I finished my first CERN post marvelling at the openness of CERN’s network to the Internet. I though I’d add a few things that I found fun and that are accessible without any kind of authentication.

• First off, the web page you’re usually presented with when going to cern.ch is CERN’s public web page, which is a nice bit of fluff, but not overly useful. There’s a link labeled “CERN users”, which takes you to the page you get when going to cern.ch from within CERN. This is much more informative, including an overview of what’s happening at CERN – seminars, conferences, other announcements.
• The summer student lectures have video and slides online, which is quite nice. For physicists, I recommend Antonio Pich’s Standard Model lecture, especially for its hilarious slides. There’s also an introduction to particle physics for non-physicists and a couple of lectures about CERN’s computing projects.
• Indico is CERN’s conference management system, which has a nice calendar with mouseover popups where you can get at the slides and minutes of the thousands of meetings and conferences that go on.
• Want to see what’s going on in CMS? There’s a page of web cams watching different parts of the detector complex, from the experimental cavern to the parking lot.
• For the more technically minded, here‘s a view of the status monitors for CERN’s accelerator complex. If you’d like to make sense of the blinkenlights, this page and the linked FAQ are pretty useful. More operational fun: Since CERN’s accelerator complex is rather old, parts of the status information are still transmitted via CCTV channels and, of all things, teletext – the CERN teletext server is a gateway for those of use using more modern receiver equipment.

I’m still amazed that all this stuff is public. Yes, the actual discussions surrounding new discoveries will be a lot more secretive, but I still like the idea that hundreds of millions of people can watch the SPS go through various stages of a power failure for their Sunday afternoon entertainment…

Update: Oh, the LHC vistar is a lot more interesting this weekend, as you can watch the progress of the second injection test.

19:00 Alternate injections into sector 78 and sector 23 which is pretty blooming amazing.

:)

Update^2: Due to the CERN reorg, most of the links to the accelerator stuff above are broken. Here is the new Vistar page.