Doing the Lemur at CERN!

We are enjoying few nice days of sun here and CERN lemurs are really enjoying it! Some days you can just have a coffee break in one of the CERN restaurants and embrace the sun with your arms open, like these lemurs do...

 

And also these other ones

 Some people is even doing the lemur on top of the CERN superconductive dipole magnets!!!

Life is good here at CERN when sun shines...

Monkey Man is getting married!!!

Monkey Man™ is getting married!!! And with Peppa!!! We wish them merry Christmas and happy new life together!!!!

Wedding details:

• Date: 24 October 2015
• Time: 12h30 (day wedding, attention to your type of dress, ladies)
  
• Place: Town hall of Banastás (town close to Huesca)

 A bus between Huesca and the little town of the wedding will be provided.

• Bus departure time: 12:00
• Bus stop location in Huesca: in front of this gas station very close to Huesca city center
• http://goo.gl/maps/JFmbl

Suggested hotels in Huesca are:

• Sancho Abarca
• Lizana
• Joaquin Costa

After the wedding, a wonderful lunch will be provided in a restaurant with 3 Michelin stars!

Some celebrities have already confirmed assistance. Among them we will have the Unique, the Authentic, the Uncomparable, the Unbeatable Michael Knight!!

PS: Monkey Man™ is a trade mark first thought by Robin, after we heard (almost dying) the famous story about how Estebanito tried to explain in English to the CERN doctor that he had backache because of typing on the computer with bad sitting habits

Evil stuff disappearing and appearing at R1

We noticed some changes this last summer at our lovely R1. To document them, I took the following picture

The first thing you can notice is that the labels are gone!!! Do you remember about the "self-destruct / evil / chaos / abort" labels in the water fountain? Mysteriously, they disappeared one day without notice. I guess the CERN management finally noticed and thought that such thing might be a bad publicity for people coming to CERN, specially taking into account the big celebrations with all those VIPs coming here recently for the 60th anniversary of CERN.

Also, you might notice in that picture a new addition to the hardware of our dearest restaurant here. Look at the top right. Yes, that blue light. These are no normal light bulbs!!! These are fly terminators!!

And there is not only one on top of the water fountain but lots of them inside the restaurant in many places, even over the coffee machines.

Maikel and Mikaela have been complaining since very long time. They even complained about it officially in the paper survey they did in R1 not long ago. R1 usually gets full of flies during summer, specially in hot years, and it is not very appealing to see them flying and walking over the nice deserts when you are about to get one for coffee break... So it seems that finally R1 did something about it!!! Well, the flies did not really disappear, but it is true that we saw much less than normal this summer... well done!

The death of Scientific Linux CERN

Scientific Linux CERN is dead, long life CERN CentOs!!

We have all been suffering with it. Installing it, and specially updating it :D It was not easy at the beginning, but little by little we all learned to love it (or at least to deal with it).

Today, the CERN IT department announced that our dear Scientific Linux CERN (SLC) is dead. There it does not say it that clear, but in the email we got it is much more loud: there won't be any more SLC versions after version 6 and, instead, we will have a new guy with us, called CERN CentOs (CC), starting with version CC7.

A new penguin has come to town. And there was no place for 2 penguins here. There can be only one.

We just hope everything will be alright from now and we will not keep changing! And remember, if you got a hard time updating from SLC4 to SLC6, imagine what it is going to be to update now to CC7 !!! Lots of fun waiting ahead!

Penis found in data from LHC accelerator at CERN when looking for super-symmetry!!!

Our worst fears have been confirmed. The Japanese scientist Sho Iwamoto was analyzing data from our beloved detector experiments at the LHC CERN's accelerator. He was just doing the harmless typical thing of studying the muon g-2 anomaly, trying to discover the super-symmetry theory. As usual in super-symmetry, he found absolutely nothing, so he did not make any astonishing breathtaking discovery. Therefore, sad and defeated, he just proceeded to write down in a plot the exclusion range, so others know where else they should NOT look for super-symmetry. Then, his eyes opened wide, looking at the picture he just had in front of him. He probably should have thought that science was just making fun of him :D

Some time later, he presented his results in the following paper.

After some time, Maikel's friend Joel went to a physics conference, in particular to SUSY 2013 at ICTP, in Trieste (Italy). Him, and all the rest of the important scientists attending, could do nothing but just watch at the sexual pictures shown by this scientist at the conference. Of course, everybody was polite enough to not to stop the conference in hilarious laugh. Joel's whole story was told in his blog so future generations can suffer as well from his experiences.


Well, the truth is that  we could have expected this after having found penis even in Mars...










 Finally, I guess I cannot end this blog post without one of the typical science memes about anthropology...

Suspicious labels and tags found at CERN

Today, Mikaela told Maikel something that he had not notice during all these years at CERN: labels.

In particular, she told him that the trees at CERN carry some mysterious metallic labels.

Maikel could not believe it, so he had to take a walk with her around Restaurant 1. There, in his astonishment, he found what he was looking for. And made some pictures for you. You should notice that such tags are put in the direction opposite to the restaurant, so they are difficult to been spotted unless if you are looking for them...

There is a dark legend behind these labels. Someone high in CERN management told Mikaela that there exists a hidden database where these "trees ID" are stored. For some unknown purpose. Everything here is identified, labeled and classified. Even the trees. And you.

After that discovery, he noticed something more... disturbing. Some of Maikel's gossip contacts sent him the following pictures, made somewhere at CERN as well:

These labels were strategically positioned... at the water dispensers at the same Restaurant 1. They keep waiting for some sleepy PhD who will press them by mistake. Luckily, it seems that nobody have yet pressed them... but... someone will eventually do... and then... WHAHAHAHAHAA!!!


PD: no need to panic, it seems evident that the CERN summer students have a nice sense of humor have just found a label marker. And some anti-matter. And some hatred for this corrupted world that must be destroyed! WHAHAHAHAHA!!

One petaelectronvolt of energy!!!!!!!!!!

This was my expression today when reading these news

Links to the news and paper here:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/04/icecube-neutrinos-came-from-outer-space.html
http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/1304.5356v1.pdf

More than 1 petaelectronvolt!!! 1 PeV!!!! If you don't know what are we talking about, there are some energy scales in the wikipedia.

So, the energy of one of these particles detected is the equivalent to a 1 megaton nuclear bomb explosion or also all the electricity consumption of the country of Greenland in one year... All that in only one tiny particle that is almost massless!!!

Of course, if you really checked that page, like my friend Edu, you will notice that I exaggerated "just a little bit" :D That page is in Joules, not eV :) Then, if you multiply per 10^-19 then you get the correct figures. So, we better don't start hypothesizing yet about how we could use these to produce electricity :D Or weapons to conquer the world and all that :P That particle, without almost any mass at all, with a petaelectronvolt of energy had only the energy of around 1000 mosquitoes splashing against your car windshield at a time! I wonder if they would break it...

And remember that our beloved LHC hadron collider at CERN reached so far "only" the energy of 8 TeV!! That is the highest energy ever achieved by mankind when producing particles, and these guys just detected from the sky have around thousand times more! You can think of all that people that was scared about the CERN creating black holes and destroying the world, creating particles of "only" a maximum of few TeV... while we are getting from the sky particles of petaelectronvolts!!!! It's like people scared of the danger for our eyes having too much light if we light a little candle, while they are outside at the sun :D

Ok, it's still much less than the famous Oh-My-God particle (yes, that exists, I did not make up that name!!! :D) which had almost a zettaelectronvolt of energy :D That is about equivalent to a 142 g baseball traveling at about 100 kilometers per hour! (not the world energy consumption, if you also misread the wikipedia table as I did :D ). But it is just a little elementary particle! And scientists don't know yet what created such kind of super-energetic particles, although there are, of course, hypothesis... Science is way cool.