CLEO COLLABORATION Quotes

Compiled by:

Stephen J. Richichi - (SJR) - - University of Oklahoma - High Energy Physics Group

CLEOns say the Strangest Things!


The following are some interesting statements spoken by
CLEO Collaborators and Guests:

I hope that you will find some of them amusing, as well.


DISCLAIMER:

"These statements are in NO WAY intended to insult or belittle the
author of the quote, or anyone else within or outside the Collaboration."

PLEASE READ THESE IN THE SPIRIT
WITH WHICH THEY ARE PRESENTED!


Last Update: Thu 03/25/99 10:36:30 EST



"PASS2 ain't nothing but a party!"
-Stefan Anderson
"BABAR or BELLE doesn't need to pay someone $100K to steal our secrets, they'll just hire our Post-Docs!"
-Dan Riley
"Optimism has no place in PASS2!"
-Tony Rubiera
"... luminosities in the 1x1032 range, which is only slightly above negligible!"
-Mark Palmer
"Whereas, since you are a Particle Physicist, hand-waving conveys an enormous amount of information!"
-Bruce Berger
"Cores were being dumped across the network, which I guess is a bad idea!"
-Stefan Anderson
"If you forget a blank line, which I did, you screw up in an inconceivable way!"
-David Kreinick
"We do not seem to need a tantulum nose on the end of [the] male part of the magic flange, and Jeff's eating of the mask has not caused any trouble."
- Dave Cinabro
"P2CHK isn't worth a Minivan, but you could get a good Used Car out of it!"
- Roy Briere
"I'm working on the CLEO-III On-Line System -- there won't be any kludges AT ALL!! ... {And you can quote me on that}!"
-Rich Baker
"You couldn't talk to the windows anymore, and that seemed to be a disadvantage!"
-David Kreinick
"If you can't count SQUARONS on your finger, it's time to get some help!"
- Brian Heltsley
"The number of files in CERNLIB has gone up by three orders of magnitude!"
-Karen Lingel
"It's clear that we don't know what's going on!"
-Ray Helmke
"For those of us doing Charm Physics, the Resonance itself is an annoying Background!"
-Don Fujino
"It no longer has some interesting features which the Old Sparsifier used to have!"
- David Asner
"Offhand I don't know what to make of this - which either means I shouldn't be in charge of the Tracking Group, or it's really arcane!"
- Roy Briere
"Experts never need documentation, so they never know when it's not there!"
-Jean Duboscq
"I realized after four times {crashing}, that there was, in fact, a pattern!"
-David Kreinick
"When you write code now, do you think in C++?!"
- Peter Gaidarev
"Do you still have a FORTRAN accent?!"
- Dave Crowcroft
"I went to the data and, Lo and Behold, {the distribution} came out, I was shocked!"
-Tony Hill
"Even though we've always run TRGR in MC, it's always done nothing!"
- Lawrence Gibbons
"CESR is surprised by this correlation, but since they've never looked at it before, they can't say if it's false!"
- Dave Cinabro
"Even the Average Shifter would probably notice that!"
-David Kreinick
"John {O'Neill} fixed the D* code so that it's actually doing something!"
- Roy Briere
"There didn't seem to be any small SQUARONS, only gigantic ones!"
- Brian Heltsley
"I didn't hear what you said, but I have nothing to add to it!"
-Dan Peterson
"I thought I had seen everything where PASS2 was concerned, but then again I'M NOT PROCESSING SVX DATA!"
-Steve Richichi
"When in doubt, Cycle the Power!"
-David Kreinick
"We'll be impressed, but not stunned, if that's the case {i.e., if cycling the power works}!"
-Ray Helmke
"The more you can blame on DUET, the better!"
-Mark Palmer
"PASS1 craps out On-Line for any number of reasons!"
-David Kreinick
"All of our D* plots depended on VCFIT in ancient and nasty ways!"
- Roy Briere
"If that goes belly up, your only warning will be the core dump!"
-David Kreinick
"You really can do nothing to prevent people from outsmarting themselves!"
-Steve Richichi
"This should be completely transparent to everybody!"
-Jesse Ernst
"It led to a full week of difficulty and confusion, but everything's under control now!"
-David Kreinick
"There's a new processor called DROP, whose business it is to Drop Other People's Banks!"
-Craig Prescott
"I can sit here and hope that it doesn't happen again, or I can take steps!"
-David Kreinick
"RESICD is like the Average Resolution, but not really the Average Resolution!"
-Andy Foland
"Once again, Dave {Cinabro}, the frightening fact is that you're on the cutting edge!"
- Roy Briere
"We found a Magic Number that we could change to make the SQUARONS go away!"
-Jean Duboscq
"It's simply not possible that the buffer is being over-written, but it's happening!"
-Rich Baker
"Fourteen nanoseconds is enough to screw things up, but not a lot!"
-David Kreinick
"You can't have an 'if' without a 'then'!"
-Steve Richichi
"DUET does funny things!"
-Craig Prescott
"I'm always nervous about re-linking LEVEL3!"
-David Kreinick
"Just in case it wasn't intrinsically anomalous, it's anomalous in a new way!"
- Roy Briere
"A thinking man will make the naive assumption that things are working correctly!"
-Bill Ross
"I couldn't do the CESR backup, because I couldn't get the cleaning light on!"
-Keith Brown, Batch Operator
"Never assume UNIX is logical!"
-Steve Richichi
"I know a lot of work's gone on, I just don't know what it is!"
- David Asner
"Exactly! They're even better than 'Not Horrifying'!"
- Pablo Hopman
"Don't they have lots of GOOD {FORTRAN} code to look at?!"
-Ed Thorndike
"Presumably, the geometry will show some bizarre anomaly that is completely inexplicable!"
- Roy Briere
"You don't want to have to perform the 'Inverse Kludge Transformation'!"
-Steve Richichi
"Might as well have it, at least at one point in time, consistent!"
- Brian Heltsley
"It's some strange variable, but I was told that it was well-understood!"
-Soeren Prell
"I had to comment out most of the warning messages to get finite log files!"
-Craig Prescott
"Both of these were interesting bugs, because I learned a little bit!"
-Stefan Anderson
"ZERO NEVER fluctuates up to 3!"
-Ed Thorndike
"The world is locally FLAT!"
-Bill Ross
"You want the code to be intelligent, because the users aren't!"
- Roy Briere
"I'm not blaming the CLEO Shifter, Who is an Idiot and I Know That!"
-David Kreinick
"It was binned on the resolution, not to make the plot look pretty!"
-Dan Bliss
"Maybe it doesn't quite fly to say twice as fast, but it makes me feel good!"
-Craig Prescott
"The non-final fit part has increased by a factor of 9!"
- Lawrence Gibbons
"Apparently it's a Canadian Holiday, ... IT'S FRIDAY!!"
-Roy Briere
"If you're trying to make a mess, you can use it all without looking at anything!"
-Dan Peterson
"An 'ACTION' is something you can make happen!"
-Mike Athanas
"I know, in principle, you can do anything in ROAR!"
-Ed Thorndike
"We're capable of running {everything} in DRIVER... The way GOD meant it!"
- MAP & CPP
"Any 'MISCELLANEOUS' ... Go Ahead, Dave!"
-Karen Lingel
"The DLT queues aren't that bad still!"
- Bill Brangan
"We BOOK 'EM, I don't know if we FILL 'EM!"
-David Kreinick
"There's a bunch of hard soft links in DLIB!"
- Lawrence Gibbons
"In principle, it's better to treat it as exactly ZERO rather than a measurement that fluctuates a little bit!"
-Mike Athanas
"My problem is, It may be 'User Stupidity'!"
- Karen Lingel
"The bugs aren't supposed to be there!"
-Ray Helmke
"The Bad News is the 'BAD CONSTRUCTION' is back!"
-David Kreinick
"Inclusion of a Bad Channel is a Good Thing!"
-Tony Hill
"ZERO is a special number, ... ZERO is guaranteed!"
-John Thaler
"You can almost believe that C++ isn't just lowercase FORTRAN!"
-Jesse Ernst
"I think everybody's constants are non-trivial -- but straightforward!"
- Karen Lingel
"Of course it's kludge-y and distasteful... I don't know why that stopped him!"
- DLK & RAB
"If the machine hangs: 1) Cycle Power, 2) Call the Expert!"
- On-Line Cappuccino Emergency Manual
"I assume it's one or two small errors away from Actually Working!"
- David Asner
"Do what you want, I'm here to make comments!"
- Lawrence Gibbons
"We could be in 3-bunch mode next week, it would be nice if we have software to deal with it!"
-David Kreinick
"Next time I'll have to have my surveys, 'Close-Captioned for the Humor-Impaired!'"
- Karen Lingel
"We found some rather Byzantine Coding in the geometry!"
- Roy Briere
"We don't like to refer to {the VD} as broken, it's 'Resolution-Impaired'!"
- Richard Kass
"The code is mostly there, it's doing mostly what it's supposed to do!"
- Dave Cinabro
"The code that generated this ntuple is old and ugly and I don't feel like changing it!"
- Abi Soffer
"When you get this settled down, are you going to write a CSN note and paste it to my forehead?!"
- Lawrence Gibbons
"Printer problems should get better in a few weeks!"
- Bill Brangan
"There weren't bugs in it, it was never intended to be that precise!"
- Pablo Hopman
"Everything isn't perfect, even SU(2) is broken!"
-Roy Briere
"We made a measurement and, Lo and Behold, it had errors on it!"
-Jim Smith
"The Sequencer Clock measures something that I am not quite qualified to describe!"
-Harry Nelson
"The 'Audio' is the one you hear!"
-Roy Briere
"I'm not going to be upset that they are different from layer to layer on the level of 3 microns!"
-Ed Thorndike
"Their goal is to make {DIFIX} non-trivial!"
-Ken Bloom
"I think the Kshort width is just going to come out right in RECOMPRESS MC!"
-Craig Prescott
"'Sparks Are Bad!' is our motto!"
- David Asner
"The crystal people got really peeved at me this week!"
-David Kreinick
"Nominally, the CPUs were the same price within epsilon!"
-Mark Palmer
"The Run Manager shouldn't bother running the experiment, he has more important things to do!"
-Ray Ng
"The files are big enough to indicate that they're coming out!"
-Mike Sivertz
"There's probably a million reasons why it wouldn't work, but it DID work!"
- Chris O'Grady
"Two easy options are: 'Well, it's good enough!' or 'It's better not to do anything'!"
-Roy Briere
"The distribution was symmetric, he just can't draw it!"
-Ken Bloom
"The errors are small compared to 50%!"
-Harry Nelson
"It turns out this is not useful, but I'll show it to you anyway!"
- Abi Soffer
"RULE #1: Nothing in Silicon is Easy!"
-Tony Hill
"In LEVEL3, anything can happen!"
-Ed Thorndike
"Even though it's wrong and completely unphysical, it should be equally bad for Monte Carlo and data!"
-Ritchie Patterson
"ONLVD now speaks the truth!"
-Rich Galik
"It seems to be the winter of eta's doing surprising things!"
-Lawrence Gibbons
"There are three bits set to tell you ... Bogus A, Bogus B, Bogus C!"
-Dan Peterson
"It looks Awful ... Is that a technical term?!"
-Bill Ross
"When no bells are ringing, everything's alright!"
-Richard Ehrlich
"I'm sure with more work, you could get it to disagree!"
-Roy Briere
"Now we only have edges at the edges!"
-Harry Nelson
"I don't know how much code I modified in the last week, but I got over 300 mail messages from myself!"
-Craig Prescott
"We can never get enough of that on-resonance data!"
-Bill Ross
"We never noticed it was not functioning because it was always working properly before!"
-David Kreinick
"Which agrees frighteningly well with what you get from hadronic events!"
-Dave Cinabro
"This is a feature of a feature in the code!"
- Harry Nelson
"When we released the trigger rate, 2/3 of it was coming from the barrel and 2/3 from the endcaps!"
-Mike Sivertz
"Are the bumps you have that she doesn't have bigger or smaller than the bumps she has that you don't have?!"
-Ron Poling
"I suppose I could fix the CLEOG code to bend things!"
-Lawrence Gibbons
"One of the things was so ridiculous, we had to hope it was a bug!"
-Harry Nelson
"The issue of what some of these internal ones are is an open question!"
-Mark Palmer
"If Andy were sitting around drooling in his office, we'd probably put him on this!"
-Roy Briere
"Some claim was made about DUET --- that's where I woke up!"
-Dan Peterson
"I had to come in and wiggle cables until the SCALs started working again!"
- Chris O'Grady
"The list is getting reasonable!"
-Craig Prescott
"{Regarding CLEO II.V PASS2,} 'Steve' is a concept!"
-Ron Poling
"After all, the b-quark mass is not exactly zero!"
-Hans Kuhn
"I'm happy to not do anything!"
-Dave Cinabro
"Evil faeries have taken over the crystals!"
-Jean Duboscq
"We just need to paint this as a feature, not a bug!"
-Dick Talman
"This looked interesting, so I made transparencies!"
-Craig Prescott
"So we got bhabhas shining up our crack!"
-Harry Nelson
"It failed a different way this time, which is encouraging!"
-Bill Ross
"Tony's our source of noise!"
-Mark Palmer
"I looked at the Small Cal code, and it's actually doing something!
-Horst Severini
"Actually, I have this exactly labelled wrong!"
-Ken McLean
"The short answer is 'It's historical';The long answer is 'It's historical stupidity'!"
-Roy Briere
"There are certain unevennesses that we cannot eliminate!"
- Ron Poling
"I don't want to teach DATLOG about Silicon!"
-David Kreinick
"I can easily reproduce an unreadable tape!"
-Steve Richichi
"There's good reason not to merge them; this thing seems to be working!"
-Ed Thorndike
"No one can assume that they'll be able to get anything done on Wednesday!"
-Mark Palmer
"They're stable, except that they're not!"
-Richard Ehrlich
"Since the shields weren't cycled this week, they've operated flawlessly!"
-Curt Ward
"The data looks exactly the same {as Monte Carlo}, almost!"
-Jon Urheim
"I'm going to have to go off-line and think about this!"
-David Kreinick
"You're taking on responsibility here, you should be careful about that!"
- Ron Poling
"Accelerators are funny things!"
-Dave Cinabro
"We re-kludged the kludge to run faster!"
- Chris O'Grady
"At least it's bad symmetrically in Z now!"
-Ken McLean
"What good is beam without luminosity!"
- Karl Berkelman
"Selden is 'izing' them right now!"
- Ray Helmke
"If it's not picked up by LEVEL3, its in the process of crashing!"
-David Kreinick
"Of the things I assumed that were wrong, the one you mentioned is the least serious!"
-Dick Talman
"Sometime's when we cruise along, it's because we've made no progress!"
-Ed Thorndike
"SVTAGR must be doing something so horrible that no logic can comprehend it!"
- Vivek Sharma
"It's not a surprise that bad silicon data hurts you!"
- David Asner
"If you give KALMAN a Gaussian thing, it will give you back a Gaussian thing!"
-Craig Prescott
"It's not exactly right, but it's something like correct!"
-Dick Talman
"Why don't we talk about it off-line!"
-Bill Ross
"When you require it to be flat across there, it's flat across there!"
-Ed Thorndike
"I get lots more errors before I get to that point!"
-Karen Lingel
"They've never been correlated with anything that's been remotely understood!"
- Brian Heltsley
"I AGREE with Harris!!!"
-Sheldon Stone
"The crystals couldn't BE any happier!"
-Jean Duboscq
"There were just lots of signs that things went crazy!"
-Mark Palmer
"When you do become concerned, STOP!"
- Dan Peterson
"You can get this {reduction} if you just turn off a quarter of the detector!"
-Tony Hill
"Ken made me start doing these plots, so I'm gonna show them all to you!"
-Rene' Janicek
"One has to assume that the person who's running has some idea what he's running on!"
-Ed Thorndike
"Nothing's dissuaded us from thinking that things will get better!"
-Harry Nelson
"If I keep iterating, I'll go off the end of the FORTRAN precision!"
-Roy Briere
"The universe isn't perfect!"
-Dave Cinabro
"If I make a mu-pair miss distance plot I can see it's mis-aligned, I don't need anyone to tell me!"
-Colin Jessop
"The new old memory is here!"
-Rich Galik
"He did claim it was relatively fish!"
-Roy Briere
"Aside from the machine being turned off, it's perfect for this!"
-David Kreinick
"They were within errors of being symmetric!"
- Brian Heltsley
"I can't remember the symptoms of the bad gas!"
- Ed Thorndike
"Time-of-Flight always looks good, except when it's broken!"
- Paula Pomianowski
"We never run out of stupid things to do!"
- Dan Peterson
"These are still the PROMs that don't work!"
- Mike Sivertz
"To keep people from editing this code, we can take all the computers out of the lab and cut off everyone's hands!"
-Roy Briere
"Don't run Netscape when your /home disks are unavailable!"
- Selden Ball
"The beam energy may be consistently off in some unknown digit somewhere!"
-David Kreinick
"I've been fixing it by hand, which may not be the smartest thing to do!"
-Craig Prescott
"I would think that the thing to do would be to saturate the CPU, rather than to saturate Rene'!"
-Karen Lingel
"One of the programs I'm responsible for was getting into a semi-infinite loop!"
- Brian Heltsley
"Steve's dreaming of the day of achieving normalcy!"
- Ron Poling
"I've been in this field long enough to be equally as uncomfortable as you!"
- Roy Briere
"We'd like to build DR3 without any shorted bushings!"
- Dan Peterson
"If Bill Gates were GOD, I wouldn't want to live on Earth-1.0 !"
-Jesse Ernst
"I don't know what these constants are, I'm just happy to be able to produce them!"
-Horst Severini
"Once it's all over, it'll all run smoothly!"
-Steve Richichi
"There are other problems at the moment on-line in that nothing works!"
-David Kreinick
"What we have in our source code is not what runs!"
-Craig Prescott
"The coil was ramped up next Wednesday!"
-Bill Ross
"You may like the new PAW better, it has different problems!"
-Karen Lingel
"We always find new physics in decay.dec!"
-Peter Kim
"The Internet is the CB Radio of the 1990's!"
-Steve Richichi
"We're aware of the problem to the point of denial!"
- Roy Briere
"When I say forward, I mean backward too!"
-Persis Drell
"This disk fails in a fairly reliable way on a regular basis!"
-Joe Schmidt
"CP Violation in nature is probably somebody else's typo!"
-Peter Kim
"We're running with uncertified gas in the VD!"
- Rainer Wanke
"The code ALREADY doesn't work, and you want to edit it?!"
- Roy Briere
"JAMEXes are persnickety!"
-Harry Nelson
"Give me a big enough script and I can analyze the world!"
-Steve Richichi, apologies to Archimedes
"There's an awful lot of things you can do, so I've done them!"
-John Yelton
"I may not have gotten it right, but I got close!"
-Persis Drell
"It's some measure of something!"
-Kay Kinoshita
"Andy Foland is Kalmanizing it!"
-Dave Cinabro
"This is all fool-proof, there's no way to lose any data!"
-David Kreinick
"It's hard to believe that it's all just a bunch of 1's and 0's!"
-Steve Richichi
"This will work, I've tested it!"
- Craig Prescott
"If there's a big jump in RESIDR, that's exciting!"
- Dan Peterson
"I look for them first, and then I get rid of them [that's how I kill background events]!"
-Tim Nelson
"I've been blowing away old and mutant versions of CERNLIB!"
-Karen Lingel
"This error message is left over from prehistoric times!"
- Chris O'Grady
"Life is so much more interesting if you get a different set of tracks each time you analyze the data!"
-Ron Poling
"This fix will keep it working without crushing other parts of code!"
-Dave Cinabro
"There aren't any known changes that we don't know about!"
- Roy Briere
"I don't understand it, but I fit it!"
- Rainer Wanke
"What I {would} have to do is boost every 4-vector on the planet!"
- Lawrence Gibbons
"My plan was to stop the bleeding of DLIB!"
- Craig Prescott
"Obviously we're not insulated from pain!"
- Ron Poling
"It's an incredibly silly reason to be losing 20% of anything!"
- Brian Heltsley
"There are lots of bug fixes that I hope I've gotten out!"
- Don Coppage
"I bet I could write a Vertex Finder that takes a good device and gives it a bad resolution!"
- Ed Thorndike
"I now have the VD mis-cabled properly in CLEOG!"
- Lawrence Gibbons
"... in a B decay, where everything goes all over the planet!"
- J. Kandaswamy
"The results so far are not demonstrably inferior to the tests done previously!"
- Ron Poling
"He thought that {being ready by} the end of the week wasn't necessarily crazy!"
- Roy Briere
"It's not a bug, it's a FEATURE!"
- Origin Unknown
"LNSON1 is off in space somewhere!"
-David Kreinick
"By the end of the summer, we should be knee-deep in the RECOMPRESS!"
- Simon Patton
"If there isn't a line of stars above it, it's probably not important!"
- Abi Soffer
"It looked like uniform weirdness!"
- Peter Gaidarev
"It's probably correct for the wrong reason!"
- Frank Wuerthwein
"It's about as hard to screw up as anything we do!"
- Ray Helmke
"xDUET now crashes with grim regularity!"
-Ken Bloom
"It could be precisely inaccurate!"
- Bijan Nemati
"Nature is NOT Gaussian!"
- Steve Richichi
"Don't stick your head in the beam!"
- Bill Ross on orange-key access
"It's highly non-trivial!"
- Bijan Nemati
"I brought the standard 'YO MAMA' display up!"
- Dan Peterson
"Today's physics analysis event is tomorrow's background!"
- Pat Skubic
"There's nothing on the outside in my mind that will solve the problem!"
- J. Kandaswamy
"If we don't touch the DAQ system, it usually keeps working!"
- Chris O'Grady
"The errors aren't small enough to be interesting!"
- Rob Kutschke
"UNIX is standard everywhere, except where it isn't!"
- Paul F. Kunz,SLAC
"Which is hard for human, but easy for 'MAKE'!"
- Paul F. Kunz,SLAC
"This isn't just a drawing, it's reality now!"
- J. Kandaswamy
"We're on salary whether we do our jobs very well or not!"
- Ray Helmke
"We expect about 2 events, but the background's sorta small!"
- Karen Lingel
"You sit down, hit 'CTRL-C' a couple of times, and it's already 3:00 PM!"
- Bill Ross
"There's tons of strange particles all over the place!"
- Bijan Nemati
"It's events per unit software!"
- Ken Bloom
"Roy found his memory leak!"
- Selden Ball
"Global Data is a BAD thing!"
- Chris O'Grady
"It's not immediately obvious!"
- Bill Ross
"Don't fill your disk drives before they're bought!"
-Steve Richichi

Please contact me if you have a noteworthy quote to add to this page.


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This Page Maintained by
Stephen Richichi / Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory / sjr@mail.lns.cornell.edu