The Blog is Back!

The Jura mountains from my CERN hostel room window.  Don't they make you want to go skiing?

Hello from Switzerland, my home for the next seven months.  I arrived on Friday, March 5th, and along with the move came a renewed commitment to blogging.  My first, and only other, foray into blogging occurred while I was living in France and I found that it was a good way to keep my family and friends informed about my life abroad.  Consequently, this blog will take on a slightly more personal bent while I'm here, although I intend to continue to focus on physics and food (and feminism--another theme that didn't make it into the title).   Posts about food will have to wait until I find an apartment; I'm currently living at CERN in the hostel and eating all my meals in the lab cafeteria.  It is much better than eating in any cafeteria I've been to in the US, but it's not the same as cooking for yourself.  I've started the search for an apartment which I expect, based on stories from fellow students, to be an arduous task.  Geneva is one of the most expensive places to live and the housing market is severely impacted so I expect to expend a significant amount of energy looking for a place in the next few weeks.
Today was International Women's Day.  CERN celebrated it in a big way, with media events and stunts such as filling all the control rooms of the detectors and the LHC with women.  They have a website dedicated to it where you could see the women in action via webcams.  The page also hosts videos of women physicists talking about why the day is important to them and links to other material about the events.  International women's day seems to be a bigger event outside of the US.  I've never heard much about it back home but I think its a good idea, generally.  Side note: did you know that Swiss women didn't get the right to vote until 1971?!  Crazy!

It must've been pretty cool to be in a women-only control room.  I am not yet qualified to take any detector shifts, but this week I am getting my certification through a week long training.  I will soon be qualified to operate the Pixel Detector!  Expect some posts on the joys of night shifts in a couple of weeks.

Also expect some posts about the return of collisions to the LHC.  The machine is preparing to collide protons at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV, which is half of the design energy but more than 3 times greater than the TeVatron, the previous highest energy accelerator.  If you can't wait for me to post about it, or read about it a major newspaper, CERN has a twitter feed which you can follow.  As my Dad would say, 'Oh Boy'.  I hope the collisions come while I'm on shift next week.  It would be absolutely amazing if the first 7 TeV collisions happened while I was in the control room.  Fingers Crossed!

And lastly, there were some successful statewide protests in California about the education budget on March 4th.  I couldn't attend because I was flying here, but the SF Chronicle and the LA Times had articles on it.  Students in Texas, Illinois and elsewhere also protested.  I'm sad to have missed it.

PS: You should check out the new Atlas public website, its pretty nice and has links to what's going on in the control room.