Obama.

What a day. History being made.

After voting, I celebrated with a bacon-wrapped hot dog from a local street vendor. Mustard and onions. America, baby.

Let’s take this country for a spin and see what it can do!

Get out and vote.

Vote for a sensible science policy. Vote for restoring America’s credibility in the world. Vote for opportunity for all Americans. Vote for restoring America’s respect for her own constitution. Vote for hope over fear. Vote for change.

Get out and vote.

Every four years we have the Olympic Games, and we have a U.S. Presidential Election. And I think we can all agree on one thing: they both make for great TV. So after those of you in the U.S. have gone out and voted, then fidgeted through the rest of the working day, we can settle down to watch what happens.

Here is a finding chart (made using the tool at RealClearPolitics) to help keep track of the important action.

Let me stress that this is not a prediction; it’s a guide for interpreting the results as they come in. Blue states are ones that Obama will almost certainly win, red states are ones that McCain almost certainly needs to win if he is to have a shot. If, as is perfectly plausible, Obama wins North Carolina or even Georgia, the rout is on, and we can settle down to the glorious task of nationalizing the means of production, collectivizing the farms, and redistributing the wealth.

But let’s imagine that we find McCain winning all of these red states. Note that the blue states add up to 243 electoral votes, while 270 are needed to secure victory, meaning that Obama needs to score 27 or more electoral votes from the gray states. Three plausible ways that could play out:

1. Florida. That’s 27 electoral votes right there, and the election would be over. However, voting in Florida rarely seems to go smoothly, and the race there is very tight.
2. Two states from Pennsylvania/Virginia/Ohio. Obama is way ahead in Pennsylvania and Virginia, so this is the most likely way for things to unfold tonight. If he wins any two of these three states, it’s over.
3. One state from Pennsylvania/Virginia/Ohio , and one or more smaller states to the West. This is the only real nail-biter scenario; note that it presumes that McCain wins Florida and all the red states. Overall not probable, but possible.

There are other possibilities — Obama loses all of PA/VA/OH/FL, but wins Indiana + Missouri + Colorado? — but those are not the way to bet. If PA/VA/OH/FL all go for McCain, gloom and doom will be the order of the day. (It’s worth emphasizing: not bloody likely.)

Poll closing times are listed here, so you can plan the evening’s festivities. Figure most results will be announced within an hour of poll closing. Florida is mixed, closing in some places at 7:00 Eastern time and in others at 8:00 Eastern, but nobody will be surprised if there are delays. So the most relevant times are Virginia (7:00 Eastern), Ohio (7:30 Eastern), and Pennsylvania (8:00 Eastern). The thing could be over early for us Left Coasters.

Recommended reading while the hour approaches: canvassing for Obama, vs. rallying for McCain. Recommended viewing: Girls 4 Obama at Shakesville.

The arena at Politico.com has an interesting Q&A today. The question is “What, for you, was the most memorable moment of this long race for the presidency.” The responses run from the obvious (Obama’s now famous race speech) to the very personal (`my 6-yr old daughter didn’t realize that a woman had never been president of the US’). Anyway, I invite you all to go have a look, provided you enjoy year-end lists.

And, I’d thought it would be great to hear from the ultra-intelligent, ultra-interesting, avid CV readers what their response is to this question. So, please, write a comment and let us know, “What, for you, was the most memorable moment of this long race for the presidency.”

I’ll start! For me, the most memorable moment happened last Saturday. I had just returned from China and called my parents to let them know I was home. The conversation turned to politics, inevitable this time of year. Usually we step on eggshells whenever this subject arises (my parents are die-hard Republicans, but I love them anyway), but this time we were all speechless. In awe of my Uncle Chuck.

Uncle Chuck is my favorite uncle – we are the scientists in the family. He came home after serving in the Navy in the South Pacific during WWII and went to school on the GI bill. Ended up with a master’s in mathematics. Worked at Oak Ridge National Lab on the very first computer systems. Went on to NASA and was one of the folks in charge of the computer program rewrites to get the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back home. He has done tremendous things and is very smart. But, he’s lived most of his life in the deep South and has somehow developed a deep racial prejudice that most of the family can’t understand. We have cringed for years whenever he has espoused on the virtues of the Bell Curve in regards to race. I could go on, but think I’ll hold back and just say he is the most racially bigoted person I know. I can’t fathom some of the things I have heard him say.

On Saturday, I learned that Uncle Chuck cast his early ballot for Senator Barack Obama for President of the USA. Nothing could have surprised me more! No matter what happens with the election tomorrow, Obama has already stirred deep, positive change in our society.

In the post about my upcoming talk in Second Life, I gave a newbie’s sketchy perspective of the outlook for the medium. But you should also hear the pitch of someone who is a real expert, both in virtual worlds and their use for scientific research. So we’re very happy to have a guest post from George Djorgovski — Professor of Astronomy at Caltech, observer of galaxies, Co-Director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research, and Director of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics. He also goes by the name of Curious George, on the other side of the reality/virtuality divide. (Note: pretty pictures beneath the fold.)

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As an avid reader of CV, I was pleased and honored when Sean invited me to contribute a guest post. Now, CV is a very forward-looking enterprise, and its Blogmaster has already fallen into the wormhole described below, so here is a little (way?) out of the box riff for your enjoyment…

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It is not every day that you encounter a technology which may change the world. Especially if that technology is creating new worlds, albeit not in the chaotic inflation sense… (and unlike certain a priori untestable physical theories, these worlds are very much real, even if they are virtual — but let’s not go there now).

The development I would like to tell you about is immersive virtual reality (VR), or virtual worlds (VWs). It has originated largely from the on-line computer/video games, and that is still its main domain, but not for much longer. This technology has already gone well beyond the games, and I think it will go very, very far. It is in an embryonic stage now, sort of like the Web was circa 1993 (remember those ancient days, when you first heard about it? your first glimpse of the Mosaic browser?), or the Internet circa mid-1970′s (ask your grampa). Its prophets were science fiction writers of the highest rank: Stanislaw Lem, Vernor Vinge, Rudy Rucker, and pretty much the entire Cyberpunk movement and its offspring — William Gibson, Bruce Stering, Neall Stephenson, Charles Stross, to name but a few favorites. Credit is also due to the visionary computer scientist (and Unabomber victim) David Gelertner, whose book “Mirror Worlds” seeded some ideas in 1991 (before the WWW!). But this is no longer fiction, folks, and a growing number of us is trying hard to make it science. This is Serious Stuff. I think that this technology will be as transformative as the Web itself, and that the two will merge, soon, and change forever how we do, well, everything — science included.

Now, gentle reader, you may be a tad skeptical at this point; that is a perfectly normal and excusable reaction! (I know that, because that was how I reacted at first … . But if you indulge me for a moment and follow me down the rabbit hole, I promise that things will get curiouser and curiouser.

For a few years I have been reading about a rapid growth of the massive multi-user on-line role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as The World of Warcraft (WoW). I never played any, or had a slightest interest (in fact, I’ll date myself by admitting that the last computer game I played was the Space Invaders, back in the grad school, as a pure procrastination device). There are about 6 million WoW players word-wide. But gaming is not what this is all about, even though in May of 2008, there was a first scientific conference held in WoW.

A more interesting development is the rise of VWs which are general, interactive virtual environments. They can be used for gaming or role playing, but also for more serious things. There are currently well over 300 VWs on-line, some of them very special-purpose, some purely as games, but many with broad and open goals, according to the Association of Virtual Worlds. By far the dominant VW is Second Life (SL), developed by Linden Lab (LL), a company founded in 1999 by Philip Rosedale, and backed by such Internet business luminaries as Jeff Bezos, Mitch Kapor, and Pierre Omidyar — and these folks probably know what they are doing.

Predictably, media accounts of SL tend to focus on cybersex and silly looking avatars, and so my own superficial initial reaction was “what a b.s., video games for adults”. I got intrigued after reading Wade Roush’s article “Second Earth” in the July/August 2007 issue of MIT’s Technology Review. However, my personal conversion was really prompted by an old friend, Piet Hut, a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Piet is a numerical stellar dynamics guru, and a person with a very creative and eclectic mind. So after he posted a couple of preprints describing his initial exploration of VWs on the arXiv server (astro-ph/0610222 and 0712.1655) I got really intrigued, and started a conversation. I was skeptical at first, but then in March of 2008 I jumped in, and it has been a fun and intriguing journey ever since.

Judging by my own experience, there is no way that you can really understand all this just by reading or listening; you have to try it. It is a fundamentally visceral, as well as an intellectual experience. It is as if you have never seen a bicycle, let alone ridden one, and someone was showing you pictures of people having a good time biking around, and telling you what a fun it is. Please keep that in mind. You gotta try it, then judge for yourself.

Let me give you a few factoids about SL first. There are over 15 million registered users worldwide, and typically about 60,000 are on-line at any given time. Nearly 300 universities have some presence in SL (typically a virtual campus), including the likes of MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. Numerous outreach organizations and museums (e.g., the Exploratorium), media programs (e.g., the NPR Science Friday), many scientific publishers (e.g., Nature) have active outposts. Hundreds of major brand companies, ranging from the usual tech giants (Cisco, Dell, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Sony, Xerox, etc.) to Ben & Jerry’s, Coca-Cola, Warner Brothers, etc., also have presence there. New business models are being developed, and companies whose business is only immersive VR are popping up. Many government agencies, both from the US (e.g., NASA, NOAA, CDCP, etc.) and from other countries, are active in SL, for outreach purposes, situational training, etc. Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds held a large conference in April 2008. Reuters has a news bureau in SL. Three countries (Sweden, Estonia, and Maldives) have embassies in SL. And so on.

There is a thriving economics in SL, which has its own currency (Linden dollars, L$) with fluctuating exchange rates, about L$ 250 – 260 for US$ 1. There is about US$ 25M in capital in SL, and the quarterly user transactions are around US$ 80M. For these reasons, the Congress held a mixed-reality (natch!) hearing, both in real life (RL) and SL, in April 2008 (see, e.g., this news report). You can find links to many other relevant news stories at LL’s own website. There are many SL blogs, which the readers of CV can surely hunt down on their own.

How does it work? In a nutshell, you can sign up for SL for free (a paid membership allows you to own virtual land, and has a few other privileges). Explore the SL website links. You download an SL browser from there. The way this works is that LL runs a grid of servers, which contain a vast database of who and what is where and how are they moving, communicating, etc. It sends the local data to your browser, which does the graphical rendering; you need a fairly new machine for this to run well, probably not more than 3 years old. SL is a “flat earth” world, and endless ocean with islands and continents. The basic unit of virtual land is a “sim” or an “island” (even if it is completely land-enclosed), and it is 256 meters square; it is mapped to a single compute note in the LL grid. Every user is represented by a human-like avatar; you get a pretty rudimentary one upon signing in, but you can acquire better designed ones for free or for money. (One annoying feature of SL is that you have a restricted freedom in choosing your avatar’s name; my nom de pixel is Curious George, and I lucked out on that one.) You can communicate with other users by voice or text; either one can be public, heard within a radius of about 20 – 30 meters, or private. You can move around by walking, flying (very cool) or teleporting (even cooler). And then … it’s all up to you, your curiosity and imagination. Users generate essentially all of the content – buildings, arts, gizmos and gadgets. There is a scripting language and a graphical editor. Or you can just buy stuff from creative and enterprising people who are good at making things in SL. You can also get a lot of free stuff, some of which is of a surprisingly high quality. SL is all about people interacting and creating content, very much a Web 2.0 in that way, even though it presages the Web 3.0, or 4.0 or …

What really surprised me — knocked my virtual socks off, so to speak — is the subjective quality of the interpersonal interaction. Even with the still relatively primitive graphics, the same old flat screen and keyboard, and a limited avatar functionality, it is almost as viscerally convincing as a real life interaction and conversation. Somehow, our minds and perceptive systems interpolate over all of the imperfections, and it really clicks. I cannot explain it — it has to be experienced; it is not a rational, but a subjective phenomenon. It is much better than any video- or teleconferencing system I have tried, and like most of you, I have suffered through many of those. As a communication device, this is already a killer app. Going back to the good old email and Web feels flat and lame.

So what has all this got to do with science and scholarship?

(more…)

It’s either an unaccounted-for background or it’s new physics. In either case, it’s complicated, for sure.

The CDF Collaboration, at Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator, has submitted for publication a new paper describing a subsample of proton-antiproton collision events in which there is at least one muon produced far from the primary proton-antiproton interaction. This subsample is not yet described by known processes, including the effects of detector/reconstruction failures, and is starting to cause somewhat of a sensation in the high energy physics community. As a member of CDF, I can tell you this analysis has gotten some rather intense scrutiny in the past several months!

The excess subsample is called a “ghost” sample in the paper, and is characterized by the fact that there can be several muons whose direction of travel lies within 37 degrees of the primary (highest energy) one, and the distribution of muon “impact parameters” has a long tail, out to several centimeters. The impact parameter is a measure of how far away from the main event vertex the particle was produced, and so these extra muons appear to come from the decay of some sort of particle with a lifetime much longer than that of the b quark.

Is this new physics? Or did CDF underestimate the rate of background processes leading to this sort of observation?

The subsample in question came to light in the course of the measurement of the b quark pair production cross section, which is proportional to the rate at which events with a b quark and a b antiquark are produced. This measurement is done in at least two ways. Unlike the lighter quarks, the b quark lifetime is long enough that it flies a few millimeters through space before decaying. So in one method, one looks for “secondary vertices”, distinct from the primary location in space where the proton and antiproton collided. These secondary vertices are where the b quarks decay to several hadrons, or possibly leptons such as muons.

The muon is the heavier cousin of the electron. It has a mass of 106 MeV, compared with 0.511 MeV for an electron. Being so much heavier, and having a lifetime of 2.2 microseconds, when it is produced, it tends to travel through very thick layers of material before stopping. Indeed, in modern large collider physics experiments, the muon detection systems lie outside the rest of the detector, effectively using it as shielding from all the other particles produced in the collisions, which are mainly pions. Pions are hadrons, consisting of a quark and an antiquark. Pions tend to “shower” and leave their energy in the heavy layers of material (typically lead and steel) in the calorimeters. But sometimes they can “punch through” and leave hits in the muon detection system, fooling us. That’s one clear component of this ghost sample. If we have badly underestimated this, it could account for all of it, but that is not too likely as far as we can tell.

The b quark decays to muons offer another way to measure not only the pair production cross section but the “mixing” of b quarks. Due to a subtlety in the weak interaction that we need not explore here, a b quark (or more properly speaking a B hadron) flying along can change spontaneously into its own antiparticle. This can lead to events where, if both b quarks decay to muons, they can have the same electric charge if one b quark has flipped to the charge opposite that with which it was produced.

In the analysis presented in the paper, the authors (a group from Frascati/Harvard led by Paolo Giromini) have ostensibly resolved a long standing disagreement between the results from two different methods to measure the b pair cross section. If one selects events with two muons, but tighten the previously used requirements on where the muons come from, demanding that they emanate from near the main event vertex, they find much better agreement between the two different measurements of the b pair cross section. But this implies that the previous measurements suffered from a large, unaccounted-for background. What is it?

The paper is an exploration of this ghost background, and the conclusion is that we can’t explain it at this point. So the collaboration has published what we’ve learned so far, in hopes that other experiments, especially our neighbors around the ring at D0, can look at their data and tell us if they see this sort of thing too. This is the most important first question to be answered, and if they do see it, I can tell you what will happen: all hell will break loose in the field. If they don’t, well, we have more work to do in figuring out just how this ghost background comes about.

If this is the first observation of some sort of new physics, then it is tremendously exciting and very, very weird. Though, oddly, not entirely unanticiapted. Neal Weiner and Nima Arkani-Hamed have a recent paper out where they predicted “lepton jets” not unlike what we are seeing. Kind of makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck…but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves just yet. I am sure the theorists are already very busy!

If you want more details, there is a very nice and much more physicist-oriented post by Tommaso Dorigo available at his blog.

Stay tuned!

Ten or fifteen years from now, virtual worlds will be as prevalent as web pages are today. I remember fifteen years ago when I had just set up my first web page and was trying to explain to my friends that this was going to be really big. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t very convincing. “The other day I found a web page that you can use to order a pizza to be delivered!” “You know, we already have a technology to do that — it’s called a phone.”

Likewise, I don’t have an especially clear picture of how virtual worlds will be put to use in the years to come. Right now, by far the leading presence in the game is Second Life, which remains clearly marked by the signs of geekdom which tend to characterize early incarnations of technological advances — for example, you have to choose a pseudonym for your avatar, the surname of which must come from a list of more-or-less goofy selections. And, admittedly, the most popular activities seem to be roleplaying and cybersex. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But the scientific community is catching on. Rob Knop, erstwhile astronomer and science blogger, now works for Linden Labs, creators of Second Life. Organizations like the Exploratorium have set up bases in SL, and one ambitious fan of the Large Hadron Collider built a mock-up of the ATLAS detector. At the research level, astronomers have set up the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, which uses SL and other virtual worlds for a number of different activities — collaboration meetings, data visualization, outreach, etc. Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study, who founded the group, has posted a few papers on the arxiv about how he envisions the possibilities, e.g.:

Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds
Piet Hut (IAS, Princeton)

All of which is preamble to mentioning that Rob has invited me to give a popular talk in Second Life, which (I think) will be happening next Saturday, November 8, at 10 a.m. Pacific time. So if you regret not being able to come to my arrow of time talk in so-called “real life,” here is your chance to hear it. It’ll be taking place at the Galaxy Dome at Spaceport Bravo — that’s a Second Life URL, or SLURL; if you have already signed up, just click that link to appear at that location in-world (as they say). It looks something like this:

Chances are that you don’t have your own Second Life identity, but here’s your excuse to join up and spend a couple of hours this weekend building your avatar and buying clothes. There’s no need to spend any money at all if you don’t want to, but if you do, there is a real economy with its own currency and a variable exchange rate with US dollars. (Just like real life, fashion choices for women vastly outnumber those for men. Unlike real life, you get to buy your skin and hair, or even your shape — or just modify the default stuff you are created with.) Here’s a useful startup guide, if you don’t mind receiving instructions from a mermaid.

Look forward to seeing you Saturday. Or rather, Seamus Tomorrow does.