Status of Another Race…

This is what we at ATLAS received yesterday….it really looks like it’s working now!

From: Peter Jenni
To: atlas-gen@cern.ch
Subject: LHC start-up plans

Dear Colleagues,

With this note we want to inform you about the latest
schedule and planning of the LHC start-up, as it was
agreed yesterday in a special meeting chaired by the
Director-General, bringing together the experiments and
the LHC machine.

Based on the good progress for the cool down of the LHC
sectors, and on the powering tests from two sectors, the
following planning was arrived at:

1) End of June: The LHC is expected to be cooled down.
The experiments are requested to have their beam pipes baked out.

2) Mid of July: The experimental caverns will be closed
after the caverns and tunnel have been patrolled. From then on the
controlled access system will be fully activated.

3) End of July: First particles may be injected, and the
commissioning with beams and collisions
will start.

4) It is expected that it will take about 2 months to have
first collisions at 10 TeV.

5) Energy of the 2008 run: Agreed to be 10 TeV. The machine
considers this to be a safe setting to optimize up-time
of the machine until the winter shut-down (starting
likely around end of November). Therefore, simulations
can now start for 10 TeV.

6) The winter shut-down will then be used to commissioning
and train the magnets up to full current, such that the
2009 run will start at the full 14 TeV design energy.

Status of the Race

This message from the Obama campaign summarizes better than anything what is going on:

TO: Superdelegates
FROM: David Plouffe, Campaign Manager
RE: An Update on the Race for Delegates
DA: May 7, 2008

There are only six contests remaining in the Democratic primary calendar and only 217 pledged delegates left to be awarded. Only 7 percent of the pledged delegates remain on the table. There are 260 remaining undeclared superdelegates, for a total of 477 delegates left to be awarded.

With North Carolina and Indiana complete, Barack Obama only needs 172 total delegates to capture the Democratic nomination. This is only 36 percent of the total remaining delegates.

Conversely, Senator Clinton needs 326 delegates to reach the Democratic nomination, which represents a startling 68 percent of the remaining delegates.

With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.

We believe it is exceedingly unlikely Senator Clinton will overtake our lead in the popular vote and in fact lost ground on that measure last night. However, the popular vote is a deeply flawed and illegitimate metric for deciding the nominee – since each campaign based their strategy on the acquisition of delegates. More importantly, the rules of the nomination are predicated on delegates, not popular vote.

Just as the Presidential election in November will be decided by the electoral college, not popular vote, the Democratic nomination is decided by delegates.

If we believed the popular vote was somehow the key measurement, we would have campaigned much more intensively in our home state of Illinois and in all the other populous states, in the pursuit of larger raw vote totals. But it is not the key measurement.

We played by the rules, set by you, the D.N.C. members, and campaigned as hard as we could, in as many places as we could, to acquire delegates. Essentially, the popular vote is not much better as a metric than basing the nominee on which candidate raised more money, has more volunteers, contacted more voters, or is taller.

The Clinton campaign was very clear about their own strategy until the numbers become too ominous for them. They were like a broken record , repeating ad nauseum that this nomination race is about delegates. Now, the word delegate has disappeared from their vocabulary, in an attempt to change the rules and create an alternative reality.

We want to be clear – we believe that the winner of a majority of pledged delegates will and should be the nominee of our party. And we estimate that after the Oregon and Kentucky primaries on May 20, we will have won a majority of the overall pledged delegates According to a recent news report, by even their most optimistic estimates the Clinton Campaign expects to trail by more than 100 pledged delegates and will then ask the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters.

But of course superdelegates are free to and have been utilizing their own criteria for deciding who our nominee should be. Many are deciding on the basis of electability, a favorite Clinton refrain. And if you look at the numbers, during a period where the Clinton campaign has been making an increasingly strident pitch on electability, it is clear their argument is failing miserably with superdelegates.

Since February 5, the Obama campaign has netted 107 superdelegates, and the Clinton campaign only 21. Since the Pennsylvania primary, much of it during the challenging Rev. Wright period, we have netted 24 and the Clinton campaign 17.

At some point – we would argue that time is now – this ceases to be a theoretical exercise about how superdelegates view electability. The reality of the preferences in the last several weeks offer a clear guide of how strongly superdelegates feel Senator Obama will perform in November, both in building a winning campaign for the presidency as well as providing the best electoral climate across the country for all Democratic candidates.

It is important to note that Senator Obama leads Senator Clinton in superdelegate endorsements among Governors, United States Senators and members of the House of Representatives. These elected officials all have a keen sense for who our strongest nominee will be in November.

It is only among D.N.C. members where Senator Clinton holds a lead, which has been rapidly dwindling.

As we head into the final days of the campaign, we just wanted to be clear with you as a party leader, who will be instrumental in making the final decision of who our nominee will be, how we view the race at this point.

Senator Obama, our campaign and our supporters believe pledged delegates is the most legitimate metric for determining how this race has unfolded. It is simply the ratification of the D.N.C. rules – your rules – which we built this campaign and our strategy around.

By the way, the speech he gave last night in North Carolina was certainly one of his best. And I especially loved the commitment to keep telling the truth, as so often these days on the Clinton’s side we have seen the most pathetic ways of distorting the truth in a clear attempt to pander to people’s fear and anxiety.
I always thought that Hillary was smart and competent but some of her latest outing (like the proposal to suspend the gas federal tax for the Summer) leave me appalled. These are not signs of intelligence, but only of thirst to grab power at every cost. This country needs something better!!!

Italian News

A striking victory was achieved yesterday by the center-right coalition in the Italian elections.
Berlusconi is back in power with the help of Lega Nord.
But the best news of all is that finally all those tiny far-left parties, relics of a cold war ended twenty years ago are GONE! (The same holds for some of the small parties on the far right).
None of them passed the 5% minimum required to have a sit in the Parliament (Italians are finally stopping to vote for parties which are still invoking the abolition of the private property..)
From something like 26 parties Italy is finally down to 6 parties sitting in the Senate and Lower Chamber. There are now two large areas, one center-right and one center-left which should help Italy to finally get to a path to a modern and more stable democracy. In fact, what has been happening over and over in the past was that these minority parties (the 2% ones) each one with a different agenda, were joining forces simply to hold on to power, with no intentions to really pass reforms and laws that would help the country.
Democracy as the rule of the winning majority was not really happening in Italy, as all these minority groups had the power of making a government do (or not do) whatever they wanted. Those shaky coalitions effectively made it impossible to govern, as it was clear with the last pathetic one led by Romano Prodi, where every decision was rendered impossible by the shouting of teeny tiny Bertinotti-style parties. It was a wise decision by Walter Veltroni’s, leader of new Democratic Party (born from the joining of the two largest center-left parties) to refuse a coalition with the far left. Let’s hope that his party will stay true to its intention of modeling itself after the Democratic or Labor Parties of the United States and Britain, respectively, and will grow in a moderate environment. This is the true opportunity for Italy to join modern democracies and the country should not squander this good chance.

Change of Season

Wow, it’s already the beginning of April. Needless to say, I haven’t posted much lately, so I’ll follow the example of my good friend lady lioness and take advantage of the imminent warmer season to change the layout of this blog appropriately…(yes, this is me…in Summer…at Fermilab…which brings me to think about how much I miss Illinois and the prairie and how out of place I feel in this new urban environment)
We have been in Cambridge now for more than six months, so it’s a good time to make some assessments. For once, I feel like I have been catapulted back in Europe…now I comprehend very well the comments of many friends (Europeans obviously) who were telling me how much I would have liked it here… I don’t like Europe, I don’t like the congestion of big cities, traffic and banks closing at 4.00PM! Ergo, I don’t like it here.
I like the simple grid structure of a city like Chicago, the ample space of three/four lanes highways, and yes (gasp!) , I admit it, I like driving instead of using public transportation…so, obviously, when it takes me 15 minutes to drive 3 miles to work (and going through some three crazy rotaries) I get a little upset…
I love shopping in one place for all my needs, so you’ll figure out correctly that I love SuperTarget ( but, don’t cringe, I hate Wal-Mart). Well, there is no SuperTarget in MA.
Not a single one. I had to say goodbye to cheap (but good quality) Archer Farm grocery shopping.
I refuse to walk into a Whole Foods (other than in dire circumstances) and being robbed of hundreds of dollars at a time, but the choice here is very limited: there is Trader Joe’s, fortunately ( but you need to avoid Saturday morning, when apparently, as it happened back in Pavia when we were shopping at gloriosa Esselunga, the whole world is out to shop and you end up elbowing your way in the tiny aisles with as much stress as to drive to work) but not everything is available. Shaw is as expensive (if not more) than Jewel Osco, and FoodMaster unfortunately reminds me too much of Family Foods…sigh, I miss my SuperTarget! ( there is a tiny hope though, that one would open in Watertown, large renovation work is underway and I asked a couple of cashiers whether a real SuperTarget was on its way…their tentative answer was yes, but do they really know??)
I mentioned already that banks close at 4.00PM here. As Federica said “it’s like Geneva!”
Yes, indeed.
And talking about Geneva lifestyle, i learned the other day that a membership (in addition to the one I already have) at Boston Sports Club to use the Summer outdoor pools is a meager 1000 dollars (May 22nd to September 6th)…1000 dollars???
Gone are the HAPPY days at Lifetime Fitness (long sighhhh!) where my membership (about half of what I pay here) gave me access to a state of the art facility, with multiple (multiple!!) indoor and outdoor pools, tons of floor equipment and the such)
There is no space here of course for a place like Lifetime Fitness, so fond remembrance will be the only thing left…
So, what is left?
The weather is somehow better, I admit. Mostly sunny days, not as cold as in Chicago. But then, I got used to the long Chicago winter and the snow (and my 4 wheel drive Jeep helped).
Access to city life? Yes, maybe easier than driving forty minutes from Naperville, but, still the same time, overall, when using the subway ( we still live a few miles from the center of Boston, it takes about an hour for Julian to get to NorthEastern).
Liberals?? Too many, too much. IL (Chicago suburbs) was a very good compromise between conservative ideals and more progressive positions ( well, after all Barack is from IL, isn’t he?
So, this brings me to my recent decision of getting myself a new bumper sticker.
If nothing else, I’ll take everything with a laugh.

Yes We Can!

Vote Vote Vote!

I echo  Gordon’s call
Vote, VOte, VOTE!!!

Obama wins SC

Winter Rumblings..

It has been a long time since my last post.
We have been back for three weeks now, after a long vacation (at least for me) in the southern emisphere.
The snow is still on the ground here, a couple of weeks ago we had another beautiful storm,that left for a couple of days a surreal landscape of ice and lights.
I started running, as one of my New Year Resolution and I found out that it’s much easier than I thought! Of course I don’t know if it is really going to help to loose some weight (another, too common, New Year Resolution!) But I’ll be happy if I’ll be able to run along the ring once the better season kicks in at Fermilab.
Speaking of which, the ominous budget passed at the end of last year is making the lives of FNAL employees and users quite difficult.
Rolling unpaid furloughs will start Feb. 1 as the director, Pierre Oddone, announced on Wednesday.
The mandatory unpaid leaves, affecting about 1,900 people, will last through September, when a new budget year begins, unless cuts to Fermilab’s current budget are restored by Congress.
And well-meaning employees are not supposed to do any work from home during those furlough days, including checking their work e-mail and phone messages ( which personally I doubt very much it will happen, as we are so used to chek our e-mails and jobs running every few hours..)
For my fellow physicists, the APS is inviting us to write to our representatives to stress how bad this decision was. Of course non physicists also are invited to protest these types of bills, as they’re needlessly damaging US prosperity in the long run.

For America’s long-term economic prospects and our children’s future, the FY08 budget ignores the urgent calls found in such reports as “Rising above the Gathering Storm” to address our competitiveness and innovation challenges. Instead of increasing the investments so critical to our innovation economy, this budget cuts vital fields of science.

There is a very strong connection between basic research and economic growth, and it sadly looks like our leading politicians have completely missed the point.
But they seem to have missed the point in many other areas.
We started a new year in a serious economic mess and the only solution they have been able to come up is to stuff a few hundred dollars in the hands of WalMart goers in the hope that this will rivitalize the economy (somebody has noticed that people will be buying Chinese products, if buying at all instead than using those few dollars to repay ongoing debts).
Of course making Wall Street pay for the damage it created in the credit sector is out of the question.
To conclude on a note of hope, though, I’ll be happy to exercise my right of vote in the democratic primaries, next week during the erly voting period which is running in Illinois until Jan 31 (for those who cannot vote early, IL will hold its primary elections on super Tuesday, Feb 5).
I’m quite disappointed by the NYT endorsement of Hillary Clinton, especially at a moment where her campaign tactics have assumed very sour tones towards Obama clearly showing how true it is that she would do anything to get this nomination.
It is certainly true that she is very smart and competent and would make a very good democratic president. However, the rise and success of somebody new and fresh like Barack Obama, who despite the young age and the “supposed inexperience” shows a great depth of understanding of many of the most important issues facing America and the world today, cannot be dismissed simply because she was there before and then she has more right to the post now (as somehow her husband inappropriately suggested in some of his remarks).
Moreover, I truly think that she would be much more divisive as the democratic candidate (especially opposed to a John McCain for example). I believe that Barack has actually much more to do with having brought independent voters to the democratic side in this primary turn than she has. And I’m not sure that the same independents will grant her the final vote.
I’m impressed by the grassroots movement surrounding Barack’s campaign and how many people have contributed even with just a little. I think he really represents the most serious hope for CHANGE. And hope is always last to die…

Snow!

Apparently I have been so lucky as to not miss the two biggest snow storms of 2007, here in Boston. On March 16th about 7 inches fell ( and I found a house!) and yesterday more than 10 blanketted the city and surroundings. It was beautiful, just strolling in the park, on the powdery snow.
The traffic was awful, cars were stuck everywhere (we spent a reasonable amount of time observing traffic at Tremont and Boylston from the warmth of being inside the corner Starbucks, with a hot chocolate in front of us). Winter wonderland….I love this weather!

GPS navigator

This one is really a laugh!
We finally got a GPS navigator (TomTom One XL-S) after being sick (mostly Julian) of driving around with printed directions to every new place in town… (I, for my side, enjoy keeping taking Rt 2 West to everywhere I need to go… )

But anyway, we found a good deal and so here we are, with our brand new GPS navigator.
We put it to the test last night, to drive to Worcester (pronounced, go figure, “Worster”) for a concert at Mechanics Hall (nice Jane Monheit and John Pizzarelli! btw).

Easy, fool proof GUI to insert our destination, the trip was quickly planned by the TOM TOM.
Except that, once we finally left the highways and arrived in proximity of Worcester, something happened and instead of Mechanics Hall we found ourselves in the middle of nowhere, with the navigator happily waving its little squared flag “you’ve reached your destination!”

So, we had to rely on old fashion advice, when already late we stopped at the only convenience store on our way and asked a lovely old lady to indicate the way.
“You’re a good 15 minutes away, since this is Leicester!” she said (again pronounced in an uncomprehensible way, something like “leister”??)

Yes, it was a Main Street, but not the one we were looking for!
So, should I send it back and reclaim my money???