Posts tagged Fermilab

Coyote at FNAL

Farm life and accelerators

4
1 year ago
by lots-o-love in ,

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.

The Americans bought out a town, slapped 15 stories of concrete on the prairie, and started hacking

The Tevatron is dead to us

1
1 year ago
by lots-o-love in

Some hacker symbol

Oh, security@cern.ch, I know you mean well, but come on…

I’m not at CERN right now. Of all the places in the world where might I be? The safest guess would be “back a my university or lab,” but let’s not be so generic. If you had to guess one specific place I bet your safest guess would be Fermilab, home to the second highest energy accelerator in the world (but only by a hair, for now). At least in this case you’d be correct. As the LHC continues to slowly work toward interesting collisions, a scientist has got to get his science fix from somewhere. There are hundreds of scientists associated with CERN who continue to work at Fermilab, which makes the security warning email I received recently about the most absurd imaginable (emphasis mine).

From: service-security@cern.ch
Subject: [xxx] XXX: Logins from unusual location(s)

CERN computer security checks have detected login(s) using your account
at an unusual location. This might indicate that your account has been
broken into.

Please CHECK whether you have established any connection to CERN
between 2010/01/xx-xx:xx:xx and 2010/01/xx-xx:xx:xx (Geneva local time)
from the following domain(s):

dhcp.fnal.gov (131.225.xxx.xxx, United States, Fermilab)

- If NOT, please urgently contact Computer.Security@cern.ch. Your
account XXX has most probably been broken into.

- If YES, then please ignore this e-mail. You will not get another
e-mail notification for your sessions from the domains listed
above.

Thanks for your collaboration.
____________________________________________
CERN Security Team | http://cern.ch/security

OK, I’ll admit I don’t connect to one of their login computer every day, maybe not even every week when I’m not at CERN (you pull data off the grid and work locally most of the time), but I certainly do now and then. It never occurred to me I might be operating from a den of l33t haxors.

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