Think of a website you like.

What do you get from that website that makes you like it? TV shows? News articles? Email? Porn? Cat GIFs? (I’m not here to judge.)

Now, think about this: how much are you willing to pay to use that website instead of its crappy competitor that your internet service provider made? When Google started Gmail, imagine AOL saying “you can access to this site for only $50/month”. I’d be displeased.

How long are you willing to wait for your website of choice to load, rather than going to the crappy (but quickly-loading) competitor your ISP runs? Imagine watching Orange is the New Black on Netflix and having to wait two hours while it buffers, even though the bland reality shows and sitcoms on Comcast’s video site stream in real time full HD. I’d be mad.

Net neutrality guarantees this will never be a problem. It means Gmail will be free, Netflix will be fast, and you can giggle at all the cute cat pictures your heart desires.

Whenever a legal issue comes up that I feel strongly enough about to make a blog post on, it’s already seen …

I’m back! After lots of work improving the theme and the implementation of my website, I’m getting back to regular blogging!

Most of the site looks pretty similar to how it did before, but there are some significant changes under the hood.

• I’ve converted almost the entire site from my homebrew content management system (Modulo) to the static site generator Pelican, omitting only a few pages that that mostly involve dynamic content. I’ll keep the old site active until I get everything converted. This will make it a lot easier for me to write blog posts.
• I switched web servers from CherryPy, which is designed for dynamic sites implemented in Python, to Caddy, which is designed for mostly-static sites. Caddy also provides an easy way to enable HTTPS, which is long overdue for my site.
• I’ve converted the math in blog posts to use MathJax, which looks way cleaner than the LaTeX-generated images I used to have.
• I have a new icon, a simple design with three circles that fits right in with the site’s theme.
• The design is now responsive and adapts to mobile browsers better. This still needs some work but at …

Well, that’s it: as of today, I’m officially no longer a scientist.

Unofficially, of course, it’s not that simple. My postdoc contract expired on September 30, but I’m still not done with a couple of projects I really wanted to finish before leaving CCNU. So I might wind up putting some things on arXiv this month and maybe even submitting one last paper, but in the long term, research and I are parting ways.

One of the last things I did before my official end was attending the Hard Probes conference here in Wuhan, which is a large international conference in my field held every two years in various places around the world. It was actually a great experience! The work I’ve done over the past 5 years (on next-to-leading-order forward hadron production cross sections, if you care) was referenced at least half a dozen times in various people’s talks — and that’s just what I saw. I got to meet several of the big names in the field, and some of them even actually wanted to be introduced to me! I had a bunch of people ask me questions about my papers and …

I’m back, with a big announcement: next week I’ll be curating the @realscientists Twitter account!

@realscientists is a rotating-curator account, which means that every week, a different person takes over the account to post about their work and life and anything else of interest to Twitter. Some weeks they have a traditional academic scientist posting. Other times it’s a journalist, author, policy maker, an industry scientist, or anyone else who is involved with science.

Tweeting for @realscientists is kind of a big deal: the account has more than 35 thousand followers! I’ve wanted to do this for a couple years, though I didn’t apply until just recently… for reasons that seem kind of silly now. As luck would have it, the original curator for next week had to cancel, so I get to step in at the last minute. Props to the Real Scientists mods for getting everything ready in about 3 days.

I’m really glad I got the chance to do this before leaving China. As far as I can tell, there’s never been a Real Scientists curator from China before — probably not surprising, since Twitter is blocked by the national firewall …

In my last post I mentioned how the coast of Vietnam, where the Rencontres conference series is being held, looks amazing — with photo evidence. You might have guessed that that image was a promotional picture, and you’d be right: it came from the 2014 edition of the conference’s website.

This one I took with my cell phone:

Guys. Vietnam is really pretty!

I arrived in Quy Nhon Saturday morning after an overnight trip from Wuhan, about 15 hours door-to-door. So despite having a couple of free days before the official start of conference events tonight (Sunday), all I really managed to do was catch up on some desperately needed sleep, and snap a couple more pictures of the coast.

Of course, I have been enjoying the food. Vietnamese cuisine, or at least what I’ve seen of it so far, is not as strongly flavored as what I’m used to in Wuhan, where every other dish is spicy with a thick Szechuan-style sauce. But they do some great things with a more subtle flavor palette. We have all our meals provided at the hotel restaurant, arranged by the conference organizers. Steamed vegetables with garlic sauce, fried spring …

Greetings, readers!

I’ve been absent from the blog for a while for a few different reasons — between some issues to deal with in my personal life and a bunch of projects for work, I haven’t been able to focus on a blog post for about six months. But I thought that streak has gone on long enough. Here’s a quick status update:

• My group has put out a paper, which was just accepted for publication into Physical Review D! This paper is a generalization of the same calculation I did for my PhD thesis, which I’m 2/3 of the way into a series of posts explaining. The third post is coming at some point, I promise.

• I’ll be traveling to two conferences to talk about this paper. First, the Rencontres du Vietnam workshop on heavy ion physics, held at the brand new International Center for Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (PDF), which is taking place next week. This is the first time I’ve been invited to present at a real conference! The venue also looks amazing.

  (image from the Rencontres 2014 website, all rights reserved)

  When the official schedule includes time for “Beach and …

Time to kick off a new year of blog posts! For my first post of 2015, I’m continuing a series I’ve had on hold since nearly the same time last year, about the research I work on for my job. This is based on a paper my group published in Physical Review Letters and an answer I posted at Physics Stack Exchange.

In the first post of the series, I wrote about how particle physicists characterize collisions between protons. A quark or gluon from one proton (the “probe”), carrying a fraction \(x_p\) of that proton’s momentum, smacks into a quark or gluon from the other proton (the “target”), carrying a fraction \(x_t\) of that proton’s momentum, and they bounce off each other with transverse momentum \(Q\). The target proton acts as if it has different compositions depending on the values of \(x_t\) and \(Q\): in collisions with smaller values of \(x_t\), the target appears to contain more partons.

At the end of the last post, I pointed out that something funny happens at the top left of this diagram. Maybe you can already see it: in these collisions with small \(x_t\) and small \(Q\), the proton …