Epsilon Exploits & Familial Foibles
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A somewhat belated announcement: we have a new cousin, Evelyn Tsiopanos, who was born about a month ago. Her parents have also posted some very cute pictures her. Hannah is apparently very excited to have a little sister just like Alora & Brittan. No doubt she will be just as mothering as well. It looks like Zara will now also have a companion for the grandmother/granddaughter beach week at Hilton Head in 4 or 5 summers when she starts going...
First we ate birthday cake for breakfast ...
... and then drove to Monterey, where we had a picnic lunch in the car and then went to the aquarium:
Maxwell was worn out after seeing all those fish, especially the sharks which were his favorite, that he fell asleep in the bottom of the stroller. The girls seized upon the opportunity to hit the junk shops on Cannery Row. Zara enjoyed riding on her daddy's shoulders so much that she ripped off my glasses and threw them onto the ground, breaking them. If they didn't look dorky already the duct tape has really done the trick.
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28 July 2006
Many young people have a security item they play with when falling asleep. My sister Jaime had her bea, all my children have used pacies, and Maxwell plays with his hair - the little tuft above his forehead. He's been doing it so long I can't remember when he started, but in the past few weeks he has started pulling it out as part of his play. Now Maxwell has a little bald spot just above his forehead where there is no hair that grows day by day. We have tried to discourage the hair pulling, but to no avail. Even giving him a buzzcut was not enough to stop those little fingers. Maxwell has also officially passed wild man status. One of his new favorite activities is diving head first off the couch. One would think that this would be an activity which would provide enough negative feedback to discourage itself, but apparently not for Maxwell. So we put down pillows around the couch and try to deflect his wildness toward wrestling and running away from Boodle. Unfortunately, the latter game usually ends in a search for high ground - like a couch. Maxwell has also adopted the hit-and-run method of aggression to vent against those larger than him as little brothers often do. This is somewhat hard to police because he still has the poor aim and light touch of a two year old. His victims, especially me, don't often realize they have been assaulted unless he lands a particularly good blow. Amazingly enough, he doesn't ever hit Zara though. The two of them get very physical in their play and steal eachother's pacies regularly, but Maxwell usually seeks parental arbitration in disputes with Zara which they are unable to resolve amongst themselves. |
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| Tonight Maxwell opened his birthday presents since we are going to the aquarium in Monterey tomorrow. (Notice that Superman is the baby in his new shopping cart). Then we went out to 7-Eleven for the evening's Slurpees. I still don't understand why they don't have these stores in the southeast! Zara has even learned to suck through a straw to enjoy the deliciousness of a Slurpee. Alas, Maxwell had so much fun that he fell asleep after dinner before we could do cake. I guess we'll have to do it tomorrow for breakfast ... |
Later today cousin Howie will finish taking the California bar exam. You can check here to see if he passed sometime thereafter. Congratulations to Howie! He's been studying like a maniac all summer, so no doubt he will be enjoying this weekend.
For the next week we're running a beam test at SLAC on a next generation DIRC prototype. Basically, it improves on the current DIRC design by focussing the light onto a smaller surface - this is important because PMTs, which detect the individual photons and cover the detection surface, represent a significant cost. (There are about 11,000 in BaBar costing $3000 apiece). Right now we're running electrons perpendicularly through our prototype at about 10 Hz to have nice resolvable signals so we can better understand the dispersion of the photons in the quartz bar. Light travels at different speeds through any medium, so the goal is to resolve the color the photon as well as its Cherenkov angle and time of flight (the two things BaBar's DIRC measures). I know that's not a very good explanation, but I'll put up a presentation later that will be a bit more detailed and hopefully clearer. Below is the part of the Cherenkov ring we're measuring in this prototype from some of today's measurements.
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23 July 2006
Today I repaired a $300 million detector with two coffee cups, duct tape and a bucket. Ah, modern technology ... actually it was just a leaky air conditioner used to cool our electronics hut. Unfortunately it was on top of the hut, and since we wanted to avoid leaking water down into our electronics, this necessitated the construction of a water collection apparatus until an HVAC technician could come to repair it. Reading some Strong Bad email today I came across one wherein Strong Bad assumes a secret identity to write for a teen magazine. These guys have pumped out such a volume of hilaritacular stuph that the characters have become almost iconic inside nerdom. Living in Atlanta they also throw in a little bit of local humor too. Alora & Brittan love it. |
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Shifting this weekend on BaBar, I'm confined to IR-2 for much of the day. Today's been rather quiet save various glitches associated with the summer heat. Very large experiments are always always coupled to the enviroment somehow, even when most of it is underground and encased in concrete.
 | They're probably glad to have one less person in our little apartment today though, because with the girls back everyone's had to adjust to a much more crowded place. Last night Cara, Brittan and I blew up at eachother (mostly at me) from the stress and had to retreat to our seperate spaces for a little while before we could be civil again. When you've been on vacation for a month and a half it's hard to adjust to just hanging around the house again, but we'll probably throw in some summercampish activities to try and mitigate that a bit. Similarly, coming home to the kid zoo is a bit of a daily shock after playing physics all day. Of course, staying home in a hot apartment alone with the kid zoo is probably the most stressful of all... |
Tonight at the table I sat watching Zara dance to the music of her new favorite toy as the coolness of night started to creep in through the windows. Aunt Jaime & Uncle Amir got her a magnetic farmhouse to stick on the fridge with all the animals in two pieces for her birthday. For every combination the farm sings a different song about a "cow-pig" for example. For some reason those tunes really set Zara's butt moving and she giggles every time she successfully assembles some wierd new creature. There's nothing quite like the squished-face smile of a 1 year old.
Italian is a language which is very similar to Spanish, so much so that to a foreigner like me it sounds like the two should be mutually intelligible. Unfortunately, my experiments speaking Spanish to the Italians here at SLAC have demonstrated unequivocably that this is not the case. I suppose it's something like trying to speak German to English speakers.
We, that is the girls and I, Have started a garden diary to chronicle our attempts at agriculture.
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19 July 2006
Alora & Brittan are back for good now and they had a blast up at crater Lake, Mount St. Helens, etc. Today we went to see the elephant seals again to celebrate. The girls and I also played in the Pacific for awhile, bodysurfing in on the waves while Ray paranoidly looked for sharks. On the way home we took a beautiful small road up over the Santa Cruz mountains from Pescadero. Pretty, but riding in the back of Ray & Bev's rental car Cara got a little sick. She also unfortunately has been bothered by the intensely pollenating tree just off our patio - her eyes, especially the right one, are red and swollen. Nevertheless it was a fun day having all our family back together. |
 Alora stands in front of the offending tree. |
This week and next is the SLAC Summer Institute on the LHC. (You can see slides from all the presentations by following the link). Yesterday I sat next to Pief Panofsky, who at Stanford over 4 decades ago spearheaded the building of SLAC, during one of the lectures. I had to wonder what he thought about this future for particle physics that doesn't include the lab he built. Judging from the smile on the little old man's face I think he was just enjoying the discussion of physics though, and not at all concerned that the linear accelerator here will mainly be used as a tool by biologists and chemists after BaBar shuts down in a couple years. Many particle physicists hope that exciting new discoveries at the LHC will revitalize the field, but as Altarelli put it yesterday in his talk, he predicted all the same supersymmetric particles (among others) would be discovered by LEP some twenty years ago. Since many of the current theories for extending the Standard Model can always be put safely over the energy horizon beyond the reach of current experiments, it is forseeable to see all the arguements rehashed to justify the ILC after they aren't discovered at the LHC. But I am something of a pessimist in this regard.
Here's a list of physics-related acronyms I've used in my blogs that may help you decipher the jargon which seems familiar to me but no doubt might as well be Swahili for a large number of readers. This will also allow me to avoid defining or redefining an acronym every time I use it in the text.
Not having airconditioning in the apartment here can be pretty rough in the afternoon, but we do have a pool to compensate. Zara loves walking around by the pool, and Maxwell is learning to like playing by the stairs. I, of course, have nice air conditioning at SLAC though...
 Running a 10K can really wear you out unless you have enough to drink afterwards. |
16 July 2006
Today I sort of skipped ahead a little in my training to run in the Carneros Napa to Sonoma 10K. Actually, Napa is about 13 miles from Sonoma which is a half-marathon, but they also had the option to run half the half-marathon. So I set a goal to run it in under an hour and trained well enough to just squeak in at 59:19. 61st in a field of about 300 is not bad for a first go either. I even had time to stop for a couple minutes in the middle to rest my swollen feet, which is what I think enabled me to run the second 5K. Napa Valley is alot hotter in the morning than San Francisco was! There were quite a few nice people along the road with hoses in their front yards spraying us as we went by to offset the heat though. The real reason I ran the race though was the afterevent - complimentary winetasting from about 10 Napa and Sonoma wineries. When else in my life am I going to have the opportunity to race through the vinyards and then sample their produce? After tasting 27 wines though, I was done. Dumping out a mediocre wine to save oneself to taste another is a difficult skill to learn - especially when the wines one's tasting are anything but mediocre. |
This afternoon we were looking around for a new park to go to and we happened upon the Westwind Barn up in the hills near Sunnyvale. There were tons of horses there and Maxwell was wide-eyed at the prospect of seeing them up close. He asked about a thousand questions about the horses and the things they did, like tapping their hooves. For Zara, however, a horse up close is the most terrible and frightening thing she has ever experienced. One very friendly horse got within about a foot of nuzzling her and one would have thought Zara had had her arm bitten off! She screamed in such terror that Cara took her out of the barn and Maxwell and I toured the rest of the place just the two of us.
Today I'm taking my first shift running the BaBar detector. Actually, the thing is heavily automated, so we just have two guys there watching to make sure the systems are working properly and that the data coming out looks good. Right now I'm the guy checking the data.
At home we have unpacked most of the boxes, but we still can't find the hardware to reassemble Zara's crib. Fortunately she's perfectly happy in the portacrib, but I am a little worried because I thought I had put the crib hardware somewhere where it would be found early on. C'est la vive.
| In case you don't live in a European country like California, the Italians defeated the French in last weekend's World Cup. To celebrate, the Italians living here hung a giant flag on the front of the main building where us BaBar folks are located. The Italian and French flags, however, differ by only a single band of color, green or blue depending on which side of the Alps you're on. Well the clever Frenchmen, armed with a dark blue bedsheet, defaced this Italian flag to make it into the French Tricolor. |
 le headbutt |
Well, Alora & Brittan are gone again. This time they're off to Mount St. Helens with their other grandparents Ray & Bev. It was nice seeing Bev & Ray yesterday evening, but I was also sad to see the girls going away again so soon. I've only seen them a few days since the begininng of June :(
 My only picture of Ole. |
11 July 2006
For some reason I have been inundated with genealogy email this past week. I don't know why, but people seem to work on it more in the summer time. Arnie Wogsland, who lives just over in Sacramento, sent me an obituary of Ole Wogsland, Jr. that is quite witty. I especially like the part about his "notably corpulent propensities". It seems that many of Ole's male descendents suffer from similar propensities, although we know from my grandfather's temperate lifestyle that the excessive imbibing of intoxicating liquors is not the root cause. More likely it is because our ancestors spent so many millenia on the verge of starvation in Scandinavia that we have yet to adapt to this land of plenty. |
Last night Cara & I slept in our very own bed for the first time in over a month. Everyone is still very irritable from the stress of moving though. This morning after returning the truck we went out to a bakery for breakfast. Alora and Brittan are really annoyed with the curtailed freedom that apartment living requires - sure there are lots of friends around, but the funnest thing to do - the pool - requires parental supervision. Right now we have confined them to the courtyard, but many of the kids go play at the park next door so we will probably include this within their play radius before too long. The area is very nice and safe, but one must assume the default paranoid position first and then modify that position based on observations. I have seen several bikes around near our apartment just sitting there without bikelocks, which portends well. Yesterday Alora biked up to the 7-Eleven with me on rollerblades behind her to learn about bike safety on roads with cars - sh e did very well, even going down Fremont where the cars whiz by at 40 mph. One can go most places only having to cross the big roads though (that is, not biking down them). Brittan, however, still refuses to attempt bikeriding. She has a mental block from fear of wiping out. We are trying not to push her, but school is just a couple months away and I would really like the two of them to be able to ride together. Yesterday Brit started out with Alora & I on her roller blades, but couldn't go fast enough for Alora to ride at the same speed. When she cut Alora off to keep from being passed again and Alora wiped out into the bushes I sent her back home. We were still in the Cherryhill complex within sight of our building, but apparently Brittan got confused and lost her way before finding it again. When she finally arrived back home Cara said she was in tears. Needless to say I won't be winning dad of the year any time soon.
Zara, who is now walking alot, really enjoys the pool. Yesterday afternoon she practiced getting in and out, in and out, in and out at the steps. She only fell in once, but Brittan fished her out before her her sun bonnet even got wet. Maxwell, on the other hand, mainatins a conservatively safe distance from the pool most of the time. He will put his feet in if the concrete is hot, but full immersion is out of the question. There are so many kids running around most of time that the place is a little zooey - more than ten other kids in our building alone, the majority of which seem to be elementary aged girls. This coupled with the renewed presense of our nice soft bed has led Cara to decide that she likes our new apartment after all, even if I did make her cry carrying Nancy's old couch up the stairs to apartment yesterday.
Today was a long day, but at least I'm back in Sunnyvale now. Unfortunately my family is not here. Cara was apparently having so much fun in Tahoe that she "forgot" to come home today. Yesterday evening when I talked to her from Arizona I naturally assumed I didn't need to remind her because Arizona is next to California. Upon further pressing today however, Cara argued that because I had tire trouble she thought I would be a day later. How a couple hours translates into a whole day I still haven't figured out... Really though, Cara just hates to carry boxes and furniture on and off of the truck, and has done her dogone best to avoid it. Loading everything onto the truck was one thing - I literally backed the truck up to the front door and pulled the ramp into the house. Unloading however, one must was several hundred yards and then up a flight of stairs before reaching our apartment. Neither was an impossible task for a young man in fairly good shape like myself, assuming retardation from three consecutive nights of sleep deprivation hadn't set in by the unloading time. Macho man thought he could easily move the empty car trailer by himself - with the stand down. Fortunately there always seems to be a female around to point out my stupidity, this time in the person of one of my new neighbor's girlfriends. Alas, macho man think slow; that is I moved it about eight feet and only after tearing like every muscle in my back and some asphalt off the road was I ready to think strange new female might have good idea. Hooking it back up to the truck as she suggested worked very well indeed. Too back my ears work only after breaking my back.
Today is my Boodle's first birthday! Driving through Oklahoma in the dark this morning and listening to the BBC I was taken back to that morning a year ago and the joy I felt meeting my youngest daughter outside the womb. It is an odd thing for rememberance of such tragic events as the London bombings to evoke such happy memories and feelings - it almost makes one feel guilty. I also remember trying to find out if my cousin Julie, who was attending school in London, was okay. Next week she will end her long sojourn across the sea, returning to the US to finish college back in Boulder. I'm also a bit sad to be missing one of my children's birthdays for the first time, but fortunately she is have a grand old time at Dell & Bob's in Tahoe.
I am sitting at a rest area 60 miles east of Amarillo waiting for a replacement tire for the trailer. Every trip has to have a mishap, and I'm hopeful that this will be it for this trip. There's nothing quite like having an audience of gawking truckers watch as you try to drive your minivan off a trailer that it's still chained to. I actually only stopped here because the sign advertized wireless access (which is not really available) and a trucker pointed out the blown tire. At least there's a nice view here across the high plains of North America.
Tonight as I vacuumed our empty house Molly followed me around the way she does before we go on vacation - she is afraid of being left behind. Everyone in Knoxville seems to be moving these days: the Baileys across the street are packing up to move to their new house over the ridge; Kara's house is almost as empty as our's since Lee took all their stuph to their new house in Evansville, Indiana; the bachelor Ron across the street is getting married soon and moving out, although he plans to rent his house out like we're doing when he moves in with his new wife. The Bruces next door are staying; Christy and Dasia (sp?) remain, as do the Loewens down the street. The commonality of the moving experience definitely makes it more bearable though. Even if we hadn't moved to California Cara wouldn't have Kara nearby and the girls wouldn't be able to play with Courtney every day.
Alora & Brittan have already made new friends in Sunnyvale, especially two sisters across the courtyard whose names I will not attempt to produce here (they are Indian like most of our new neighbors). The truck is all packed and I will be back with them soon.
It's nice to be in Knoxville for the 4th, because here they still celebrate independence from the British today rather than on the 20th of August, when it's celebrated in Sunnyvale. Of course, after Cornwallis' defeat at Yorktown he did go kick their butts around in India... The couple things I remembered having to do today quickly swelled to multitude; apparently I had forgotten about things like cleaning out the oven and packing the garage. Doh! Tomorrow there are supposed to be thunderstorms and, while I am excited to see weather other than the daily evening fog one gets in the south bay, I am not looking forward to trying to pack a truck in it. Maybe I will luck out and the Copper Ridge will divert them to the northeast bypassing the Beaver Valley, but the newscaster on the radio didn't mention any scatteredness - usually the herald of the possibilty of such a diversion. The thunderstorms have been particularly strong this year, and last week one took out quite a few trees - vindicating my decision to to remove our Bradford Pear with the cracked trunk. That task would have no doubt been thrown on me this week as well if I hadn't pre-empted it.
As California is a European country, I have been following the World Cup and was sad to learn that Deutschlands Mannschaft lost to the Italians today. It has also led me to think about how much my life has changed since the last World Cup, when Deutschland also lost, although not until the final match. At that time I was living in my parents basement, having graduated from GA Tech just a few months earlier and unable to find a job (which I like to blame on a certain run-in with the Fulton County PD, but probably had more to do with my people skills). Thusly unsure of a future in physics I was considering going back to school to finish a German degree, which ended up being a nice hiatus to fortify my resolve to pursue physics. Needless to say 4 years ago was not a high point in my life. Contrast that with today; I am working at SLAC on one of the biggest High Energy Physics projects in the world, living in Sunnyvale with two more joys, Maxwell & Zara added to our family, and renting our house in Knoxville. I could not have imagined the past few years turning out much better than they have. I suppose that it really is always darkest just before the dawn breaks, or coldest just before the sun breaks through the fog to Californize the metaphor. Nevertheless, there are many hurdles ahead: finishing my Ph.D., Alora & Brittan's teen years, attaining financial independence, and other perils of the Undiscovered Country.
I suppose my blogs of late have been reflective and a bit sappy, but big lifechanges often lead one to access the trajectory they've chosen. Studying Goedel's theorem back at Presbyterian I realized the true power of the mind is when it's released upon itself, and these blogs have somewhat supplanted my journaling. So y'all must suffer through. I'll still try to keep polemic relegated to my politcal blog though.
Right now I am sitting in the San Francisco Airport having arrived obsessively early as always, so I've got some time on my hands. I have discovered that the courtesy phones located around the airport also often have courtesy plugs, at least, since they are out in the open, I am assuming they are courtesy plugs. I can also get wireless here if I'm willing fork out 6 bucks an hour to T-Mobile. As I am not, so y'all probably won't see this until at least tomorrow. My family is on their way back to Año Nuevo so Maxwell can show his sisters the elephant seals that are the focus of half his play these days (the other half being devoted to dinosaur bones). Hopefully the fog has burned off this time so Cara can enjoy the beautiful vistas of the Santa Cruz Mountains one can see atop the dunes on the way out to see the elephant seals. Cara finds such juxtapositions of Spanish and English in the placenames out here hilarious: Los Altos Hills, South San Francisco, but especialy the Spanglish formations like El Camino Way. This particular example is a side street of El Camino Real, translating roughly as the king's highway. In Spanish the noun precedes the adjective though, so El Camino is the road and Real means it's the king's. The coiners of El Camino Way appear to have assumed the opposite. Having lived here as a kid it seems normal to me but it's still fun to hear Brittan talk about going down to San Joe's. I remember having long arguements with Packie about the correct pronunciation of Jose Canseco's name. (Being younger and having only gone to school in California, he was of course correct).
This morning my genealogy website, Wogsland.org, also netted me another relative: Tim Amundson. Tim claims to be the great grandson of Amund Simonson, who is also my great great great grandfather. Apparently his parents still live in Iola and he lives in Wisconsin. He will be able to fill in alot of information for the Amundson branch of the family tree but unfortunately his information about Amund Simonson's origins isn't much better than mine. He contacted me hoping I would be able to fill in the gaps. If only we knew where Amund hailed from the search might be easier...
 Max gets his bling on to dance at Kate & Howie's. | Today was our big winetasting day in the Russian River Valley. We focussed on Pinots, Zins and Ports while trying to pick interesting places for the younger set. It was alot of fun, and afterwards we headed down to Berkeley to see Kate & Howie. We had dessert there and the kids turned Kate's wardrobe into dress-up central. There was music, dancing, make-up and performances. |
Nanny & Poppy brought A & B out here, and they are staying for the weekend. Yesterday they all went to Chinatown, but today I got to come too as we went to Muir Woods, Muir Beach, and starting winetasting. Tomorrow will be our big winetasting day, so tonight we're staying at a hotel in Santa Rosa. It's been very busy ...
