It was a good trip from Toronto to Modane. Two planes, two trains, and a bus … and I was standing at the feet of alpine mountains in beautiful Modane. Here are some scenes from the trip.
This week will be something of an intense travel exercise. I am off to a 2-day workshop at the Modane Underground Laboratory on the border of France and Italy. To get there, I leave on a flight (today) from Toronto to Paris, connecting through New York. This puts me into […]
What is a work vacation? It’s when you keep working but do it from a different location than your work site. My own experience with this is that doing this can vastly improve productivity while serving the interests of your employer and yourself. Last week, I had something of a […]
I have decided to wake up nice and early today to watch the live stream of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics announcement. It will likely begin later than scheduled, but the formal event should begin around 5:45am ET. I’ll post here as the event unfolds. I am very curious […]
Many months ago, I wrote about my experiences in cloning a system from a failing disk to a fresh disk. This process repeated itself this weekend. This time was a little different. Previously, the cloned disk used the old style “master boot record” (MBR) or “gnu partition table” (GPT) method […]
These are my personal notes from day four of the Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics Conference. The full conference materials are online: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1199289/timetable/#20230831 August 31, 2023 The fourth day kicked off with a focus on gravitational waves [Mavalvala]. The speaker began with a history of the technology. The LIGO […]
These are my personal notes from day three of the Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics Conference. The full conference materials are online: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1199289/timetable/#20230830 August 30, 2023 We began the third day plenaries with a focus on dark matter. The first talk explore models for dark matter [Cirelli]. The potential […]
The plenaries on the second day began with beam-based neutrino physics [Wen]. The speaker reiterated the target parameters and discussed existing results and future facilities for measuring them. They began by noting that sin2(2theta13) is known by Daya Bay to 2.8%, and that Double Chooz has just updated their measurement […]
These are my personal notes from day one of the Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics Conference. The full conference materials are online: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1199289/timetable/#20230828 August 27, 2023 The rhythm of the TAUP conference is to have plenary sessions in the morning, followed by a lunch break, then parallel sessions throughout […]
To Vienna I write this while sitting on a plane flying just south of Ottawa. We are early in the flight. We departed Toronto a little behind schedule and will land in Vienna, Austria around 08:30 local time tomorrow. The in-flight meal has not been served, and we are in […]
Tomorrow I will board a plane at the Sudbury airport and, connecting through Toronto, depart for Fredericton, New Brunswick. I am excited about this for at least a two reasons. First, this coming week is the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) annual Congress. The week-long meeting will bring students, post-docs, […]
It has been a long time since I was crammed in a big unpleasant crowd of people. Let’s take stock of the last three years. My last major international trip was at the very beginning of March 2020. Outbound from Dallas to CERN, the planes were semi-normal (more masking than […]