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Leaving

Liz

I’m leaving Boston tomorrow. It’s a strange feeling. This place has been my home for the last 4 years. I’m in the process of packing. I can only take as much as I can reasonably fit in my car. How do you decide what things you will need for the next 6 months, and what can sit in storage until you can come back for it? Can my stuffed animal come?

I’m sad to be going. I didn’t realize how familiar everything around here has become. I know all the shortcuts to get around on my bike, and I think I may have even mastered the art of driving in Boston (though I still get lost sometimes). Almost everyone I know is here–my friends in my hometown have long since drifted away to their own adventures. But then again, all of my friends here who graduated this year have also moved on. I’m one of the last who is still in the Boston area.

So there is nothing to do but start my own adventure.

Step one: shove worldly possessions into car.

Step two: …..

Step three: Adventure!

Album Review: Red Album by Weezer

Ben

As any geeky kid who ever had a 12-sided die will tell you, Weezer is awesome…or at least used to be. But what about now? I liked the single they released: Pork and Beans. But I’ve heard bad things about this new album. Below I’ll give a track by track review of the new album.

Track 1: Troublemaker

Yea this one is pretty horrible, and gets grating after a minute or so.

Track 2: ummmmmm why does this sound like Girlyman? Oh. Ooops.

Track 2: The Greatest Man That Ever Lived

Started off HORRIBLY. But then during the Choir section I action really liked it. Then Rivers came in singing in a falsetto… :<

Why is he stupidly quoting shakespeare?

Track 3: Pork and Beans

Excellent. Pure Weezer goodness. Simple and catchy with a hint of El Scorcho.

Track 4: Heart Songs

Eh. The lyrics are pretty dismally trite. It’s sad cause I feel like the sound they are creating is overused and overly generic. It’s not that I don’t like “Pop Weezer”, but this just isn’t very good. But I could maybe see this song growing on me. The ending is extremely reminiscent of old weezer. To the point where it’s like they are teasing me with good music.

Track 5: Everybody Get Dangerous

This is just troubling, it’s almost like that other song Hashpipe (which I also disliked). And what is this Sympathy for the devil stuff at the end?

Track 6: Dreamin’

I liked this song better when it had the muppets.

Track 7: Thought I Knew

Um, who’s singing? This sounds like the absolutely worst Guster song I’ve ever heard. No, I’m sorry Guster would never have a song this bad, Guster could sing about cookies and I’d be happy.

Track 8: Cold Dark World

LA la la laaaa La la laaaa la la…oh sorry it was the same opening as an Architecture in Helsinki song.  This song is bad. This album is not looking good.

Track 9: Automatic

:< This isn’t Rivers either. Bad.

Track 10: The Angel and The One

Good start! Will they screw it up? No. The first good song since Pork and Beans.

Track 11: Miss Sweeney

It’s weird…I think I might like it, but I honestly am not sure.

Track 12: Pig

I actually liked it. I thought I wasn’t going to, but you really need to listen to the entire song before you make the call.

Track 13: The Spider

Too slow. Wrong sound for them.

Track 14: King

Wow, I really like the intro. Not-Rivers sounds good for the first time. It reminds me of Kill Bill for some reason? This is the best song on the CD but it sounds nothing like a Weezer song, honestly it’s like I’m listening to a different band. That being said, if this One song is a hint of a new direction they are thinking about moving in, then I strongly support it. Listen to it here.

Is this how it begins? My parents don’t listen to much music, and to be totally honest I don’t know many adults who do. Is it just that they follow the bands that they grew up with until they either a) broke up or b) got dismally worse and worse?

Also, am I an adult yet? Maybe more importantly – to me at least – am I a physicist now?

aww

Ben

#returning a "tuple" or nothing
if plane<3: return listOfObjects, evtList

Awwwwwwww, if plane loves returning listOfObjects, we all get an evtList…how cute.

And then I Found Twenty Dollars

William

So, Ruth and I are still on the beach. Our kayak rentals are expiring this morning, so I got up at six to make a little more fun before returning them. Ruth was too tired to go, so I went fishing instead. The bait fish were schooling like I have never seen before, and I even saw some kind of large ray swimming along the beach. I caught one fish and then the school moved on, so I gave up and went back to the beach house. I spotted some dolphins chasing the fish, and I did the only logical thing–running wildly down the beach chasing the dolphin. This could not go on forever, so I stopped and stared into the surf. And then I found 20 dollars. For reals.

Perhaps I should donate it to some dolphin research or protection fund. Any ideas?

Kayaking with Ruth and Shark

William

Ruth and I are vacationing in Florida with my mother’s side of the family for a week. I rented some kayak’s for a couple of days, and we have been having great fun with them. They are the sit-on-top ocean type and are really easy to use. We headed out east this morning along the shoreline toward the Coffeen nature preserve. Huge groups of fish were schooling and jumping out of the water, and it was pretty amazing to paddle through them. The larger fish circle around the smaller ones and forced them to the surface where they can more easily attack them. This whole spectacle was pretty awesome until a much bigger fish, specifically a five-foot long sand shark, spotted us. I stopped splashing my paddles, and the shark approached from the rear of my kayak doing that wide swooping, swimming motion that is so scary to watch from above. He came with in about four feet of my boat, but decided we were not worth eating as we were drifting away from “his” school of fish.

.mit.edu

Do you know how hard it is to break the habit of typing “.mit.edu” after every computer name? I swear, I should just change my shell so that .mit.edu always gets replaced by .cern.ch.

A presentation in two weeks!?

Ben
Whatever happens this summer, I am extremely glad I got the chance to work at CERN. Because truth be told, after working in a lab with 2 Grad students, a postdoc, and a professor I don’t think I ever would have believed how incredibly different this kind of physics is. I really think MIT has done a bit of disservice by not encouraging its undergraduates to try a different field of physics each summer.

I’m about to go into a video conference so I will finish this post later tonight…

Well it seems that I left writing this for more than a day. Needless to say, the video conference was incredibly complicated and I don’t think I understood more than 2 minutes of it. I’ll admit I hit my lowest point in the talk when I subconsciously rebuked all those at the conference to go and troll around on arxiv to find some interesting physics to look at (ha!).

Starting at about 10:45 pm when the soccer match of the eurocup ends my apartment is constantly being berated with horns. You see I live next to a huge park, but for the duration of the Eurocup it hosts a TV screen larger than the Hatch Shell (maybe the same size…but I still think larger). So every night somewhere between 10-15 thousand people or more watch the game there, dressed in whatever paraphernalia they have for that country. It’s kinda a big deal here…

Why don’t we have that kind of national pride? Believe me, I’m no fan of jingoism, but I like many others I’m sure have felt distant from our country, most of the time embarassed.  I’m sure those who would argue against me would rail against my “intellectual elitism.”  And maybe it is just that, I am part of a generation of intellectual elites who were more likely to read excerpts from Howard Zihn’s history book in school than any other.  I distrust the government more and more everyday and refuse to affliate myself with either political party. But is this all because of intellectual elitism?  Since when was it that only intellectuals believed in privacy? Or as one of my favorite quotes goes, that our government is becoming “A government so small that it will fit into our bedrooms“. More than anything in recent memory, what gives me hope is the Judiciary (both the state and the federal judiciary).

I actually have much more to say about this, and an article I want you all to read, but I will post about it later. Instead you must relieve yourself of these heavy topics and watch and listen to what is below:

and as always a song, in this case one that highlights the illusion of privacy as this band made the entire video using Britain’s mass of CCTVs and then used Britain’s FOIA to get the videos…plus it’s awesomely catchy.

Old electronics

Ruth
Is it possible to feel nostalgia for something that you’ve never experienced firsthand?  Even though I didn’t really become a computer geek until after the internet bubble burst, I definitely have a soft spot for old electronics. It’s not like I can remember owning one of these mythical computers for which Emacs was actually too bloated and huge to be a practical text editor. Maybe it’s because I have so many happy memories from MIT of tinkering with the fantastic and bizarre ancient machines that were discarded by labs. At any rate, I love old electronics: they’re like indie rock but even less accessible.

So you can imagine why I think that this video, which features a bunch of old computer equipment chiming along with Radiohead’s “Nude”, is completely and undeniably awesome in every way.

Overly Priced Local Calls

Ben
I wanted my second post to include beautiful pictures that would make everybody jealous…but I’m really lazy. Instead, not but fifteen minutes ago I came across the evidence of a $50 phone call that had been charged to my credit card. This of course upset me, but I guess I have no one to blame but myself…I mean any reasonable person would assume a local call would cost approximately 50 dollars in Switzerland, no?
I’ve finally discovered what I am working on this summer, and I wish I could say that I was totally thrilled about it but sadly I am not. It is possible that it will grow on me. It seems they’ve put me in charge of finding the Higgs 🙂
…
No, they didn’t.

Above you see the CMS Detector in all its cartoon glory. I have been tasked with working on the TriggerDQM-HLT which is similar to the GCT, HCALDQM, ECALDQM, the L1DQM and some other acronyms which amazingly enough I’ve forgotten! (Who’d a thunk, aye?).

To give the briefest description I can for now (as I’m sure I will be able to say much more later in the summer) I am working on partially real time…though more or less, post data-taking Data Quality Monitor to make sure the Software triggers are working correctly. The triggers are a set of hardware and software tests that rule out the unimportant collisions in the collider, they are separated into Level 1 and High Level Triggers (HLT) which are implemented in mostly hardware and software respectively.

You see when the LHC goes into full kick-ass mode in a few years they will be recording approximately 40 MHz of collisions. This number is so insurmountably large by today’s standards that the task of sifting through it all with present technology is impossible. So the idea is, since most of it is trash anyways, to get rid of all but 100 events (we are actually probably going to go down to ~10 events per second for the next few years and slowly build up to 100).  I’ll explain more about how we go from 4,000,000 reactions per second at the early luminosity of the LHC down to 10.  Before I leave this topic I want to make note of the fact that even down at this low a number of events the LHC will be pushing ~100 GB/s of data.

Also, a fist bump? A terrorist fist jab? Who knows????

Oh American culture how miss/hate thee.

Also, I will try to put at the end of a post what I am listening to. (For better audio head here)