We spent the last two weeks, and part of the summer holidays, in Italy ..
Passing by Lake Garda, we spent one night close to Verona, to then cross the Po plain, have a hiking stop at the Stone of Bismantova and cross the Ligurian Apennines to get to La Spezia.
I just returned from holidays at both the North and the Baltic Sea.
One week each in Garding on Eiderstedt and Fährdorf on Poel.
We had a very nice time watching the water come and go at the North Sea, walking the mud flats and dikes, taking a boat trip to see seals, porpoises and other animals living the sea, visiting the wonderful Multimar Wattforum and other nice places. Had some good food (lot’s of fish) and a lot of wind and quite a bit of rain.
On Poel the weather changed for the better and we had beach time, sand-castle (or figures) building, paddling tours on the Breitling (Bay of Wismar) and lot’s of other things.
Here’s a few pictures from both seas, some of which also made it to my gallery.
This week, I had the pleasure of participating in the 7th edition of the Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP) in Puebla, Mexico.
Besides talking about latest updates on “Searches for long-lived particles in ATLAS” and “Particle Physics Outreach as a Strategic Pillar for Society: A report from IPPOG”, as well as presenting posters on “Communicating ATLAS: adapting to an ever-changing media landscape” and “ATLAS Outreach: on the dissemination of High Energy Physics and Computer Sciences“, I also had the chance to see a – way too tiny – bit of Mexico during the week.
Unfortunately, due to the cancellation of my original flight to Mexico and the resulting late arrival, an extremely persistent jet lag waking we up at around 3am each day, and the fact that I already had to leave on Friday, there wasn’t really any time to explore much of Mexico. So I could only see a bit of Puebla’s city centre and – through the conference excursion – the archeological site of Teotihuacan.
Quite an intense week with lots of physics (see timetable), little sleep, lots of Mexican food and many people to meet. If only Mexico wasn’t a twelve-hour flight away …
Just left the closing session of this year’s outside ATLAS Overview Week 2017 which took place in Bratislava, Slovakia. Besides the usual physics, detector and performances updates, we had our internal ATLAS25 celebration party on Thursday.
From the outreach side we presented and got people involved in various activities and presented some really nice videos documenting the past 25 years during the celebration.
Obviously there was also some (though not much) time to see the city, the castle, the Most SNP and to escape from the clutches of a corrupt policeman.
Last but not least, the ATLAS collaboration board just granted me the honour to be the next outreach co-coordinator, starting next March :)
Just returned from a week in Bucharest at the ‘ATLAS Exotics and SUSY Joint Workshop’, which took place at the Ministry of Culture and had its conference dinner at the slightly oversized Palace of Parliament, depicted above. The latter holds some interesting records, e.g. as the world’s largest civilian building with an administrative function, the world’s most expensive administrative building and the world’s heaviest building!?
Anyways … the workshop was nice, the dinner was nice, my talk was nice ;) and Buchrest certainly interesting … which reminds me of an equally interesting article on Bucharest I read this week.
