Survival Tactics of a Road Warrior

As a particle physicist, I am extremely dependent on a computer for my daily work. But not only for work, I am increasingly relying on mails and text messages for communication. In particular, calls on my mobile from Japan to Europe are not a particular economically sustainable option. So here's how I survived eight weeks without a proper computer.

Move to the cloud. While I haven't found a good solution for larges quantities of pics and videos, yet, here are some suggestions for migrating the rest of your data.

• Music: I am getting my music from Spotify. The subscription rate for one year is less than getting a new hard drive, plus I get the latest music. I hope they start their service in Japan soon.
• Code: Your source code should of course live in a repository under version control somewhere. CERN, for example provides access to svn and git servers to their users.
• Documents: The lingua franca of scientific documents is LaTeX. Allows you to change Operating Systems easily. See code.
• EMail: Tricky. I use gmail, which provides me with all the services I need. If you have privacy concerns, you need a hard disk. But then you need to make sure you get the same operating system for your new computer.
• Calendar: Provided by gmail for me. Use the Provider for Google Calendar add-on for integration into Thunderbird, a cross-platform solution for communication.
• Contacts: Again, gmail has what I need. Integration into Thunderbird via the gContactSync add-on seems to work for me, but I've just started using it, so the verdict is still out.
• To-Do List: I use ToDoist. Has nice integration with the rest of my eco-system.
• Notes: Springpad is a great solution to jot down quick notes, upload images or plots for a project you work on, or upload some files (like bash configs, or the like).
• Editor: If you spend a large fraction of your time writing code (or documents), do yourself a favor and learn how to type. I learned the Colemak layout and I'm not going back. In addition, learn keyboard shortcuts for your editor. Which means that you want to use one that is cross-platform, so you don't have to re-learn everything when you borrow a laptop from somebody. I like Sublime Text. For my purposes it's as powerful as Emacs, plus it looks pretty.
• FTP client: My tool of choice is Cyberduck. Works on Mac and Windows and integrates with Sublime Text for editing of remote files. Make sure you donate. On Linux, of course the default file browsers for KDE and Gnome support browsing remote file systems.

Once you reduced your dependence on a physical hard drive, you can get quite far with a modern smartphone and a data flat-rate. It's quite impressive, really. I've survived the last 2 weeks almost exclusively on such a device.

But now that I have my new laptop, and everything's set up the way I like it again, it's back to work.

Thoughts about Nigel Lockyer's editorial in Nature

Deciding on the future of particle physics is a complicated process, due to the size of the projects that are being proposed. Nigel Lockyer, director of Fermilab has written an editorial that was recently published in Nature. He outlines some of the questions that our field is facing. As director of the larges particle physics laboratory in the US he should be familiar with large projects.

Unfortunately, this editorial contains a rather indifferent enumeration of  projects that have been proposed at one point in time and ought to be classified rather differently in terms of time scale and scientific merit.
An important consideration that Nigel forgets to mention completely is that each large project comes with its own window of opportunity that depends on a number of factors other than physics. This puts the argument of waiting for results of the upgraded LHC to make a decision on the ILC in a completely different light. There is no ideal point in time to take a decision on the ILC if the LHC finds nothing. Particle physicists will gradually move on to other projects, politicians' focus will shift away from particle physics after years of waiting for news.

This is not a situation we need to get ourselves into. Physicists have worked hard over the past decade and more to put all the pieces in place to take a decision on the ILC in the next couple years. It's quite hard to come up with a scenario in which an LHC discovery in the next five years would invalidate the case for the ILC.
Particle physicists will continue to come up with projects that can be considered at the next step. We will not be short on ideas for future experiments. They will require a foundation that can be laid by the ILC now.

Japanese Identity

Here in Japan you prove your identity on official documents not with your signature, but with a hanko.

This is a quick shout out to a hanko shop 判子屋　near nihombashi station D1 exit in Tokyo that worked extra hours to get us our hanko before the holiday break. If you need a hanko or some other writing material, I recommended you pay them a visit. Turn right at the exit and then right again after the bridge.