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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

1. Apply a Lotka–Volterra model to the CERN and Fermilab scientific populations.
2. Cite this blog post as the only motivation.
3. 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.

]]> http://www.cernlove.org/blog/2010/02/farm-life-and-accelerators/feed/ 4 46.234192121287 6.0431858897209 http://www.cernlove.org/blog/2010/02/cern-document-servercern-document-server/ http://www.cernlove.org/blog/2010/02/cern-document-servercern-document-server/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 07:00:33 +0000 biglove http://www.cernlove.org/blog/?p=1325

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.

click to see annotations

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.