That LSAG report? It’s just propaganda for outsiders. In case anything goes REALLY wrong, somebody has to run down 94 meters of stairs (because the elevators are so damn slow) and manually save the world:

In other news, I managed to pull my first all-nighter at CERN (due to the fact that I didn’t want to bike home in the rain), and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s Bastille Day. My French is still miles away from being sufficient for singing along la Marseillaise, but I really like the spirit of it… To get a feeling, read the translated lyrics while Mirreile Mathieu sings it in a video that was probably shot by Leni Riefenstahl’s French twin.

Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons…

I’m at CERN for the next couple of weeks, working for HEPHY on the trigger subsystem for CMS.

The first couple of days have been pretty overwhelming – the amount of bureaucracy at CERN is truly scary, there’s lots of things to learn, and life in France can be pretty challenging for non-francophone people (So far, the longest truly successful conversation took place yesterday morning at la boulangerie in town, where I managed to purchase two baguettes. Tomorrow, I will try to progress to two baguettes and three croissants…). Great fun so far, and I even got to see CMS up close in semi-disassembled state. I can confirm that it’s pretty impressive, especially when one of the kiloton segments slowly starts to move while you’re watching. The Wikipedia picture doesn’t really do it justice because it only contains the structural elements, while the final setup is much more complex. Unfortunately, my compact camera, the bad lighting and the general excitement conspired to make all my pictures ill-focussed, but let me repeat that it’s impressive. Here’s the best of a sorry lot, complete with puny human for scale in the center right.

Another amazing thing about CERN is that pretty much everything that they do ends up on the public web. All our schedules, documents and even source code are on Google. While compiling a piece of the trigger software today, I was foiled by a missing header file. Googling it gave me the change from the CVS (Yes. In 2008. Amazing, but not in a good way…) web interface where it was deleted. Every PC gets public IP addresses. I really wonder how the IT people keep the whole mess alive with tons of temporary people always arriving or leaving…