Finally, a post on cool stuff from APS that has nothing to do with my talk, my job search thoughts, or the media workshop.

Francis, John Beacom, Kate Scholberg, and Carter Hall are all inspiring, insightful, and fun speakers.

There were some cool sessions on education, and I wish I could have gone to more of them (and more outreach sessions). But at this stage in my career, that’s not first priority. They’re still fun when the alternatives are, like, narratives about the Higgs discovery and crackpots on alternatives to gravity. The Illinois physics department as a whole got an award for reforming their physics courses, with wonderfully dramatic results. Students said physics was engaging, easy, (easy!) and relevant to their lives. The specific methods are easy enough to find with a google search on “physics education research”, but what struck me was their “no heros” attitude. They discussed openly that no one person should have to sacrifice to keep the system going, and in this way they hoped to make their reforms sustainable. It’s a wonderfully pragmatic (and comforting) attitude, especially when I’m comparing it to my job search attitude: how can I make sure I look like a hero in research? Being part of a mentored “no heros” endeavor certainly sounds more pleasant.

Totally different topic: a couple people in neutrino talks here used the line that theta13 went from being unmeasured to being the best-constrained parameter within a few months. This comment wrankled, because theta13 was already better constrained before it was measured than theta23 is now. So while it’s *technically* correct (“the best kind of correct”) to say that it was unmeasured, it’s misleading, and it draws the coolness away from my thesis. But since it’s correct, I’ll just put this on my blog and not call people out in questions after their talks.

Wavelength shifting fibers: they use them in Daya Bay. We were considering them for Pingu/Mica. The main concern for us was that a scintillating process inherently smears our timing resolution, which is critical for us, not having beam timing for veto and all that. So I asked a Daya Bay presenter how they get around this: what’s the timing resolution on the wavelength shifting fibers in their muon veto cap? She didn’t know the answer, because it’s not limiting for them: the veto coincidence window is a whopping 200 milliseconds. So, this can’t really answer Pingu’s question.

Morgan Wasco had a cool talk discussing the way we publish cross section results, (“we” being “experiments who can measure neutrino cross sections”) which reminded me a lot of the tone of Chad’s talks about publishing limits and effective areas. The format for each can imply how the numbers should be used in theories. Morgan’s point was that experiments should publish results that include as few theoretical assumptions as possible, so later citers don’t have to untangle assumptions from measurements. Very sensible. It would probably be more useful if I were making cross section measurements. 

Ok, this higgs speaker is actually much better than the last one, and I’m tempted to wrap up this post quickly so I can listen: he just quoted a tweet from yesterday. “Nightmare scenario developing at LHC: standard model observed, and nothing else #aprilAPS”

John Beacom’s talk was cool, and the bit I learned from it is that in a supernova, neutrino interactions with each other are The dominant effect in the outflow time profile. There are *that many* neutrinos. It’s mind boggling. Also, he was one of the few speakers who said that IceCube is one of the most important neutrino experiments out there: not just for neutrino astronomy, but for neutrinos absolutely. So I liked him :-) (most precisely, he said that neutrino astronomy, cosmology, and neutrino neutrino experiments all had to advance together, and each had something to contribute to the others).

Finally, it’s been wonderful seeing old friends. I got see an old roommate from college, and my roommate here is a friend from a summer school a few years ago. The press room is being run by a friend from my time at Fermilab. And of course the networking: when half of all conversations are “when might you be hiring?” I find myself talking through job ideas with peers more than I’d ever consider doing at home, even though we talk so much more at home. The conversations here are just more concentrated.

My flight is this afternoon, and I’m spending a day around Fermilab just to visit people and unwind, so I’ll be back for SAC review on Thursday (not that I expect to participate particularly, but I’ll be back). And I have jobs on the cluster in the meantime: monopod running on all my simulation samples, after Sebastian’s L8 cuts. When I get back, it’s time to dive into Feldman-Cousins code, and redoing my event selection.

A final note: the reactor anomaly is going away. Sterile neutrinos will be dead within two years, and Moriah will have a stale thesis if she sets out to study them. Marius might be able to make it out in time, but only because he should be finishing soon, and once he’s published and the reactor rates are explained, Moriah will have to find something else cool in IceCube. The next generation of my analysis could work well, and apparently once I find someone to replace me, I’m allowed to graduate. So: Moriah can do the next version of my analysis!