Returning to SLAC after the winter break is *always* a stress-affirming experience. After several weeks of total research avoidance practices (TRAPs), I had the unenviable job of remembering what I’d been doing before the break. Thank goodness for logbooks!
After a one-day “getting up to speed” period, I managed to dig into the malfunctioning veto system simulation code I’d written for the Braidwood collaboration and complete the detective work needed to find the cause of the problem. The problem was that any particles traversing and interacting in the veto system were *never* leaving behind “hits”, traces of their passage. The solution: a one-line typo in the code that sets the “active detector” status of the veto system. Thanks to the hard work of one of my collaborators, and my hunting and pecking, we solved the problem within a day.
Other than that, I spent my research time making some final updates to the analysis software I wrote for the B→τν analysis, as well as finishing up the new release of the software for the b→sγ analysis that the MIT students and I have developed. All of that is now working, and we’ve made a subdivision of physics labor that should carry us through the next few weeks.
The biggest time-sucker this week was the planning for the annual SLAC/Fermilab users’ lobbying trip to Washington DC. This is an effort by the user (non-lab-employee) communities at both facilities to organize a message and take it to Washington. We stress the importance of federal investment in the physical sciences (the ultimate message must be broad!), we thank the Congress for any work they did to reverse cuts or make increases last year, and we talk about our research, its motivation and application. Most importantly, we go as constituents and/or citizens, scientists with an active and enthusiastic engagement in better understanding the universe.
After a long week of planning with past and new members of the trip management team, I was very happy to be leaving Friday for a weekend with Jodi in Minnesota (she’s been there all week for a workshop). I attended my morning meetings from the airport (yay “Skype”:http://www.skype.org!), had a decent flight to Minnesota (spent an hour discussing with my row-mates the science behind global warming, what it means to have “consensus” in the scientific community, and how esoteric aspects of modern physics have real and measurable impacts on everyday life), and was later happily on my way to the hotel in a taxi.
That’s when the taxi got hit. We were on a busy stretch of highway halfway between the airport and the hotel. There was a point in the road where the lane we were in merged with a semi-circular on-ramp. Traffic suddenly stopped ahead of is, a bright sea of brake lights, and the cab driver also applied his brakes. It was then that we were struck from behind and pushed over to the side of the highway.
The woman in the car behind us, commuting to her work at a Minneapolis hospital all the way from Wisconsin, struck us while accelerating onto the highway from the on-ramp (which she admitted immediately to the patrolman who later took down the report). This turned out to be a terrible stretch of highway, as there was another car involved in an accident pulled off on the other side of the highway just a hundred feet ahead of us.
The process of meeting with the patrolman, getting the report, and moving our cars out of traffic took about 45 minutes. The taxi was dented and chipped, but mechanically undamaged. The woman’s car was smashed on the right front side, consistent with somebody who was accelerating around a corner when she struck us. That vehicle had pretty obvious mechanical damage. To boot, she wasn’t carrying car insurance, and got a quiet but stern lecture (and citation) from the patrolman.
Needless to say, I was really happy to see Jodi! Thankfully, everybody in the accident was undamaged. This leaves me alive and well to engage in the delightful Minnesota Lutheran sterotypes that will be nationally aired when I attend the live performance of “A Prairie Home Companion” tonight!
