All posts by Sascha

Moshimoshi Japan

Japan, Kyoto

I am just about to finish my second day in Japan, still a bit jet-lagged and well fed from today’s welcoming reception at the University of Kyoto.

Yesterday we arrive at Osaka airport and made our way straight to Nara, where we checked in to Chiaki’s very nice guest house. After a little introduction to the house and the city, she offered us three bikes and we made quite a tour throw the Nara park, visited the Great Buddha Hall and some smaller temples and had some Japanese food at a food festival.

Today we started the day with a beautiful breakfast prepared by Chiaki and including everything from sausages, over egg, to soup, bread, jam and even a desert … hmm! The weather was slightly less optimal (rain all day), but we still made a little bike tour to see a few gardens and a bit more of the town. In the afternoon we took the train to Kyoto and moved into yet another traditional (though this time quite luxurious) Japanese house (we even had Champagne in the fridge).

After a long introduction to the house and all the features (yes, also here the toilet is capable of many things), we went for the reception.

Kulturnatten – Culture night in Copenhagen

CERN, Copenhagen, Niels Bohr Institue, Outreach, Physics

It was a long, but successful day yesterday!

I spent about 17 hours at the institute, but besides a bit of ‘regular’ work we managed to set up small but quite nice exhibition about particle physics, the LHC and CERN in general and ATLAS in more detail. This year we also managed to show the ATLAS LEGO model for the first time at Kulturnatten. With no surprise, quite a success! There were actually people coming specifically to see the model! :)

In addition to the little exhibition we had an extra auditorium were set up ATLAS Virtual Visits for the first time in Copenhagen. We had in total four 30 minutes live connections to the ATLAS Control Room in Geneva, Switzerland. There were between twenty to thirty people in each session, that sometimes (actually quite a few of them) stayed longer than an hour to ask questions and listen both to the guys we had at CERN and us locally.

I might at some point also post a link to the recording of the sessions here. [link]

To round of the day, and to make yet a bit longer, we used our webcast hardware to set up a remote viewing room for Holger Beck‘s late night lectures, which were otherwise heavily ‘over-booked’.

So it was a long day, but I’m quite satisfied with what we managed to do!

Man on a mission …

CERN, Geneva, Outreach

… and the mission were some special shifts at point one, just above the ATLAS control room. Unfortunately the task did not give any credits within ATLAS, but to build my third ATLAS model in plastic bricks isn’t too bad of a job either.

To be more precise it’s actually a reassembly of the second model I build in Copenhagen, though had to take apart (at least in sections) before shipping it to CERN. Another specialty of this build is the fact that – and LEGO enthusiasts please excuse – I decided to use glue this time. Since this model, after being shown at researchers night this weekend, s supposed to be driven by car to Montreux for the ATLAS week during the next five days.

So I ended up sitting in a room with twenty computers, no window to open and the smell of glue in the air … Yeah!

Anyways, once again the model tuned out nice and hopefully it will survive the trip.  I guess I’ll know tomorrow …

In the meantime I heard that also CMS managed to build a plastic brick version of their detector … I’ll post more details once I have them! Also that means LHCb will be my next mission ;)

Humble Bundle and more

Android, Computers and IT, Humble Bundle

It’s time for the sixth Humble Bundle. Well, actually it already been some time and it’s only ten days left, in case you care for nice games from independent studios were you can choose yourself what to to pay! I bought mine yesterday and already had a short session with one of the six games included.

And since I am writing about games, I’ll just go on and mention that I also got caught (for reasons I myself have not yet fully figured out) by The Simpson: Tapped Out [SaMeOrigin] and Wordfeud [SaMeWord] on my iPad recently. They work pretty well for the five minutes before going to bed or in the morning after the little one got his first dish of the day … at least the latter one also exists for Android (link).