Peaceful sounds at work
Feb 10th
Today, this was the definition of the “ambience” in CERN’s Building 40. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was being sabotaged.
Hear the atmosphere which is so conducive to productive work at CERN.
Open-air Batiment 40
Dripping liquid on head after urinating: Toilet Design Awards 2010
Feb 1st
Recently I “drained the dragon” in one of CERN’s plumbing-oriented establishments, choosing a urinal as my preferred receptacle of the day. As I looked down, flushed, and set about the generally onerous task of negotiating my considerably out-sized family jewels back into their boxers, I felt liquid dripping onto the back of my head. Leaping back, I looked up in shock and terror to see that
- each urinal has its own tank (I’m told this is called a cistern),
- each cistern is mounted on the wall directly above the urinal,
- there is apparently no cover for the cisterns, allowing what I hope to God is clean water to slosh out.
I always thought that, even if they are clean (and I’m not convinced of that), toilet-related liquids should be kept inside pipes, and under lids, as close to the ground, and as far away from my head as possible. Just another preconceived notion smashed by CERN plumbing innovation.
Shifts: revisited
Jan 21st
In my previous rant about taking shifts, I made a veiled criticism to the quality of coffee served in the nearby vending area. After all, with this being the heart of the Franco-Swiss megaplex, one would expect there to be good coffee just about anywhere you go. As it stands, CERN is actually quite well known for its high-grade coffee outlets in Restaurant 1, Restaurant 2, and various other cafes around the lab (some popular ones are in Building 40 and Building 30). However, as is the case at Point 1 (where ATLAS physicists take shifts), people are reduced to paying for coffee to come out of something like this:
Real coffee bean selection on the left, instant coffee selection on the right. I'm serious.
I hesitate to actually call that coffee. I mean, considering the depths of the abysmal sorrow, lonliness, and despair felt by a shifter on a cold Saturday morning around 04am, couldn’t the powers that be grace us with something a little more…legitimate?
Well, ATLAS be praised. They have. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the invention which make shifts tolerable — meet our new Nespresso machine:
Things are looking up.
HOT AIR 160° C FOOD HOSE
Jan 11th
My 2010 New Year’s resolution is to eat/drink/inhale all my food/liquid/oxygen through this HOT AIR 160° C FOOD HOSE.
Where documents go to die
Jan 8th
The CERN Document Server or CDS is a piece of software only its coder could love. For the most part it fulfills its function of storing and organizing documents, and it is clear a lot of work has gone into it. But, sadly, I can’t recall ever thinking to myself “wow, this really makes my life easier.”
In the past I have never had good luck searching for documents. Even if I know that such a document exists. Even if I in fact authored the document. Even if I personally submitted the document, I have still had trouble finding the document. One solution, at least in the last case, is to use the “Your Submissions” page associated with your account. Here is roughly what you will see if you’ve submitted a note for approval,
If you click on the image and pop-up the full sized version you will be presented with a perfect reproduction of what the most critical part of this page looks like rendered in almost any browser. Go ahead and try to read that grey line, the characters are no more than 6 pixels high. The status column in this case reads “finished.”
Anticipating that the user will likely have hundreds of submissions, all of which she demands appear on one page and yet none of which she actually wants to be able to read, the designers have decided to employ the smallest font a browser can legibly render. Then they shrink the most critical information, the line listing the actual data such as document approval status and identification numbers, just a little bit more (technically, with HTML’s <small> tag).
This text, which is not quite entirely illegible, might be forgiven if it were not for the fact that not a single bit of data on that 6 pixel high line is linked to anything. At the very least you would think that the reference number would link to the full document record, and it certainly would be handy if the action and status values linked to more details about each. Instead, after waving my mouse around in utter disbelief every time I find myself on this page, I end up squinting as I select and copy the document reference number.
The search box is only located on a dedicated search page; because, really, who needs easy access to searches on a document server? I go find the search box and paste in the reference number.
This is the point at which one starts to feel a little cocky. As you paste this nice unique identifier into a box on that dedicated search page it seems as if the whole world is finally now wrapping around your finger. And in that moment between mouse-down and mouse-up, as the shaded relief of [search] inverts and reverts, it seems this “document server” is now finally, inevitably forced to unlock it secrets, maybe to even “serve a document” to you. But, alas, if you are like me and don’t always suffer through the fame and glory of publishing public documents and instead are content to be the only person to read and reread your internally published, verbose and yet highly specific yammering, then at this point you are greeted with
No public collection matched your query. If you were looking for a non-public document, please choose the desired restricted collection first.
WTF?! To see the list of “Your Submissions” I obviously am logged in. Why the fudge can’t CDS figure this out and search every damn collection that I have access to? Instead, even though I am the holder of both an authenticated session and a unique identifier for a document which I submitted myself, I am now forced to scroll through approximately 350 collections and make a guess as to which one my document is in. Thankfully, it is not hard to identify a few good possibilities, but these collections either need to be searched one at a time or each selected one at a time in separate pull-down menus before doing the search.
I’m down with OP V
Dec 2nd
Well, the holiday season in Geneva is certainly getting off to a festive and boisterous start. From the pretty lighted trees by the lake to the yet-to-be-seen-illuminated Christmas lights in St-Genis-Pouilly, it’s clear that it’s time to get our “fête” on. Even more notable, the LHC has given us physicists an early present or two.
Needless to say, the past 10 days or so have been quite titillating at the lab. Thousands of e-mails have been exchanged, hundreds of plots have been generated, and many million cups of coffee have been consumed. As we “ramp up” for the next few weeks of beam and commissioning before CERN becomes a ghost town, I feel like it’s important to share with you, our devoted audience, a little taste of the magic.
Of course, it’s impossible to stay in the control room for one’s experiment 24/24 (or, for you ‘merkins, 24/7). So, the friendly guys down at the CERN Control Centre (CCC), the control room for the LHC, have created a web-based resource which one can use to receive up-to-the-minute updates on the status of the LHC proton beams. My friends, I present to you OP Vistars — Page 1:
Christmas lights for your browser.
If you’d like to check in every once in a while yourself, click here.
This page is a nice way to be kept in the loop about current activities along the LHC as well as its four experiments. Pay special attention to the ‘Comments’ box in the bottom left. This usually gives a good description of the plan for the immediate future. On the top, one can get some crucial beam information, including the number of protons per bunch in an LHC beam (denoted with an ‘I,’ shown for both beam 1 and beam 2), whether or not there is beam circulating (the two big green BEAM indicators), and the beam energy. The beam which was circulating for the example image was characterized by a proton energy of 450 GeV, which is equivalent to their energy at injection. Injection is quite a tricky process, and it occurs at points 2 and 8 along the LHC (hence the TI2 and TI8 acronyms).
When you really start to think about it, though, this is a masterfully designed, albeit mysterious, piece of internet. Actually, many of the individuals who gaze at this site for many hours a day are perplexed by some of its most prominent features. But the colors sure are nice! As an example of our confusion, in a survey of some 20 ATLAS physicists (my colleagues), I found that exactly 0 of them knew what the shit was going on in the four plots found in the middle of the screen. Noting the x- and y-axis labels, one might suspect that these should be showing the beam position in the x-y plane (and the left-most plot supports this), but nothing about plots (b)-(d) suggests this at all.
The ATLAS run coordinator is reputed to have said that, when one of these plots is shaped like the second plot above, the LHC is operating as a fixed-target collider interacting with someone’s head. I highly doubt it, Christophe.
Perhaps the most elusive question, however, is the following one: Does anyone know what the fuck “OP Vistars” means?
Making friends, losing conciousness
Nov 6th
Slippers, a kind gift from a Russian friend who was maybe too kind with the vodka
I’ve got a little story about these slippers. It’s a heartwarming tale of international friendship and vomit.
When I first moved to CERN, and before I acquired a proper apartment (recall that this process can be difficult), I lived at a CERN hostel for a few months. This wasn’t one of the relatively new and very conveniently located hostels right next to Restaurant 1 and Building 40 (two hubs of activity). Instead, I lived in what we commonly called the ”French hostel” (more specifically it is the ”Saint-Genis hostel,” part of Foyer Résidence Schumann, which also provides housing to people outside CERN). It is off-site and requires a bike or shuttle bus ride to work, but it has the advantage of cheap single rooms that can be booked for long periods of time.
Life at the French hostel is pretty basic. The showers and toilets are shared, though each room is equipped with a sink. During my stay a hot water heater was broken for almost a month during which only those who leapt out of bed before sunrise got a hot morning shower. The kitchen/common area at the end of each floor was primitive. (I hope there have since been some upgrades, though I doubt it.) We had an ancient electric range that sat on the counter as a free-standing component. The microwave was a hefty industrial model of similar vintage that showed off enough metal to make the modern American homeowner proud, except that it worked only part of the time. There was a fridge with small locking sections for each resident, two tables, and some chairs. That’s about it. The space was large, but largely empty.
It seemed like quite a disproportionate number of the residents were Russian, though their hearty dinner gatherings my have unduly enhanced their visibility. One especially gregarious fellow from my floor made frequent shirtless appearances in the common area. We spoke quite a lot. He was older and had been working at CERN and other high energy experiments in Russia for quite some time. He teased me about my salad dinners, which apparently where only fit for a rabbit. My kinship with rabbits was conveyed in pantomime, with a little hopping and sniffing, as was most everything else: neither of us spoke the other’s language.
One evening my friend insisted that I join them in of their large gatherings in the kitchen. The table was filled with bread and crackers, preserved fish, some meat, and plenty to drink. Vodka had marched out from the hostel cupboards, each new bottle introduced as “the finest Russian vodka.” There was one young person who could help with translation. Up until that point in my life my most extreme drunkenness involved slipping off for a nap under the table during one of our biannual grad-school house parties. This nerd was not prepared to keep up with liquor poured 8oz at a time, but I was determined to do my duty as a gracious guest. It wasn’t long before the plate of sardines was swimming back and forth in the sloppy surf that my view of the world had become. I stumbled back to my room in search of some snacks to add to the party, but instead spent a moment on the bed before leaping to the sink and filling it with the most vile cheese-fish-crackery vomit. In my next conscious moment the kitchen was empty and the sun was about to rise.
At least a week passed before I ran into the fellow who had been translating. He greeted me simply with, “it is good to see that you are alive.” Not long after that I met my shirtless friend in the kitchen. He dragged me back to his room and dug out of his suitcase a pair of handmade slippers, the “finest Russian slippers” I’m sure. One of the best of the very meaningful gifts my CERN friends have given me.
Postscript: One day I found my Russian friends clustered around the microwave, disassembling it with a pocket knife. They poked around inside the chassis, sometimes with the power on. Eventually the roomful of scientists and technicians prescribed one wadded up piece of aluminum foil for a gap that under much safer circumstances would be bridged by a fuse. I entered just late enough that I never learned if the fuse had been blowing or the aluminum, having been previously installed, had been shifting. In any case, our intermittent microwave problems were fixed.
Underground CERN: it’s Half-Life in real-life
Oct 26th
It’s one of the greatest games of all time. You clamber over pipes and through ducts. Cables of unclear electrical status dangle uncomfortably close to puddles of water. Tunnels lit by rudimentary emergency lighting lead on and on past a hissing steam pipe, then dripping water, then silence, until the darkness slowly reveals a moist and fleshy lump growing out of the ground.
The game is high energy physics, though there are a couple decades of decay between these scenes and active science. A few years back, shortly before the game Half-Life 2 came out, a group of us explored the little-traveled CERN tunnels recorded in the photos below. The resemblance to the original Half-Life–with its steam leaks, ventilation shafts, and dark corners hiding headcrabs–is uncanny (though my observations indicate that CERN’s dark corners are not fully populated). It’s a testament to Half-Life’s genius design and storytelling that the fantasy of Gordon Freeman’s life becomes so plausible in this real-life setting. It’s also a testament to the awesomeness of science!
High energy physics these days requires all the infrastructure of a large industrial facility with some extra loving attention paid to cryogenics, cables, and computing clusters. It’s amazing to think that these abandoned tunnels, pipes, and cables, though extensive, are dwarfed by the facilities still in operation and newly built for the LHC.
It’s almost enough to make a scientist wonder, “will this open a dimensional rift?” and as a backup, “where is the nearest crowbar?”
CERN’s new water conservation initiative
Oct 19th
Working at a world-class institution like CERN is tremendously exciting. As you might assume, not only does CERN lead the world in particle physics, its general infrastructure is also top-notch and maintained by a tireless team of highly dedicated individuals. On a daily basis, you see the same incredible human ingenuity and generous financial resources used to probe the building blocks of matter also being put to use for more mundane things like plumbing. On a recent trip to the toilet, I discovered a bold new water conservation initiative apparently underway. And boy, does it work!
I ... think I'm done washing now.
First I should tell you a dirty little secret about myself. I can be a bit of a glutton, and sometimes this gluttony gets into the realm of wastefulness. One of the forbidden pleasures I allow myself is the use of warm water for hand-washing. Please don’t think I’m such a bad person, it just feels so warm and comfy, and when nobody is watching I just love it. Well, the CERN water engineers are far too clever for reprobates like me! They’ve installed a system whereby the warm water starts out clear but slowly turns yellow, until it is the color of unhealthy urine. Well let me tell you, I shut that hot water faucet off pretty quick! Some people like me never learn, but when your hands are covered in what is probably urine, you start to catch on! Although, I’ll be honest with you – and this is kind of embarrassing – the urine-based warning system has been in full production for several months and yet I still fall back to my old ways.
cutting-edge water conservation system
The story is not over though, because I hadn’t learned my lesson yet. I turned on the cold water and went right back to enjoying myself, getting all that soap off my hands, and I’ll admit, basking a little too long in the cooling water massage. I was so focused on my own pleasure that I didn’t immediately notice the warning signal, in the form of a splashing sound over and above the normal splashing from the sink. Well, I ignored that warning and I finally got the punishment I deserved. I suddenly realized my feet were soaking wet and my gorgeous Italian leather shoes were ruined. Because, get this, the water was going straight out through the drain onto the floor! Brilliant! This time I finally got the message.
I shut that water off immediately and will think very seriously about how often I wash my hands from now on. I can’t begin to imagine the level of sophisticated Swiss engineering needed to implement such an advanced water-conservation system, but CERN is obviously willing to shell out some big money to make it happen. Kudos to them! Hopefully I can be a better world citizen and steward of our precious natural resources from now on.
Feedback Loop