It's the Weekend!

This has been both a restful and busy weekend so far. When I came back on Thursday, I found out that we were going to host a bbq/party on Friday, which was fine with me as it was something to do. *smiles*

The bbq was very civilised, only about 6 people, eating and drinking with a couple of cds playing. But then a whole group of about 12, mostly American people come from their weekly bbq, and one of them in particular was very loud and annoying, and kept making awful punch with our decent alcohol. We lost two thirds of a bottle of Absolut Vodka to him, which I wanted to have with cranberry juice. He also attacked some tequilla and scotch and rum we had lying around, but that was all old stuff so we didn't mind. He and his friends also monopolised Anthony's laptop, which was providing music after the cds, leaving it very loud and wouldn't let us turn in down. He also crashed on our couch and woke us all up in the morning. peh. I forgot how stressful it is hosting a party, worrying about the running out of food and drink, and furnishings.

We were lucky and nobody broke anything, though a couple of drinks did get spilt. We only spent a couple of hours cleaning up on Saturday, to stop the whole place from stinking of beer. We won't be having another party any time soon. Though I guess I should have a flat warming once I move into my new place. That maybe a little more civilised since it's further away from CERN.

I spent the rest of the night reading the third book of the Twilight Saga, which mu Aunt bought for me on my last day in LA. The series is quite addictive reading. It is a good combination of action and drama about humans, vampires and werewolves. I've been losing a fair bit of sleep over it.

Saturday night we went to another party in our apartment complex, which I didn't really enjoy. I wasn't in the mood for more drinking or small chat with people I didn't really know so only stayed for an hour.

Today wasn't at all what I expected, I dropped off my flatmate at his cricket match so I could have the car to go to CERN and catch the bus into town to go to the lake, however, there ended being a fatal flaw in this plan, in that I couldn't get back into the apartment.. I put the key in, and I accidentally locked, then unlocked then locked the deadlock, but couldn't actually open the door. Then the lock got stuck! I tried for ages to get it to move, but ended up bending my key the key, so stopped as I didn't want to break it in the lock. I also checked all the windows and they were all locked, and I would have to break the half-fixed one to get in again.

Luckily I now know the person living next to us, and asked him to help, and he got his friend who has broken into many an apartment in this complex with a knife and a dvd case. However, he can only do this if it's not deadlocked. So we tried oiling the lock, but it wouldn't budge. And then we sat around thinking about what to do and decided to go to back to the cricket game to ask my flatmate's opinion, since he has to live in an insecure apartment as well if I broke a window and would have to call somebody if the lock was broken. He came back with his keys and a cricket bat to break the window if neccessary. Luckily for us though, his key was able to open the door, probably because his wasn't bent and the oil had gotten to every part of the lock by now. *phew* It was the best possible outcome in this situation, though it made us look a little stupid.

Now it's kind of late in the afternoon and I can't be bothered going all the way into town (minimum 45 minutes one way) and so will go with the other guys to watch the end of the cricket game. It should be relaxing, sitting in the sun, and since it's cricket, it'll be nice and easy to watch, not too much concentration involved.

Oh yeah, I haven't even said what happened when I was driving to cricket. So when we were driving into the CERN site where the cricket field is, i kind of veer the wrong way (left instead of right) as I'm confused about the side of the road I need to be on and he said left, but he meant the left lane of the right side so, I swipe my card in and drop him off at the field and then this car drives up, blocking my way. I got all confused as this meant it would have been driving on it's left and so I go left and they go to their right and block me again and then, they signal for me to stop. Two CERN security people then walk out and come to my window they ask me for my "permit" which I thought was my permit to be on the CERN site, my CERN id, because we've all gotten emails about how security has been upgraded at all the sites but they actually wanted to see my drivers licence! I wasn't driving that badly! But later Anthony explained they recently there have been some dodgy goings on with the CERN vans one incident was 8 apanese student crammed into a 5 seater van so I guess they were suspicious of Asians they tell me go after analysing my Australian licence for a bit. They first thought i was american from my bad French though, but yeah, that was unexpected and annoying. I only reckon it was because I was Asian that they needed to check up on me, they would have asumed I was British if I were white and going to the cricket I reckon. peh. I'll get the other guys to drive their car afterwards.

Whirlwind Visit

After summer school ended, I flew to LA to visit my relatives and friends and now I'm in the airport on the way back to Europe. It's been such a short visit, I wish I had organised a couple more days, I really would have liked a bit more time with everybody, but I really do need to get back to work; when I was booking flights, my supervisor said I should only take a couple of days off.

So what have I done with the four full days I have here? Quite a bit. I wanted this to be a relaxing break, but I've been very busy. It has been nice to be busy with fun things though. Where the only things to be worried about are what to and eat next. Where I say what I want to do and other people drive me around. Thank you so much everybody for giving me some of your time. I know how busy you all are with work and there are other people you want to spend time with.

The visit didn't start off too well. After a five hour wait for my flight to LA, my plane ended being an hour late due to a late arrival. Then, they didn't give me any free food so I was starving by the time I got to LA! I completely forgot how bad service was on American Airlines. Luckily my aunt was there to pick me up, and take me down to Little Saigon for pho. mmmm. I had made a plan not to eat anything but Asian food out for the visit, and this was a great start. *grins*

Saturday was spent with one of the guys I met at UCLA while I was on exchange and his girlfriend. It could have been very awkward since I had never met his girlfriend, but it wasn't too bad. We started our time together with a late dim sum lunch, which was very tasty and totally within my Asian food plan. *smiles*

Then we went to Griffith Observatory, which I wanted to go to in the past, but it had been under renovations for years. Being free, there weren't too many fun hands-on exhibits, though there were heaps of rotating spheres explaining day and night, seasons, tides, moon phases. And there was the newest wall showing a small part of one of the sky surveys, which was cool. It is amazing that we only see a very small fraction of what is actually out there with our own eyes, and some of us don't see anything most of the time anyway due to weather or light pollution.

But the exhibit that I actually learnt something from was a very simple one. They had a wall, with information about each of the planets, with a set of scales for each one, showing what you would weigh on the planet. Now, it was a little misleading since they also only gave how much more the planets weighs compared to Earth and it's volume, but not it's radius. And it turns out that only on Jupiter would you feel substantially heavier than you do on Earth, everywhere else, the weight of the planet doesn't scale as it needs to do much the radius, since gravity is proportional to mass divided by radius squared. Even more amusing, while we were going around and trying to figure out why we were so light on the other planets, another guy kept telling us that "weight doesn't have to do with mass, but with how fast the planet is rotating". We had to work very hard to keep straight faces as he told us this for the third or fourth time. *grins*



The other reason I wanted to go to the observatory was for the view over the LA basin. Here it is in all it's glory. Isn't the urban sprawl and smog lovely? I couldn't even see the ocean! You could see hills and the Hollywood sign in the other direction though, which was kind of cool. It is kind of scary how dry and barren the hills are though. I guess it's to be expected since the area is a semi-desert.

After the observatory, we hung out at a coffee shop before it was time to go to the next attraction, which was the LA production of Wicked, the musical. I've wanted to see this ever since my sister and I were in New York and it was playing there, but it was too soon after it was opened so it wasn't possible to get half price tickets yet and there were so many other shows on that we wanted to see. Then it just opened in Melbourne as I was leaving for Switzerland last month, and I was worried it wouldn't be playing by the time I got home. I quite enjoyed the musical, despite going with two people who had already seen it before and for whom the story wasn't surprising and kept comparing the performers to the recording and other production. I liked the twists and turns of the storyline, which I won't discuss here in case I spoilt it for anybody, but was slightly disappointed in the quality of the performers (not really in tune) and the production (microphones levels were off). I was also having issues staying awake due to the lack of sleep during the previous couple of nights.

Phew. That was only Saturday... Still three more full days to go!

Sunday was family, which started with a late breakfast, even though all of us were up early, none of us realised the others were up. We then went kayaking in the Naples Canals, starting at the bay.We rowed to the end of a canal to see the moon jellyfish which like to congregate there. Just like in Finding Nemo, the tops of their bells aren't poisonous, so you can reach down and touch them. I even picked one up! But I think that might not have been a good idea as it didn't move again once I put it back in the water. But then, it didn't sting me, like it's supposed to, so maybe it wasn't alive to start off with... *blushes*

It was so nice to be in the sun and on the water. I had forgotten how hard rowing was, particularly against the current, but luckily for me, my Uncle wanted his exercise and was happy to do most of the work. *grins* On the way back, we saw his brother out with his little sailing boat, and I was able to get a ride.



There I am, balancing on the front of the boat. I was quite worried about it capsizing, since both of them told me that that was a real possibility with the extra weight at the front. Luckily, that didn't happen, and I stayed relatively dry and didn't even get hit by the boom. It was fun, I kind of would have liked to try steering the boat myself, but we didn't really have the time to and I didn't want to wreak the boat. I felt quite spoilt really, getting driven around in my Uncle's MX5 (Miata in the States) with the top down *grins* then going on a shiny new sailboat.

After the fun was duty time, and we went to visit my grandparents and cousins. This is always an awkward visit for me, since I can't communicate properly with my grandparents, I can understand their Vietnamese, but they can't understand me, since they don't know English and I speak very little Vietnamese. Nevertheless, it was nice to see my grandmother and my grandfather again, who just had a stroke a couple of years back and is slowly recovering, but has trouble talking and walking. They both looked happy to see me, but they definitely weren't as vocal about it as my cousins, who remembered who I was and were glad to see me, at least the younger two at any rate. They were surprisingly older and taller than I remembered, and so were less annoying. I think they were glad for some new source of amusement since they had been stuck at home all summer holidays, and kept inviting me over to play later. I kind of wish I could have, but I already had plans for my other days in LA. I don't think I would have had the energy to keep up with them though.

After dinner with them and some of my other relatives, my relatives dropped me off at another friend's parent's place and we drove to his place in Santa Barbara, which is where he now goes to physics graduate school. It was quite a contrast going from his parent's place to the his place, which he shares with four other physics grad students, going from neat and clean, to not so neat and clean. We played some Rock Band, which was quite fun, particularly the drums. Unfortunately, I didn't know most of the songs, meaning that I couldn't do the singing part for many of them.

Monday was basically spent at the beach, two different ones, with a lunch break between as well as a tour of UCSB. Situated between a small mountain range and the coast, Santa Barbara is a very pretty place, with Spanish influenced architecture in the download area and lots of palm trees. But I wasn't there for the place, I was there for the beach.

So we started out going to the beach nearer to my friend's place, where you park at the end of the road and take a walk through some trees and shrubbery until you reach a small cliff and look for a non-eroded path down. The area was very pretty, bad the beach was a little disappointing due to the morning mist, which hadn't cleared off yet, so the water looked all grey and the oil rig and boat in the distance wasn't very picturesque at all. We hung out there for a while and I amused myself playing at the water's edge, trying not to get wet and watching a group of birds doing the same, though they weren't playing, they were trying to eat bugs in the sand in between waves. They looked quite funny running up and down the sand all the time *grins*



On the way back to the car, we took a different path, which took us by a whole group of eucalyptus trees, and I couldn't help taking this photo because if I didn't know better, I would have thought it was taken in Australia somewhere. It is kind of weird being back in LA. It's at the same time familiar and foreign.

We then tried to find a Japanese place with was open for lunch after 2pm, which I thought in the US wouldn't have been a problem, but I forgot that we were in a small town. We eventually found one open and snuck in before they closed, and then ate so slowly that they kept hinting for us to leave, which we mostly ignored.

After lunch, we went to UCSB. I do not know how anybody does any work done there. The campus has the best location. It has its own beach, is bordered on three sides by coastline and has it's own lagoon. And since it's in Southern California, it supposedly only rains ten days a year. This is reflected in the building design. The normal physics building actually has balconies for corridors, which would not be possible in anywhere wetter or colder. The university also has a separate Institute for Theoretical Physics, which has a very impressive building situated almost right on the edge of the cliff. The building is built around a courtyard, with the academic's offices facing out and the postdocs and students facing in. There are random backboards in the corridors and a very nice 'contemplation' room facing the ocean. Quite a difference compared with the normal physics building where my friend doesn't get any natural light in his office.



After driving around and looking at the ocean from inside, it was hard to resist its call, and it was time to go to the beach again. This time, one which was easier to get to, the one right next to the university campus. See those buildings in the background of the photo? That's the uni! People must get desensitised after a while and the beach isn't so special anymore.

So that was Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday were fairly quiet, driving back to LA, with some factory outlet and ordinary shopping along the way, Korean BBQ dinner with my relatives (yum!) and meeting up with my friend again, before coming here where I'm about to board the plane.

The End (of School) is Nigh...

So tomorrow will be the last day of the summer school and to be honest, most people are are a little physics-ed out. This is particularly evident in the discussion sessions, which aren't nearly as lively as they were last week. I think having the day off on Sunday reminded us all that we were in the foreign country and stuck in lectures all day. Personally, I've found it much harder to concentrate this week than last week and have resorted to using my laptop during lectures to keep me warm and awake.

Today was much easier than the previous days though, as we only had two lectures, followed by an excursion to the Addler Planetarium in Chicago, followed by dinner at the University of Chicago.

So we were buses out to the planetarium, where we saw two shows at had some time to roam about the place. The shows were a little disappointing; the first showing off 3D visualisations which were cool, but nothing special, and the second was a planetarium show about the different types of collisions in the universe, which was interesting, but because it was in the planetarium theatre, and with the reclining seats, I fell asleep. They also didn't do the customary thing of showing us the stars beforehand which I wanted to hear since I don't know the stars in this hemisphere that well. The displays in the planetarium were kind of cool, they had quite a view hands-on exhibits, the coolest being a model Mars Rover which you could remote control behind a wall, only using input from a camera mounted on the front of it. The only issue was that there were lots of kids around hogging all the exhibits. It must be school holidays here or something. The view from outside the museum back towards Chicago was amazing despite the weather though:



After the planetarium we went to the university, and had to sit through a talk about the physics department there. It was followed by a talk about cosmology, which would have been quite interesting, apart from the fact that the seats were uncomfortable, the room was humid and I had had a week of physics beforehand. Then are was the school dinner, which was also a bit of a let down as it was a buffet, but I guess this was a school, not a conference and it has basically all been free for me, so I really can't complain.

Steak Fry?

Today I learnt that 'Steak Fry' equals 'BBQ' but with different meat and bread (steak and baguette versus hamburger/hotdogs and buns). Oh, and there are bandannas at a steak fry. I think we were supposed to use them as serviettes since they came wrapped around our knifes and forks, but that seemed like a waste, so we all decided to wear them instead:





Note all the different ways that we found to wear a square piece of material and I also want to acknowledge that the above photos weren't taken using my camera, but by one of the British students.

The Third-Most Populous City in the US of A

Coming from Switzerland, Chicago and Illinois are a bit of a shock to the system. It is amazingly flat here. Not a mountain or high hill to be seen anywhere.It was kind of surreal flying in last week, flying down from Canada, down the massive Lake Michigan and then all of a sudden, there were skyscrapers on the edge of the lake then urban sprawl. America is also a bit of a shock to the system. The huge cars and roads here really can't be found anywhere else in the world.

Today we finally got the day off and they provided buses to and from Chicago for us to explore the city which is just visible on the horizon from FermiLab. It is interesting to note that it is ranked as the third mot populous city in the country, it only has 3 million people within the bounds of the city, which is less than Sydney's 4.2 million people and actually less then Melbourne's 3.8 million people. It must have something to do with how the bounds of a city are defined.

Working around the downtown area, you feel so small as the buildings are so tall, and it's actually quite pleasant to walk around as they always provide shade. The levels of the city are also kind of crazy, with one of the streets having three levels. A walkway at the river level, an upper boulevard and a lower roadway. As well as the multilevel streets, there are also supposedly multitude of tunnels under the city, for the subway, for water supply, old freight and supply tunnels, now used for utility and communication lines.

Other facts I found interesting about the city is the canal that was built so that the sewerage of the city via the Chicago River wouldn't flow in their water supply being Lake Michigan. There was already a canal there for shipping, but they deepened it so that it would be lower than the lake so water from the North branch of the river would go to the canal instead of to the lake. So now the treated sewerage goes down to St Louis rather than out to the lake and they can deal with it. The other towns around the lake weren't too impressed with this, worried that the canal would take too much water from the lake, Chicago then built a lagoon and lock system to restrict water flow.

Anyway, enough about the city and my impressions and onto what we did. We first walked around to look for a cruise company office to buy tickets for a cruise around sunset. Then we walked along the river to the Sears Tower to go to the observation deck on the 103rd floor. Sears Tower was once the tallest building in the world, and they still claim to be if you include the two television antennae on the top. It was built in the 1970s in only 3 years and is designed like a set of tubes, all starting at the base and only one goes the highest. Supposedly on a clear day you can see to 4 different states.



As you can see from this photo, it wasn't perfectly clear by the time we got up to the SkyDeck, but the view was still magnificent. Lots of tall buildings and the Lake looking eastwards, and flat land as far as the eye could see westwards. It was also very cool as there was an Air and Water Show on in Chicago that day, and we could see the planes from the deck. I've always found it strange viewing foreign cities from above as I don't know many of the landmarks to look at, but it's cool to be that high up in a building. It was very very full of people though.

After coming down, we went in search of Pizzeria Uno/Pizzeria Due for the original Deep Dish Chicago style pizza. We found the restaurant eventually, with the help of a mobile phone equipped with Internet and GPS, ordered an individual pizza each, and waited. Deep dish pizza seems to take longer to cook than ordinary pizza due to the thickness of the crust and filling, it's kind of like eating a pizza flavoured pie, particularly since the sauce is on top and the filling on the inside, so it doesn't dry out. It was very tasty, though I wasn't able to finish it.

By this time, we were tired and it was over 30 degrees out, so we walked the main shopping street in town, stopping at the Apple store, to the Hancock Tower, then out to the lakefront, where we were going to swim, until we saw the rubbish in the water and all the people there. So we just went to the park at the start of Navy Pier and rested. While we were there, we saw this little guy pop out of the bushes, hop around and eat grass. He wasn't scared of us at all.



Then it was time for our cruise. First we went around the Chicago River, with the guide pointing out the interesting buildings and explaining their history. There are a couple of ones I remember, but I won't bore you all with it here. The most interesting one, engineering wise, is the Boeing Headquarters, which the train lines run below, meaning that they weren't allowed to put columns down to the bedrock, so instead a whole wing for the building is supported from above by steel trusses, which looks very disturbing from the lower river level.



The boat then headed out towards the lake, after going through the lock system. And I look about 20 skyline/sunset photos, of which is one. I also learn about what changing the ISO on the camera does, which I used in the next photo.



This Cloud Gate sculpture was the first and last stop of the day, which is just a huge reflective jelly bean, which somebody must have to clean everyday and also stop pigeons from leaving white matter on it. It looks very cool on the inside, with the warping of the reflective surface and making interesting images. I have heaps of photos of this as well, but this is one of my favourites, with the lights and curved buildings.

A Working Collider

Today we only had three lectures and got the afternoon 'off' to go on organised tours around the FermiLab facilities. Which sounds more interesting than it actually was, because their collider is actually running, it's not possible to see the beampipe in the tunnel or the experiments in their caverns. But it was still pretty cool seeing the control rooms, as well as the LINAC and new computing center, though I am disappointed we didn't get to see the neutrino experiments.



So here is a photo of the control room, they had just finished injecting a store of protons and antiprotons into the Tevatron, so things were changing on the display screens. I felt kind of bad taking photos since there were people in there, but it's cool with all the different screens, all showing different monitoring plots. If you want to see the live status of the machine, it is up on the web here.



This is a photo from the D0 control room, where you can see the changes in technology in computer screens, and things happening in their detector. The D0 detector is like a smaller version of the ATLAS detector, it also has an inner solenoid and an outer toriodal magnetic field, though theirs is solid iron rather than air-core. It also has a liquid argon colorimeter. But both the CDF and D0 detectors are so much smaller, as is the Tevatron. The Tevatron only accelerates protons and antiprotons to 1TeV, so their ring is much smaller - 1km in radius and only about 7m underground. The detectors are about half the size of ATLAS, and were built in halls next to the ring and slid into place. So now all you can see is empty halls, which isn't so interesting, though CDF does have a life size poster of their detector there. For live events from either detector go here.



If you recognise this little guy, I pronounce you a nerd. He's the tape robot for one of their grid storage systems in their grid computing centre, which is a new centre built to handle the processing and storage which now doesn't fit into their original Feynmann computing centre. I include him as robots are cool. *grins* Actually, I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but the computing centre was kind of cool, with the different rooms for the different purposes, storage, networking, power and processing.

Learning?

Yesterday I spoke about almost everything except for what I have learnt at this summer school, so today I thought I would mention some of the things which I have learnt / heard over the past few days:

We had Trigger & DAQ talks given by the head of the CMS trigger, and it was quite interesting to hear what they were doing. I like their two level system, which seems more flexible than the ATLAS one, and also how they are going to add storage, so they can save events underground before sending them out to offline computing since the machine won't be running for long periods of time at the start. Their electron trigger is quite a bit more complicated than ATLAS though, since their calorimeters are inside their solenoid, meaning the energy deposits are asymetric and have strange shapes. They are also implementing a pseudo-RoI approach to reduce the amount of data they need to unpack, which I didn't realise they were doing.

"There are many physicists in the world... but not so many good ones" - Guido Atarelli, of the DLAP QCD evolution equation. His lectures and discussion sessions have been fairly interesting due to his way of putting things. He has been giving the theoretical introduction for the school, lying the basics for the more detailed lectures on the various areas. He has also mentioned a few discrepancies between experiment and theory which I didn't know about before, though the differences are only about 3 sigma.

I have also heard a fair bit about QCD, but I don't know how much I have acutlaly learnt from those lectures, since most the of the content is new to me, and I find it hard to follow theory from lectures without the follow up exercises and reading.

We also had a Computing talk by a person high up in CMS computing, in which I learnt that CMS doesn't have the same Tier 2 cloud structure around the Tier 1s. Theoretically, each of their Tier 2s should be connected to each of their Tier 1s, though in reality, this isn't true, but it only matters for raw data, since each of the Tier 1s should have a full copy of all the analysis level data, though this won't be true for first data.


This is the FermiLab logo. Weird looking isn't it? Today I learnt that it's a schematic of a quadrupole superimposed on a dipole magnet as the Tevatron here was the first synchrotron to use quadrupole magnets in a FODO lattice to focus the beam instead of extended aperture dipoles.

I got the answer for a question I've been pondering for a while, which is, how the proton beams in the LHC will pass each other in the single beam pipes in the experiments when not colliding. And it's complicated trajectory which allows them to pass each other without colliding, made by not turning on the focusing magnets. I guess I should have realised that this was possible, since other machines only have one beam pipe all the way around, like the Tevatron, and they can manipulate the beams there to only collide when they want it.

Hadron Collider Physics Summer School

So I've been overwhelmed with information for the past couple of days at the CERN-FermiLab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School. We have up to 5 lectures a day, each an hour long with 15 minutes for questions, and there is a lot of material covered in each of them. I've been okay so far on the experimental side of things, since they have been discussing things that I have some experience in - trigger, calorimetry and computing, but I have been getting lost in the Standard Model and QCD lectures.

The day starts at 9am and we have discussion sessions until 9pm, which is very tiring. It is also very unhealthy, since we are given sweets and coffee twice a day and eat lunch and dinner from the cafeteria 20 metres from the lecture room, so we don't move very much. We even get shuttle bused to and from the hotel to the hall on yellow school buses!



Luckily, my hotel has a pool, which I have been using since I have been waking up way too early due to jetlag. We also when for a walk yesterday lunchtime to see the FermiLab bison herd, which is much cooler than the CERN sheep.



Actually, FermiLab has a very different vibe to CERN. It is an hours drive west of Chicago, in the countryside, so there is not much to do close by. The grounds of the laboratory are much larger, though very empty, so instead of buildings everywhere, there is Wilson Hall, then the experimental halls, and empty land - prairie, wetlands and forest. There is less people working here, and you can tell that you are in States and Europe, and not just from the language. Firstly, the whole place is kept at a ridiculously low temperature thanks to the air-conditioning. Secondly, none of the windows in the whole building can be opened, which I guess is part of the design, but still, no fresh air in the whole building is strange. Thirdly, there is an overuse of packaging and polystyrene in the cafeteria. There really is no need for polystyrene bowls and cups when there is real cutlery and plates which need to be washed. It is also very American to have a 15 level building in the middle of what is essentially a field. It has been cool to come out here and see what it is like though.

More from the Airport...

Random comment about this airport... it has amusing announcements for when passengers are late for their plane, something along the lines of "passenger x you are delaying your flight, please report to gate y immediately or we will offload your luggage" now this is all said in a sing song robotic English, similar to the robot from Portal, which is not the effect I think they were going for. *smiles* Also, I think that it is probably am empty threat anyway, how are they going to find your luggage in the hold that quickly to offload anyway?

Now that I've been in the airport for while, it's quite a nice place, as airports go. There are lots of seats, comfortable ones at that, and television screens setup to watch the Olympics. It also has a small art exhibition for people to look at, which was nice. I quite like the Dutch artwork from the Golden Age. The detail in the brushwork and the use of light just mesmerises me. Not to mention heaps of shops, though a lot of them repeat themselves throughout the complex. I haven't been tempted to buy anything yet though...

Airports. Peh.

I am currently sitting at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam with not much to do. Now some of this is my fault as I forgot to bring any EUR with me and don't feel like exchanging any of my USD or CDF, so I can't buy food, which I don't really mind as I'm not hungry and it's overpriced anyway. And I also forgot to grab a book to read from the Australian apartment this morning. But I did bring my knitting with me, which I had started up again in preparation for knitting on the plane to Chicago and here.

However, in Geneva Airport, they decided that my bright yellow plastic 5mm diameter knitting needles were too dangerous to be taken on a plane and confiscated them off me. Plastic! I bet you some of the pens in my pencil case could cause more damage than those needles! I was not happy, particularly since I had gotten them through Melbourne and Singapore airport a month ago and had checked the American travel security agency webpage which said I could take them on. But everybody knows that you can't argue with security personnel, particularly the fastidious Swiss kind who only seemed to speak French, so I pulled the needles out of the my knitting and sat down.

Thinking about it now, I should have been more prepared and put in a safety row, brought a book and some of the local currency of my transfer airport, but I always forget the prepare for the travel in my worry about the trip. To make matter worse, you have to pay for internet at this airport, so I will be back dating this later.

*sigh* Now that I've got all those complaints off my chest, I will tell you all about why I'm actually here in the first place. I am off to the Hadron Collider Physics Summery School, which is being help at FermiLab, which is an hour west of Chicago. It starts tomorrow and goes until next Friday. I have looked at the timetable for it, and it is very full, unlike some other schools, but we get a day off on Sunday to go look around Chicago, which should be good. After Chicago, I'm going to visit my family and friends in Los Angeles for a couple of days before heading back to Geneva. I've bought a fair bit of Swiss chocolate for everybody, and am really hoping that it'll last until I see them. If is doesn't, I am really sorry and will be blaming the mid-west weather. *grins*

Research

While I'm waiting for one of my collegues to come and pick me and my stuff up, I thought I'd spend some time explaining what I've been doing here, research wise. I actually spend most of my time here in front of my computer writing, running or debugging code, despite what it seems like from the previous entries, when I'm already going out and doing stuff.

So for the past couple of months, I've been working on the Level 2 ATLAS Electron Trigger. Now I know that for most people, this makes no sense whatsoever, so I'll break it down.

I recall that in a previous post, I gave an introduction about ATLAS, a general purpose precision particle physics detector located at one of the collision points on the LHC ring. Operating at design specifications, the detector will see one collision every 25 nanoseconds, and with each event generating a megabyte of data, it is physically impossible to record all this information to disk within a reasonable budget. Not to mention, not all of these collision events will be interesting from a physics point of view.

So ATLAS employs what we call a trigger system, to select which events look promising and store them for offline processing and analysis. ATLAS has a three level trigger, the first implemented in onboard electronics and the other two using specialised software. I work on the first of the software systems. In brief, I am modifying a cluster seeding algorithm so that it doesn't lose a certain type of physics event from a specific particle. The algorithm I am implementing is a two-dimensional sliding window algorithm, performing energy sums to find the highest three by three area within a larger grid to seed cluster formation in subsequent algorithms.

Okay, that paragraph is very technical and I don't know where to start explaining everything. I keep using the word cluster, as the signature of an electron in the ATLAS detector is a curved track in the Inner Detector and some energy deposited in the Calorimeter. Now the way an electron deposits energy only depends on the initial energy of the electron and the material. The energy deposit is called a cluster because the Calorimeter is made out of cells, and when an electron goes through, a group or cluster, of these register hits.

I am finding it quite hard to explain this stuff coherently without feedback from somebody listening, to ask questions and to gauge reaction. Anyway, this work has been quite slow, firstly trying to understand the ATLAS trigger software, and the electron slice in particular. Then figuring out what information was accessible to me for use in the algorithm, write the code, then test its physics and timing performance, as there are fairly strict timing budgets for each of the ATLAS trigger levels. And that is kind of where I am now. Testing the simpler version of the algorithm and implementing a more complicated version. The simpler version involves just a straight out substitution of the old code for my code, and the new one involves changing the interface of the class.

So that is one of the things I am doing at the moment, I think I'll leave the description of the other things for another day...

More fireworks!

Last night was the end of the Fete de Geneve, which meant there was an hour long fireworks display on the lake. My flatmates and their friends invited me out for a picnic, and since the guys from the Australian flat didn't have any concrete plans, I joined them. We set up out our picnic on the north side of the lake, where it wasn't too busy. And the reason for that was apparent when the fireworks started. There were three spots for the fireworks were being set off, and we only had an unobscured view of one of them. But it was okay because there were so many of them, and we could see the higher ones above the trees and buildings. It was a really amazing display, the photo below is of one of the highlights. Huge fireworks which hang in the sky and shimmer for a while afterwards, making it look like it's raining gold.

Internet Tv!

is amazing! All I needed to do to watch European tv on my laptop was download the program Zattoo and make an account. Then I am able to access all the European digital television channels! This meant that I was able to watch the Beijing Opening Ceremony while doing work! *grins*

Vietnamese people

also live in Geneve. I went shopping today to get chocolate for my friends and relatives in California. And between the shopping centre and the tram home, I overheard three different groups of Vietnamese people. It still gives me a bit of a shock to hear Vietnamese around here and a little strange to then hear them swap to French as oppose to English, but people here must find it strange that I speak English with an Australian accent. I hope they didn't think it was strange that I was listening on their conversations. I wonder if they thought I could understand them.

Anyway, it was nice to hear the language again, I know it's weird because I can't speak it very well myself, but the culture is part of who I am. I can't pinpoint exactly what it is that I identify with, but right now I really miss the food. I want my bowl of pho for five dollars at uni. I want a rice cooker as I've found out how hard it is to cook rice on a stove, but am still not too sure whether I should buy a dodgy looking European noname one which I saw for thirty-five francs today. I want the ten dollar bowl of vermicelli and spring rolls. Mmmm... I have to stop thinking about food... and learn how to cook all this stuff myself... Or maybe I should try and befriend the next set of people, though they might think it's a little strange...

WALL.E

is a very cute movie and you should all see it when it comes out in your area of the world. I can't believe it's out here now, in French in Switzerland and won't be out in Australia until mid-September. We really do get jibbed when it comes to release dates. Though Australia got Dark Knight before Switzerland, so it's really movie dependent. I guess they wanted to wait for school holidays. I also can't believe how expensive it is to see a movie in Europe. I guess ten euros in Dublin for an adult was reasonable, but eighteen francs here is a little steep. Luckily they took our Melbourne student cards and we only had to pay fifteen. Popcorn at cinemas is also different here, salt in Dublin and you can get sugared stuff here. A trivial fact, I know, but interesting nonetheless. Oh, another point to note is that I think the Village Roadshow people back at home also own the Pathe cinema chain here, the Villiage symbol was on the chairs and they had the same carpet, which you can see under this random cow statue.

Fireworks and a Bonfire!

Yesterday was Swiss Day, a celebration of the oath hundreds of years ago which is the foundation of Switzerland today. It was raining all day but cleared up after dinner, so we decided to go and see the fireworks which I missed last year because we got there too late. We thought we had missed them this year and were watching people set off their own when the official ones started and we rushed over to watch them. It was kind of interesting, they were in a park, in a slightly open area, so all the fireworks had to go up and they also had lots of pinwheels, which I don't usually see as they don't show them in Australia. They also had accompanying music, which is also different, but quite interesting and really added another dimension to the spectacle. Then after the fireworks, they lit a pyre, which they had set up on sand on the grass. It was very cool watching it burn, wood turning into ashes, and feeling the heat from the flames.



Swiss Day marks the start of the Fete de Geneve, a week long carnival on the banks of the lake, which me and a couple of my Australian colleagues went to this evening. Since none of us are the ride or sideshow game type people, we watched other people at play, trying to figure out what the scam was in all the games. And then there were more fireworks! At home we only get fireworks twice a year, New Years and Australia Day, here they have them three times in one week! I knew about the Swiss Day ones, and I'm really looking forward to next weekend's display, but this was quite random. It was supposed to be a light show by the lake, and there were some grandstands which you could pay to watch the show at, and maybe it was better from there. But what I learnt was that 'light show' means 'fireworks with lights shining onto the smoke in between'. We were on the opposite side of the lake to where the paid seats were, so perhaps we missed out on whatever shapes and patterns the lights which seemed to be shining towards were making, but the fireworks were cool. The new thing seems to be a big bang, followed by smaller ones, there were lots of fireworks like that. They also had these special kind which lit up and just hung there, slowly falling, even slower than the smoke around them. I don't understand how that could work really.



I wonder if it's the same in Australia, but looking around at the people who went to these events, it seemed to be coloured people and tourists. If I were Swiss, I would want to see where all my cantonal tax money was going. But maybe if it's the same every year, you could get sick of it. I was kind of feeling a little old for the carnival already, but then I've never really been into that sort of money wasting activity. Not to mention the fact that I get dizzy from rides. *shrug* It was fun and it was a nice evening to be out and about.