Dec
12
2009
It’s being tired, because you’ve been cramming information about jets, electrons, muons, photons, and all manner of other things yet unidentified in your head. It’s the swelling in your eyes because you’ve been staring at code, a sheriff and an outlaw locking eyes on a dusty main street, each knowing that only one of you [...]
Dec
10
2009
The Blackberry goes off at 6, playing a jolly little electric piano tune. In the dark of a room in Hostel 41 – a room I have affectionately taken to calling the “Monolith Apartment” (see Stanley Kubrick’s “2001″) – I dismiss the alarm and swing myself out of bed. Thus begins the second of two [...]
Dec
07
2009
This has been a whirlwind week for me. Ever since I arrived in Geneva last week, I’ve been keeping myself as busy as a grad student so that I can be a more effective professor. I truly need to understand something of ATLAS before I can lead a group of people in ATLAS. In the [...]
Dec
02
2009
Day two: jet lag. Despite five hours of sleep on the plane from Dulles to Geneva, my body insists that it is, in fact, midnight when we land. It is unhappy, it is tired, and it is angry at my brain for keeping it up. Despite the overwhelming exhaustion, the eyelids heavy like pig iron, [...]
Dec
01
2009
I am on my first trip to CERN as a real collaborator in the ATLAS experiment. I have not earned the right to call myself a “member” yet – at least, in the sense that I can sign papers. I am a newbie (n00b, if you will), a greenhorn, and I am going to CERN [...]