Greetings greetings one and all!
Two things of note recently. First off we'll do the more fun one because I'm most excited by that. I was interviewed for the ALICE internal news thingy (ALICE Matters) which basically is an internal document that goes around so that this bloated, complex organization of introverted egoists can have some way to tell what is going on outside their own narrow specialty.
The woman doing the interview had just finished up her master's in science communication (a very difficult subject as any of you who have ever tried to read anything written by a scientist can attest to) at Imperial College in London. She applied for the job here at ALICE through a connection of her adviser's and here she is, less than three weeks after her master's degree working at a huge complex experiment. I go into detail here because she is rather cute and I offered to show her around. We'll see how that pans out (no doubt further updates will occur as news warrants). She's entertaining and just slightly awkward in an amusing scientist way, which I can dig.
The interview was basically on my background and interests, as well as a bit on how and why I wound up at CERN. I gave the usual interview things: marathons, martial arts, not in as great detail as I would have liked to (I enjoy bragging), but this was just a preliminary interview to give her a place to start from. Tomorrow we're doing lunch for a second, more detailed interview.
Beyond that (obviously more important to me at the moment) interview and girl, I have been settling in here and starting to really dive into how data analysis is done. The program used at ALICE for data analysis is called aliroot, which is a bunch of add ons to a program called Root. I've been learning to use root for the past several months. The significance of this to this post is that I went to my first meeting here where I actually understood one of the discussions they were having! I was quite excited.
Ok, so the way meetings here at CERN work is there are a number of scientists who belong to different projects who meet regularly to discuss various and sundry issues relating to their sub group at ALICE (or whatever greater experiment or group they belong to). This particular meeting had to do with the software developement of aliroot. In general scientists in these meetings fall into a number of social groupings. The meeting coordinator physicist tends to keep things moving and on topic. The effective presenter physicist is a physicist who is capable of presenting their topic at a level anyone with a basic understanding can understand and will convey it at a volume that everyone can hear (even though listening via the online meeting tool called EVO). Needless to say this is a theoretical physicist that no one has ever come across yet. The more common varieties of physicist are the quiet mumbling and/or heavy accent physicist, the somewhat lost physicist (my general state of being), the loud and/or angry detractor physicist, and the endlessly questioning physicist.
The last two in this group seem to exist for the sole purpose of extending meetings well beyond their scheduled boundaries. There were one each of the loud and angry detractor physicist and the endlessly questioning physicist. In this meeting's case, the questioning physicist was also a crotchety endlessly questioning physicist.
The former can be of use in that they keep the other phycisists honest and makes sure that pipe dreams dont waste time and resources. On the other hand, they can be an impediment to progress by denying that anything but the status quo can work and we should stopwasting our time trying. Or, in this paricuar meeting's case, nothing works so everyone (else) need to do things faster and better.
Crotchety endless questioning physicist was half paying attention and answered his phone three or four times in the course of the meeting and in between yelled loudly about various questions he had. He had to yell, granted, because only half the personal microphones set up around the table actually worked and neither he nor detractor physicist had a working one (which just added to the fun).
Needless to say, the meeting went over by about 45 minutes (this was an hour and 20 minute meeting by the schedule) and we never did arrive at a consensus for at least one of the discussions. Meeting coordinator physicist was quite frustrated by the end, and I was giggling silently to myself whilst trying to pay attention and learn something from what was going on around me. I'm fairly certain I learned more of politics than of physics in the course of that meeting...
Until next time campers!
Caio!
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