It’s been several years after his last appearance at Culture Box in Copenhagen and it’s been several months since I managed to see Laurent last time. So about time for both of us ;)
And what should I say … it was great!
After three hours of warm-up by the residents, Laurent started at 2am and continued until 6am.
Certainly long enough to make my knees hurt for the rest of the weekend. The good kinda pain though ;)
A lot of LEGO related things happened within the past days/weeks :)
I just came back from my trip to Bergen/Norway, where – besides taking some holidays – I spent a couple of days building yet another ATLAS LEGO model.
Only this time, I was only observing a bunch of kids (up to ten at a time) doing the actual construction of both the large and the small model. The whole thing was organised as part of the biannual meeting of the Norwegian Physics Society, which also invited me to give a plenary talk about outreach with plastic bricks, and my new Build Your Own Particle Detector programme. It was great fun, everybody learned something and I’ll certainly do it again … Thanks to the Bergen people for inviting me :)
Yesterday, I found the new issue of PhysicsWorld at the institute, which features yet another nice little article about the models and their success in the LEGO Cuusoo programme.
Today, I could convince LEGO to support my Build Your Own Particle Detector programme with a few more kilos of LEGO bricks, which we will certainly need for the CERN Open Days in late September.
Speaking of those, I finally will get my own 54 square meters tent again. Which will be packed if the expected number of visitors is actually true :)
Last but not least, we’ll do the same thing for Kulturnatten in Copenhagen, 11 October 2013.
It’s already the second week in San Francisco now. Lot’s of things to see and do, so I did not manage to write something earlier.
First thing that caused quite some excitement was the fact that I arrived last Monday, while my baggage did not. So I actually had to waste some time on shopping. Some might not call this a waste of time, but you know me.
Besides the shopping tour, I also did quite some sightseeing and walking in SF, including a walking tour over the Golden Gate Bridge and a night tour of Alcatraz. On Wednesday I went to the SF NerdNite at Rickshaw Stop to see a couple science/tech inspired talks given by more or less known figures in the bay area.
On Friday, my baggage finally made it to town. Just in time for a little hiking weekend in Yosemite.
After a four hour drive to the park on Saturday morning, we went on a very nice 15 km hike onto the Mono Pass and the Sardine/Mono Lakes overlook. Coming back to camping ground, some grilled sausages and corn we already waiting for us (greetz Alex, Tobias, Wilko). After a nice and rich breakfast by Tenaya Lake, we made another more relaxing 8km hike, took a dive in one of the small and very cold lakes just outside the park and made us on our way back to SF.
Back in town, I had to realise that not only my first option to print my poster had failed. Also the backup failed, so I had to call and run/cycle through town to get my poster printed on Monday. It was done an hour before the session started.
Talking about the session/conference. It was nice start yesterday, not only on the physics side. In fact, the non-physics part was even more exciting. Besides a few small technical difficulties, we had a power cut interrupting the session, that apparently affected about 300k people in SF. But thanks to the diesel generators in the building the show could go on.
Now I gotta go back to the conference …
And for those that always care, don’t be jealous about the weather … it’s raining; and I’ll be uploading some pictures soon.
It took me some time, but finally I managed to write a few words about the fantastic event I took part last Sunday.
I was asked to run one of the stations during the inauguration event of the new Passeport Big Bang interactive circuit at CERN. The circuit is a permanent installation and collection of cycling tours to explore the LHC and the area its situated. During the inauguration event there were a variety of stations set up the inform, educate and entertain the public. One of the stations happened to be my idea of a “Build your own particle detector” competition.
Following the spirit of the ATLAS model I made back in 2011, the task was of course to build the model in LEGO. Putting together pieces bought by the high energy physics group at the Niels Bohr Institute, the CERN outreach group and myself, I managed to get about 15 kg of LEGO. Stuffed in my tracking backpack, I took them from Copenhagen to Geneva and back as my only travel luggage. CERN organised a nice and big tent with plenty of room for heaps of people and kilos of LEGO. With the help of the ATLAS event management team, I managed to fill up the tent with a few posters, my large ATLAS model and a nice big 42″ screen showing the model construction time-lapse movie.
Even though we were certainly lacking a few things in organisation and were certainly not enough people (thanks to my helper Natalie), the idea worked out extremely well.
We estimated the number of children passing through and playing with LEGO in the hundreds, with 81 models handed in for the competition. Again, thanks to the people setting up the ATLAS tent next to mine, I also had some giveaway for every contestant, to bridge the waiting time for a decision of the grand jury.
You can see some pictures of the event and all the models in the competition at http://passeport.mehlhase.info/.
As the event was quite a success, I’ll probably set up a similar event during the CERN Open Days on September 28th/29th and at Kulturnatten in Copenhagen on October 11th.
… that’s last week in very short words.
In more details, this mean that last Thursday “Non Trivial” (this week’s team name) made first place at The Globe pub quiz, even though there was a European Sing Contest section which we failed miserably. Apparently the other 25 teams did so as well ;)
On Saturday we went on a tour through the local ARC incineration plant, as part of the Danmarks International Region days. I got a tour through the plant following the waste. Sounds weird but was actually quite interesting. In the end we had a look at the construction site of the new plant, Amager Bakke, which is supposed to be ready in 2017.
After some chill-out time at the beach bar of the Copenhagen Cable Club, watching wakeboarders fly and dive, and a bit of geocaching, we rounded of the day with “Romeo’erne og Julie” performed in the incineration plant. It was a very nice mixture of cello and electronic music and both classical dance and Parkour. One even got used to the slight smell of all the waste in the background ;)
The only bad thing about the event was, that there were hardly any people to see this great performance!
