Something Dramatic to Prove It

I told ya I could bake:

Chocolate cake with chocolate ganache filling and chocolate buttercream icing and white chocolate circles. I loved how impressed everyone one was with the chocolate circles, as they were very easy to make. Unlike the ganache.

Chocolate cake with almond-coconut buttercream frosting and toasted almonds. I used coconut in the frosting in place of some of the powdered sugar, which tasted great even though it made for a rather not-smooth frosting job.

Chocolate cake alternating with layers of chocolate ganache, petit buerre cookies, and whipped cream, frosted with whipped cream and topped with crumbled cookies. Invariably when making cakes, something completely bombs, and in the case of this cake it was the whipped cream. Hence the sorry-looking frosting job--I could only handle so much hand-whipping before something was going to get damaged. It's too bad I don't have a picture of the cross-section of a piece; this cake cut into very clean slices, with the dark chocolate cake contrasting prettily with the cookies and whipped cream.

Now, having sufficiently soothed my baking pride, I just need to get all the dishes done and my jeans fitting again.

Paris!

Europe is small. It just seems that all the major cities of Europe are really close together. My home state is five times the area of Switzerland. Flying home for Christmas from grad school takes four hours; I think a four hour flight here would carry me across most of this continent. Europe just does not seem very big to me.

And that is a beautiful, beautiful thing, because even a grad student with little time or money can manage to visit a lot of famous places. I started by going to Paris.

Paris Highlights

EVO Meetings

One of the wonderful things about working at CERN is how international it is. Each of the experimental collaborations boasts members from dozens of countries, all working together for the expansion of human knowledge. I am one of two native-born US citizens sitting in my nook of an office area, which I share with nationalities from two other continents.

One of the not-so-wonderful things is, how do you hold meetings that people from forty-something countries want to be able to participate in?

CERN is no stranger to dealing with communication issues; the internet was invented here, after all. Virtually all the conference and meeting rooms here are set up with microphones and cameras so that the meeting can be broadcast online vdia EVO and all interested participants can use the program and an internet connection to connect, listen in, and express their opinions.

This includes those interested participants who feel no desire to stop working/ leave the comfort of their nooks/ walk a kilometer across CERN/ walk downstairs to wherever the meeting is physically happening.

Of course, if most of the participants are not going to appear at the meeting in person, why go to the trouble of scheduling a room and making anybody try to find the meeting at all? This thought is the genesis of the EVO meeting, or a meeting where all the participants call in and discuss business via headsets and laptops. Webcams are normally not used.

I admit that it is convenient to do things this way. However, it is weird to make a presentation in such meetings. I made my first EVO presentation this week, which means I sat in front of my computer in my nook, with a McDonald's-esque headset waving a microphone in front of me, talking to my computer screen. Everyone else had muted their microphones (it's a necessary politeness, and a much appreciated on to cut down on background noise), which meant I couldn't hear anything as I talked and would have no way of knowing if everyone else was still connected or if I really was talking to myself.

I was told my presentation went fine, and I will have to take their word for it. Because it sure felt like an odd presentation.

Anatomy of a (kitchen) disaster

Now I realize that I enjoy thinking in symbols and therefore allow natural coincidences to take on deep meanings. Still, sometimes I get the creepy feeling that the country of France is out to demonstrate just how not French I am.

For example, I was once again in need of using up some baking ingredients before they spoiled, and so opted to make a blueberry coffee cake, the recipe for which I had gotten online. This recipe was written by a resident of Paris, so I felt that I would be safe in using French ingredients in a French recipe. I couldn't find enough blueberries for the cake, so instead I opted to make up the difference with dark chocolate (I wanted to see if I liked the flavor combination). It was extremely dark, Lindt dessert chocolate, too--I was using good stuff. The batter was easy enough to mix up in my food processor and get into the pan and into the oven.
Now, the recipe clearly stated that I should use a 9 inch/22 cm cake pan, which I did. There was a note that a spring-form pan was preferred, which surprised me since the batter was kind of thin and I would have thought it would leak out the bottom. The pan was quite full, but I've made a cake or two from this website before and neither of them rose very much.

I must have been tired, because how I could expect a cake containing baking powder and baking soda, even weighed down by 500 g of blueberries and chocolate, not to rise, in hind-sight I do not know.
As you are undoubtedly foreseeing by now, about fifteen minutes into the baking I heard a sizzle and caught of whiff of something burning. Sure enough, batter was trickling over the sides of the pan. I hurriedly transferred the mess onto a cookie sheet and let it finish baking, thinking that even if the cake was completely ruined it's easier to throw away an entire burnt cake than an overflowing pan of half-burnt batter. Instead I ended up with an overflowing pan of crisped cake.

Lava-flow, by Physics Girl, in mixed media

(Banging head against counter)

I can bake. I promise I can bake. Even though now I get to scrub out the bottom of my oven before I can do so again, I Can Bake. I think I may have to do something dramatic to prove it, but I Can BAKE.

The Rose Queens

I love plants. I love how they are beautiful and green and alive-looking. I love how they depend on me and gently insist that I take care of at least them every morning (when the stars align to assign me fourteen hour days at CERN, the temptation to neglect my living space grows to proportions that would shock my mother). I love how when their basic needs are met, they flourish and repay me with all sorts of nice things, including strawberries and fresh herbs and flowers. But I think the miniature roses reign as queens of my little balcony garden.

I rescued my four miniature roses at the beginning of March. It was NOT spring yet, but the local grocery store had started carrying some spring plants, miniature roses among them. I was there picking up some pastries to celebrate having successfully found and taken possession of my apartment when I caught sight of the poor rose choking in a plastic collar and drying out in its little pot. Having had several miniature roses, I could not resist this one's plight. It joined my purchases and came home with me.

When I removed the double layers of plastic wrapping, I made two discoveries. First, that plastic wrapping really had been choking the plant; most of the leaves on the bottom two-thirds of the canes were in the process of falling off. Second, there were four plants in there, some so little that they had been completely scalped by the leaf attrition. Clearly, these plants would not be winning beauty contests any time soon.

Learning French

When I staggered off the plane the morning I arrived three months ago, my French vocabulary consisted of three words: "bonjour," "si vous plait," and "merci." "Au revoir" cannot be included because I couldn't actually say it; while I find the French 'r' sound quite fun to practice, it is not easy to use, and that word has two of them. I had known I would be moving to France/French Switzerland for several months before I actually did so, but taking a class in French did not work out, because of the combination of my university's rather crazy French department/graduate school course-taking policies and my unwillingness to haul myself across town to the community college. Hey, my car had been quietly declared about to die by the mechanics, and I had other things that needed my time. Like research.

Besides, working at CERN does not require foreign language abilities (programming languages excepted). All of the physicists working here know English to some degree. Virtually all of the secretaries, security guards, and other CERN staff do as well. In fact, the only places on CERN that insist in operating in French are the restaurants, and I'm pretty sure everyone there speaks English, too. They understand English questions and references; they will just insist on talking to you in French, first.

However, living in France without knowing French is a different story. While I've never met anyone particularly snotty about their language, everything is labeled in French. My bank statements are in French. The instructions on how to set up my internet router were in French. Announcements over the loud speakers in stores and on trams are in French. Everything at the grocery store is labeled in French. If nothing else, I needed to learn enough French to know what foods I was buying; there are some things for sale in French butcher shops I would not want to accidentally purchase. Besides, it is highly demoralizing to walk around a city feeling like you are deaf.

So learning French climbed my list of priorities with alacrity. I had brought a teach-yourself-French book with me, inherited another from an intern who I met here, and started attending some language classes hosted by my church. My vocabulary began to grow. It was about a month after my arrival when I had my first break-through. I was riding the tram into Geneva and staring out the window when I saw a McDonald's sign with the slogan "la bonne prix pour les bonne amis." I thought to myself, "hmm, that means the good price for the good friends." Then I skipped my way around town for the next two days because I had read a phrase.

Bienvenue!

By the end of World War II, Europe found itself low on physicists and laboratories. While the fields of quantum mechanics and particle physics were rapidly developing, Europe's stronghold in these sciences had been located in Germany. Many of those physicists had immigrated to the US or joined the German war effort and were arrested at the war's end. In an effort to revive physics in Europe, the remaining physicists pushed to create a European Council for Nuclear Research (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire), dubbed CERN. Eleven countries agreed to create the council, which selected a site outside of Geneva, Switzerland for its new laboratory. Following ratification of the CERN Convention in 1954 by the original 12 founding countries, the council was dissolved and the European Organization for Nuclear Research was born.


The acronym CERN was kept, though, probably because it was easier to say than OERN.


Now, over 50 years later, CERN is home to the world's largest and highest energy particle collider, several nuclear and particle physics experiments, and what has to be the largest collection of advanced physics degrees and would-be computer geeks on the planet Earth. Laboratories and universities in 63 countries contribute money, equipment, and manpower to its experiments in return for access to the data collected. Post-docs and graduate students from all over the world come to CERN to build and maintain equipment, take shifts in the control rooms, and analyze data for presentations, publications, and dissertations.

That's why I'm here. I'm a graduate student in high energy particle physics working in one of the experimental collaborations at CERN. After finishing my coursework, my adviser arranged for me to move to CERN to do the research for my dissertation in person. Here I am, analyzing data along with other students and post-docs from my university, and here I'll stay, until my adviser and I agree that I'll get more done back in the US.

Doing research at the largest physics lab in the world, on the door-step of a country famed for its chocolate? Completely awesome.


http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/about/History-en.html