Monday, January 25, 2010

Poster 4 ur office

I decided to post our recent demotivator here as well... Let's hope it becomes obsolete in a couple of weeks but nobody says we can't use it as a reminder :p

8 comments:

  1. Very cool, although too much geek :D Only CERN experimental physicists might understand it :) Anyway, for me it is really funny!
    Who is next to post another poster?? :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thx, I think that everybody can understand what it means even when they don't know about run numbers... Ahem, ahem, I thought _some_ people were already working on their own demotivators btw...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Translation for normal people (I was also asked by Alberto):
    - each time we switch on the CMS detector at CERN, we have one "Run", each one with a different "Run number"
    - ideally, we will have one "LHC fill" per day, and one "CMS Run" per day, with 100 000 collisions per second (100 KHz), and 0, 1 or several candidate events per collision
    - we are used to be testing things and we are continuously starting/stopping the detector so we rarely have Runs that last for more than one hour and even then, we don't have stable LHC collisions so most of the ones we had were from cosmic rays, that were not 100 kHz but one every several seconds (and rarely good). This means that we were used get very few good events per Run number (if any) and some people named the collisions by its Run number
    - so, the sentence of the poster means something like: "there will come a day when LHC will work properly" :D

    ReplyDelete
  4. Actually, your explanation to me via gmail chat was clearer, so I copy/paste it here (sorry, only in Spanish):

    15:44 me: yo no lo entiendo: "There will come a day in which we will not know every event by its number" ...
    ¿es que a los events hay que darles nombre propios como si fuesen personas o qué?

    15:59 Juan: hay que ser fisico experimental del cern para pillarlo
    ahora mismo cada vez que pone a funcionar el CMS, se dice que hay un Run, y se conoce por su Run number
    16:00 y como apenas se ve un evento de esos cada vez, pues se usa ese Run number
    siempre estan diciendo de no hacerlo asi pero la gente sigue haciendolo
    cuando el Cern funcione de verdad, idealmente habria solamente un Run por dia, y millones de eventos en cada Run, no uno solo
    16:01 vamos que la frase esa quiere decir algo asi como "Mi sueño es que algun dia el Cern funcione"
    16:03 me: ok, comprendo. Se identifica run number con event number porque los run son tan mierderos que no producen más que un evento identificable/valido/interesante, no es eso?
    16:04 Juan: eso es
    16:05 me: ok
    gracias
    Juan: se supone que cuando el Cern funcione, habra solo un Run por dia entero, y habra unas 100 mil colisiones por segundo (una tasa de 100 kHz de colisiones) con 0, 1 o varios eventos por colision
    ahora muchas veces los Runs duran minutos :P
    porque algo esta cascando cada dos por tres
    raras veces duran varias horas
    16:06 y como no habia beam dentro del lhc, solo se captaban rayos cosmicos, y esos no se pillan 100 mil por segundo, sino uno cada varios segundos, si acaso
    16:08 me: Cuando quieres sabes explicar bien las cosas :D

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Se identifica run number con event number porque los run son tan mierderos que no producen más que un evento identificable/valido/interesante, no es eso?"
    Exactly. (Ha ha, I was able to understand this phrase ...or so I think!!)
    But I want to add that during the first days of data taking and analysis it was not simply a joke, people were showing plots and were saying "this point came from this run+event, that came from that r+e", and the original phrase used in the poster was said by one of the guys responsible for the whole data taking. (I don't mean Fidel, he just put the original phrase in a new context!)

    Unfortunately I cannot contribute to this blog with gossips at the moment but I'm looking forward to learning them from you :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Who are you, Μιχαέλα? The greek Michaela-Eleni or the greek Michaela-Maria?

    ReplyDelete
  7. I just gave the sentence a new comic-dimension regarding the "I have a dream" speech:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_have_a_dream

    ReplyDelete