ub^-1/s. Preparing for blizzard tomorrow.
followed up by the comment:
Tevatron Too bad the accelerator isn’t going to shovel my driveway.
Likewise, as a grad-student now living off site this sort of thing means that it is unlikely I’ll make it to the lab to work over the next few days. Generally, this isn’t a big deal for me, the component of the detector I help maintain (Electromagnetic Calorimeter Timing or ‘EMTiming‘) has few to no problems and most of them are software related (one of calibrations drift) and can be dealt with remotely. What I do end up missing out on is being physically there to take part in the discussions and get feedback from experts.
Particle physics is an interesting game, especially from where I sit nearing the end of my analysis and hoping to present the results that will go in my thesis in the upcoming weeks. Getting feedback is really important, however presenting results that you haven’t vetted really well is also problematic. You can end up wasting a lot of time because you showed plots that had a “bug“ in them (bug meaning a problem in your code) or presenting an idea for estimating your background that ends up not working out….then having to explain in another talk why what you initially thought was wrong and how you were just wasting your time.
So, with Snow-mageddon bearing down on me, I will take this time to crawl into my little whole of an apartment and finish vetting my final plots and ideas.
CDF Collision Hall as seen from outside (in the spring)...very pretty orange
The CDF collaboration meeting is coming up in under 2 weeks and I need to have my results ready for presentation!
Time to get my ducks (or in the spirit of Fermilab) geese in a row!
