Hello all,
This week wasn't particularly exciting, but it was a good week nonetheless! Here are some of the excerpts from my emails to Amy! It is probably too detailed for the average reader, so you can definitely feel free to skim it! To aid in your skimming I have Bolded the first several words of the paragraphs that I thinkare more interesting.
From the 16th of July:
I woke up at 7 since the birds were singing me some wonderful songs early in the morning and we had our window open.... Anyway, I couldn't go back to sleep and didn't really want to so I just did my workout for the day! I did 30 inverted pull ups, where you lay under the desk face up and use the edge as a pull up bar keeping your heels on the ground. I also did some lunges, Russian twists and triceps using my back pack as a weight and suspending it over my back.
Anyway, after that, I studied vocabulary and read some more of the Bible. I'm in Isiah now. I found a dramatized reading, so I listen to it and read along at the same time. It helps me to keep reading rather than getting lost in my own thoughts. Here is the link if anyone is interested: http://www.biblegateway.com/resources/audio/
Then, I went to class for the first lectures but then went to the library to start studying E and M for next semester. They have the same book we will use except one edition older. After this, I ate a sandwich and some crackers and such and then worked on some Garfield stuff. I met at 4:30 with Marcello to talk about my next project which will involve some modeling with Garfield, so I will feel like I am doing something of consequence.
I had to bike over to Prevessin for that, but it was a nice temperature outside finally, so that was good. After getting back, I took some more parts of the practice GRE tests and then Zack and I went to Coop to get some groceries. I found a 6 pack of canned corn for only 3.80, which was awesome! I also bought some more mozzarella cheese balls and had a tomato mozzarella sandwich. It was really good. I had it on one of those square buns that are rounded on the top and have hard crust and a special name that I can't quite remember. (Later I remembered it is called Caibatta.) I also put some spices on it and put it in the oven.
After dinner, Zack and I went on a nice little bike ride on the internal CERN loop. We went on a circle road above where one of the pre accelerators is. I found this trash bin that had a ton of metal scraps in it. I got a cool one with numbers all down it and was thinking to bring some more back as souveniers, a piece of machinery from CERN!
After this we started to make bread pudding with a dried up baguette. Zack and I made it for the most part. The recipe called for ground cinnamon and Zack got some sticks so we could grind them.... I ended up doing that on one of the smallest graters and it turned our pretty good, just painstaking. The bread was super hard too! I had to cut it with my super sharp Victornox steak knife thing in order to break it up a bit. While we were waiting for the bread pudding to cook, both Alexes, Zack, Katelyn and I played cards. It was surprisingly good in the end! We used sugar that didn't seem quite normal though so it didn't seem quite as sweet as I was used to.
From the 17th of July:
Today was a good day! I got up at 7:30 and went for a run at 7:40 with Zack around the 2.5 mie loop. Then, I ate an energy bar for breakfast and headed to the classes. I listened to the first one which was on detector physics. The Italian lady from Purdue University gave her final talk and it was pretty good:) Then, I went to the library to read more EM stuff for next semester. This will also hopefully help me on the GRE, because I won't have had EM before it, nor Classical Mechanics, nor particle physics... I'm really not sure how well I will do on the test, but it is only a piece of the admission process. I bet when I'm actually going to school, I will be able to survive even if I am a little less prepared than other students, after all, that is what it was like coming into under grad from Whitehall...
I had a salami and swiss cheese sandwich for lunch along with a can of apricots and some crackers. I worked on my computer in my room for a while and then went to Prevessin to meet with the sub advisor. Shobhit and Felipe and I will be working together on the new Garfield project. Today, we just heard what we would eventually be trying to do, and then Shobhit helped Felipe and I install Garfield onto our profiles at CERN. I was definitely the furthest behind since I hadn't used Terminal (the little black window that pops up on your computer that the computer savy use to control their computers) much at all. Anyway, I booted into Linux and eventually made my way through the Terminal and installed the things I need. We set up a meeting time for tomorrow, which will be good. I'm glad I can work with them, because other wise I would be even more lost.
After that, I rode home from Prevessin and sat in my room working on the GRE English questions on around pages 50-70. I didn't do that well, but I am planning to read all of the ones that I got wrong again and then their explanations.
Alex Sherman and Alex Fragapane both came knocking at my door at about 5:30. Alex F wanted to go for a bike ride and Alex S wanted to go walk around Geneva more. I chose to go for a bike ride and it was good. We went around the north of CERN and then to the South East. We rode through the tiny towns where we hiked the first time with Rubin. It was a nice little ride and easy enough that my legs shouldn't be too sore for tomorrow. They have just recovered from the last Hike....
We stopped by the little Coop on the way home and got some fixings for little Pizza things. The type of bread was caibatta again. We got a larger piece of it, about 5 by 9 inches and we cut it in half and put his tomato pasta sauce on it. Then I put on some of my salami and fresh mozzarella cut in thin slices on it and topped it with little pieces of tomato and some green herb mix that has green onions and garlic and stuff. We played cribbage while waiting for it to cook and then continued while we ate it. It was so delicious!
There were two mishaps while we were making it. When Alex used my super sharp victornox knife to cut the tomato, about the 3rd time through, he sliced open his finger. It wasn't as deep as the kid at the party a couple of weeks ago, but it still bled a lot. Then when we were getting the pizzas out of the oven, he burnt the back of his hand a little. He wanted to eat it out of the glass dish we cooked it in, but I convinced him that that might not be a good idea.
From the 18th of July:
This morning, I woke up at 5:22 and then got ready to go hike the Jura again. It was just Zack and Alex S and I, but it was good because we could go pretty quickly. We ended up doing the entire trip in 4:35 as opposed to the 5:10 last time and the 7:20 the first time. It was a little chilly at first since we left so early, but it felt good. We even saw the mysterious animals that Phil Rubin had been telling us about. They looked just like some variety of goat. They were brown and had little curved horns. We saw them 6 times, though I think 2 were the same since we went down the same way we came up. We even saw a mother and her kid. It would have been cool to get a better picture of them, but they were a long way off.
After our hike, we showered, ate some more food, and then went to the 3rd lecture which was about nuclear physics. It seemed pretty basic, covering different isotopes and decay processes like I had learned in Modern Physics, but it was still nice to at least understand it a bit as opposed to it going completely over my head as some other lectures had done.
After lunch, I biked over to Prevessin and started working with Shobhit and Felipe on some of the simulation stuff. First, we went through the construction of the geometry that is used for the GEM detector and then we ran various tests to try to reproduce the results that were on some slides our supervisor had given us. It was pretty interesting and I felt like I might actually do something useful while I am here. Anyway, after trying to get my computer to do the simulations unsuccesfully, I watched them and gave a little input and then rode my bike home in the midst of a rain/thunder storm. I got pretty wet, but it wasn't that bad since I could change out of the wet clothes right away. The thunder here sounds soo cool since there are mountains on either side of the valley and it echos all around. The mountains seem closer than they are to Whitehall, so it seems to echo more impressively.
I just got back from Karaoke a little bit ago and it was pretty fun! Definitely CERN style. Ok, so we got there and it turns out that it was a huge conference type room. There were rows of tables going across and in the front there are some computers facing the audience and then a large projection screen all the way in the front. There were microphones in front of each place and in order to speak, you push the button on your mic. Only 4 mics can be on at once, and when yours is on, the tip of it glows red. If you push it and aren't one of the 4 speaking, it is green until you are almost next, in which case it flashes green. It was so cool though, because they would just find youtube videos of the karaoke songs and then everyone could see and sing. It was pretty chill for the most part, because you could just sit there and sing or not, or whatever. People had lots of alcohol, which made it a bit more interesting later, and things got especially interesting when the security guard showed up. I'm still not quite sure what the problem was except we were being super loud! (100+ kids singing karaoke and 4 of whom were hooked into the speaker system) They were having some sort of event outside the Council Chamber, and they could undoubtedly hear us too. He talked to the student who was running it and then left and came back in 10 or so minutes to tell us to stop. Dang! Oh well, it was a good excuse to leave. They told us to clean up our mess and then leave. I didn't have a mess, since I didn't bring anything, but some other people and I stayed to wipe down the tables where there were little spills and to put the mics and headphones how they were originally. It was a pretty fun evening.
Here is the basic layout of the room, except there are no mics in this picture and also there are older chairs.
From the 19th of June:
Today was a pretty great day! This morning, I went to lectures and did some more EM reading during the third lecture. I then headed over to Prevessin to do my research for the day. I realized that I could probably use my PUTTY terminal thing (that I used while doing my research on AU's high performance computing cluster) to log onto CERNs servers to use the programs that I needed. I was able to do that and by the end of the day I was able to edit the code and control the simulation to a small degree. That felt pretty rewarding even though the other kids had done that by the end of the first day.
I rode my bike back and then before too long, Alex F asked if I wanted to go ride bikes or hike or something. It was kinda rainy so I thought that we could maybe take the tram into Geneva. We didn't really have anything specific to do, so we just went to Coop instead and got some more pizza fixings. This time, we put a pepper in the sauce (which was also supposed to be spicy). We cut it up in small pieces, and then fried it in oil. After sauteing it for a while, we dumped in the tomato pasta sauce and cooked it some more. Then we had salami, mozzarella, tomatoes, the spicy sauce, on the caibatta. The spicy sauce was quite good and made it taste similar to the smoke and fire pizza from Matchbox! We played Crib again and I got beat so badly, 120 to 72. Not quite a double skunk though. Then right off that bat next game, I got a 21 hand!
Then, this guy named Jose from Madrid sat with us and kinda learned how to play. We then played Kings and Slaves, the card game we played a lot in the airport. We also met this girl Ni(c)k(k)i(y)(ie) (I have no clue how she spelled it) from Greece and she played with us also. She said she was going to get some ice cream from R1 (restaurant 1) and asked if we wanted to join, so we were like, "what the heck, we might as well." We ate our ice cream and talked a bit about nothing important and then played Spain's version of BS. It was a lot better than our version, I thought.
Here is how it is played: All the cards are dealt out. Then someone starts with 2s and will then say "one 2." (for example) The next person can then say BS or can play more twos. They might say "three 2s" This keeps going on until someone doubts the previous person and then they flip over that persons cards. If the person was lying, then they have to pick up the pile, but if the cards were what they said they were, then the doubting person has to pick them up. The person following the one who picked up the cards then starts with a new arbitrary number. Some differences are that it stays on the same number until it is doubted, and only the next person can call BS on the previous person. Also, at any point if you have all 4 of the same number in your hand, then you can lay them down (put them in the discard pile). There seems to be more skill in this version, since one person doesn't end up with all the cards doubting everyone else.
Surprisingly, the weekdays were more exciting than the last 3 days.
MY PROJECT DETAILS
On Friday, I ran some more specific simulations with Felipe and we started to make a plot of the data we had obtained. Here is in general the setup of the experiment we are modeling. There are these two plates that have a voltage applied between them. Then there is another small layer of copper-plastic-copper that has another voltage applied. This layer has small holes for electrons to pass through. The voltages are such that electrons will be accelerated towards the bottom of this detector. The muons (charged particles like heavy electrons) are created in the collision and then aren't absorbed by the other part of the detector and thus make it out to this part that we are modelling. The muons have such high energies that they can ionize (knock an electron off) the gas particles in between the charged plates. The electrons then accelerate and collide into other gas molecules and can in turn ionize them. Therefore by starting from a single electron, you can get multiple electrons out. The purpose of this is so that they can detect the presence of the first electron by the 1000s of electrons that will eventually reach the detector. This is called an electron avalanche.
What we do in the simulations is to start a given number of electrons in a geometry that is like that of the actual experiment. We then can set the voltages for the various plates and can then determine the average number of electrons that are created from an initial one. There is a large variation in this, since it is all goverend by chance (statistics). Therefore if you let the program run with more electron events, you can get a more accurate picture of what would actually happen. Near the end of Friday, we started to do 4000 electron events, which take about an hour to complete, so we eventually just gave up (since it was about time to go home) and we just ran it on our computers from our rooms in the evening.
On Friday evening, aside from this, I looked up a lot of information about various graduate schools that have both Education masters degrees and Physics masters or PhD degrees.
On Saturday, I first went for a run and then I went into town to buy all of my souveniers for the trip and also some gifts for people at home. I then rode the tram home, ate a sandwich, grabbed my vocab cards, and then went down to the lake to hang out on the beach and study some GRE vocab. I also went to the Jet D'eau for a close up picure.
On Sunday, I did my laundry, which was quite a process since they didn't have any laundry detergent for me, so I had to look around other places and identify laundry detergent in French. I also read the Bible and fasted for something for the morning.
This evening I am going to go to a Special Antimatter event, where they show a movie and then have a question and answer session. It should be interesting and fun, at least something to do. The reason I have been just hanging out for the last 2 days is that all of the other GMU people are gone this weekend to various places.
Here are some pictures from the above description!
Here are some pictures from our 3rd hike. There is the little animal.
That is (from the left) me, Alex Sherman, Zack Siegel. Alex asked this man in french to take our picture. He had a nice camera and seemed to know what he was doing.
This is the Jet D'eau from the bridge.
A random fountain in a park. It was such a nice day on Saturday!
I stood in the shadow of the Jet D'eau on the pier right next to it.
Here is a live statue. He was really good. I felt a little guilty taking his picture and not paying him, but I had seen at least one person put money in the container.
This is a view from the window of my room. Today, it really wanted it's picture taken, so I obliged.
That's all for now, but I hope it was maneagable.
Here is the basic layout of the room, except there are no mics in this picture and also there are older chairs.
From the 19th of June:
Today was a pretty great day! This morning, I went to lectures and did some more EM reading during the third lecture. I then headed over to Prevessin to do my research for the day. I realized that I could probably use my PUTTY terminal thing (that I used while doing my research on AU's high performance computing cluster) to log onto CERNs servers to use the programs that I needed. I was able to do that and by the end of the day I was able to edit the code and control the simulation to a small degree. That felt pretty rewarding even though the other kids had done that by the end of the first day.
I rode my bike back and then before too long, Alex F asked if I wanted to go ride bikes or hike or something. It was kinda rainy so I thought that we could maybe take the tram into Geneva. We didn't really have anything specific to do, so we just went to Coop instead and got some more pizza fixings. This time, we put a pepper in the sauce (which was also supposed to be spicy). We cut it up in small pieces, and then fried it in oil. After sauteing it for a while, we dumped in the tomato pasta sauce and cooked it some more. Then we had salami, mozzarella, tomatoes, the spicy sauce, on the caibatta. The spicy sauce was quite good and made it taste similar to the smoke and fire pizza from Matchbox! We played Crib again and I got beat so badly, 120 to 72. Not quite a double skunk though. Then right off that bat next game, I got a 21 hand!
Then, this guy named Jose from Madrid sat with us and kinda learned how to play. We then played Kings and Slaves, the card game we played a lot in the airport. We also met this girl Ni(c)k(k)i(y)(ie) (I have no clue how she spelled it) from Greece and she played with us also. She said she was going to get some ice cream from R1 (restaurant 1) and asked if we wanted to join, so we were like, "what the heck, we might as well." We ate our ice cream and talked a bit about nothing important and then played Spain's version of BS. It was a lot better than our version, I thought.
Here is how it is played: All the cards are dealt out. Then someone starts with 2s and will then say "one 2." (for example) The next person can then say BS or can play more twos. They might say "three 2s" This keeps going on until someone doubts the previous person and then they flip over that persons cards. If the person was lying, then they have to pick up the pile, but if the cards were what they said they were, then the doubting person has to pick them up. The person following the one who picked up the cards then starts with a new arbitrary number. Some differences are that it stays on the same number until it is doubted, and only the next person can call BS on the previous person. Also, at any point if you have all 4 of the same number in your hand, then you can lay them down (put them in the discard pile). There seems to be more skill in this version, since one person doesn't end up with all the cards doubting everyone else.
Surprisingly, the weekdays were more exciting than the last 3 days.
MY PROJECT DETAILS
On Friday, I ran some more specific simulations with Felipe and we started to make a plot of the data we had obtained. Here is in general the setup of the experiment we are modeling. There are these two plates that have a voltage applied between them. Then there is another small layer of copper-plastic-copper that has another voltage applied. This layer has small holes for electrons to pass through. The voltages are such that electrons will be accelerated towards the bottom of this detector. The muons (charged particles like heavy electrons) are created in the collision and then aren't absorbed by the other part of the detector and thus make it out to this part that we are modelling. The muons have such high energies that they can ionize (knock an electron off) the gas particles in between the charged plates. The electrons then accelerate and collide into other gas molecules and can in turn ionize them. Therefore by starting from a single electron, you can get multiple electrons out. The purpose of this is so that they can detect the presence of the first electron by the 1000s of electrons that will eventually reach the detector. This is called an electron avalanche.
What we do in the simulations is to start a given number of electrons in a geometry that is like that of the actual experiment. We then can set the voltages for the various plates and can then determine the average number of electrons that are created from an initial one. There is a large variation in this, since it is all goverend by chance (statistics). Therefore if you let the program run with more electron events, you can get a more accurate picture of what would actually happen. Near the end of Friday, we started to do 4000 electron events, which take about an hour to complete, so we eventually just gave up (since it was about time to go home) and we just ran it on our computers from our rooms in the evening.
On Friday evening, aside from this, I looked up a lot of information about various graduate schools that have both Education masters degrees and Physics masters or PhD degrees.
On Saturday, I first went for a run and then I went into town to buy all of my souveniers for the trip and also some gifts for people at home. I then rode the tram home, ate a sandwich, grabbed my vocab cards, and then went down to the lake to hang out on the beach and study some GRE vocab. I also went to the Jet D'eau for a close up picure.
On Sunday, I did my laundry, which was quite a process since they didn't have any laundry detergent for me, so I had to look around other places and identify laundry detergent in French. I also read the Bible and fasted for something for the morning.
This evening I am going to go to a Special Antimatter event, where they show a movie and then have a question and answer session. It should be interesting and fun, at least something to do. The reason I have been just hanging out for the last 2 days is that all of the other GMU people are gone this weekend to various places.
Here are some pictures from the above description!
Here are some pictures from our 3rd hike. There is the little animal.
That is (from the left) me, Alex Sherman, Zack Siegel. Alex asked this man in french to take our picture. He had a nice camera and seemed to know what he was doing.
This is the Jet D'eau from the bridge.
A random fountain in a park. It was such a nice day on Saturday!
I stood in the shadow of the Jet D'eau on the pier right next to it.
Here is a live statue. He was really good. I felt a little guilty taking his picture and not paying him, but I had seen at least one person put money in the container.
This is a view from the window of my room. Today, it really wanted it's picture taken, so I obliged.
That's all for now, but I hope it was maneagable.
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