Kategori: forskerliv
forskerliv
#forskerliv no.2 (og bittelitt Higgs)
Det startet så bra; solen skinner, det er friskt, men deilig ute, fikk tid til en dobbel latte på h-melk på Café Ro på vei til Blindern (fikk til og med tatt en titt på A-magasinet og lest om den nye, cubanske danseren i Nasjonaballetten, Osiel Gouneo - tror definitivt jeg må få tatt meg en tur i opreaen veldig snart), kom meg på jobb i passende tid, og var flink og satte meg rett ned med opplinjeringen av partikkeldetektorene 😀
I går skrev jeg jo at jeg var frustrert fordi jeg hadde gjort dobbeltarbeid, og sånt er jo gjerne litt irriterende, men i dag var jeg da fornøyd siden jeg bare skulle fullføre det arbeidet jeg begynte på i går (altså etter at jeg var ferdig med dobbeltarbeidet). Som sagt så gjort: Jeg sitter og taster og leser av tall på skjermen - som jeg møysommelig skriver ned i tabeller loggboken min - da jeg etter en to timers tid oppdager at det er noe rart med de tallene jeg har skrevet ned...
Etter litt detektivarbeid (aka. forskning?) finner jeg ut at jeg har lest av tallene fra feil sted (jeg har lest av et plott, men jeg skulle lese av i terminalvinduet), og siden jeg ikke er sikker på om jeg har gjort det hele tiden, men kanskje skiftet på å lese av fra plottet og terminalvinduet (fordi jeg var sikker på at det var samme tallet på begge steder) må jeg forkaste arbiedet fra i går, pluss det jeg gjorde i juni.
Tilbake til scratch. IGJEN!
Én ting kan jeg love: Dette er nå ettertrykkelig nedskrevet i loggboken. Uthevet. I rosa <3
Vel vel, man lærer jo en prosess - og jeg må jo strengt tatt være glad for at til tross for at jeg sitter og gjør "slavearbeid" så følger jeg såpass med at jeg oppdager feil som lett kunne vært oversett - og dermed ville ha forplantet seg videre...
Som jeg nevnte tidligere denne uken så gikk årets nobelpris i fysikk til Englert og Higgs, og jeg sa også jeg skulle skrive noe om det - men siden andre allerede har gjort dette på en utmerket måte deler jeg disse to linkene:
"For nesten femti år siden foreslo både François Englert og Peter Higgs, uavhengig av hverandre, en løsning på modellen fysikerne brukte for å beskrive de aller minste byggeklossene i universet."
"Årets Nobelpris ville ikke vært mulig uten oppdagelsen av Higgspartikkelen ved ATLAS og CMS. Fysikere og teknikere ved UiO har gitt vesentlige bidrag."
Så får jeg vel nesten feire at det er fredag og deilig helg med denne fine lille videosnutten om Higgs-partikkelen, der professor i partikkelfysikk Alex Read (her på Fysisk Institutt ved UiO) forklarer 🙂
#forskerliv
October it is!
God fredags kveld alle <3
En ting som forresten er utrolig hyggelig med det å ha flyttet opp til kontoret er at Gry har flyttet inn i nabokontoret nå etter at hun ble ferdig med doktorgraden, og offisielt ble PostDoc - her er et koselig bilde vi tok i dag (vi skulle teste ut noe) 🙂
Nuclear physicists in action (ja, jeg vet jeg har skjeve, rare tenner) 😉 |
Sunniva stenger ned syklotronen (videoblogg)
Siden sist @sunnivarose (Off to Haugesund)
Denne ukens Tim Minchin
All white walls, white carpet, white cat,
Rice Paper partitions
Modern art and ambition
The host's a physician,
Lovely bloke, has his own practice
His girlfriend's an actress
An old mate from home
And they're always great fun.
So to dinner we've come.
The 5th guest is an unknown,
The hosts have just thrown
Us together for a favour
because this girl's just arrived from Australia
And has moved to North London
And she's the sister of someone
Or has some connection.
As we make introductions
I'm struck by her beauty
She's irrefutably fair
With dark eyes and dark hair
But as she sits
I admit I'm a little bit wary
because I notice the tip of the wing of a fairy
Tattooed on that popular area
Just above the derrière
And when she says I'm Sagittarien
I confess a pigeonhole starts to form
And is immediately filled with pigeon
When she says her name is Storm.
Chatter is initially bright and light hearted
But it's not long before Storm gets started:
You can't know anything,
Knowledge is merely opinion
She opines, over her Cabernet Sauvignon
Vis a vis
Some unhippily
Empirical comment by me
Not a good start I think
We're only on pre-dinner drinks
And across the room, my wife
Widens her eyes
Silently begs me, Be Nice
A matrimonial warning
Not worth ignoring
So I resist the urge to ask Storm
Whether knowledge is so loose-weave
Of a morning
When deciding whether to leave
Her apartment by the front door
Or a window on the second floor.
The food is delicious and Storm,
Whilst avoiding all meat
Happily sits and eats
While the good doctor, slightly pissedly
Holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history
When Storm suddenly she insists
But the human body is a mystery!
Science just falls in a hole
When it tries to explain the the nature of the soul.
My hostess throws me a glance
She, like my wife, knows there's a chance
That I'll be off on one of my rants
But my lips are sealed.
I just want to enjoy my meal
And although Storm is starting to get my goat
I have no intention of rocking the boat,
Although it's becoming a bit of a wrestle
Because - like her meteorological namesake -
Storm has no such concerns for our vessel:
Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency
At the cost of the natural remedies span>
That are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs
When herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals
When homeopathic solvents
Can resolve it?
It's time we all return-to-live
With natural medical alternatives.
And try as hard as I like,
A small crack appears
In my diplomacy-dike.
By definition, I begin
Alternative Medicine, I continue
Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call alternative medicine
That's been proved to work?
Medicine.
So you don't believe
In ANY Natural remedies?
On the contrary actually:
Before we came to tea,
I took a natural remedy
Derived from the bark of a willow tree
A painkiller that's virtually side-effect free
It's got a weird name,
Darling, what was it again?
Masprin?
Basprin?
Asprin!
Which I paid about a buck for
Down at my local drugstore.
The debate briefly abates
As our hosts collects plates
but as they return with desserts
Storm pertly asserts,
Shakespeare said it first:
There are more things in heaven and earth
Than exist in your philosophy
Science is just how we're trained to look at reality,
It can't explain love or spirituality.
How does science explain psychics?
Auras; the afterlife; the power of prayer?
I'm becoming aware
That I'm staring,
I'm like a rabbit suddenly trapped
In the blinding headlights of vacuous crap.
Maybe it's the Hamlet she just misquothed
Or the eighth glass of wine I just quaffed
But my diplomacy dike groans
And the arsehole held back by its stones
Can be held back no more:
Look , Storm, I don't mean to bore you
But there's no such thing as an aura!
Reading Auras is like reading minds
Or star-signs or tea-leaves or meridian lines
These people aren't plying a skill,
They are either lying or mentally ill.
Same goes for those who claim to hear God's demands
And Spiritual healers who think they have magic hands.
By the way,
Why is it OK
For people to pretend they can talk to the dead?
Is it not totally fucked in the head
Lying to some crying woman whose child has died
And telling her you're in touch with the other side?
That's just fundamentally sick
Do we need to clarify that there's no such thing as a psychic?
What, are we fucking 2?
Do we actually think that Horton Heard a Who?
Do we still think that Santa brings us gifts?
That Michael Jackson hasn't had facelifts?
Are we still so stunned by circus tricks
That we think that the dead would
Wanna talk to pricks
Like John Edwards?
Storm to her credit despite my derision
Keeps firing off clichés with startling precision
Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition
You're so sure of your position
But you're just closed-minded
I think you'll find
Your faith in Science and Tests
Is just as blind
As the faith of any fundamentalist
Hm that's a good point, let me think for a bit
Oh wait, my mistake, it's absolute bullshit.
Science adjusts it'
s beliefs based on what's observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I'll spin on a fucking dime
I'll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It's a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it's memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it's had in it!
You show me that it works and how it works
And when I've recovered from the shock
I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.
Everyones just staring at me now,
But I'm pretty pissed and I've dug this far down,
So I figure, in for penny, in for a pound:
Life is full of mystery, yeah
But there are answers out there
And they won't be found
By people sitting around
Looking serious
And saying isn't life mysterious?
Let's sit here and hope
Let's call up the fucking Pope
Let's go watch Oprah
Interview Deepak Chopra
If you're going to watch tele, you should watch Scooby Doo.
That show was so cool
because every time there's a church with a ghoul
Or a ghost in a school
They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?
The fucking janitor or the dude who runs the waterslide.
Throughout history
Every mystery
Ever solved has turned out to be
Not Magic.
Does the idea that there might be truth
Frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon
On Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you
Frighten you?
Does the notion that there may not be a supernatural
So blow your hippy noodle
That you would rather just stand in the fog
Of your inability to Google?
Isn't this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable, NATURAL world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?
If you're so into Shakespeare
Lend me your ear:
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw perfume on the violet is just fucking silly
Or something like that.
Or what about Satchmo?!
I see trees of Green,
Red roses too,
And fine, if you wish to
Glorify Krishna and Vishnu
In a post-colonial, condescending
Bottled-up and labeled kind of way
Then whatever, that's ok.
But here's what gives me a hard-on:
I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant lump of carbon.
I have one life, and it is short
And unimportant
But thanks to recent scientific advances
I get to live twice as long
As my great great great great uncleses and auntses.
Twice as long to live this life of mine
Twice as long to love this wife of mine
Twice as many years of friends and wine
Of sharing curries and getting shitty
With good-looking hippies
With fairies on their spines
And butterflies on their titties.
And if perchance I have offended
Think but this and all is mended:
We'd as well be 10 minutes back in time,
For all the chance you'll change your mind.
Feeling bad…
På toppen kommer selvsagt alle sånne ting som at jeg har sagt at jeg skal gjøre ditt og datt - feks ny tekst i Aftenposten (som jeg omsider nesten er ferdig med nå, btw)...*dårlig samvittighet*
Unnskyld til alle som venter på et eller annet fra meg; enten et svar på en forespørsel, eller et faktisk produkt (type tekst eller noe)!
Fascinert
Videre snakket vi om jeg hadde vært en sånn som alltid var "god i matte", og til det er svaret NEI! Jeg var ikke automatisk god i matte som barn; jeg syntes matte var utfordrende, og følte at alle andre var mye bedre enn meg... Men noen (var det mamma, eller pappa - eller kanskje begge to?) sa at da måtte jeg jo trene. Selvsagt. Man blir jo ikke god til noe som helst uten trening - sånn er det jo faktisk med alt 😉 Også man må starte på det nivået der man er, og jobbe seg gradvis oppover...
#forskerliv
Men "forskerlivet" er jo mye forskjellig, da; det er jo ikke bare å henge på labben. Mye er type jobbing foran en PC, som man kan gjøre mange forskjellige steder - feks liker jeg selv godt å sitte på café og skrive der, og føler på en måte jeg får mer ro på en café som Laundromat enn på Blindern (ikke alltid, da, men). I tillegg til å være på labben eller sitte foran PCen og analysere data, eller skrive artikler, så består jo forskerlivet i å reise rundt på konferanser (dette er jo viktig for gode, faglige diskusjoner, lære nye ting og bli oppdatert på forskning, og å dele sin egen forskning med andre), og å reise og delta på eksperimenter andre steder enn "hjemmelabben" her på Blindern.
Men, altså, det er jo sant at jeg driver med en god del som ikke er direkte knyttet til doktorgraden min; jeg driver jo mye med formidling av fag, og det er noe jeg gjør fordi jeg syns det er viktig og fordi jeg syns det er gøy! Også er det jo sånn at jeg driver formidling på ganske mange måter nå - og sånn er det bare med den saken; men det er klart at jeg nok kanskje hadde kommet lenger med forskningen og doktorgraden dersom jeg droppet bloggen, droppet å holde foredrag (bortsett fra et foredrag en sjelden gang på konferanser), droppet å snakke med journalister, droppet å skrive kronikker, droppet å jobbe med bok...så det blir jo svært mange lange dager og sene kvelder.