It came!

When I arrived home this Saturday evening after a full day of grocery shopping, research at CERN, and French class, out of habit I checked my mail box. I check it about daily, for reasons I do not know. I receive mail at a significantly lower frequency than daily, that's for sure. But there is a bit of magic in opening the box and perhaps finding something for you that you did not expect.

I checked my mail box and found a box. A box that makes one wonder how the mailman managed to fit it through the slot of the mail box, as that strikes one of being of moderate size while this box was not. Well, the box had been slightly squished. But it had my name on it and was for me, so with childish glee I scampered up the stairs to my apartment to find a knife and open it.

My suspicions were that this was the book I ordered from Amazon. But I only placed that order ten days ago, and the website repeatedly promised delivery times to Europe on the order of three to five weeks. Besides, there was no lop-sided smile on the box.

But there was a lop-sided smile on me as I opened it and found my book, nestled amongst its plastic air cushions. A salute to Amazon for its marvelous service. I have gotten myself Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, and here it had flown to me in a mere ten days.

Because I am probably the only person in this corner of France, the land of amazing boulangeries, crazy enough to be making my own bread. Where shall I start? The challah? Oh, no, wait . . . the English muffins! But the pain a l'ancienne . . .

Chamonix and Mont Blanc

The people here love their mountains. When I was apartment-hunting shortly after arriving in Geneva, I quickly learned to expect a brief geography lesson when looking at a new place. From every window and balcony, I would be shown the Jura mountains to the west, or the Saleve to the east across Geneva. The east-facing views received the extra prominence of being toward the Alps. There, they would say, on a clear day you can see Mont Blanc.

Mont Blanc is the highest mountain peak in the Alps and the Western Europe. It is close to 5000 meters high, and is apparently a very popular destination for alpiners and others who like to clamber over mountains in the snow. For those of us less adventurous who simply want to admire the peak, there are simpler ways to visit.

I visited a couple weeks ago with some friends. We drove from Geneva to Chamonix, a little French town in a valley close to the base of the mountain. Once there, you can take two cable cars up to l'Aiguille du Midi, a peak about 1000 meters lower than Mont Blanc where a tower observatory has been built. It really makes you wonder how they got the heavy equipment up there to build it; it reminded me of a castle tower somehow perched precisely on the mountain peak, but with snow tunnels. From there you can take another little cable car to the Italian side, or another elevator up to the tip-top of the needle and the observation deck closest to the white mountain.

It was a beautiful day when I was there, clear and sunny. I could see down into the valley holding Chamonix and across layer after layer of rugged peaks that surround. The mountains all seem to be named with the French words for teeth or needles, and aptly named at that. I watched the alpiners heading out across the ridges of snow that just seemed too impossibly narrow to walk on in the Vallee Blanche. And there, rising proudly above all the rest with a pristine cap of snow, was Mont Blanc.

I grew up with mountains, and then went to grad school in a place that didn't have them. It is lovely to be back in a place that has and appreciates their mountains.

Construction and the Trams

Geneva has a wonderful system of public transportation, an army of buses, trams, and even a boat or two that canvas the city and its suburbs. From 5 a.m. until 2 a.m., public transportation is easily available, and there are night buses for the remaining hours when the normal routes shut down. Of all of these, the trams are undoubtedly the powerhouses of the fleet. With the carrying capacity of about six regular buses, air-conditioning, and their own set of roads and traffic lights, a ride on the tram is far more relaxing than bouncing around in the bus. With a punctuality instilled, no doubt, by generations of clock makers, the trams operate with error bars of approximately a minute on their schedules. I firmly believe that Geneva has been designed that the trams are the only timely or direct way of getting anywhere in the city.

Yesterday, however, the trams of Geneva let me down.

FAQ: Made any discoveries yet?

Particle physics seems to have a knack for producing dramatic headlines. The LHC will produce data on such questions as dark matter, how matter behaved the first fractions of a second after the big bang, the Higgs boson and electroweak symmetry breaking, the hierarchy problem, supersymmetry, and extra dimensions, with the possibility of stuff like micro black holes and strangelets thrown in for good measure. It will do it at the highest energy man has ever reached with sub-atomic particles, somewhere between 3.5 and 7 times the energy of the next closest accelerator, with four massive collision point detectors eagerly catching every little thing they can. This goes on round the clock, day in and day out, a constant string of tests and calibrations and collisions, and it has been since the end of March.

The perfectly logical next question is, made any discoveries yet? When will the experiments produce results about all these questions?

After much thought and many uncomfortable blank stares, I have finally come up with an analogy to answer this question.

A particle physics experiment is like being handed a die with 1 million sides. The only way to see what is on one of the sides is to throw the die. Each side of the die is labeled with one of maybe twenty-five symbols, some of which are thousands of times more common than others. Your task is to answer questions such as, which symbol is the most common, what is the ratio between the number of squares to the number of circles, is there one star somewhere on this die?

Finding the most common symbols wouldn't take too long, because they would show up frequently as you roll the die. To determine whether or not something is actually on the die, you need to make several million rolls. After the first million, you would only expect to see it once, so seeing it not at all is not terribly unlikely. Proving it isn't there would take a lot longer.

At CERN, all those interesting questions have much less than a one in a million chance of happening. So LHC has a great deal of dice-rolling to do.

American to French Baking

It is a fairly well accepted fact that I like to bake. While this hasn't always been true, enough evidence has amassed over the past three years or so to be tolerably convincing. So, when it was decided I would be living between the lands of really awesome chocolate and really awesome desserts, I was assured my baking would never be the same. Imagine what it will be like, they told me, baking with Swiss chocolate and French butter.

Well, they got part of it right--my baking is not the same.

Warning: serious baking geek-out session follows.

Long-distance with your adviser

I knew when I moved across the Atlantic Ocean that some adjustments would have to be made. I would need to adjust to a new language, to new foods, to new lay-outs of stores, to new working hours, to new customs. However, nobody warned me about the difficulties of having my adviser four thousand miles and six time-zones away.

I like working with my adviser. He has always been willing to answer my clueless questions, give me advice on the best way to get involved in things, and made sure he checked up on my progress regularly. When my office was down the hall from his, I would weekly receive either an unexpected visit or an email requesting that we have a talk. Actually, it is kind of refreshing to not have to worry about him suddenly commenting on something in my ear when I didn't realize he was behind me or getting an email saying that he wants me to come by his office as he wants to have a talk with me. I guess he has never figured out how ominous that sounds.

While here, I don't have to worry about these things. Also, since it's summer, my number of institute meetings has been cut back, so I don't have to make as many presentations to the professors from my university.