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.

New safety sign at CERN!!!

 The CMS detector system administrator have made public today this new sign. It has been found at the P5 CMS experiment site. No previous warning or information from CERN safety team was made before. I guess they believed the sign was quite specific :D

The sysadmins are now crossing emails discussing about it and about its implications. One of the real emails being sent around says:

"Have we got icinga checks for the coffee machines ? To check water
pressure, coffee level etc etc..."

So there might be already plans for an important monitoring of the coffee conditions.

This is not really an issue to joke about, as we all know the importance of the coffee supplies at the CERN control rooms. Real eLog entries sent around by the detector shift crew in critical data taking conditions are of the kind of (yes, some were so hilarious that I saved the emails :D)

• 30 August 2011 12:20 : No sandwiches +Coffee machine down: 

  Situation getting critical.

• 28 July 2011 23:14 : Owl shift Jul 28-29

• ps: RFMs: PLEASE make sure there is enough water, coffee,

  cups, and particularly sugar, this is part of your

   responsibility and paramount to shift morale!!!!!

•  24 July 2011 06:00 : COFFEE CARD left with only 13 coffees

  Please refill it in order to keep a very high efficiency

  of the shift crew

•  20 July 2011 23:16 : AND THERE IS NO COFFEE CARD

  see subject. Riots/Strike to be expected in near future.

• 19 November 2010 21:19 :
  

  HELP! the night is going to be very long....
  our coffee card is gone missing after 20:00 and 
  we are left with a few capsules of "caffe espresso leggero"!
  Please take it back.

There is no word in elvish, entish, or the tongues of men for what i want to say

That quote from TreeBeard, from Lord of The Ring, is the first thing that came to my mind when I arrived to CERN this week. Along with the images of the deforestation and the enraged march of the Ents that followed that feeling.

It is true that there was some advertisement. We all received the CERN email announcement about that. But, as usual, we just discarded it as junk email or ignored it, thinking that it would be some standard piece of useless information that we don't need.

Then, suddenly, one day you arrive back to work and see that almost all CERN trees have disappeared. This place, that in arcane eras was a legendary piece of old ugly buildings surrounded by old huge trees, it is converted into just the bunch of old and even uglier structures.

Before, our eyes could still afford the pain, as the wonderful trees managed to hide most of the ugly buildings. But now they cannot stop bleeding in pain, after seeing the reality. Yes, CERN is even more ugly now :D

Ok, I exaggerated a little bit, the previous pictures are not actual pictures of CERN :D I leave you here few real pics I did:

PD: my apologies, this was meant to be posted past week but I forgot to click 'post' and my 3 seconds fish memory took care of me forgetting about that forever :D

CERN Project: Blowjob

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Discovery of the Maikel boson!!!

Oops, I just noticed that I never published this post, I'm very sorry!!!

There was so much excitation during these days of the Maikel boson discovery that I could not cope with that :D

I don't remember what I was meant to say but I put here some representative slides of the event. First one is one of the typical ATLAS slides, with very professional nice contrasting colors (sorry if watching them just made your eyes to bleed of pain) and their typical clear and professional Comic Sans font, that makes you feel like if you were reading a fun magazine rather than one of the most important science achievements of all time. Well, I will dedicate a main article only to comic sans so I will just comment about their nice result of 5.0 sigma significance!!

The second slide is a typical slide from the competing experiment, CMS, with nothing major to mock about and getting a similar result, taking into account that used totally different detector, software and people, so it is a good cross check. Worth to notice that the CMS result shown is a combination of all possible Higgs decay channels while the ATLAS one was just combining their best ones, so you cannot really compare both results.

 Finally I will just show a picture of how did probably Higgs feel during the presentation :) Actually, he was crying of emotion several times...

Exciting times at CERN!!! But, as CERN Director General said, we are not yet sure that this is the Higgs Boson predicted by our quantum physics theory (called Standard Model) but if it is not, it should be its twin brother, because it looks pretty much the same :)

Also, I want to make clear what does that 5.0 significance number means. I will show it with this nice picture that someone sent around :)

The way this works is: we find lots of particles decaying in different ways, and we expect a lot of noise coming from similar particles decaying in similar ways. Then we make simulation models to predict how many particles we would see in case we really had Higgs boson and in case we did not, and then we compare with what we detected. 5.0 significance just means that we found many more decay result particles than in case that Higgs boson did not existed, in the way that we are mathematically 99.999% sure that such extra particles are not just a lucky coincidence (called technically: 'statistical fluctuation').

And now many people would say "yeah, but I don't give a shit; that seems totally useless and a waste of money", similar to what many people said regarding electricity, lasers, microwaves, nuclear energy and so on (when the theories related to these were discovered). Imagine!! Scientists are just starting now to imagine new inventions that will come soon from knowing the correct equations of the quantum mechanics!!! I am not an expert on that topic but if the Higgs boson is the responsible of giving mass, will be able in the future to remove or add mass to stuff?? Space travel? Waste reduction? Loosing weight so getting slimmer and sexy in no time? Well, I guess not anytime soon, but surely we will find lots of indirect uses!! Also, when Einstein proved the photoelectric effect, he probably could not imagine that it would be used in the future for solar panels, opening the door of the elevator or flush the men's toilet in public bathrooms...

Higgs (or similar) discovery inminent!!!

Nobody can stop the gossip. It's one of the strongest forces of the universe (even stronger than gravity, electroweak and nuclear strong forces...). By now, most people has already known by any possible non official source that CERN will make a big announcment tomorrow.

CERN created a facebook event page where they announced the special meeting they will have tomorrow morning at 9am about an "update on the search of the Higgs bosson".

Many blogs, as explained in my previous post, leaked (or invented!!) a lot of details of what CERN will show. Lots of international newspapers, including the New York Times, also spread the news, even citing these unofficial blogs as the main source of information, at the same time as CERN official word is to not to believe anything they say.

Also, Fermilab already warmed up making an emergency press conference to show their results first!!!

And the Director General of the most important R&D public agency in Spain sent this announcement claiming that CERN already found Higgs!!!

Anyway most of us know the real truth. They will just say the typical technical details of  "we have found an excess of data over noise of so many blah blah standard deviations that could be compatible with the existence of the Higgs boson with a confidence level of blah blah but could also be this or could also be that other particle and we need more data to understand exactly such excess."

In any case, as you can imagine, there are tons of people gathering at CERN already, like moths going to a lamp at night.

You can see in this post the photo of the first person already sleeping there in front of the door of the auditorium where the conference will start tomorrow at 9am :D You can even see still sunlight outside so this person started picking up a place long time ago!! Actually the CERN DG already said by email to all employees here that they will open the doors of the auditorium only at 7h30, not before, so they prevent people for starting going tonight to sleep inside :D

We expect lots and lots of people going tomorrow there. The opening of the doors of the auditorium probably will be much worst that the opening of a shopping center the first day of sales. Prepare for the worst!!!

And of course, I also expect to be there!!! But  I doubt I will get a place!!! :P

As someone said in the official CERN event... OH MY GOD PARTICLE!!!

The BIG gossip

The gossip is all around us. You can smell it in the air, feel it in your skin, see it on the faces of the people around...

By today, everybody knows that a team of physicists gathered in a room on Friday to "open the Pandora box" and begin crunching the new data from this year. Newspapers from all the world are spreading these news, some of them with funny headlines like  "New Data on Elusive Particle Shrouded in Secrecy", "Europe Overtakes U.S. in Physics Pursuing God Particle" or "Excitement builds over Higgs data".

Some blogs they even give lots of details! This one claims, with lots of details, that both Atlas and CMS have already observed the Higgs boson for sure with sigma of around 4 in at least one of the decay modes (more than 3 implies 'observation', more than 5 is called 'discovery'). It's funny that some VIPs, like the Atlas spokesperson, have already alerted about that and pleaded “Please do not believe the blogs” :D

The rumor of the discovery is even a trending topic in Twitter!! (#HiggsRumors).

Of course, the official version (and probably the only reliable one :D) is that nothing happened yet, they are still analyzing the results and you have to wait to the avant-premiere of the show where the final results (double-checked lots of times) will be presented. Basically in a couple of weeks in an important physicists conference.

And, once again, it could be that this is just a rumor :) Don't forget that Higgs has already been "discovered" 2 or 3 times here if you believed all the previous rumors!!!! :D

E.T. reading its PhD!!

 It is now confirmed: E.T.'s zombie (see this post) stayed so long time inside Esther's skull eating her brain that eventually became intelligent and now is even going to get a PhD!!

Still, E.T. could not open it's way out of that hair prison so everybody is convinced about Esther being alive and going to present the PhD by herself :D

The official event is here. Esther fans (and E.T.'s) are trying to make a videoconference possible so nobody will miss it!

Good luck, Dr. Esther!! Oops, sorry, I meant good luck, Dr. zombie E.T.!!

CULO!!!

I know, it has been long since nobody really wrote here in this blog, so I had only that thing to say :D

CULO!!

Area 300

What's with this building?

"This building" is bien sur the "Alice building", no. 300-301-160-161.

Legend has it that an old experiment was there, for ever cemented away from existence many centuries ago, and since this cube of cement was lying too close to the main gate to make sense the only solution was to surround it by three extensions. And make them into offices and labs to surround the ancient spirit by alive human action, adding oblivion to eternal isolation.

Everyone working there seems to have heard about this legend but nobody knows for sure. And here is a hint for you by an informer of this blog: Next time you find yourself turning around the (too many) cute corners of the Alice building as you try to reach R1 on feet on a rainy day, attempt to go to its central part.

And I didn't even tell you to raise your gaze to its rooftop.

Robots also read in the restroom!!

Today, Maikel did an astonishing discovery, thorough his wide list of scientist spies/contacts that he has made during his eternal stay at CERN...
His friend Jose Tokio managed to get this picture from a hidden camera in the toilet of a super robotics secret research institution. One of the robots of the lab was found there!!! And he was even reading!!!
It is still to be investigated if the toilets shit anti-matter, like CERN scientists...
Also, it is worth to investigate which kind of toilet paper it is better for taking care of their delicate ass cutis.
In addition, in this photo it was made another unspeakable discovery: if you pay a lot of attention, you can see the foot of someone hiding behind the poor robot, who is unaware of the disgusting fact... So, there are also robot voyeurs who enjoy looking at them!!! Puajjj

The Legend showed up in official CMS meeting!!

It looked like a normal Tuesday at CERN. All online (i.e. responsible of daily data taking) representatives of the CMS detector of CERN were in the middle of a meeting. They were discussing the important problems they had that week which, due to unexpected hardware problems, made them to record much less data that their competitor, the ATLAS detector. There was people upset and everybody could feel the tension in the ambiance.

At some point, someone were commenting something about Maikel's stuff, so he felt obliged to also comment about that to clarify the situation. For some reason, he felt very tired that day. His brain worked slower than usual. But still he had lots of important things to say, to clarify the situation and fix the problems. He could not imagine the disaster that was about to happen.

He interrupted the whole conversation and stood up from his chair to speak, with a very serious face and voice, standing sure of himself and clear about his intentions. His eyes looked clear and confident of what he was talking about, as he was talking from the point of view of an expert of his sub-system, as well as the on-call person who was there when the problem happened and could clarify everything.

In that moment, one of the persons of the meeting showed a big smile on his face and started laughing like crazy. Most people was totally shocked by that fact. It looked like he really got mad about the different big problems that happened that week. But then he made a sign that made everybody understand. He pointed with his finger to Maikel and shouted:

- I LOVE YOUR T-SHIRT!!!!!!

Suddenly, all people in the meeting muted. The meeting was interrupted without any logical reason. Everybody turned slowly their faces to look towards the direction where such finger was pointing at. Then, everybody understood. And laughed!!! There are legends that still tell how such laughs were heard even by the Dr. Conan in the far Cimmeria...

Maikel did not understand at first. Then he looked to his T-Shirt. He was wearing the "The Man - The Legend" t-shirt!!! He was so sleepy that morning that he just took anything from the wardrobe without checking. The unfortunate t-shirt he got was the one that Maikel and Mikaela gifted him for his birthday, just as a joke, but hoping that he was not wearing it at work.

Of course, Maikel laughed as much as the rest, and the tension of the meeting disappeared, so finally everybody enjoyed :)

After the meeting, he wrote to Maikel in the chat the whole story and he is still laughing about it.

That was the second most fun story that t-shirt ever heard, being the first one of the annals Michalina's famous joke regarding that the t-shirt was probably right because "behind every legend, there is always a small little truth"...

The Mystery of the Lost Coin

The issue of the toilets in the building where Maikel works is still not over. The toilet in his floor is still not fixed... Not even after CERN recorded his second inverse femtobarn of data!! And Maikel is very disappointed because nobody did any party this time!!

Anyway, in spite of working in the World Cathedral of Science, the most advanced High Energy Physics laboratory of the world and the most technological place ever made by mankind, Maikel still needs to spend a dangerous journey everyday desperately looking for working toilets while running away from the radioactive shit that commented in other posts.

One day Maikel decided to go to a distant place where some Maikel told him he could find a clean toilet (just 2 floors below him). After the risky journey, he arrived to the peaceful resting place but, right before he could start to do his stuff, he noticed something highly unusual.

A coin inside the toilet!!!

He started thinking about how could the coin have arrived there. Maybe there was someone around checking if anyone tried to get it with his hands (puajjj!!!!). Maybe there was even a camera around! For sure the coin was there since some time ago, as it seemed old. Maikel didn't think about making a photo of it, but it looked very similar to this one that someone else did.

Anyway, of course Maikel was not going to get his hands dirty in the disgusting radioactive water for a coin, although it seemed like a 50 cts (almost enough for getting a coffee from the machine, mmm). He had a different plan. He decided to monitor the coin as well!

During some days, he was making a double research work: at the same time he continued improving the monitoring software of the CMS detector while dealing with unexpected power cuts, system problems and LHC configuration changes, he was also researching about who was getting the coin, monitoring the stuff from time to time. During more than a week the coin stayed there. Not even the cleaning staff dared to get the coin out of there. Probably because they know more than anyone else about the unspeakable horrors that may happen to someone touching such water. Most probably the have their cleaning legends about the Dark Ages of CERN and also about the Chosen One that one day could get the coin out, in the same way as Arthur was chosen to get Excalibur.

One day, the Chosen One came. And got the coin out. But it happened exactly during the days Maikel was on vacation in Spain so he could not get to know who was :( In the other hand, that gave an unexpected alibi to Maikel so he can prove that he was not the one who took it!!

Now we all know that here at CERN, among us, there is some hero, the Chosen One, who would be ready to risk his live for all of us. Or at least for the contents of the toilet...

Μιχαέλα is at cern

Tsk tsk tsk, journalism has fallen so low that I have to do the reporters' work now...