I am a “retired” postdoc in particle physics, trying to transition into the tech industry. I started out programming with Java around 1999, and more recently I’ve been doing a lot of work with Python, C, and C++, although I do occasionally dabble in PHP, Perl, shell scripting, and other languages.

  1. 2017
    Jul
    04

    New site!

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    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 …
  2. 2016
    Oct
    01

    The end

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    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 …

  3. 2016
    Aug
    13

    Coming up: a week as @realscientists

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    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 …

  4. 2015
    Dec
    31

    A look back at 2015

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Well, that’s it.

    A whole year of me promising to write more blog posts has come and gone, and it hasn’t happened.

    In the spirit of not making excuses, I’m not going to get into why I haven’t kept the blog updated this year (well, okay, a little: postdoc work and studying Chinese kept me busy, and some personal issues wrecked my motivation), but let me resolve that I’m going to pick up the pace in 2016. There will be a lot of interesting physics developments to write about! I still have an explanation of the months-old pentaquark paper on my to-do list, and there’s a mysterious bump in the latest LHC data that could be nothing, but is attracting everyone’s attention nonetheless. And that’s not even including the updates about life in China.

    So here’s to 2016 being a year of rebuilding, off- and online.

    Follow the blog (and other updates) on Facebook and Twitter!

  5. 2015
    Oct
    20

    Technical problems this summer

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    It’s been a while since I updated the blog — I’ve been busy, but there have also been some technical problems with the site, so I couldn’t put up blog posts until I fixed them. I’ve got a lot to report about my adventures traveling over the summer, though! More to come soon.

  6. 2015
    Jul
    26

    A Virtual Welcome to the Rencontres du Vietnam

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    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 …

  7. 2015
    Jul
    23

    Checking in after a busy semester

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on — Edited

    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 …

  8. 2015
    Jan
    25

    About saturation

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    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 …

  9. 2015
    Jan
    01

    A look back at 2014 on the blog

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Every New Year’s Eve I do a review of my favorite blog posts from the past year. And normally I have too many good physics posts to make a top 10 list like so many other sites seem to do. But not this year. It’s been a pretty quiet year for blogging, especially for physics blogging (unless you count that one really big blog post they call a dissertation).

    Therefore, New Year’s resolution #1: write more blog posts about interesting physics. This is one I actually think I can keep.

    For now, here is a short list of my favorites out of the 32 blog posts I wrote this year.

  10. 2014
    Dec
    16

    Adventures in China: The Christmas

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Guess where this is?

    This is the restaurant where I went to dinner last night. A fancy, yet very definitely Chinese restaurant. In China.

    News flash: Americans aren’t the only ones obsessed with Christmas.

    Okay, to be fair, nobody turns Christmas into an obsession quite like the United States. I think the frantic rush to start making preparations in September is a uniquely American tradition. But the celebration is catching on among the Chinese, especially young people, in a big way. From what I hear, a lot of Chinese are taking Christmas as an occasion to spend more time with their families. And businesses are capitalizing on the spirit by putting up holiday-themed decorations — lights, presents, and even decorated trees are everywhere.

    As I write this, I’ve been sitting in the Beijing airport for five hours listening to a loop of “Santa Baby,” “There’s No Place Like Home For The Holidays,” “Silver Bells,” “Jingle Bells,” and a rather Hawaiian-sounding rendition of “Let It Snow” (notable for the contrast with the complete lack of snow outside).

    I guess the lesson is, if you’re tired of the Christmas frenzy, you might be able to hide, but you can …