Christmas with a detector

I have written earlier about taking shifts and watching the detector. It's usually not an enormous amount of work, but I was still happy that someone else volunteered to take care of i over Christmas this year. I was only appointed as stand-in "run coordinator", which means that I'm responsible for planning and administration of the shifts but in ideal cases should not have to do much at all.

Unfortunately it also means that I'm in a responsible position and the first person to be contacted if something should go wrong. Which it did. On Christmas day we lost connection to one computer in the lab, and could not get all information about the status of the detector. I spent hours and hours trying to figure out first how to deal with the lost connection and then how to make sure that the detector is stable and in a state which will not harm it until someone can get to the lab. I didn't lose any sleep really, but I missed parts of Christmas.

Good that my family is patient, and that we didn't have any elaborate plans.

This is what it's like to be a scientist, sometimes. Even for someone so far from workaholic as me.

Merry Christmas!

I think most people have better things to do right now than to read blogs, but anyway. Happy holidays, and all that! I'm hoping to get time to write a bit the next few days, and to read, and to sleep.

The data plot pitfalls

It's really an art to present a graph or a plot and explain it.

When I was a new PhD student I was very impressed (actually slightly intimidated) by how a professor could glance at a plot and immediately have comments or questions. Even complicated graphs seemed transparent to them in a way that I did not understand. This made me feel slow and even slightly stupid, especially if I had made the plot and could not explain the features. Sometimes I was not even sure exactly what data I had put in the plot, since I was still struggling with the tools (if you are in the game yourself: I used Fortran and PAW, and when I started I had only very superficial knowledge of programming).

This made me believe that other scientists, and also other students, would probably understand everything if I only showed a graph. The first times I went to collaboration meetings I would show plots and tables and equations and just assume that since I, who was a beginner, could make these they would surely be self-explaining to the more experienced people in the audience.

But they are not. Will the audience remember the definition you showed three slides ago? Will they know how the trigger works that you are talking about? What points could be easily misunderstood because of your special terminology (like using the words "cut" and "variable" as if they were synonymous)?

I learned a lot since then, and among other things I have some experience with interpreting graphs and data plots. It's not as difficult anymore, which should perhaps not be a surprise. This is a skill that just developed with exposure to lots of ways to present data, nothing that I consciously learned.

At the same time I gained some insight into exactly how much you need to explain, and in what order, and how much of the details of your own little special research corner is completely unknown also to people inside the same collaboration. I don't think I really mastered it yet of course, although I'm much better at it.

What I have learned is that clear communication always makes life easier, but also that clear communication takes some effort. You have to understand enough about your audience to be able to see your own plots with their eyes. And while a picture might say more than a thousand words, it might be worth spending a few sentences on explaining what the important features are and give the others time to take a good look at it. If you just flash a plot for a few seconds you will probably leave the listeners more confused than they were before. (Maybe this should be obvious, but if you have been to some conferences you have seen how it's sometimes done.)

Some sciency links

Science is fantastic. If you have missed the Dyson sphere search that people are actually working on, click on that link.

If you want to stay up to date with what is going on in dark matter searches, you might want to take a look at this thing in Nature: a balloon borne detector has seen a bump in the spectrum of cosmic electrons, which just might be an signature of annihilation of dark matter particles. Of course it's too early to say anything conclusive. This is the kind of data we have to work with so far, and all indications of an observation of any kind will catch the interest of people in the field. So far we are used to being content with setting limits on different models for the dark matter particles.

Speaking about the fantastic, I have recently discovered the Science Not Fiction blog, "looking at the science of futurist technologies—and cool TV shows, books, movies, toys, and video games". There are some fun things there.

But to the question is scientific research a requirement to write believable science fiction? i think I would answer "no". Well, to some extent you will probably need some kind of scientific literacy, but I think there are many kinds of science fiction that are just as good without knowledge of a lot of scientific results. Just like the examples in that blog post. This is probably one of the eternal discussions in fandom, closely related to the questions of whether sf is dying and whither it's going. Hope they make a mind meld of it over at SF Signal!

Canadian house decorations (and politics)

Apparently Canadian politics is entertaining right now. Actually, this morning I passed an apartment building where someone had posted "GO COALITION!" in huge letters across three or four windows. That made me smile, because I like when people are enthusiastic about things.

Some of the more extreme Christmas decorations also make me smile. It was very windy on Monday, and I passed a house where an inflatable Joseph was beating the inflatable child with his staff, while the inflatable Mary struggled to stand up. That's one of the weirdest things I've seen.