On the weekend, I finally found a sadly non-permanent local source for my beloved bubble tea. The nice woman selling it pointed me to a web site, which is a bit short of content at the moment. She also talked of a newsletter and a possible brick-and-mortar location in the works. I sure hope this works out!

So, Austria is about to cancel its membership in CERN (Google your own article, I’m not about to link to any Austrian news outfit). Fits neatly with the Austrian Way of handling the Zwentendorf affair – pay for expensive construction of something hugely complex, then opt out when it’s about to be turned on and actually generate benefits. Of course, Austrian researchers will continue to work at CERN (you can’t just throw out people who built an experiment that’s about to be turned on, anyway), but career building at CERN has probably just become a lot more difficult. As someone who’s just writing a thesis in HEP, I’m slightly annoyed, but I presume it’s worse for people who poured lots of time and energy into doctorates and research work.

Update: sos.teilchen.at has a petition.
Update^2: Heh. Who would have thought that a measly 32000 signatories to an online petition and statements by 16 nobelists plus a lot of behind-the-scenes maneuvering would actually suffice to stop this?