» I'm your biggest Fan

The LHC...
I have a lot of fangirl stories of more normal varieties, but that era of my life ended rather messily in ways which are not nearly amusing enough for B3ta. So I won't bother with those. However, I still have a bit of fangirl in me which got directed in a rather odd way last year.

I had ended up on a PhD programme which resulted in me getting a CERN access card last summer. I establised around July when I was working there briefly that I had legitimate access to the CERN control room, but went home in August.

Being a board full of geeks, most of you should know why 10 September was a day I was very much looking forward to. It was the day the LHC would be switched on and the world's media attention turned to CERN. I tried desperately to find an academic reason to be there (free flights), my supervisors annoyingly found an excuse to send me there on 4 September and then promptly back to the UK the next day. But remembering that

1) I still had a CERN access card
2) Easyjet exist and fly to Geneva

I wasn't going to be stopped so easily.

About 10 days before I decided I WAS going, and 2 friends decided to accompany me. I didn't even know if I'd be able to get them in, and heard that the event was going to be broadcast in the auditoria which sounded awfully like we were going to be discouraged from the control room.

Now comes the real obsessive fan bit. We arrived at about 11pm the night before, and knew that even looking for accommodation was pointless. We made our way to the site with the control room, security let all 3 of us through, then the people at the control room willingly let us in! It was 2am...no-one was there except the people actually operating the machine. Oh yes, we were officially the biggest LHC fans IN THE WORLD.

We felt a bit awkward there, deciding we'd just get kicked out later we made our way back to the main site to watch from an auditorium after a few hours attempting to sleep rough outsite the restuarant. It soon became clear that they were letting people in the control room, I went back there after they'd got the beam around once but by then they'd tightened security and my non-CERN friends weren't even allowed on that site. But we could still all say we'd flown to Geneva, been in th LHC control room at 2am, slept rough and been at CERN to see the biggest science event of our lifetimes so far.
(Fri 17th Apr 2009, 8:57, More)

» Gambling

Getting the word "penguin" into a physics paper
Two physicists, Melissa Franklin and John Ellis were playing a game of darts, had a bet that the looser had to use the word "penguin" in their next paper. Apparently Melissa didn't finish the game but someone else took her place and her replacement won. This was probably a good thing because Melissa was an experimentalist and they tend to write papers in extremely large collaborations, any spurious penguin references would probably have been vetoed by about 200 people. As a theorist (and now a bloody high ranking but surprisingly down-to-earth one), John Ellis could do pretty much what he liked. He got high and decided that some of the diagrams looked like penguins, so the conditions were fulfilled. Wikipedia's finest photoshopping shows some slight resemblance: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_diagram

However, the paper in question turned out to be rather influential. Everyone who has studied particle physics to 3rd year undergraduate level will almost certainly have heard of these "penguin diagrams". The entire course of particle physics was made slightly more entertaining by a stupid bet.
(Wed 13th May 2009, 9:07, More)

» Procrastination

Very important skills training
The word "procrastination" instantly reminds me of this comic: www.phdcomics.com/ (all PhD students should be familiar with it).

The author, Jorge Cham, tours around universities giving a talk about PhD life called "The Power Of Procrastination" and last week he came here. I expected it to have been orgainsed by some students, much to the horror of university staff, but no, it had somehow got classified as a course run by the Skills Training Division! Look here if you don't believe me: www.mpls.ox.ac.uk/skillstraining/courses/jorgechamlecture.html

I had a deadline looming the next day. I did some of the work, went home intending to do more work, then my housemate asked if anyone else wanted to watch Casino Royale with me. Since I'd learnt on a university-approved skills training course that lack of procastination can be fatal* I duly obeyed.

Jorge Cham lied. I failed.

Click "I like this" if you think this actually means I wasn't procrastinating properly and need further training in it rather than I shoulnd't have done it at all.

*Apparently 1 in 200 PhD students attempt suicide from stress and procrastination is the only way to prevent this.
(Fri 14th Nov 2008, 19:25, More)

» Dentists

I'm better than my dentist
About a year ago my dentist told me I needed quite a large filling in one of my teeth, although I'd had no problems with it. Given that bits had been falling out of quite a few of my teeth (due to a combination of shitty teeth and creme egg addiction) I believed her and decided it was better to deal with it before more fell out and it got nasty. It hurt afterwards (I'd had no aneasthetic thanks to injection phobia) he said it had gone very close to the nerve and damage was possible so root canal might be necessary later if stayed very painful.

Anyway, pain slowly faded away, then intermittently returned after more teeth disintegrated and I went back there. It started to get quite bad so I had it X-rayed as we suspected the nerve was dying and the dreaded root canal might be necessary. X-ray and poking about in my mouth showed nothing.

Eventually it got so bad one night a couple of months ago I coulnd't get to sleep because my mouth was in agony. There was a large swollen bit under my tooth which I decided was the problem, and I needed to burst it there and then and let whatever infected crap was in there out NOW. It was 4am, I was tired and in pain, but so much pain I decided there was no way it could get any worse. So I got some mouth ulcer gel for aneasthetic and looked for a pin. Coulnd't find one, but I found a Leatherman (big sharp multitool) and went to the bathroom and started randomly jabbing at my half-numbed jaw.

Luckily before I'd drawn any blood, I found a sharp bit which seemed to have flesh trapped behind it. I managed to dig out the trapped bit of flesh without even breaking the skin, and it's been far less of a problem ever since, I've only had unbearable pain once for a couple of minutes. How the dentist didn't spot that when I did without being able to see what I was doing is beyond me.

Moral of the story: DIY surgery by random stabbing while half asleep is more effective than careful work by a qualified medical professional.
(Tue 7th Nov 2006, 10:53, More)

» Tales of the Unexplained

Dreams
I've had one or two little paranormal occurences but the weirdest one I had involved what I believe to be a dream which turned out to be true. It was quite a few years back and I can never totally rule out that it wasn't a dream at all but remember what was real and what was a dream had never been a problem for me, and I don't think I would have been so freaked out had there been a reasonable chance the first part had not been a dream at all.

The dream was very mundane, I was just having breakfast reading a newspaper next to the chair before school. I didn't intently read the paper, it was just there and I was glancing at it. It was a rather weird story about a chimneysweep (didn't think they still existed!) whose wife had gone into a labour at home and he'd delivered the baby. I remembered a couple of key phrases, the name of the baby and what the photo looked like.

A few days later I was going through some newspaper to put in the guinea pig hutch and saw a little article saying that a chimneysweep who had delivered his wife's baby had been nominated for some award for his outstanding efforts. WTF?? I spend ages going through the pile of old newspaper until sure enough, there was the exact article I'd seen in the dream! I think it was backdated to a couple of weeks before when I thought the dream had occured, so it would already have been in the recycling pile. I don't know the family and have never met them, why can't I dream useful things like lottery numbers??

A few less spooky dreams have happened since then. I once dreamed there was a public footpath going through my back garden from the back fence behind the wendy house to the front drive. After much fighting through bushes to get behind the wendy house, there actually was a gap in the fence right where the path in the dream was! More recently I dreamed a lift at university went down to a secret basement deep below, when chatting to some lecturers a couple of days later it turned out the lift is an unusual hydrualic design which does actually go down below floor level, and I've been relaibly informed that there is a (small and uninteresting) secret basement corridor down there.

I've only had one useful "prophetic" dream but it was fairly minor and personal and would probably scare the crap out of my housemate if any of my friends read this, guessed who I am and told him! It kick started me into getting something done which would have left me very pissed off for a very long time had I left it even a day later.
(Fri 4th Jul 2008, 13:17, More)