Chocolate Cake Tour

 

I think chocolate cake is one of the most perfect desserts.  This means I have collected several chocolate cake recipes, each suited for a different use.  At the easiest end of the spectrum there is the wacky chocolate cake recipe.  No butter, no eggs (making it an option for those who don’t eat those things), very easy to mix up with small people as assistants, and it turns out with the texture of a boxed cake mix but much better flavor.

Mon Bijoux

Once upon a time, I thought that using electrically powered appliances for baking was for wimps.  If our ancestors for ages untold had managed to churn out meal after meal with wooden spoons, whisks, and will power, I could do so as well.  I was a teenager, my mom did most of the cooking and my sister did most of the baking, and my favorite thing to make was a batch of brownies with melted butter.  A wooden spoon or spatula worked just fine, and I didn't have to worry about dangling the cord into anything sticky.  Furthermore, a lot of doughs, either for bread or cookies, were stiff enough that most hand-held mixers (the only kind of mixer I knew of ) couldn't handle them anyway.

Jokes about Units

One of the “joys” of moving from the US to just about any other country is the need to get used to SI, or metric, units.  Food is sold by grams, kilograms, and liters; street signs are marked in kilometers and kilometers per hour.  An attendant joy is that periodically, someone will mock the fact that the US still uses the old English units to your face.  As an American physicist, I have lived and worked with both, and also as a physicist, I can be annoyingly focused on the use of units past the attention span of those cracking the original joke.  So let’s discuss the metric system, shall we?

The metric system was introduced in 1799 in France an attempt to move beyond older and regional systems of units to something more logical and universal.  Today, the metric system has been replaced by le Système international d'unités, often abbreviated SI units.  The idea was to have units that related to each other in a logical way, that could be derived from a set of basic units, and (a bit more modern priority) that could be derived from natural phenomena.  The original basic metric units were the meter (m), the second (s), and the kilogram (kg); the SI system currently has seven fundamental units, adding the Kelvin, the candela, the mole, and the ampere to the original three.  All other units within the system can be derived from simple combinations of this basic group.  For example, the unit for force, the Newton, is defined as the force needed to accelerate 1 kg of material to a speed of 1 m/s in 1 s. 

So . . . where are you?

Through my time at graduate school, I was asked frequently what I wanted to do with my PhD in experimental high energy particle physics.  Personally, I opted to continue doing what I had been doing to take advantage of the amazing stuff happening at CERN now and in the upcoming few years.  So I went hunting for a post-doc position, and I was fortunate enough to find one that offered me a lot of opportunities.

"Lot of opportunities" in this case means I changed just about . . . everything.  I changed research focus, I changed institution, and I changed experiment (adviser's response: "What a good opportunity!" fellow students' response: "Traitor.").  Now I work in the collaboration across the ring, doing precision measurements instead of searches.

This also required a move.  Now I live in . . .

What it takes to finish the PhD, part 1

1.  Perform studies for three years.  Work on projects in five different areas.  Get lectured about not responding to emails fast enough.  Learn many clever tricks to locate code snippets to patch into your own work.

2.  Create a thesis outline.  Watch your adviser rewrite it.  Rewrite it again as you begin working on your thesis (it's just a guideline, really).

3.  Read several other dissertations trying to get a sense of how one puts together such a document.  Puzzle over what in the world makes your adviser say the one packed with grammar mistakes is well-written.  Come to the realization that dissertations are unofficially ranked first on thoroughness and second on originality; writing style is far less a consideration.

Writing a Dissertation: a Word of Caution

I can virtuously say that writing my dissertation started several months before I intended to finish, as I located a suitable template and began copying and pasting chunks of other papers I had written back in November of last year.  I then didn't touch it again for a couple of months.  Hey, I had started it, and I had an outline and everything.

Writing recommenced in February, when the bustle to put out conference notes in early March had larger passed away from this lowly graduate student performing studies and become a thing of editorial boards and professors.  I ended up having a couple of weeks at CERN during which I could focus on writing, but this lovely time ended at the beginning of March when I had to pack up and move back to the United States, to complete my dissertation and prepare for my defense in a place where people couldn't come lean over my desk in my not-cubicle and ask more questions.  At the time, I had drafted about five and a half chapters of my thesis*, two of which my professor had seen.  I anticipated writing at eight total.

I despise moving.  I have nightmares about airports and air travel.  This move was putting some significant distance between me and my fiance.  It was a stressful time.  But I survived the apartment-emptying and stuff-packing and luggage-weighing and goodbye-saying to find myself arriving at the Geneva airport very early in the morning after a painless taxi ride and handing over my luggage with no complaints at all about weight.  It was marvelous.  I settled into my seat for the nine hour flight, and allowed myself to watch a movie before thinking that I should really be good and convert some more of notes into actual dissertation text.  I opened my laptop bag (which also contained my headset, webcam, camera, and several books and other electronics; I was moving after all) and saw this:

What's in a year

 

(You come to the blog and enter upon a scene of colossal clean-up.  The air is cloudy from dust.  In the midst of this, you see our host, hard at work.)

Oh, hello.  Welcome back.  It has been a while, hasn't it?  But I have two very good excuses for that.

Excuse 1:

 

 

Excuse 2:

 

Yup, I finished my PhD (wrote-defended-revised-submitted the thesis) and got married all in one year.  I also moved four times and counting, since I am not done settling in yet.  It's been a busy year.