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.