And today at CERN . . .

. . . absolutely no work got done. Instead, everyone flooded the main auditorium early in the morning. It was full by 11:30 a.m. There were people sitting in the aisles. No one could connect to the internet because the wireless routers were flooded. Security prevented anyone else from entering after noon if they hadn't already found a seat.

The reason for the fuss was at 2:00 p.m., when the spokespeople for ATLAS and CMS (in that order) presented the status of their Higgs boson searches with the jaw-dropping amount of data they each collected this year. Details can be found here: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/

Details can probably also be found on innumerable news and science websites. But I would suggest starting with what CERN had to say on the matter. After all, since scientists at CERN are studying the particle, shouldn't they know best what they've found out?

Change is in the Air

picture from science.nature.nps.gov

Today, the LHC ended the last of its heavy ions runs. Data-taking for 2011 is over, with over 5 inverse femtobarns of data delivered to each of the multipurpose experiments. The technical shut-down has begun.

CERN won't shut down of course, not for a while yet. Analyzing all that data is going at a fever-pitch, and with the end of beams in the accelerator tunnel the accelerator and experiments will be swarmed by engineers and technicians making repairs. But things are changing.

My little corner of this great enterprise is changing, too. As I'm planning on graduating next summer, my time at CERN now has an end date. I will return to the US early next year.

Boy oh boy, do I have a lot to get done.

Chateau de Chillon

No, Romania did not satisfy my craving for castles.

Chateau de Chillon, near Montreux and on the far side of Lac Leman from Geneva, was touted to me as Switzerland's best castle. It's built on a little island just off the lake shore, and it is a honestly, truly, wouldn't be out of place in a fairy tale medieval style castle.

It still took me almost twenty months of living in Switzerland to go visit. My bad. But a couple weeks ago I had a friend visiting and the desire to be a silly tourist, and so hopping on the train and chatting two-thirds of the way around the lake sounded like a lovely way to spend the day. It helped that it was a totally gorgeous fall day. Switzerland is a beautiful country.

Seg-Fault

Sunday evening I baked a batch of cookies. They were pretty good; I ate a few. I brought the remaining two dozen to CERN with me Monday morning, and perched the box on the edge of desk. I work in what is essential a cubicle sans walls, so this box of cookies should have been visible to everyone walking past in the hallway. I even put a handy sign by the cookies to indicate that people could take one.

Yet, Tuesday evening I took the above picture.

Does this surprise anyone else? Untouched cookies? In a very large building populated by physicists? Physicists known for demolishing free food at every opportunity? Seriously, some conferences post guards around the buffet table to make sure we don't "sample" it out of existence before the meal is supposed to start.

Freaky Pharmacy

pictures from www.frenchgardening.com

So Halloween has come and gone, and I didn't exactly get to celebrate it as I had intended. France and Switzerland are aware of Halloween; the stores carry some cheap costumes and make-up and fake spider webs, and I even saw pumpkin carving kits in one. But they don't really seem to get it. Christmas cookies are already on sale. Certainly they don't understand pumpkins. They call all squash pumpkins, which I am staunchly opposed to. Butternut squash are wonderful in their own right, but I'd rather stick with lovely sugar pumpkins for making cookies and pies, thank you very much.

But I didn't get to celebrate Halloween and try to educate those around me into the wonders of pumpkin baked goods, because I wasn't feeling well. Instead, my Halloween was devoted to a terror of an entirely different kind: dealing with French pharmacies.

ESHEP and Romania

Particle physics is a very, very international field. If you don't consider travel a perk, you will have struggles with this field. CERN's experiments involve physicists from hundreds of countries. So, when it comes time to have a conference or school or something, it isn't too difficult to find a colleague from a very interesting place to host said conference or school. Our conferences can turn up in some cool places to visit.

Oh, and in Paris, because judging from the posters around CERN, Paris hosts a disproportionate number of conferences. But who's complaining about that? To share my current favorite quote about the city of lights, "Paris is always a good idea" (Audrey Hepburn).

CERN also hosts schools for students throughout the year, some based at CERN and some that migrate around a bit. I had the awesome opportunity to be part of the European School of High Energy Physics this year, held in Romania. So I with many other CERN physicists flew out to Romania in September for two weeks of physics lectures, mountains, castles, potatoes, and limited internet access. It was awesome. We were at a resort in the Carpathian mountains in Transylvania. I could see why vampire legends would flourish here The country was wrinkled with little valleys and crevices that you could miss walking over some plateau you thought was the lowest land. It would be easy to miss something there.

Berlin

After France, Germany was second on my list of European countries I wanted to visit. I had intended to check that off last fall, but for various reasons my travel plans had to change. The first time I made it Germany was shortly before New Year's, when a certain large storm rearranged all travel plans in the northeastern United States and after more than eight hours of nail-biting in the airport and another eight hours of sleep deprivation on the plane, I made it back to Europe by way of the Frankfurt airport instead of going straight to Geneva.

I was in no mood to appreciate any part of Germany that day, and declared that the Frankfurt airport could not be representative of the country. My introduction to Germany must be better than that.

That better introduction was completed by way of Berlin this past August. This is why I needed to get my hair cut.

Ah, Bravery . . . and hair

Living in a country where everyone else speaks French and I don't has made me reevaluate what bravery is. I currently have a new contender for bravest thing attempted in France: I got my hair cut.

I find it hard enough to communicate with a hair stylist about what I want done with my hair when we both speak the same language, so attempting that communication in French was intimidating. This is why I had put off getting my hair cut for about . . . oh . . . eight months.

What's a femtobarn?

In case you didn't know, sometimes physicists use some . . . rather odd units. Particle physics can be really odd that way, where we even go so far as to say that the constants h-bar and c equal one, let normal units like meters and kilograms get rearranged accordingly, and therefore mass, momentum, and energy can all be described by the same units. From such lines of thought, we get the unit the barn. Unlike the slug, the outhouse, and the shed, the barn is a common unit despite its name.

Yes, those are real units.

Easter: The Ugly

Contrary to popular belief, most of my cakes don't go according to plan. It is not uncommon for them to dramatically not go according to plan. In fact, from my success rate I don't know how the belief that my cake escapades normally go according to plan got accepted as a popular belief. It could only be held by those who have never, ever, ever joined me in my kitchen while I bake. Nothing goes according to plan. This is why I would never attempt a wedding cake without some serious training first.

Instead, I remain evasive about my plans beforehand and get creative about salvaging things that go wrong. So when my intended cake roll refused to roll nicely, I attempted a layer cake instead. Less fancy, but still decent and tasty, right?

Easter: The Bad

Yea, so this post is late. I spent the month of May working a lot. I do that sometimes. And then I left CERN for a week to do (almost) nothing physics-related for a week. It was awesome.

I could also argue that this baking episode kind of, sort of deserves to be forgotten, and I can't even find the picture I wanted to top this post with. But I will shoulder on anyway. Despite the insanity, I still found a little time to cook.

Way back in Easter-time, I decided I wanted to make myself a special cake. I had the year previously bought a nid de Pacques and quite enjoyed it, and I wanted to make something a little fancier. My intention was to make a small jelly roll cake, and then decorate sections with chocolate frosting and candy to look like eggs. The cake was to be a genoise sponge, and the frosting was to be chocolate ganache.

It's May!

Ah, the first day of May. Apparently, it's a holiday around here, too, though a less formal one than perhaps Easter. Since it fell on a Sunday this year, it seemed to be marked only by people selling little posies of spring flowers.

I approve of this holiday. Of course, I am particularly fond of the month of May. It was also a beautiful Sunday today, and the roses bushes around CERN have started blooming, and I finally got my balcony garden assembled, so celebrating spring has my vote.

Easter: The Good

Happy Easter, everyone!

Easter is pretty big holiday around here. Most businesses and banks take both Friday and Monday off, making it a four-day weekend. Even CERN closes for the holiday, though by "closes" I mean that the restaurants and post office and UBS branch and bureaucratic stuff is all shut down and no official meetings are held. The experiments still run, and they took a huge amount of data over the weekend.

I worked--that's part of being a grad student, after all. But it was Easter, and so I also indulged in a few treats. For myself, I got the classic Lindt chocolate Easter bunny shown above. For everyone else, I baked.

Some of it even turned out.

J'aime la France , mais . . .

images from www.harvestwizard.com

I love France.

One day I hope to learn how to live there.

Invariably when living in a foreign country, things fail to work as I would expect. For me, this seems to happen with a depressing frequency in buying produce. I mean from the grocery store, not from a farmers' market. I can handle buying bread or pastries, even fish from the poissonerie, but somehow I have had a depressing amount of trouble figuring out how to buy things like fresh apples.

For comparison's sake, first remind yourself how produce-buying works in the US. You find a plastic bag provided by the store, and fill it with the desired amount of fruits or vegetables of one kind. You then take that bag with you to the register, where the cashier weighs the produce and calculates the cost. In France, the first part of this process, selecting and bagging your produce, works exactly the same. Here, however, customers must find the scales located somewhere in the produce section and weigh their bunches of bananas and bags of tomatoes themselves, by selecting the correct pictogram from the list. A little sticker is printed out to adhere to the bag with the final price.

Well, except for things that aren't sold by weight, anyway. Bundles or things sold by number don't need to be weighed.

Spring and 7 TeV Protons

CMS Experiment © 2011 CERN

This time last year, there were a lot of going's on at CERN. After the collider's first low energy collisions and an accident that took the machine offline for a year and a half of technical work, the Large Hadron Collider delivered its first 7 TeV collisions on the morning of March 30, 2010. I was standing in the atrium of my building, watching video being streamed from the different controls while reporters with big cameras ran around watching all the physicists. The LHC status page was prominently displayed, as we all prayed nothing would cause the machine to dump beam yet again.

Then all the flags went green for stable beams, and the first event displays of high energy collisions appeared. A new energy regime had been opened, something that only happens every twenty years or so in my field. For weeks afterward, we passed around pictures of events like proud new parents.

Spring and the end of March have come again. The primroses have popped up in every lawn while pale pink blossoms open on the trees. Tulips are starting to put in an appearance and birds can be heard squawking at 4 a.m., and collisions have resumed after the winter hiatus at CERN. There was much, much less fanfare this time. There is also now much more data.

ATLAS Experiment © 2011 CERN

Me and My Compiler . . .

Research tends to portion tasks in phases. Sometimes, the week's tasks will involve making many, many, many slides. Sometimes one may find one's self reading papers until one's brain hurts. And sometime, the need arises for new code. Perhaps the old code isn't adequate for how the project has evolved. Perhaps you went on vacation for a week and cannot remember what in the world your code was doing any more. Perhaps you started a new project, and thought to yourself, hey, I can use all the clever ideas I've been collecting to improve my analysis!

Whatever the reason, you settle down for some quality time with your compiler. If, like me, you don't code every single day and tend to forget the nuances, allow me to share a few hints my compiler taught me.

My compiler does not throw an error when someone forgets to put the return statement in the function. It throws a warning, but otherwise compiles everything just fine. This is a bit of a problem if that function returns a pointer you actually want to use (unless of course causing a seg-fault is what you wanted to do . . .). So don't forget the return statement.

Templated functions can save you a lot of coding on repetitive tasks. But templated functions should not be included with the rest of your source code. They need to be in the header file or in a special file of their own. Your compiler will compile the functions with the source code just fine, and then have no idea what function you're trying to call when you actually run your code. Since ROOT errors messages are about as useful as an elephant in ballet class, figuring out why your function has gone missing can take some puzzling, particularly if you've been at your desk for more than ten hours.

Happy Birthday, Einstein

I find March a very interesting month. It is the tail end of winter, so it is still cold and frosty. But spring is also coming, so there is more sunlight and flowers start to pop up and the birds get very, very noisy arguing about whatever it is birds argue about in the wee hours of the morning. It doesn't really have any official holidays unless perhaps Easter falls during the month, so for the duration of my college career the entire month of March is a marathon of projects and tests that doesn't let up until you crash into finals in April.

This year is not exception, though tests aren't to blame this time around. Now it's shifts and a paper for my professor.

It's too bad, because I would like to celebrate the first flowers and actually make myself a cake for once. Besides, March 14 is Pi day (March 14 = 3/14 = 3.14 . . .) and Einstein's birthday, so every physicist should have a chance to celebrate.

Kasekuchen

Baking projects tend to come in twos for me. The first project is to produce a birthday cake or scones for breakfast or candies and petit fours for a certain red dominated holiday in the recent past, the project that was planned out and ingredients purchased for and a final home pre-determined. The second project is then found to be necessary to use up the leftover cream or spare egg whites or spare egg yolks or abundance of butter that take up residence in the fridge and threaten to invite their fungal friends to visit if allowed to grow bored. These second projects have the benefit of requiring a fair amount of creativity to use up what random and perhaps mismatched ingredients were left by the first project, and they also give me a fun chance to test the type of recipes I might never otherwise make.

And, if the experimental second project bombs and lands in the garbage, I haven't really lost anything compared to throwing the offending ingredients away directly.

Anyway, there was in the recent past a holiday devoted to chocolate, and so I opted to celebrate one of my favorite ingredients and the birthdays of a few friends by making a tray of goodies. I make chocolate-covered candies and petit fours iced with mousse. It was all quite good and eaten quite quickly. But the mousse had required heavy cream, and after my previous sad experiences trying to get French cream to whip properly, I had bought rather too much. Downsizing the butter and egg populations in my fridge didn't look like such a bad idea, either.

You Know You're In Switzerland When . . .

Yup, that would be a weight-loss cereal with flakes covered in dark chocolate. The caption on the bottom translate to something like "our program for your weight." There is another version with a higher proportion to chocolate-covered flakes to not-chocolate-covered ones, and a milk chocolate one as well.

Truth be told, I compared calories per serving, and this version doesn't do worse than the honey and almond or fruit and nut versions it was sitting next to.

A Year After Arrival

On February 4 2010, I arrived to a gray, cold morning at the Geneva airport to start my residence in Europe while working at CERN. I spent the next month hunting for a decent apartment. Finding housing in Geneva is a pain for everyone right now, with how expensive the city is and stiff competition for any and all housing. Luckily for me, CERN isn't in Geneva, and it is much more practical to live just across the border into France.

I wasn't looking for a particularly nice or fancy apartment. I really only had one criteria: I wanted one with an oven. It turns out that that can actually be a fairly specific request around here. In the realm of tiny single bedroom or studio apartments, a stove-top is considered necessary for a kitchen, not an oven.

A Year After Departure

On February 3 2010, one year ago today, I boarded an airplane bound for Geneva, Switzerland with only a one-way ticket in hand. I have now spent a year living outside my native country. When I left, everyone called it an adventure, this experience I was about to have, and they were right. It has been an adventure, as long as one keeps in mind that often the heroes of adventures spend a lot of time tired and confused and working like mad.

So as I sit in my cozy apartment and reflect on what I've learned in the last year, I thought I would record a few of the lessons I've learned on living in on the Franco-Swiss border.

0. French survival phrases
S'il vous plait = please
Merci = thank you
Je ne parle pas francais. = I don't speak French.
Parlez-vous anglais? = Do you speak English?

1. Dress up for any and all business dealings with other people.
It is hard enough to ask for help in a foreign country, where you know you are about to slaughter someone's native language and probably need to ask for someone who speaks yours. Holey jeans and worn out shoes make it much harder to stand your ground, make your request, and not feel like an idiot. So dress up. The confidence boost is well worth the extra time it takes, and you will probably be taken more seriously, too.

2. Be agreeable, but don't always agree.
I believe it is the natural tendency for Americans to agree rapidly when we want to avoid a possible confrontation and make whoever is trying to speak to us go away. The desire to quickly kill conversation only grows when it is happening in languages and accents one doesn't comprehend well. I would recommend fighting the inclination to automatically agree unless you are positive you know what the person is talking about. So smile, be pleasant, and say no. He's probably just trying to get your phone number, anyway.

Along those same lines, sometimes playing dumb and a strong American accent work wonders at ending conversations. So does not having a phone number at all.

3. On opening doors
The two most useful verbs in the French language are not "etre" or "avoir" or anything like that. They are "pousser" and "tirer." Pousser means to push, and tirer means to pull. Since roughly half of the doors around here open the opposite way of what an American seems to expect them to do, you can spare yourself some embarrassment by scanning the door for forms of these words. If it says pousser or poussez, push; tirer or tirez, trying pulling. It will make your entrances and exits a little easier and more graceful.

That being said, it is still preferable to try both pushing and pulling just to be sure that a door is really locked, to tugging at the thing for five minutes in the cold and giving up only to have someone walk past you and push it open without a hitch.

Tour of Emotions

Vexation: Spending two days staring at a maze of code packed with classes and structs you've never heard of before, full of vectors in two different coordinate systems, one of which you cannot find a definition of, in an attempt to track down a sign error. Your desk is slowly buried under scratch papers marked with arrows projections, and possible coordinate axes.

Elation: Finding yourself staring at a sketch that makes the error obvious. You found the problem! And you didn't make the mistake!

Frustration: Being unable to find a fellow grad student or post-doc or supervisor on this project ( you'd really prefer the grad student or post-doc) with whom you can check your brilliant conclusion to make sure it really is brilliant.

Trepidation: Realizing that fixing that error may well require informing one of the best muon experts you know that the code he wrote five years ago is wrong.

Image taken from www.forumgarden.com.

A Word of Advice on Phones

When buying a phone in Europe, one requires two pieces of technology. The first is a phone of the type that most US citizens are already familiar with; the second is a SIM card, or a small microchip-like object that comes attached to a plastic card roughly the size of a credit card. The SIM card must be placed inside the phone in a special receptacle near the battery, and I believe enables the phone to work across country borders. This ability is of course necessary around Geneva, with country borders a scant handful of kilometers away.

First, one's new phone will also come out of the box fluent in the native language of the country, regardless of what language the original box or contract or owner's manual is in. For Switzerland, that would be German. Looking up the words for "settings" and "language" in whatever that native language may be will ease that first meeting with one's new phone, until one and the device are on speaking terms.

One should also observe that the little plastic card the SIM card was attached to is marked with several cryptic numbers, and is the case with all such scraps with cryptic numbers, should be guarded zealously. Otherwise, when one returns to the US for Christmas and must shut down the phone for the flight, one will find that one's phone is demanding a PIN number that one doesn't have. Upon failing to accurately recall the PIN three times, the phone will then demand a PUK number to reset the PIN, giving one a total of eight tries for that before some more extreme measures will be taken. Thus, one will be rendered without a phone for three weeks after returning to one's current abode, while one methodically gathers up every scrap of paper that as squirreled itself away into every corner of one's tiny apartment in the process of looking for that little plastic card.

Image taken from www.technonix.com

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

I know, I'm a little late. But I've been busy. I had to make my way past the storm that closed the Northeast's airports to get back, before dashing across the country. I spent New Year's Eve at a huge dance on the outskirts of Paris, and some time on January 1 wandering along the brilliantly lit Champs Elysees. Notre Dame was lovely.

And then I went back to CERN and back to work. It's amazing how much one forgets after taking a couple weeks to not think about one's code. One wonders how it ever worked in the first place.