Snow on the Horizon

The view from my bus stop on Saturday,

As part of my new job, I was trying to attend the AIDA Horizon2020 workshop at CERN next week. It's a good opportunity to network with the groups who are active in detector development, and to get a good overview of the field. Not really a short trip from Sendai, but such is the life of a particle physicist.

Well, it looks like Frau Holle had something against my travel plans. After my flight from Sendai to Narita got canceled on Saturday, I spend a significant fraction of my day on the phone to get the flight changed to Sunday. It's not as easy to get the airline to accept they are responsible for taking care of their passengers as you might think. And apparently the travel agents can't always call the airline support numbers from outside of the country. A little after midnight everything was sorted and I had my new itinerary.

The view from my browser window on Sunday.

Unfortunately, the flight got canceled again. Notice the missing arrival time next to the flights expected at 08:55 in NRT.
So now I am trying to get a refund. It seems to be completely normal for the airlines to fly for 20 hrs. from Japan to Switzerland, arrive in the evening, spend the night in Switzerland and fly back the next morning. I'm trying to convince that a) I was trying to attend a meeting that will be over by the time they propose to get me there, and b) spending less time on the ground than in the air is something I would rather avoid in any case.

There are again some lessons to take away from this:

• Online travel agencies are worth their money.
• When it looks like it's going to take forever for the agent to get back to you, or if they put you on hold repeatedly, have them call you back. Most agents will happily do that. It took me a while to learn that, and I am honestly a bit nervous about my next phone bill.
• If you cancel or change an inbound flight, and you would like to keep your outbound flight, make sure the airline knows about this change. Most airlines will cancel your whole itinerary including your return trip if you don't show up on an inbound flight. The airlines are supposed to notify the operators of your connecting flights of any cancellations, but apparently you cannot rely on this. 
• Trips with several different carriers cause significant headaches to change.
• The airline that cancels the flight should be held responsible for the follow-up with the connecting flights and possibly re-booking those, even if they are code-share flights operated by other airlines. I had to call offices in Japan, Switzerland, and in the UK to find this out. After insisting that the operator of the canceled flight should take responsibility, the agent became suddenly quite helpful.

Safe travels.

The first month in review

The first month in Sendai has certainly been rather eventful. The excitement of the new environment hasn't worn off, yet, but fortunately I'm starting to become more productive. I still don't have my household, yet; apparently that will take another month. On the other hand, I do have:

• registered myself at the ward office (if you live east of Sendai Station, your ward office is surprisingly far away from the station).
• opened a bank account. This took about two hours, but it was rather straightforward (given the fact that my wife speaks Japanese). Unfortunately, I don't have a Japanese credit card, yet.
• met (most of) the graduate students. Seems to be a great bunch. I look forward to working with them.
• introduced myself a number of times to different groups. I find myself sharing different bits of information each time, just to prevent myself from getting bored.
• bought a six-months bus pass. I'm not an avid driver.
• signed up for a new cell phone plan with a data flat rate. This helped me survive several weeks without a laptop. See also my previous post.
• registered with a new certification authority (KEK) for a grid certificate. Apparently, moving between different certification authorities is not foreseen on the grid. I can currently not delete my old files.
• started to get involved with some of the different research projects that we work on at Tohoku University. I plan to post a bit about each in turn in the coming episodes.
• accepted the job of deputy Linear Collider Detector R&D liaison. This task will most certainly provide material for future blog posts as well. My responsibility is mostly to facilitate communication. To ensure the best achievable performance and cost-effectiveness of the detectors it's important to encourage the widest possible participation in building them. The Detector Baseline Documents for ILD and SiD have been written, but the detector collaborations are still in the process of being formed. Now is the time to get involved with the detector concepts and help shape the face of these collaborations. If you work on particle physics detectors and care about Linear Colliders, please make yourself known.
• not really studied as much Japanese as I had planned. Back to work.

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.

Apartment Hunt in Sendai

Finding a suitable place to live is an important part of the moving process. Each location comes with its own specific challenges, which are usually compounded if you are not a citizen of the country you live in. If you are a particle physicist, chances are you know what I'm talking about.
In Geneva, finding a place to live takes a couple months in my experience. Once you've found a place, as a postdoc you probably need to find a guarantor, and enough money to cover the deposit amounting to about three months of rent.

The housing market in Sendai is thankfully much less crowded, giving you a much larger choice of apartments. The approval process, however, is rather prohibitively difficult for foreigners:
After finding an apartment on one of the Japanese-only web sites, you contact the agency for a viewing appointment. If you like the place, you need to get approved for credit, which is basically impossible for a foreigner without a Japanese bank account. (Which I am sure you can't get without a permanent address in Japan. The typical catch 22 for foreigners.) Luckily (?) there are companies who help with getting approved - against a not insubstantial fee. I addition, you still need a Japanese guarantor; apparently retired people don't qualify for this.
When you have all of this together, you need not one, but two hanko - the Japanese replacement for signatures on legal documents. This is a stamp of your name and it uses a special ink. Apparently there is simple version, mitomein 認め印, and a more complicated version, jitsuin 実印, and to sign the rental agreement you need both. You can get them at a hanko-shop, and then they need to be registered to your name at the ward office.

Like I said, prohibitively complicated. For foreigners Tohoku university has a number of resources.
http://www.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/cms/?pg=100113145442
https://www.cefix.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/house/default_e.asp
http://www.insc.tohoku.ac.jp/cms/index-e.cgi?pg=130527113858
There are a number of reasons why I chose to go to the open market instead, and for the ILC I'm sure some people prefer to live on campus, while others rather live in the city. Enabling this choice is one of the action items when the ILC gets approved.

A new year, a new job, a new continent

I will be joining the Tohoku University group at the beginning of next year. This is an exciting opportunity, but it required yet another international relocation.
A few lessons learned:
- Do not move between the years, if you can avoid it. The holidays complicate everything.
- Give yourself enough time for visa applications. 2 months is not too much, particularly if paper work needs to be sent back and forth.
- Give yourself enough time to sell your stuff. In particular electric gadgets that operate on a different voltage than what you find in your new destination.

With the new year I plan on updating the blog with accounts of the research in my new group as well as situations I might encounter as a European in Japan. That's at least my new year's resolution.

Now I need to find a suitable apartment. Wish me luck.