Today the last two blue tit youngsters left the birdhouse on our balcony.
After a somewhat depressing first attempt last year, with all eight youngsters dying, this time around the parent(s) managed to get at least two of initially eight youngsters till the end.
Today at around 8am and 11am they finally left our balcony house their parents have been setting up since the very end of March.
For those of you interested, there’s a more time-lapse and motion-detection clips in a YouTube playlist.
This week I had the pleasure to have been invited to the 25th IPPOG Meeting in Sofia, in fact to talk about Munich Quantum Valley and quantum-computing in general in a quantum-computing panel discussion.
It was a pleasure to reconnect to my former colleagues and discuss what is my new job now with them.
Besides that, Netzwerk Teilchenwelt also presented the ALICE LEGO project I cohosted recently and the Particle Twister game I codeveloped :)
Earlier this month, I had the pleasure to present the new ATLAS Visitor Centre at the Lepton Photon 2021 conference. It’s been great and fun to lead this project and to propose and develop at lot of new content together with great people within the ATLAS Collaboration, the CERN exhibitions team and the design company Point Prod in Geneva. And it’s great to finally see it come to conclusion and open up to the public once visitors are allowed at CERN again.
After more than sixteen years at the ATLAS experiment it seems to be time for a change, and for me that change is going from quarks to qubits, and from a mix of fundamental research, teaching and science communication to a full-time job working on public engagement and didactics for the recently founded Munich Quantum Valley.
“Locked Out” is the title for a piece I created in memory of the 19 hours we’ve been locked out of our apartment last week, due to a material defect in our apartment-door lock.
A broken piece inside the locking mechanism of the door caused the key to turn inside the lock cylinder without actually moving the bolt in the lock (obviously this we only learned after all the hassle). After informing the janitor at about 8pm, him calling two somewhat suspicious ‘locksmith’ services, quite a bit of waiting time and both failing on the door after trying out all their arsenal on the lock, we called it a night at about 12:30am and joined our kids at some friends’ place.
After sending the kids to school on borrowed clothes, food and school equipment, we got back to the action with another locksmith who at least didn’t even try and just recommended a dedicated expert. Around around lunch time the forth (well, maybe the first real) locksmith arrived and took about two more hours to open the door with heavy machinery (and brain).
