CERN Love
where physics and life collide
Should we be concerned?
Aug 11th
I’m here today to talk about flooring. The kind people walk on. I’ve seen a lot of floors in my time, from the linoleum tile my dear old mother installed all by herself in our humble kitchen when I was a wee lad, all the way to the 2000-year old tile floor in the Vatican Museum that supports millions of visiting feet per year with nary a scratch … after being transported thousands of miles by slaves and horses, that is! I’ve walked on a lot of floors throughout the entire world, and I can say with absolute honesty that every single one of ‘em has succeeded in supporting my weight; that every last one of ‘em has remained flat and avoided caving in under my feet, thanks to the laws of gravity, strong building materials, and good workmanship. Because I say that the only thing you would ever ask a floor to do is, well, nothing at all! You would ask that floor to stay flat and motionless, and to bear your weight across it, repeatedly, for years on end. You would never ask that floor to cave in under your feet; to crumble pathetically under the weight of a hundred kilo or so; to turn to rubble in the course of nominal daily usage. That’s why floor-makers get paid; I’ll go so far as to venture that’s the only reason they get paid. I claim that the only thing required of a floor is not to cave in. Well, if you’re in agreement with that statement, then you’ll agree that the upper floor of CERN’s Restaurant 2 has utterly, abjectly failed in its incredibly simple mission. This is truly the first floor I have ever encountered that has been unable to bear the strain of human feet, and the failure of it and its builders fills me with a deep-seated disgust and enduring concern.
Chocolate bar yardstick
Apr 20th
Sorry about all the silence the last couple weeks. These days our day jobs are getting pretty busy.
Beam dump at Point 6
After the question “what is 7 TeV?” came up in the comments on our imminent collisions post I though it would be fun to take a tour of some common quantities in energy physics. All of this appears in other sources such as “LHC: The Guide” (2008) and, many talks such as “LHC Status and Commission Plans”.
First of all, let’s stay humble. The size of the LHC and its experiments are often enumerated for dramatic effect with numbers like
- 27 km in circumference,
- 100 m underground,
- 8 stories high,
- 12,500 tons, etc.
But all this huge equipment is just support for the diminutive stars:
- bunches of 1011 protons,
- each 7 cm long and 1 mm in diameter (about the size of a mechanical pencil lead).
That really isn’t much stuff considering that macroscopic things contain around 1023 atoms. At rest this bunch of protons is just 1.6×10-13 g of matter. Given this tiny mass and the pencil-lead dimensions you end up with a density of roughly 4×10-7 g/m3, which is absolutely nothing considering that hydrogen gas is 200 million times denser at 90 g/m3 (the LHC can run for many months using the protons from one bottle of hydrogen gas). To increase the odds that these protons run into each other the bunches are focused to a diameter of about 16 μm just before they cross. Still, collisions are rare, with everything running well there will be at best 20 interactions per crossing (and only a tiny fraction of these interactions will be of any interest to scientists). On the otherhand, the LHC can be filled with 2808 bunches spaced about 7 m apart, and with all these bunches moving at just a hair under the speed of light we can end up with 600 million interactions each second.
So, what about this 7 TeV thing? A teraelectronvolt (TeV), or 1012 electronvolts (eV), is a unit of energy. What we are measuring is the energy available in individual proton interactions. The LHC was designed to operate up to 7 TeV per proton, or 14 TeV total. But, for the next couple years the protons will be accelerated up to a speed where each proton carries 3.5 TeV of energy, and for just a moment while two protons collide we will have 7 TeV of energy in one place ready to make new particles (a Higgs boson, dark matter, or maybe something completely new).
A TeV is actually a very tiny amount of energy. A popular analogy is to a flying mosquito, one proton has the same energy as a handful of mosquitoes,
| Energy | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Kinetic energy of a flying mosquito | 0.81 TeV | assuming a 1.5 mg mosquito moving at 1.5 kph |
On the other hand, we have to give these protons some credit. They are a lot smaller than a mosquito. In fact, if you consider energy density these interactions are record breaking. A simple way to look at this is in terms of energy per particle interaction. Chemical energy is what runs batteries, bombs, and us; but chemical reactions involve only around one electronvolt of energy per atom. Potentially, each of the LHC protons brings 7 trillion times more energy to their little party.
| Process | Energy per particle interaction |
|---|---|
| Chemistry | ~1 eV |
| Nuclear fusion | ~20000000 eV |
| LHC collision | 7000000000000 eV |
Of course there can be quite a few protons spinning around the LHC at one time, and though only a few interact each time the bunches cross, we can wonder how much total energy is in the beam. This is important for two practical reasons that have nothing to do with the science:
- What would happen if the beam were to somehow go astray and hit the beam pipe and surrounding apparatus?
- How can we safely remove the beam in the normal course of work?
The short answer to the first question is pretty simple: bad things. The beam can punch through 2 meters of solid copper [slides 23-25]. But, it should be noted that it is essentially impossible for a person to be hit by a beam, even if they tried. This is because the beam travels in a vacuum pipe that does a very good job of keeping air out, not to mention human hands. In addition, no one can get anywhere close to tunnels with active beam without breaking safety interlocks that cause it to be dumped immediately. The danger is really only to the equipment. Of course they found exceptions to this in Soviet Russia.
When it’s time to inject a fresh beam of protons or the beam must be removed quickly for safety it is diverted toward a very large chunk of carbon that is liquid cooled and shielded in a 1000 tons of metal and concrete. A nice article about the beam dumps can be found in IEEE Spectrum.
So, to the energies…
| Energy | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Energy in a head-on highway collision | 1 MJ | cars each 1 metric ton moving at 115 kph |
| LHC: Energy in one beam | 173 MJ | 2808 bunches, 1.1×1011 p/bunch, 3.5 TeV |
| Energy in chocolate consumed by two Swiss people per year | 244 MJ | 22.4 lbs of chocolate / year / person in Switzerland |
| Energy required to melt 1 ton of copper from room temp. | 620 MJ | Wikipedia: 63 g/mol, 24 J/mol/K, 13 kJ/mol |
| Kinetic energy of freight train moving at 60 kph | 1400 MJ | 100 cars, 100 tons each |
| LHC: Energy in the ATLAS’ toroidal magnetic field | 1600 MJ | source: ATLAS e-News |
| Chemical energy in 1 metric ton of TNT | 4600 MJ | Wikipedia: Trinitrotoluene |
| LHC: Energy in the magnetic field of all the LHC dipoles | 11000 MJ | source: slide 12 |
| Chemical energy in 1 metric ton of dark chocolate | 24000 MJ | USDA: search for ‘chocolate 60-69%’ |
You will notice that for all this crazy amount of energy in the beam (almost 200 car-accidents worth) there are even bigger energies lurking at the LHC. The magnetic field of the ATLAS toroid stores 10 times as much energy, and 10 times beyond that is the energy stored in all the LHC magnets. In fact, the average pair of Swiss people consume more energy every year in chocolate than our measly beams can provide.
(One thing I love about these numbers has nothing to do with high energy physics: you might have been surprised that there is over 5 times as much energy in chocolate as there is in TNT. What is important about an explosion is not as much that a lot of energy is released, but instead that it is released very quickly.)
Cheezburger → ← LHC
Apr 2nd
I have to give a shout-out to I Can Haz Large Hadron Collider. My favorite image from the site is the following; needless to say, it is the apex of all our hopes and dreams as physicists.
Collisions imminent
Mar 30th
Howdy lovers,
Well, today’s the day! The LHC people have decided, along with all the experimenters, that it’s time to collide some protons at 7 TeV. Actually, the hoopla was originally scheduled to start this morning at 09h00 (CERN time). That plan was amended several times, so that physicists I talked to all had different ideas of the actual start time for colliding the beams (I heard 03h00 at some point). The initial attempts this morning to ramp the beam have both failed due to unforeseen errors in the quench protection system (QPS) and some other electronics, but they’re now saying they expect beam (and collisions!) to be ready around noon or 13h00. So, that means that our early risers in the US might be privy to all the good shit.
For your viewing pleasure, we’ve compiled a list of links to various webcasts broadcasting the day’s activities:
- LHC First Physics Webcast (be sure to click around to the various webcams, at the bottom of the page)
- Our beloved OP Vistars (Page1 is often the most informative)
- CMS cameras: One Two Three
- ATLAS public page, home to a nice feed and some pretty pictures
- ATLAS event displays
- A pretty informative CERN Twitter feed
- The LHC Announcer (this dude talks to you about the LHC activities)
So, click away. We’ll try to keep you updated, maybe copying some of the pretty photos of the day here for you to see. Let us know if you find other interesting webcasts to link here, either by commenting or by e-mailing dipole@cernlove.org.
Happy collisions!
UPDATE: We have collisions! At 13h22, the LHC people declared “STABLE BEAMS,” and we’ve been seeing 7 TeV collisions ever since. The press release is here, and the champagne is everywhere.
Diner conversations everywhere
Mar 27th
I present to you “the most inane conversation ever captured on camera,” all thanks to CERN. I’ll start the video at 5:36 for some setup, but the really relevant bit is at 7:26, a transcript of which follows,
Fearne: What’d you want to talk about. We can talk about anything.
Peaches: Ummm, the Large Hadron Collider.
Fearne: The what?
Peaches: You know they have made this thing called the Large Hadron Collider. It’s in Texas or something, where they are trying to create a black hole in space.
Fearne: Right, you want to talk about space.
Peaches: Yeah.
Fearne: Go for it.
Peaches: Well, I’ve always been interested in Quantum physics, and about theories of, you know, how we came to be and why… Um, which is I guess how I got involved in spirituality and stuff and that way and the religious path I choose to go down and stuff.
Fearne: Which is what?
Peaches: I don’t want to talk about it.
[later] I am a scientologist, I’ve been a scientologist for a while now.
[Thanks to Reddit]
Large hardon
Mar 24th
About a week ago, the LHC was preparing itself for its inaugural 2010 current ramp to values consistent with 3.5 TeV energy proton beams. While this was simply an opening act for the feature presentation (actual 3.5 TeV + 3.5 TeV collisions) next week, it certainly was an exciting and optimistic event celebrated widely at CERN and around the world. Record energies were reached in the field of particle acceleration, and the timing was perfect considering the growing awareness of the 2010-2011 LHC physics programme.
One media outlet that decided to express its enthusiasm for the huge success of the LHC’s initial foray into the high energy realm was the British online newspaper The Telegraph. Here is the article they published the day after the successful 3.5 TeV commissioning; really, things are pretty tame in this write-up — catchy headline, video of cute physicists, and lots of fervent anticipation for next week’s collision extravaganza. However, when this article first appeared on the website of The Telegraph, their elation with the world record breaking energy ramp-up was much more apparent:
If that didn’t strike you as odd, have a look at that headline one more time.
Actually, this is quite a natural joke to be made, if you think about it. I was surprised to find that, while ‘large hadron collider’ yields around 900k Google hits, ‘large hardon collider’ only finds 63.4k! I can only hope that our fellow internet comrades will up the efforts to capitalize on this goldmine. Sexual innuendos mix quite well with physics jargon. How do you think the term hadron was derived in the first place? I feel like we’re not far from hearing the phrases ‘beam dump’ and ‘that’s what she said’ used together quite regularly.
On the other hand, the top hit of that Google search surely sets the bar pretty high: http://largehardoncollider.com/
Towering rabbit of doom
Mar 22nd
Everyone knows that bunnies are cute and fluffy; why then do human-constructed likenesses of them turn out to be so utterly terrifying? Appearing harmless and adorable in nature, a bunny writ large is at best creepy and at worst, devastating. And yet we insist on creating ever larger monuments to the long-eared ones. It’s possible that our widespread practices of rabbit idolatry perversely reflect some deep and ancient animosity between the races; after all, a child’s first impulse, when given a small (possibly edible) bunny effigy, is to bite off its head. Like other dangerous and potentially world-ending pursuits, CERN finds itself right in the center of the ongoing human vs. bunny struggle, with rabbit flesh prominently featured as a dish on the lab’s rotating menu. Now the world’s tallest chocolate bunny has been erected a stone’s throw away from the LHC in the outskirts of Geneva. Physicists and laypersons alike were encouraged to worship at the feet of this delicious and unholy monstrosity. While other countries may claim to have constructed the most massive, I sincerely doubt anyone can beat this 5-meter tall chocolate bunny.
I fear that our overweening pride has not only threatened the destruction of the universe, but that this graven image shall reach unto the heavens as the ancient tower of Babel, its pointy ears penetrating the event horizon of some intergalactic time warp, bringing down Armageddon upon our heads.
LHC Update – March 2010
Mar 18th
Some of our readers not plugged-in to the everyday scene of physics at the high energy frontier might be confused remembering that we promised you some bad-ass proton collision action somewhere around 14 February, which was over a month ago, and realizing that, indeed, the beloved 7 TeV data is still nowhere to be found. In fact, the media has been so focused on the 1-year shutdown expected for the LHC in 2012 (and seriously, it’s not because of the Mayan calendar…) that no one has really posed the obvious question: “Umm, hey… wasn’t there supposed to be stuff happening already this year?”
Have no fear, friends. Your friendly LHC scientists are simply making sure they are working with a well-oiled machine, and these kinds of delays are completely normal. January and February were used for commissioning the machine at low current, and further developing the Quench Protection System (QPS); here’s a nice article by SymmetryBreaking giving some more information about the LHC’s QPS. Having a robust protection against accidents such as the one in September 2008 is clearly a high priority. Beam was re-introduced to the LHC a few weeks ago, and the progress is steadily imrpvoing, however carefully the technicians are working.
Tonight is a special night, however. For the first time in 2010, we are witnessing the LHC dry-ramping* to the current which corresponds to a 3.5 TeV proton energy; this is the target energy for collisions in the 2010-2011 run. Of course, live coverage is brought to you by OP Vistars. In case you missed it, here’s a snapshot in the early stage of the ramp.
(*Dry-ramping implies the current in the magnets of the LHC are being ramped up, but that there is no proton beam circulating at the time.)
Kick the tires and light the fires.
We here at CERN Love are as giddy as schoolgirls about this.
Behind the scenes: how physics really gets done
Mar 15th
As a non-physicist, you may think that physicists spend their time writing equations on chalkboards, tweaking complicated machines, or scribbling equations on chalkboards. If you read Dan Brown, you probably think they run around in white lab coats. However, hands-on work involving machines and equipment is often given to undergraduate interns and graduate students, while PhD physicists conduct their work a little differently…
- CERN physicists spend most of their work day in meetings, not in labs or their offices.
- There are so many meetings that committees have been formed to hold meetings to figure out how to reduce the number of meetings (I am not making this up).
- Physics analysis is done on laptops during meetings, because it has to get done sometime, and physicists are always in meetings.
- Nobody pays attention to the speaker because they’re submitting physics analysis jobs and creating ugly ROOT graphs on their laptops; they know they can always get the slides later from Indico, the conference management tool everybody uses to post their slides.
- The presenters know nobody is listening so instead of creating readable PowerPoint slides or learning the most basic presentation skills, they write entire blocks of fully formed text in their PowerPoint slides using miniscule font sizes and read verbatim from the slides in an often inaudible monotone. They know that if anyone wants to see their results, they’ll just read the slides on Indico later. Generally the presenter faces the screen, with his/her back to the audience.
This behavior habitual and completely ingrained. I was once in a tutorial for physicists held in a computer lab, where every seat had a desk with a dedicated computer terminal. The participants all filed into the room, sat down at their computer terminals, got out their laptops, put them in front of the computer terminals, and plugged their laptops in at the same time, blowing the room’s electrical circuits.
Finding your way around CERN
Mar 12th
We have already noted that “the building numbers here don’t make a damn bit of sense. If they do follow any kind of scheme, it’s not a scheme that helps you find buildings.” So, suppose you have a workshop to attend in the AB auditorium in building 6. You might know where building 5 is, but one learns very quickly that that sort of information doesn’t do you the tiniest bit of good at CERN. Instead, your only resource is undoubtedly the ancient “WWW Map” of CERN.
(By the way, I once spent twenty minutes wandering the halls of building 6 trying to find the infamous AB auditorium. Not to be outdone, at CERN the room numbers can be just as confusing as the building numbers.)
I actually find CERN’s building map page mostly effective and a cute little throwback to a time before Google Maps. It’s the horseshoe crab of web pages, ugly but effective. Go ahead and open Netscape 1.0 (or maybe something even older) and find yourself a building, if that happens to be your thing. It’s all just GIFs and links (image maps are used in some places, but not nearly as much as you would expect), and most of the time it gets you where you need to go.
Of course though, there are some serious and silly limitations,
- Clicking top map zooms out revealing the only other zoom level available. Clicking bottom maps inexplicably takes you back to the home page. Panning is never an option.
- If you land in the Prevessin site the bottom right map doesn’t indicate this at all. From the home page try CERN Clubs Spaces > Picnic area; if you don’t have an inkling that this is on the Prevessin site then you are going to be very confused for a while.
- The orientations of the other two maps are not consistent with the the overview map in the bottom right (the only one with north properly straight up). Why they did this I don’t have a clue; my only guess is that they wanted to layout the Meyrin site a little more horizontally. This is a big reason why the previous picnic area example is so confusing, the shape of the Prevessin site is not as obvious when presented in multiple orientations.
- At least at first glance, there are no simple everything-in-a-pdf versions of the maps. There is a very prominent link to a 3D PDF that takes a while to download and render, after which you realize the 3D in this case is a useless gimmick. I have run across a PDF with 3D content a total of zero times outside of this page; there must be a very good reason for this. Actually, there are PDF maps of all the sites, but the only place you can find them is via a very subtle link at the bottom of the map page after you have clicked on a point of interest or searched for a building. There is no link at all from the main page. (Contrary to what it says, they are accessible outside of CERN, one slightly pleasant surprise.)
Hoping to discover what other information might be available, I found my way to the GS Department Patrimony and Site Information page. The page is littered with promising links that when poked reveal themselves to be dead and rotting. But, there is one handy find: a GPS navigation page provides a CSV file with the latitude and longitude of all the buildings for uploading to your navigation system. (Relevant to the discussion in our building number post, there is also a page listing the construction date of each of the buildings, but that page is not accessible outside of CERN so I won’t bother linking.)
Finally, a tip: keep watching CERN Love. We are working on a geographical component to the site that hopefully will be handy and informative. We also hope to publish some interactive informational pages that will be very relevant to the start up of the LHC. Both should appear in the next couple weeks.
We’re getting testy
Mar 10th
One disgruntled physicist who sits in Building 40 is fed up. Remind me to never leave my coffee dishes anywhere near this dude(ette).
Public spaces NOT to be used for dish storage.
If we're not testing the parameters of the standard model, we sure as hell are testing each other's patience...
How you found us
Mar 8th
A fascinating aspect of writing this blog has been to sift through our web logs and see how readers find us. It shows us which topics are relevant to today’s internet. It also disturbs us to discover how twisted your minds are.
Firstly and rightfully, the most commonly used search term is…
- op vistars
Apparently we’re not the only ones who are baffled by the cryptic OP Vistars page. Next we present some ROOT-related searches, not all of which are complimentary:
- fuck you root cern
- root ugly plots
- root cern ugly
- cern root evil
- root cern sucks
- root cern design ugly
- you are the roots of all my evils
- root of all evil cern
- root of all my frustrations
- blinding data cern root
The following searches give us insight as to how the general public views CERN:
- cern and time rifts
- cern to open dimensional rift
- cern broke nov 2009
- cern diamonds
- cern dog
- cern monorail
- plumbing at cern
- cern bufet
- cern swirls
- working at cern boring
Whatever CERN may be, it sure as hell isn’t “boring” and I am disgusted that anyone would type this into Google, and that Google would lead them here. Next, the obligatory potty-related searches:
- cern swiss urine
- lavabo love
- urine and hand washing
- liquid drip when toilet
- hand washing proper sign with foot pedal type
I would really like to know what these people were looking for. On second thought, I really don’t want to know. Here are a few more miscellaneous gems:
- motombo love
- shitty geneva studio
- spiderman+physics+analysis
- how i did not find love
- throbbing eyeball
- what is love half life
- porn love.org
I am completely unable to explain or categorize this one:
- you plote
And all you faithful Spanish readers out there, we love you! if we ever translate CERN Love into other languages, Spanish will be the first:
- blog del cern en español
The LHC thrust deep into our cultural consciousness
Mar 5th
Congratulations CERN media relations, someone in Spain is clearly drinking your Kool-Aid (or Flavor Aid, it seems history is unclear).
Remember that smutty detector porn that CERN started feeding the media a few years back? The stuff where our super-conducting toroids are laid bare, nothing left to your nerdy imagination. How can you not forget?
Here, let me introduce you to an old friend, it may have a temporary word with your techno-thalamus,
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Either the guy is really small or the orifice is really big.
This image can be found in the ATLAS barrel magnet gallery as well as in every media packet ever distributed by CERN. If you are a heavy pop-sci consumer you senses are probably already deadened to it. (Do you remember your mom warning you about this stuff back when you were 13? She should have.) Well, if you browsed the magnet gallery just a little bit too long then you might be struck by a jarring final image like this
Familiar? from a production of Berlioz's Les Troyens last year
This is from what seems have been a very short lived production of Hector Berlioz’s Les Troyens at the Palau de les Arts in Valencia, Spain. It’s the classic legend of Troy and Carthage in the form of opera, but this very contemporary production seems to have been ripped from the science and technology section of your local paper by the same people who brought you Battlefield Earth. According to one review the theater company directing the production “was received with mixed applause and boos.” After watching the following montage of the production–where it seems bits of every sci-fi drama ever produced was collided at near the speed of light, irradiating the performers, and transporting them back to college in which everyone is issued a MacBook–I think I would be applauding and booing at the same time, both loudly. The ATLAS toroid scene is at 1:09,
[By the way, if you want to learn more about this theater company, La Fura dels Baus, and you decide to visit their web site at www.lafura.com, you might take into consideration the fact that you will be treated to immediate full screen video. If you are lucky (or unlucky, depending on your setting and sensibilities) the random clip will include nudity or even simulated sex. Good times.]
Correction: as the first comment points out, I originally put “Palau de les Arts” where I meant “La Fura dels Baus” in the last paragraph.
Things physicists say
Mar 3rd
For years, an experimental physicist sits through countless hours of physics lectures which mostly focus on the theoretical. Hypothetical is the name of the game. Being engulfed in a sea of abstract jargon, a few phrases really adhere to a physicist’s subconscious, making him prone to conversational non sequiturs. A few qurirks that come to mind are excessive use of the words trivial and coupling. For example, “These cables seem to be trivially wired, yet I can’t tell how these two are coupled.” A little bit of an awkward oratorical toolkit develops over one’s education.
But, I feel that one introductory phrase really exemplifies the problem associated with developing this flavor of vocabulary. Let’s consider the expression, “In principle.” From the Free Dictionary, “in principle” actually seems well defined:
in principle – with regard to fundamentals although not concerning details
Pretty clear, right? “In principle” should probably be used to discuss more lofty or general ideas and situations, as opposed to everyday, common issues. Let’s take a look at a few examples:
Don’t say this:
- In principle, the weather is nice today.
- In principle, I am hungry.
- In principle, I’d like you to plot the diphoton pT as well as the jet pT.
- In principle, we should go out sometime.
Say this:
- In principle, we expect two solutions to this equation.
- I agree with you, in principle.
- In principle, the distributions should be identical.
- In principle, I should find you attractive, but I actually don’t.
Okay, so, maybe don’t say that last one. But, social graces are a whole other lesson that we should probably cover someday soon.
No smoking
Mar 1st
At the CERN hostel, this sign indicates that you may not smoke cigarettes, cigars or pipes. I guess it’s ok to smoke anything else.
Where are my robot hands?
Feb 26th
Earlier we discussed the LHC’s current robot monorail, little TIM, but 30 years ago CERN had far loftier goals and they were all about getting grabby. What follows are some photos grudgingly requinquished by CERN’s document server. The first one is my favorite, because this fellow is clearly living the 1981 dream.
Ever wish you could just shoot your arms through an iron-impregnated concrete wall and shake some sense into that radioactive pressure vessel on the other side? In 1981 you could.
The robot arms were eventually upgraded and attached to both monorails and trucks tethered by umbilical cord. “MANTIS’ as it was known, has more photos in CDS. You can also read more at “MANTIS – a compact mobile remote-handling system for accelerator halls and tunnels”, “MANTIS 2 : a new long range remote vehicle and servo-master-slave manipulator for the CERN accelerator complex” and “Teleoperator evolution at CERN”.
Reading some of those documents, MANTIS sounds like a really handy guy. Maybe that is why he was eventually incorporated into the military-industrial complex; given complex reasoning skills; and, through some fortune, jolted into a zest for more than just the life of a radioactive science-slave or autonomous killing machine. CERN was the crucible in which was forged one who “is alive”, a crafty, cultured cowboy. We miss you, Johnny Five!
Left: a slave in the bowels of CERN. Right: bandanas aren't just for the human overlords anymore.
The problem of gender
Feb 22nd
In the 21st century, it can sometimes be difficult to tell men and women apart. Of course, if you spend enough time with a person, you can discern their gender based on a variety of social cues. However, when it comes to toilets, it seems to me that the role of a sign maker should be to accentuate, celebrate, and make abundantly clear the differences between the male and female body, so that the reader knows exactly what is going on at first glance. The last thing any of us wants is an unwelcome intrusion of the opposite gender while we are doing our business.
The highly stylized man and woman icons shown above are apparently not clear enough for the occupants of building 40. In their typical can-do mindset, these physicists have taken matters into their own hands and added some explanatory signage.
This home-brew solution of adding signs and annotating existing ones, while effective, seems a bit overwrought. Where can we look for better answers? One shining example is to be found just outside the Main Auditorium, where the men’s room door demonstrates in no uncertain terms just which kind of human may enter, while simultaneously discouraging riff-raff from degrading the premises with anything less than a suit, bowtie and dress shoes.
Stick figures can also be identified by a more direct method of course: by drawing the genitalia. While we have not yet found it at CERN, this method is being used nearby in western Switzerland.
I would like to thank lovehurts for providing the last photograph. He took it while urinating … standing up.
Farm life and accelerators
Feb 20th
The highest energy accelerators in the world cover a lot of ground. The LHC tunnel passes mostly hidden under pasture and a few small farms, but even right in the middle of the laboratories, assembly buildings, and offices of CERN’s Meyrin site one finds a flock of sheep. The sheep rotate through a few disjoint grassy patches small enough that I really start to wonder if it’s worth the trouble. CERN’s sibling over in the US, Fermilab, hosts on its grounds some even more substantial farm and wildlife: bison, horses, deer (though the population was heavily culled a few years back to make the roads safer) and some ponds well stocked with fish and frequented by herons.
At least one person has relayed the speculation that the animals are primarily present to allay local’s fears of radiation: if sheep can spend all day snacking on top of an accelerator then how dangerous can it be? The problem I have with this theory is that it makes no mention of the scientists who spend just as much time in just as much proximity to our scary science stuff. Does the public honestly think we are so driven to distraction by our whizzing particles that we might very well hang our balls in the beam to see if it tickles? Let me go on record and say definitively, no, we are not.
Below I present evidence of how deadly serious the Fermilab-CERN competition is.
Sheep take shelter under CERN's ISR overpass near one of the LHC assembly building.
One of my many coyote sightings at Fermilab
Potential for future study:
- Apply a Lotka–Volterra model to the CERN and Fermilab scientific populations.
- Cite this blog post as the only motivation.
- Win Ig Nobel prize (for a physicist of my meager stature, the equivalent of ‘profit’).
That is unless one of our five highly esteemed readers scoops me on this. I dare you.
CERN Document Server
CERN Document Server
Feb 17th
CERNLover lots-o-love expertly commented on one of CDS’s completely terrible web pages. Today I am reviewing a true classic: http://cds.cern.ch, none other than the CDS home page itself. I should admit that I feel a bit sheepish today; finding egregious flaws on CDS web pages is like shooting fish in a barrel. It is just so universally bad that I’m not sure where to start. Might as well start at the top.
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CDS stands for CERN Document Server. It’s a long and difficult acronym (no, not really), so the CDS folks have helped you out by putting that title right at the top where you can’t miss it. Twice.
Sandwiched between them is the tiny word “Home”. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a link; it’s not (I know you already clicked on it). Oh no, if it were a link, it would be a very slightly darker shade of blue indistinguishable to the human eye. Nope, “Home” is just a tiny word surrounded by ample whitespace, serving no purpose whatsoever. It’s true that that on other CDS pages, that space is occupied by breadcrumbs telling you your location, but on the main page it just looks dumb.
Let’s move on to the proud proclamation of how many records CDS has. Actually there are two such statements, about a centimeter apart on my screen … and they don’t match. Just when you thought 900,000 was an impossibly large number, well GUESS WHAT, 1,017,486 is even bigger! I guess we can never really know just how many records CDS has, but rest assured, it’s a gigantic number! A large portion of these records are “fulltext“, a term I (a native English speaker) and my English-speaking friends have never heard in our lives. I’m certainly ready to believe that it is some computer science or librarian term, but I question whether any users actually know or care what it means. Apparently it’s pretty damned impressive though for archives to be sporting fulltext, because it deserves its own sentence. As soon as I find out what the fuck fulltext is I’m going to convert all the documents on my computer to it.
Search or browse? You decide! It’s not clear from first glance what the difference is. I know what “browse” usually means on a website (basically looking through categories instead of text search), but not here. Go ahead, type in a word, click “Browse” and see if you can figure out what the fuck is going on.
Not entering any search or browse terms today? Then perhaps CDS can interest you in two incredibly dense columns filled with terms nobody understands, but by God, every single one of them is a hyperlink pointing somewhere. These columns are labeled “Narrow by collection” and “Focus on“. Every time I read these two labels, my brain grinds to an infuriated halt. Don’t those mean the same thing?! Is there a discernable reason that there are 5 checkboxes next to the left column but not the right? Oh God I am so confused. Those checkboxes and underlining under every single word are making me all misty-eyed remembering my first day learning HTML. Seriously though, the point here is to be impressed by the sheer number of subjects CDS has in its archive. You’re not supposed to be actually reading those, you idiot!
If you do attempt to read the headache-inducing arrangement of subjects, you’ll find some oddities that will make you completely lose whatever faith you may have had in CDS up to this point. For example, there are both “videos” and “videotapes”. I have to admit I don’t understand the difference here. And if you click on “General Talks”, you get a list of … videos.
A truly baffling item at the end of the second column is the heading “Archives”. Holy hell! Do you mean that up until now I haven’t been looking at archives? I thought CDS was by definition an archive! And by the way, CERN Archives apparently make up a subset of Archives, even though I thought the C in CDS stood for CERN. Actually I’m certain it does.
Finally, at the bottom of the page, far, far away from the search box, are some more search options. If you are lucky enough to know what the hell these things are (KISS, anyone?), you might want to include them in your search (after you’ve already done searches that didn’t work, I suppose). That’s kind of like Google saying way at the bottom of their page “Didn’t find what you were looking for? Would you like to search the WHOLE internet? Because up until now we’ve just been fucking with you. Step right up and click a bunch of checkboxes, and we’ll be on our way!”
Amazingly, I only have one suggestion that will fix everything at once with one stroke. Just change the word “site” at the bottom to “shite”.
I would like to apologize to the CDS developers for ridiculing their life’s work …. but, damn. You would think they would care a little bit more about their public image.
Happy Valentine’s Day from CERN Love
Feb 14th
There are a lot of things to celebrate today, including Chinese New Year, the winter Olympics, and the America’s Cup, but Valentine’s Day holds a special place in our hearts, because it is so closely associated with CERN Love core values, including love, hearts, ridicule, loneliness and depression. We would like to take this moment to thank you, our readers, with a special poem.
Roses are red,
Dipoles are blue,
All you lonely physics groupies, remember,
CERN Love loves you!
We’d like to share an email that was sent to the ATLAS Collaboration and intercepted by our electonic intelligence division. You might expect the ATLAS lost and found to be full of pocket protectors, graphing calculators and dosimeters, but it’s not. We’re not sure what this says about ATLAS physicists.
Email from the ATLAS Secretariat regarding the Lost and Found
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