Category Archives: Cities

The Italian wedding trip

Geneva, Italy, Snowboarding

Last weekend I went on a little trip to Italy to join in for the wedding party of two friends of mine (greetz to A & A). Along with the party, they scheduled some time for skiing and relaxation.

During last week, I then got the news that the skiing was cancelled due to too little snow on the slopes :(

Two days later I got an update saying that we wont ski because of too much snow on the pistes!?

A state that unfortunately didn’t change until our arrival on Saturday. This also ment that the location for the party and the dinner could not be reached :( But in a glorious re-booking effort they managed to find hotels in the lower village/town and a restaurant to fit all the about sixty people (mostly Italians). After a good night (in cowboy and indians costumes) we finally managed to do some skiing on Sunday before driving back to Geneva, from where I flew back with a two and a half hours delay on Monday morning (thanks for the night and dinner to J & J).

More on slammed science

Berlin, CERN, DESY, Outreach

Just got an email with the links to the first Youtube videos from the Weltmaschine Science Slam in November.
Be aware that all is in German.

1. “Schwarze Löcher am LHC Teilchenbeschleuniger” (Sofie Wolf)
2. “Das ATLAS-Experiment” (me)
3. “Dark Matter: Kleine Teilchen, dunkle Massen” (Eike Middell)

?. “Die Naturgesetz-Maschine – Das Noether-Theorem” (Ulrik Günther)
?. “Von Flaschen, Mücken und UFOs – Der LHC-Teilchenbeschleuniger” (Clemens Lange)
?. “Zufall, Zonk und Z-Boson – Wahrscheinlichkeit und Monte-Carlo-Simulationen” (Martin Mamach)

Slam time [update]

Berlin, CERN, DESY, Outreach

Today is slam time in Berlin … my first one … quite excited!
19h00 at Urania Berlin (link).

Back from the slam … second of six :) … it was an interesting and entertaining night, though I didn’t see much as I had to wait outside for all others to finish before me … anyways, there might be another slam coming up some time next year …

Apparently there will be recordings of the event on youtube at some point … I’ll keep you updated!

GeoCaching in Copenhagen

Copenhagen, GeoCaching

You’ve probably heard of geo caching before … so did I, but never really cared. But after my parents got pretty excited about it last week and we had two good friends and passionate geo cachers as visitors for the weekend (greetz L&M), we decided to combine our little Copenhagen tourist tour with a little geo hunt :)

After discovering seven caches on Saturday, it seems it caught me and I finally registered on Sunday to join the hunt …
It seems like a nice thing to do to see place you otherwise might end up going … we’ll see.

Only the pricing model of GeoCaching.com is something I did and still do not really fancy!
With only the basic and free account you simply cannot do much :( Also the Android app costs about seven euros.

Fortunately there is c:geo for Android which is free and my choice for now … though it has some troubles in the offline mode that I haven’t figured out yet.

Here’s my currently not so impressive stats:

Profile for SaMeCache

Paris, but not Cairo

Paris, Physics

Now I finally have the time to write a few words about last week, which I happened to spend in Paris. The 2011 Hadron Collider Physics Symposium was on the menu, a week of physics talks with the latest and greatest from the theory, Tevatron, the LHC and others. Quite a few nice and interesting talks and posters, a nice conference dinner on a boat on the Seine and besides all that some (too little) time to see Paris. It’s been eight years since I’ve been there, still I could remember a few places … which always feels good. I stayed in Troels’ old apartment, which a friend of his now rents, but doesn’t use all year long.

While strolling the streets at night I also came across a few Space Invader pieces, which kinda fitted well as I just watched my “Exit through the gift shop” DVD recently …

Besides all the good points, the internet was really crappy at HCP and non-existing in the apartment. Therefore I didn’t manage to do as much work as I was hoping to get done. Also I got asked whether I wanted to present our long lived particle results at a conference in Cairo next week. Though it seemed quit tempting I finally refused as I will be quite busy with the Weltmaschine Science Slam tis week and still had the non-internet problem … by now it actually showed that the decision was also quite good from a health point of view seeing all the news from Cairo these days.