Summer conferences are always a great deal of fun. I admit while I in general I do not travel well, that I do enjoy myself at such times.

This summer is shaping up to be a good one. I’ve already been invited to present at 2 different conferences already on some of my x-ray scattering work. And for a person in my situation (looking for a faculty position), being an invited speaker at respected conferences is a great way to advertise. In fact I suspect it’s more or less a requirement for most physics faculty positions. Aside from the direct interaction with people from far and wide, it also looks very good on a CV.

... as measured by human contact.

The world seems a bit smaller today. Which, while not quite as much the world traveler as Kerri is, I have lived in some pretty different places. Something very odd happened when I was looking at Stephen Hawking’s webpage a few days ago. Something I really didn’t expect.

I noticed a name that struck me as... unusual, Chamblin. When I was very young (5-8ish) I had a friend whose last name was Chamblin. I’ve not seen him in let’s say at least 25 years. However, it’s not a name I’ve seen spelled that way anywhere else and I suppose for some reason when I saw it written it struck me as kind of odd. So there it is on the Cambridge University website along with Stephen Hawking.

Now, the little neurons in my head (overworked and deficient to be sure) probably would not have made any connection were it not for something I’d heard uttered while I believe I was an undergraduate. I remember my mother saying that, “do you remember your friend? His older brother has gone on to study mathematics in England.”

Mathematics, England, and Chamblin... that statement hit enough things in my head while looking at Hawking’s publications to wonder, could it possibly be that this Chamblin and my friend could be related(or even his brother)? I shelved the thought last week as I got busy with some other work, but it’s come back into my consciousness a few more times since then. Today I had the thought while sitting at a computer and looking for something else to do while one of my programs finished running.

The story, at least the start of it, is that in fact the Andrew Chamblin, theoretical physicist and Andrew Chamblin, older brother to my friend, were one in the same. I say “were” because tragically he passed away 3 years ago.

It is a very odd feeling... Amarillo TX is a pretty small town, especially when one considers the mentality of many of the people there. I’d more or less assumed that I’d been about the only person to leave Amarillo for a career as an academic/research physicist, at least during my own years. What’s more is as soon as I’d made the connection that indeed there was someone else that had come from the same place, going out into the wide-wide-world doing physics, that the connection was broken. For the shortest moment I knew that there was someone that would be really fun to contact. Someone perhaps to meet if we overlapped on a holiday visit some winter. Someone that had traveled the same road out of Amarillo and into the world of physics.

It’s actually not the same road and I’m being a little too liberal with my nostalgia. Andrew Chamblin excelled early in school and showed a bright future very early on. I on the other-hand experienced a terrible education by the same school district, gaining the distinction of “mentally retarded” during the 2nd grade and having it follow me through high-school. Andrew Chamblin went to Rice, then Oxford, and then Cambridge directly from Amarillo after high school. My high-school guidance councilor recommended that I “find a good trade school,” and there was some mention that I could make a decent plumber. My path to physics was a bit circuitous. Hmmm.... I’ll be nice and say I took the scenic route. It was only after attending community college that I found people that inspired me to do well (and even since, throughout the years, my academic path has been somewhat unusual).

What is more is that I may well have seen Andrew Chamblin during my adult life, perhaps passing him in a hallway though without realizing our common geographical origin. In fact, had I not decided to switch from theoretical physics to experimental condensed matter physics I almost certainly would’ve met him (again). He collaborated with several of the theorists at the University of Washington while I was a graduate student there.

This has been a rather unusual half an hour.

I only have only a couple sets of memories of Andrew Chamblin. Even then they’re not of him as “Andrew Chamblin”, but only the older brother of my friend. There’s nothing insightful to my memories, just typical things of kids growing up, one from a birthday party and one of running down an alley.

I’ve not spoken to my friend nor anyone from his family in years. I’m not even sure if he’d remember me. However, I think it’s worth tracking him down just to see where this goes.

After watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos “remixed.” once, I’m not sure what to make of it.:

My initial reaction is one of cautious interest, mixed with doubt and unease. I also don’t know that I actually like the music/melody regardless of subject.

First, my unease... I love Carl Sagan’s work for science outreach. I grew up with a copy of his book Cosmos. His work, and those by people like Timothy Ferris, played no small part in my choice to pursue physics degrees and eventually to study science professionally. If you’re going to take his work and redisplay it, then my automatic reaction is going to be somewhat adversarial. It is up to the writer or artist to convince me that what they’re displaying is indeed going to adequately communicate his ideas and be true to his vision. If you’re going to remix Carl Sagan, then you’ve got plenty of things stacked against you in my mind.

Plus, starting from the whale-songs is a little... well, odd or disjoint. Anyhow... I can look beyond all that, if for only a single reason.

It’s not a matter of whether or not I like the music, the video, or whatever (so long as it’s not miss-representing him). I don’t need to like it. What matters is if other people like it and, upon seeing it, decide to learn something more about Sagan and his messages. If someone decides to go out and read Cosmos because they saw that video, then that’s a great success regardless of whether or not I actually like the “remix.”

I’m not really sure what to make of the music. I’ll readily admit to listening to “spacey” ambient music while driving out into the country with friends to setup a telescope on several occasions. There was even a really cool one that was largely inspired by S.E.T.I., complete with a small reading by Frank Drake. Maybe I’m too old for the Sagan music/video to appeal to me, but again, maybe that’s not the point.

After watching it a second time, I didn’t notice anything adverse with regards to taking Sagan out of context. What I did notice was more interesting, even just watching it and hearing a few of the phrases from Cosmos evoked rather powerful feelings of what it was like when I was younger and reading (or watching) Sagan. His inspirational messages still manage to touch me across all these years. When I was an undergraduate, I wanted very much to meet him, to convey my appreciation for his work to educate and inspire. Sadly he lost his battle with cancer just weeks before I was to leave to attend school in upstate NY and I never got that chance.

Anyhow, have a look at it (the whole thing, don’t just turn it off after the whale-song hooting) and meditate a bit on some of the beauty of nature.

We’ve had an interesting turn of events at the Gordon Conference this year. Everyone from our current group is attending the conference. Indeed, a rather large number of people from ANL are all coming to the conference. Interestingly, there only appear to be a handful of us here so far.

Kerri and I took a rather odd route to get here. We went first to NY (in order to stop there for a significant period of time on the way back) and then up to Maine the next evening. Needless to say, I doubt anyone else went first to Albany and then took a car up to Maine.

The lab uses a single travel agency for official travel. It seems that there were 8-9 x-ray science people from ANL all booked on the same flight, including everyone else from my group. This flight turned out to be a “nightmare”. There were significant delays before the flight left Chicago. It then made it about half the way when one of the pilots was walking back through the cabin a few times. The plane then turned around and went back to Chicago with a “technical problem.” Apparently 1 of the instrument flight systems on the plane had failed (1 of 3, so it’s not that the plane was without sensors), but it made it such that they did not wish to attempt an instrument landing (and indeed we had fog, wind, & rain).

ANL people should be slowly trickling in tomorrow.

Anyhow, thankfully I’m here and my talk isn’t for a couple of days anyway.

I’ve never been to Maine before and the country looks just beautiful here. In fact, this entire trip has really made me miss the northeast countryside.

Here’s a fun pair of pictures. Why, oh why would this happen? The answer is kind of fun.





This is our back porch, in the snow and in the sun.

I saw this today posted on someone’s door and thought it was too funny to pass up. After looking on the web a bit it seems that some of the popular understanding of this letter is that it’s with regards to a physics journal. In fact, that’s the impression I came away with after seeing it posted in our hallway in the Materials Science Division. However, the author is a real person, Roy F. Baumeister, and is not in physical science at all, but rather in psychology. There’s also a follow-up response from the editor below.

Sample Cover Letter for Journal Manuscript Resubmissions
by Roy F. Baumeister
Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:

Enclosed is our latest version of Ms # 85-02-22-RRRRR, that is, the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the goddamn running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even you and your bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over helpless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren't reviewing manuscripts they'd probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him or her to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them the review process could be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers' comments we couldn't do anything about. For example, if (as review C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited. Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13-28 by Reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews.

We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to your journal.

Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper much better the way we originally wrote it but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle, restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We couldn't, or wouldn't, have done it without your input.

Sincerely,

----------------




To: Authors, MS #85-02-22-RRRRRR

From: Editor, Journal of Educational Psychology

Thank you for your thoughtful response to my decision letter concerning the above-referenced piece of excrement.

I have asked several experts who specialize in the area of research in which you dabble to have a look at your pathetic little submission, and their reviews are enclosed. I shall not waste my LaserJet ink reiterating the details of their reviews, but please allow me to highlight some of the more urgent points of contention they raise:

1. Reviewer A has asked me to inform you that, as his suggestions were not mentioned in my previous decision letter, he resents you calling him sadistic and imbecilic. He has no quarrell with arbitrarily tyrannical.
2. Reviewer B suggests that you cite his work EXCLUSIVELY in the introduction. He has asked me to remind you that he spells his name with a final "e" (i.e., Scumbage), not as you have referenced him in the last version.
3. Reviewer C indicates that the discussion can be shortened by at least 5 pages. Given the fact that the present Discussion is only three pages long, I am not certain how to advise you. Perhaps you might consider eliminating all speculation and original ideas.
4. Reviewer D has asked that you consider adding her as a coauthor. Although she has not directly contributed to the manuscript, she has made numerous comments that have, in her view, significantly improved the paper. Specifically, she believes that her suggestions concerning the reorganization of the acknowledgments paragraph were especially important. Please note that she spells her name with an em-dash, and not with the customary hyphen.
5. My own reading of the manuscript indicates that the following problems remain:
* By "running head," we do not mean a picture of your son's face with legs attached. Please provide a four- or five-word title for the paper that summarizes the report's most important point. May I suggest, "Much Ado About Nothing"?
* Please make certain that you have adhered to APA stylebook guidelines for publication format. Please direct your attention to the section entitled, "Proper Format for an Insignificant Paper" (2001, p. 46).
* Please submit any revision of the paper on plain, blank stationery. Submitting the article on Stanford letterhead will not increase your chances of having the article accepted for publication.
* Please doublecheck the manuscript for spelling and grammatical errors. Our experience at the Archives is that "cycle-logical" slips through most spellcheck programs undetected.
* Although I am not an expert in quantitative methodology, it is my understanding that the "F" in F-test does not stand for "f___ing". Please conduct a word search and correct the manuscript accordingly.

Yours sincerely,


Editor, Journal of Educational Psychology

p.s. - If your original submission had been as articulate as your most recent letter, we might have avoided this interchange. It is too bad that tenure and promotion committees at your university do not have access to authors' correspondence with editors, for it is clear that you would be promoted on the basis of your wit alone. Unfortunately, it's the publications that count, and I'm sorry to say that JEdP is not prepared to accept this revision. We would be perfectly ambivalent about receiving a seventh revision from you.

Sometimes things end up looking like something completely unintended.

For my recent experiments I had to put together the little x-ray scattering vacuum chamber again. The last time we used it there didn’t seem to be anything special about its appearance. However, this time there seemed something quite peculiar as I put things together. It looked very similar to an elephant or an insect.

Here I’ve removed the long hose from the front “snout,” but the effect is still there. The two largest ports where the x-rays come in and go out (which above are glass, but replaced by Beryllium windows) make the eyes. It’s got ears and a nose, along with a couple of dangling arms/appendages. In truth it really was not intended to look like something else. It’s a surface scattering chamber complete with vacuum hardware and measurement pieces, an RF induction heating system, rotating sample stage feedthrough, fine-adjust gas flow leak-valves, burst-disk, and enough windows that I can see the sample positions during the experiment.

One of my friends took one look at it and said, “Ganesh!” The name stuck. So we have a vacuum chamber named after a Hindu deity. Stranger things have happened (I recall the himalayan pray flags that routinely went up during experiments at one beamline at the ALS), but it is a little odd to have my surface scattering experiment refereed to with the proper name of a god. “How is Ganesha today? Is Ganesha’s pressure ok? Is Ganesha’s thermocouple measuring the temperature accurately?”

It turns out that Ganesha the deity is often seen as a patron of science (among many other things). So perhaps the little vacuum chamber Ganesha is not without some obtuse justification beyond mere appearance. For better or worse, the name has stuck and I surely hope that it’s not seen as offensive.

One further thought... Most of our samples involve at least some (if not large) parts made from precious metals such as gold and platinum. So there have ben several occasions where such precious metals have been “offered” to Ganesha. Thankfully he’s always returned them to us intact.

Often I’ve felt an odd “queasiness” at synchrotrons. Part of it is the constant noise and the inevitable fluorescent lights. But most of it comes from being in a large, very large, circular building where most everything looks the same. A small round room would be bad enough, but (I think) you’d rather quickly adjust after all it is in fact round and rather apparent. A synchrotron is a little different.

There’s the large size and there are also an enormous number of straight lines. However, there must also be bends...

The picture above looks like it’s been taken through a distorted lens. It seems like you should be looking down a hall and that it’s been manipulated to be skewed. But in fact, that’s just the way things look. It’s all big enough that it seems as though it should be straight. Pretty much anywhere in the facility, any way you look, you’ll see hallways, walls, pipes and conduits all going and bending in ways that just do not seem ‘right’.

One of my collaborators walked by me today, took one look and said, “Hopeless...”

He was referring to me after seeing the background on my laptop. Many people have meaningful pictures of loved ones, children or pets. Many people have photos from some place or event. Others have exotic graphics or pictures of beautiful imagined things. What do I have?

What is it and why am I hopeless?

The picture is a photo of an analog oscilloscope screen. The little green lines are pulses detected by an x-ray detector, one line per photon in a short period of time. When they overlap on the screen it can get quite bright. Anyhow, this is readily recognized in these parts (namely the Advanced Photon Source) as what an x-ray diffraction person uses to do experiments. Or at the very least, a tool to do the experiments. No one sits around and says, “that’s about 20% brighter... oh wait, 30% brighter... now dimmer.” It’s of course fed into a computer which records and counts them.

As I write this, it's early morning. A thin crescent moon is rising, framed between a brilliantly shining Venus above, and Saturn and the star Regulus below.
By the way, at the outset I should mention that the official observing food of Astronomers are Fig Newtons.

Growing up I didn't do terribly much in the way of science. I was identified early on as a "special needs" child in the public school system and special certainly doesn't mean anything good in this case. Aside from a few rare, bright patches, I could have been better served without the benefit of my public education.

The exception to this was astronomy. As a small boy my father used to bring me out to look at the stars. He bought a large 6inch telescope and I have many happy memories of us sitting outside (though often in the cold) looking at the planets and stars. It was, perhaps, this early activity that set the stage for things to come later in my life. This interest was, unfortunately, blunted somewhat through the Amarillo school system. However, all things come to an end and eventually I left high school for the local community college. As poor as my public school experience was, my interest in learning, and ultimately science was quickly rekindled by some wonderful professors. Along with this personal renaissance, came a renewed interest in amateur astronomy. And it is some of the anecdotes from that time that I wish to tell you.

I developed a few friends, similar in age, that enjoyed taking that telescope out. At one point our favorite spot to go observing was down in a little nature preserve canyon called Buffalo Lake. We found it rather late in the year about the time when the park would be closed after hours. So we called the park ranger's office and obtained permission to go observing. He didn't seem to mind us being there. We were quiet, didn't litter or drink, and certainly were not there to poach game with a telescope. Earlier that year, an electronic gate had been installed at the entrance. The gate closed automatically everyday at 6pm, preventing people from entering and tire-spikes made sure to keep people out once they'd left. Fair enough, we just needed to be in before the gate closed.

Well, one day we were late getting there and the gate had closed before our arrival. Now, every good amateur astronomer back in the day had a copy of the Sky Atlas 2000. It contained huge maps of the night sky that would fold out, and as any good group of observers, we had a copy between us. However, our copy, for a small extra fee, was officially the "Field" version of the atlas. Until this moment, none of us fully appreciated what this meant. In our moment of need, I realized that the field version of the Sky Atlas 2000 was more than just an atlas. In fact, it was also a gate key. Let me explain.

By angling the approach of a car to a set of tire spikes, you can have it so that only one tire goes over the spikes at a time. As such, you can then carefully, and slowly drive one tire up, place your copy of the Sky Atlas on the spikes, drive that tire over, and then move the Atlas to protect the next tire. I recommend having at least two people to do this. Anyhow, it worked! It was a happy time indeed as now we could come and go from the park as needed. So on those very cold nights when we'd run out of coffee & Fig Newtons, or needed an extra blanket, we could just go get one without fear of the entrance gate being blocked.

One fine afternoon, we managed to get to the gate just before it closed. We quickly drove the car under the gate and within seconds the gate began closing behind us. We got out of the car and cheered our good fortune. We also hopped back over the gate and ran up to place our admission fee in the park money box. Though we might be there after hours and skirting the gate system, we certainly wanted to pay our share for use of the park. About that time a game warden/wildlife official drives up and is in a foul mood. He gets out and explains how he has just caught several guys that have been poaching animals. "That's good" I think, not realizing that by "just caught" he meant right now and that by "poachers" he meant us.

After a good deal of threats on one side (I'm gett'n tha Sheriff), and a good deal of explanation on the other (It's really quite impossible for our telescope to actually fire any sort of ammunition at a deer regardless of how hard you try). We avoided out right arrest and only received a small fine, plus permanent expulsion from our favorite observing site. It mattered not that we had permission from the original park ranger. Nor that we were good enough to go back and pay our fee.


There was the time, while looking for a place to go observing that we picked up a hitch hiker. We were out in the middle of nowhere and a guy is standing on the road trying to get our attention. Now, there's 3 of us and only 1 of him, and he looks about our age and in need of assistance, so we stop. He just needs a quick ride to town as his car is broken down. No problem we think, and off we go. It's only after 10 or so miles that he explains how his buddies (who were also out with him) we hiding in the bushes. They were hiding so we wouldn't see the fact that they were armed with rifles. While it's certainly true that we would not have stopped had we encountered 3 raving lunatics waving rifles at us from the side of the road, this also almost caused us to dump him back on the side of the road. Sigh...

At one point I began trying to take pictures through the telescope. This was long before digital cameras and required quite a bit of work to get a camera mounted at the correct position. It also meant that you didn't get to see the pictures immediately, but instead had to carefully record what each exposure should have been and then wait for the film to be developed.

Getting the film developed actually turned out to be quite a problem. Most places that process film have someone that checks to see if everything on the roll should be developed. The first time I turned in film for development(3 rolls of it), all I got back were a few pictures of the moon. The kind attendant explained that all the rest of the film just showed "little specks of light" and "blurry light" so they decided not to develop them. The next time I tried to do this, there was a further problem because the employee could not tell where exposures began or ended. So I started taking "blank" pictures with a flashlight down the telescope so that every other picture would be clearly defined making it possible to locate exactly what I wanted in between. I explained all this to the film store and eventually everything got sorted out and I got the pictures developed that I wanted.

That worked great for about a week, then the store went out of business.

So for my next batch of film, I took it into the local walmart (everyone has a local walmart don't they?), the same place where I would stock up on Fig Newtons for our nightly excursions. So as to avoid enduring the entire process over again of training someone how to develop my pictures through trial and error, I decided to cut it short and attempt, through explanation, to get it right the first time. I asked to speak to the person that would develop the film because I had a special request. I began with, "I need you to develop these pictures regardless of how they turned out or what they look like."

Now, in hindsight, maybe that's not the best way I could have started the conversation. She immediately picked the film up, threw it at me (a mere 4 feet away from her), and yelled, announcing to the entire world within earshot, "YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED! WE DON'T DEVELOP THOSE KINDS OF PICTURES!" It took a full 2-3 seconds before I realized the error inherent in my approach. The fact that I turned beet red did nothing to help my cause. Regardless it was too late and despite a few protests on my part, I was quickly escorted from the store by a manager and asked not to return (neither for photos nor fig newtons). They didn't need my kind of business. It was interesting as most people just pointed, stared, and quietly discussed my offensive photography amongst themselves. I think it would have been easier had they at least laughed. sigh...