It is not true that academics spend the whole of the summer on holiday, but the pace of life does change and I have eaten more pancakes and been swimming more often that usual.
Both the pancakes and the swimming are due to being in Arizona for two weeks with the family, where the hotels and motels provided both, usually at breakfast time. The first week was work, the second a holiday.
The work part was the fourth workshop in the "Boost" series. Some of the previous meetings have featured here before. This year it was organised by the University of Arizona in Tucson. Although in deference to the heat and humidity, they chose to host it in Flagstaff, which is about 400 km further north and 1400 metres higher.
It's a pretty focussed meeting built around how best to understand the hadronic jets which are produced in great numbers when protons collide at the Large Hadron Collider, and how best to use that understanding to measure the Higgs boson and search for other new things. I summarised the general topics a couple of years ago after the Princeton meeting, when we had just found out first highly-boosted top event, and things continue to move on very rapidly as we digest all the new data we have taken since then. How well we can deal with jets, and their internal structure, will be one of the determining challenges of the next phases of the LHC, when we go to higher energies (so higher boosts, in general) and also higher collisions rates. In particular, a higher rate of collisions will mean that the "pile up" - the occurrence of several proton-proton collisions at the same time - will get more intense and can confuse jet measurements. Some of the techniques being developed and discussed at the Boost meetings are important to mitigate this.
Moving slightly away from work, Flagstaff is home to the Lowell Observatory, which discovered canals on Mars, key evidence for the expanding universe, and Pluto. Two out of three isn't bad. (Pluto may now be the first dwarf planet rather than the last planet, but it is definitely there and they are very relaxed about the re-categorisation.) There's a charming make-do air about the observatory (though they do have a state-of-the-art research telescope). One of the previous state of the art telescopes still runs the dome on tyres of a 1954 Ford Pickup, and unless I'm mistaken, they share with ATLAS (or Fabiola at least) a fondness for Comic Sans.
After this, we toured around a bit. If you get the chance, I especially recommend the train to the Grand Canyon (and the Canyon itself of course), the dinosaur footprints outside Tuba city, and Monument Valley. The picture at the top shows the valley just before we set out on what was supposed to be a dusk and moonlit tour - you can see the headlamps of a jeep on the very bumpy road we were about to take - but which due to cloud cover became a dusk and pitch dark tour. But still amazing.
Monument Valley is in the Navajo area, which also includes Tuba City and "Four Corners", where the borders of Arzona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico meet at right angles. This looks very unnatural on a map, and my prejudice was that such geometric borders implied a rather featureless and dull landscape. Far from it. The landscape, and culture, of Arizona is amazingly varied.
Driving back towards Flagstaff and Phoenix for the return, we went through the Hopi Indian area (which is surrounded by the Navajo one). These reservations are (unlike some in the USA) not arbitrarily selected concessions, but are the same land the people have lived on for centuries. We met some guys on a hill outside Polacca (Highway 81. Google Maps struggles to find it.) who could trace their ancestry back to the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, when the Spanish were (briefly) driven out. The whole history of the pueblan, Spanish, native american, Mexican and anglo/US mix in this area fascinated me and is a lot more complicated than bad Cowboys and good Indians (or vice versa). Although the lodge we stayed at in Monument Valley was founded by the couple who got John Ford and thus John Wayne interested in filming there.
Boost 2014 will be hosted in London by us at UCL. I hope we can live up to Arizona's standards. London may have fewer rattlesnakes and tarantulas, but we have plenty of scenery and wildlife I guess. Reported by guardian.co.uk 11 hours ago.
Both the pancakes and the swimming are due to being in Arizona for two weeks with the family, where the hotels and motels provided both, usually at breakfast time. The first week was work, the second a holiday.
The work part was the fourth workshop in the "Boost" series. Some of the previous meetings have featured here before. This year it was organised by the University of Arizona in Tucson. Although in deference to the heat and humidity, they chose to host it in Flagstaff, which is about 400 km further north and 1400 metres higher.
It's a pretty focussed meeting built around how best to understand the hadronic jets which are produced in great numbers when protons collide at the Large Hadron Collider, and how best to use that understanding to measure the Higgs boson and search for other new things. I summarised the general topics a couple of years ago after the Princeton meeting, when we had just found out first highly-boosted top event, and things continue to move on very rapidly as we digest all the new data we have taken since then. How well we can deal with jets, and their internal structure, will be one of the determining challenges of the next phases of the LHC, when we go to higher energies (so higher boosts, in general) and also higher collisions rates. In particular, a higher rate of collisions will mean that the "pile up" - the occurrence of several proton-proton collisions at the same time - will get more intense and can confuse jet measurements. Some of the techniques being developed and discussed at the Boost meetings are important to mitigate this.
Moving slightly away from work, Flagstaff is home to the Lowell Observatory, which discovered canals on Mars, key evidence for the expanding universe, and Pluto. Two out of three isn't bad. (Pluto may now be the first dwarf planet rather than the last planet, but it is definitely there and they are very relaxed about the re-categorisation.) There's a charming make-do air about the observatory (though they do have a state-of-the-art research telescope). One of the previous state of the art telescopes still runs the dome on tyres of a 1954 Ford Pickup, and unless I'm mistaken, they share with ATLAS (or Fabiola at least) a fondness for Comic Sans.
After this, we toured around a bit. If you get the chance, I especially recommend the train to the Grand Canyon (and the Canyon itself of course), the dinosaur footprints outside Tuba city, and Monument Valley. The picture at the top shows the valley just before we set out on what was supposed to be a dusk and moonlit tour - you can see the headlamps of a jeep on the very bumpy road we were about to take - but which due to cloud cover became a dusk and pitch dark tour. But still amazing.
Monument Valley is in the Navajo area, which also includes Tuba City and "Four Corners", where the borders of Arzona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico meet at right angles. This looks very unnatural on a map, and my prejudice was that such geometric borders implied a rather featureless and dull landscape. Far from it. The landscape, and culture, of Arizona is amazingly varied.
Driving back towards Flagstaff and Phoenix for the return, we went through the Hopi Indian area (which is surrounded by the Navajo one). These reservations are (unlike some in the USA) not arbitrarily selected concessions, but are the same land the people have lived on for centuries. We met some guys on a hill outside Polacca (Highway 81. Google Maps struggles to find it.) who could trace their ancestry back to the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, when the Spanish were (briefly) driven out. The whole history of the pueblan, Spanish, native american, Mexican and anglo/US mix in this area fascinated me and is a lot more complicated than bad Cowboys and good Indians (or vice versa). Although the lodge we stayed at in Monument Valley was founded by the couple who got John Ford and thus John Wayne interested in filming there.
Boost 2014 will be hosted in London by us at UCL. I hope we can live up to Arizona's standards. London may have fewer rattlesnakes and tarantulas, but we have plenty of scenery and wildlife I guess. Reported by guardian.co.uk 11 hours ago.