I apologize for the lack of posts for the past week. It has been a very busy week for me. The entire ALICE collaboration is at CERN this week for alice week, a series of seminars and talks that are designed to keep everyone up to date on what is going on and what needs to be done. Mostly it was over my head and thus ten hour days sitting in lectures that were both irrelevant to what I was doing and beyond my comprehension was trying. However, it was also useful to be there so as to absorb something by osmosis, so I suppose it was good to have gone. Regardless, I'm tired.
Good news as far as my thesis is concerned. Remember that spiky graph I showed you that I said was a rho particle peak? That was a major milestone not only with my thesis, but also with Creigton's DOE grant. What this means is I wont be roasted and fed in the cafeteria as a warning to other students. It also means I'm getting an A thus far in independent research (one of the myriad fill in the blank credit hours that allow me to get degree credits while working on my thesis). Next I'll be working with a bunch of data created via a simulator in order to perfect my code before using it on vast, vast quantities of real data in order to do useful and mysterious things with it the likes of which you'll never know! Or, more to the point, I'm not sure yet what exactly I'll do after I do a lot of work with the simulations. See how many rhos there are for a given number of tracks (that multiplicity thing I was talkin about) most likely.
In other news, I did go to Charlie's (the pub in St. Genis I've mentioned before) yesterday with several people, so I'm meeting people and making friends. There is one in particular named Rose who is, if anything, an even louder more exuberant person than I am and at least as nerdy. Moreso because she's been a dungeon master while I've only ever played DnD. Also there was Bo (of extreme mountain hiking fame), Jai (one of the OSU students I share an office with), Dhevan (post doc at OSU, pronounced Dave-in) and a number of people I had seen but never yet met. It was good times with plenty of beer!
It has started to get cold here, below freezing the past two nights (and not much above during the day). Clear and sunny though, which makes walking to CERN in the morning with everything covered in frost quite pretty. And cold.
My main task now is to survive until Christmas! I'll be back in the US for about a month (working at STAR in New York for all but a week or so of that). I'm greatly looking forward to Christmas in Boise with my cousins, siblings, parents, and various aunts and uncles. Gonna be fun! And good food. And skiing. By God there shall be skiing.
Until next time!
Ciao!
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