Hello, all
I feel like Adam Sandler in the movie "Click" - fast-forward a few months and whoa! Where did the time go?? Three months with no blog post?? What have I been up to, you ask.
Working, mostly, of course. Once again, how can one summarize months of living? Impossible, but try I will, mmmm, yeeesss. No no! Try not! Do! Or do not...(sorry, channeling my inner Yoda).
Regarding the LHC, once they got it running, they fell into a pattern of "machine development", or MD, during the week and then "stable beams" over the weekend. The difference is that from the experiments' perspective, it's the stable beams we want, in order to collect data and publish papers. But then sometime in late May, late on a Friday night, there was a power outage that affected the whole ring and all the experiments. They lost cryo in one segment I believe and that meant no beam at all over the weekend.
Now the biggest high-energy physics conference of the year (the International Conference on High Energy Physics, or ICHEP, held this year in Paris) was scheduled for July (actually one week from now). The experiments wanted a certain amount of data by conference time in order to brag about new physics results there. But because the LHC team was losing time, their goal was to work non-stop on machine development and get the LHC to a higher luminosity so they could make their year-end goal.
So they had a decision to make. They did as this movie title suggests, and I think they made the right decision. They decided they weren't going to give us stable beams on the weekends any more, because the longer term goals of the LHC were more important. So for about three weeks in June we had no stable beams with which to collect data. They started back up again with higher luminosity - basically it means they increased the number of protons per circulating bunch to 10^11.
How much is 10^11? Well that's 100 billion, which is only less than 1% of the current U.S. national debt. You know, it used to be that Carl Sagan would use the phrase "bullions and bullions" to refer to the stars in the sky or the galaxies in the universe. But the universe has got nothing on the U.S. Federal government!
And for all the good of the money they're spending like profligate debutantes, they might as well be throwing them around a ring at high velocity and colliding packets of bills into each other to see what will happen.
But I digress.
So now we're back to data-taking again, at increased rate, and we may even have barely enough data to squeak in a few results in Paris next week.
So who's ahead? I was commiserating with another student about the lack of progress on writing the thesis that will mark the end of this long haul. He insisted I was ahead because with the help of some weekly deadlines applied by my adviser I've managed to write about 25-30 pages of it. I insisted he was ahead because at least he had a thesis topic picked out and has been doing analysis work on it! This will be my major task in the next month; all my candidate topics so far have come and gone.
On a more personal note, we managed to have my mother visit us during the month of May - that was a lot of fun! We put the kids in the same bedroom and Mom had G's room to herself. She got to see how we live from day to day, and she also got to see some sights. We took a couple roadtrips - pictures are on Dropshots. The first road trip we took during the long weekend created by the Ascension holiday. We went to Interlaken. K and I had been there twice before, once in 2006 on tour with her parents, and more recently a couple years ago when we stayed in Grindelwald. This time the weather stayed sour the whole weekend long with low hanging clouds and drizzle - hard to see the Alps this way. But we tried to make the best of it.
Then we took a day trip to Chamonix/Mont Blanc. While K watched the kids down below Mom and I got to go up the "telecabine" (cable car) to the Aiguille du Midi, which is quite an exhilarating eyrie from which to view the world. The altitude and the view both take your breath away. I was able to stay in contact with K using the cell phone from 14,000 feet above sea level.
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing
Heard some time ago on local English-speaking radio station Radio 74 - which seems to be run by the local 7th -Day Adventist church (those of you longtime MN residents, think of the bad old days of KTIS a couple decades ago): "Today's good news verse: Proverbs 31:4-7:
That was today's good news verse."
I felt encouraged. In fact I took quite a bit of strong drink on the night after the last election...
Well, that's it, ran out of steam with this one, I'll have to post about the kids later...
-PKBGD
I feel like Adam Sandler in the movie "Click" - fast-forward a few months and whoa! Where did the time go?? Three months with no blog post?? What have I been up to, you ask.
Working, mostly, of course. Once again, how can one summarize months of living? Impossible, but try I will, mmmm, yeeesss. No no! Try not! Do! Or do not...(sorry, channeling my inner Yoda).
Regarding the LHC, once they got it running, they fell into a pattern of "machine development", or MD, during the week and then "stable beams" over the weekend. The difference is that from the experiments' perspective, it's the stable beams we want, in order to collect data and publish papers. But then sometime in late May, late on a Friday night, there was a power outage that affected the whole ring and all the experiments. They lost cryo in one segment I believe and that meant no beam at all over the weekend.
Now the biggest high-energy physics conference of the year (the International Conference on High Energy Physics, or ICHEP, held this year in Paris) was scheduled for July (actually one week from now). The experiments wanted a certain amount of data by conference time in order to brag about new physics results there. But because the LHC team was losing time, their goal was to work non-stop on machine development and get the LHC to a higher luminosity so they could make their year-end goal.
So they had a decision to make. They did as this movie title suggests, and I think they made the right decision. They decided they weren't going to give us stable beams on the weekends any more, because the longer term goals of the LHC were more important. So for about three weeks in June we had no stable beams with which to collect data. They started back up again with higher luminosity - basically it means they increased the number of protons per circulating bunch to 10^11.
How much is 10^11? Well that's 100 billion, which is only less than 1% of the current U.S. national debt. You know, it used to be that Carl Sagan would use the phrase "bullions and bullions" to refer to the stars in the sky or the galaxies in the universe. But the universe has got nothing on the U.S. Federal government!
And for all the good of the money they're spending like profligate debutantes, they might as well be throwing them around a ring at high velocity and colliding packets of bills into each other to see what will happen.
But I digress.
So now we're back to data-taking again, at increased rate, and we may even have barely enough data to squeak in a few results in Paris next week.
So who's ahead? I was commiserating with another student about the lack of progress on writing the thesis that will mark the end of this long haul. He insisted I was ahead because with the help of some weekly deadlines applied by my adviser I've managed to write about 25-30 pages of it. I insisted he was ahead because at least he had a thesis topic picked out and has been doing analysis work on it! This will be my major task in the next month; all my candidate topics so far have come and gone.
On a more personal note, we managed to have my mother visit us during the month of May - that was a lot of fun! We put the kids in the same bedroom and Mom had G's room to herself. She got to see how we live from day to day, and she also got to see some sights. We took a couple roadtrips - pictures are on Dropshots. The first road trip we took during the long weekend created by the Ascension holiday. We went to Interlaken. K and I had been there twice before, once in 2006 on tour with her parents, and more recently a couple years ago when we stayed in Grindelwald. This time the weather stayed sour the whole weekend long with low hanging clouds and drizzle - hard to see the Alps this way. But we tried to make the best of it.
Then we took a day trip to Chamonix/Mont Blanc. While K watched the kids down below Mom and I got to go up the "telecabine" (cable car) to the Aiguille du Midi, which is quite an exhilarating eyrie from which to view the world. The altitude and the view both take your breath away. I was able to stay in contact with K using the cell phone from 14,000 feet above sea level.
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing
Heard some time ago on local English-speaking radio station Radio 74 - which seems to be run by the local 7th -Day Adventist church (those of you longtime MN residents, think of the bad old days of KTIS a couple decades ago): "Today's good news verse: Proverbs 31:4-7:
4 It is not for kings, O Lemuel,
it is not for kings to drink wine,
or for rulers to take strong drink,
5 lest they drink and forget what has been decreed
and pervert the rights of all the afflicted.
6 Give strong drink to the one who is perishing,
and wine to those in bitter distress;
7 let them drink and forget their poverty
and remember their misery no more.
I felt encouraged. In fact I took quite a bit of strong drink on the night after the last election...
Well, that's it, ran out of steam with this one, I'll have to post about the kids later...
-PKBGD
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