Once upon a midnight dreary

While I drooled sleepless wearies...

So turns out that if you upset your sleep schedule without preparation or warning by, oh, say working a midnight to 8 am shift for six nights in a row, you get pretty darn tired pretty fast. So if this post sounds like it was written by a demented zombie, that's because it pretty much was. I've had a grand total of 11 hours of sleep over the past three days.

I am currently in the ALICE control room working a data acquisition shift. Thus far my jobs have been to 1: jiggle the mouse on occasion. 2: glance at the big screen at the front of the room to make sure that the run is still going. 3: write a few incoherent sentences in my thesis to make for amusing proofreading once I have my brain cells back in order.

The shift before mine actually had some interesting things happening what with a fire alarm in the central most detector of the experiment which is not only wrapped in many layers of other expensive equipment and sealed in a thick metal casing but is also rather deeply underground. Fortunately it seemed to just be some smoke, probably from some cluster overheating (I assume, though I really have no idea) and the ventilation system took care of it before the fire department had to go down and try to save an exceedingly expensive machine. There were also some software issues, but there are always software issues, so those are less exciting.

My shift is likely going to continue to involve prodding the mouse and making sure the run continues for the next seven hours.

Part of the reason I'm so sleep deprived is I had some things to do during the day at the CERN main site in Meyrin (which as far as I can tell is the section of Switzerland that CERN occupies. It may also be a suburb of Geneva but I don't know). So after eight hours of shift, I slept from 9 am to 11 am and got up to go back to work for five more hours. Polly did kindly meet me for lunch and spent a reasonable amount of time laughing at my zombie stare. After that I had a meeting with Yiota and another compatriot of ours named Francesca Bellini who works on the DQM system.

The reason for this meeting is over the past few days I've been involved in some small planning for what for some reason was called the ALICE master's class. Basically it was an outreach to some high schools, one in Frankfort and the other in Darmstadt. They gathered at local universities to learn a bit about how data analysis happens at ALICE. In particular about the different kinds of particles used for collisions at the LHC (proton-proton and lead-lead collisions).

The meeting was about the final event which was to talk with real CERN people! This was Francesca, myself, and one other amazingly named grad student: Magnus Mager. We went over the analysis that they had done and discussed what it showed. Basically we asked questions on topics that they had studied and move the presentations along. It was fun! Good to be in front of an audience for an hour, even if it was physics related, over a computer video connection, and in a minor role.

I think I did quite well in not falling asleep considering how alive I felt during the presentations. Not because they were boring. They weren't. I just hadn't much brain power at that particular juncture.
ciao!