Time-out for cake

Sheeeeeeeeee . . . don't tell; I'm supposed to be writing my thesis.

But thesis-writing has the amazing ability to make one both quite hungry and suddenly full of inspiration for every other writing project one has ever contemplated. Ever. So allow me a little cake-writing before returning to my technical design reports.

I am not the baker of my family. Shocking, I know. But growing up I was never as eager to be attached to the oven as my little sister; the attachment to baking came later, when I had to start consistently feeding myself. 'Twas her who collected cookie recipes and could time every element of a meal to be done within minutes. I could . . . well, I could turn out a decent batch of brownies, but more ambitious projects tended to run into problems.

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.