pheloniusfriar (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pheloniusfriar) wrote2014-08-19 08:52 pm
pheloniusfriar) wrote2014-08-19 08:52 pm
The Fermilab Test Beam Facility post
I had planned to post as I went when I was at Fermilab in May. I even started by posting a lovely and relaxing picture of the dinner I made on May 5th, before stuff really got going. I have barely had a minute since then, but certainly not a single moment from the time the stuff showed up until I was long gone from Fermilab. I estimate that in the three weeks I was there, I worked over 250 hours, most of which was under insanely stressful deadlines — it was some of the roughest weeks I've ever spent. I have since been told that I'm a grown-up physicist now since I have been to, and nominally survived, a test beam. I maintain that I am still a larval physicist, but maybe now I'm a larva who has ... seen ... things. When you add to that I had decided to take a course on information technology and society (yes, both in the same course... TSES4005 if you care to look it up) via remote learning (video on demand) while I was down there (a compressed 6 week course in one summer semester), and things went pretty quickly from wtf to holy fuck my anus is bleeding (a metaphor, my insides stayed inside pretty well... except for the massive head wound, but that was late in the test beam, and a welcome distraction by that time). Overall, it was a terrible experience, but the team succeeded in getting the data we needed (on the last day running, of course, apparently that's just the ways these things tend to work... some are not so lucky and end up having completely wasted their test beam time). The experiment was a success and we got the first real particle data from the very first pre-prototype of the small-strip Thin Gap Chamber (sTGC) design that will be built at facilities all over the world (including Carleton University where I am), and used to build the New Small Wheel (NSW) muon detectors of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN during their 2018 upgrade window. Being involved with that effort was fucking amazing!!! Weighed against the brutality of working as hard as I did, darned if the balance still doesn't fall on the "I am so glad I got the amazing honour to participate as an important team member" side of the equation. Not that I haven't been a complete wreck since then trying to wrap up all the research I was doing last year and finishing my second semester (6 week) summer course (which wrapped up last Friday at 11:52PM when I turned in my final essay). I needed to get a deferral on my take home exam for TSES4005 because I was such a disaster by the time I got back and could attend classes physically, but I ultimately landed an "A" in that course, which I am extremely proud of given how things had been going for me. Oh, and the "small" detectors called the New Small Wheels are actually 10 metres (about 30 feet) in diameter and each weigh 112,000kg (about a quarter million pounds). Small only in name, when you're this big, they call you NSW!
So... this is actually more of a photo essay than a lot of gabble from me, but I'll try to explain each image very briefly. For those of you easily disturbed by images of ultra cool physics equipment and physicists, I have put most of it behind a cut. The images are also smallish, but clicking on them (at least the ones under the cut) usually leads to a larger version of it (opened in another tab for your viewing pleasure). I will start by mentioning that Fermilab is in Illinois, and as such does see tornadoes from time to time. There were warning placards all over the place and emergency warning systems in every room and hut on the entire 27.5km2 campus. In the test beam facility (the "Fermilab Test Beam Facility" or "FTBF"), the tornado shelters were... the toilets. But, for some reason, there was a bizarre gendered component to these potentially lifesaving architectural features that left us pondering whether men and women needed separate rooms in which to prepare for doom, or whether tornadoes came in two types... the gentle reader is invited to ponder along with me.
We were experiment T-1049 and this was where we were going to be for three weeks starting May 7th (we showed up a few days early to get ready before things got going officially). The bold squares you can see on the drawing are huge concrete blocks that formed the test beam room that we were going to set up in and which acted as radiation shielding while the accelerator beam was on (we were obviously not in the room when the beam was operating). Heady times were ahead!
Most of the time, I managed to eat pretty well. I had a small "efficiency" kitchen in my room and I wasn't afraid to buy groceries and use it! It was not all drab and dire either, there were always ways to be able to smile at something :).
When you go inside the Fermilab Test Beam Facility building, you will find a building within the building, which is where the control room (office space) resides. It is pretty much a repurposed double-long construction trailer placed inside the overall building. Now stuff 30 people from all corners of the world in there for three weeks... add pizza and coffee... the pressure of a one-shot test beam and I think everyone did remarkably well, all things considered. There was only one true grumblebum (a Canadian yet), and one ultra-curmegeon (not Canadian), but sometimes it's good to have a "heads up" about who to watch out for (or at least be prepared for) in future endeavours.
To get into the beam area, you needed to follow a safety interlock procedure. In short, you had to have the radiation badge that you were issued (we had to take training at Fermilab after we got there and before we were allowed into the FTBF), you had to call the accelerator control centre and inform them you were about to perform a controlled access, when they had turned the beam off they would remotely open a magnetically-locked key door and we had to unlock a key for each person (a minimum of two) going in (that's the one person = one key instruction on the sign). Once every person had a key, two people would operate the interlock: the first person would insert and hold their key in the outside interlock (second photo), and the second person would unlock the door and then insert and hold their key in the inner interlock (third photo), then the first person would release their key and come in and lock the door behind them (there was a time limit before the interlocks "dropped", which would be a huge hassle, but it never happened accidentally while we were there), and then the second person would release their key and we would go in to the particle beam area (again, the beam was turned off at that point, of course). The reverse procedure had to be followed on the way out: one had to hold their key in the inner interlock panel, another opened the door and held their key in the outer one while everyone left. We then had to insert all our keys back into the key box and lock it before the beam could be turned on again. If any key was missing, the beam could not be turned on by the accelerator control centre: thus the strict one-key-one-person rule... if that were not adhered to, someone could potentially be in the test beam area when it was re-activated, and there would be a lot of angry (and possibly sad) people. Experiments have been kicked out and people banned for life for not following the safety rules (although, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has been irradiated that way... they just broke the rules and a radiation accident could have happened).
Yes, those are Christmas lights above the passageway amongst the concrete shielding blocks, sometimes the main lights were turned off to use the laser alignment system and it was good to be able to see going in (fyi, if you look at the diagram above, this entryway is the one shown at the top going into the room made of concrete blocks); and yes, there were two radiation sensors that we needed to use when we exited from the beam area: one to make sure we didn't pick up any radioactive dust or something on our hands/arms or shoes (mostly), and one to make sure any equipment that had been in the beam area had not become radioactive. Why? The high intensity 32GeV pion beam we were using for our test could easily blow apart atomic nuclei and wreak all manner of other havoc. The good news is that the radioactivity usually decays very quickly, so just waiting a few minutes before going in was sufficient (again, we had badges that we wore while in there, just in case... so we could find out after the fact, when they were checked after we left, that we had received too high of a dose... nobody did, fyi). The final picture is not very interesting to look at, sorry, but I feel the need to include it because it's a view that not many people get to have: it's looking into the mouth of the dragon, the aperture in the concrete walls where the accelerated particle beam enters into the test beam area room. If the beam were on and I had the same view, I would receive a lethal dose of radiation in the span of a few minutes. Game over, man. It's a humbling place to have been standing. As a note, during setup and teardown, or if we needed open access for many people during the time we were there, we could call the control centre and request that they "drop" the interlocks and the beam would be down until they sent a team to inspect the area (make sure nobody was left inside), lock the doors, and re-enable the interlocks. It was comforting to know there were procedures in place.
If you go back a little in time, I posted an enigmatic (to me at least) picture of bison grazing in front of the beamline berm with the odd curved roof of the FTBF building in the distance. Here is a close up of the FTBF building, and a view of its insides. The inside view doesn't, in my mind, do justice to the scale of the place (or its "all business" demeanor), but I don't think such a camera shot was possible with the equipment I had (a cheap digital camera). The huge stack of concrete blocks on the left (on their sides) was the shielding for the central test beam line, and the blocks standing up on the right side of the picture is the other entrance to the test beam we had our equipment in (this is the entryway shown on the diagram at the bottom of the room made with the concrete blocks). The office/trailer would be to the right of the view in that photo. Also, fyi, the big concrete structure coming out of the FTBF building (with the cars parked beside it) is the central test beam line that continues on to the more permanent experiments at Fermilab. That is the view of the FTBF building, but when you walked out of the building, the view you had was pretty much the opposite: it was beautiful and lush farmland (this was all part of the Fermilab campus, which is an active and productive farm and conservation area). Going in and out was often quite the surreal experience for me (and I presume others). The last photo in this group was a sunset one night looking over those same farm fields. No processing was applied at all to the shot, what you see is what I saw. If you look at the large version of any of my photos, this would be the one to do it with.
This last block of photos will wrap it up for my experience at the FTBF (Fermilab Test Beam Facility). I have a bunch of other photos from my last two days at Fermilab, where I managed toescape from my prison get away from my desk while people worked on something I didn't need to be involved with, and then again the next day after the test beam was over for us. I am debating whether to post those shots or not because they are more just interesting pictures rather than part of a narrative. I will be posting my pictures from the day trip I did to Chicago on my way home.
This is whereI was chained up did my work from while I was at Fermilab. Doing 12 to 18 hours at a stretch was not as out of the ordinary as it should have been. The folks in the picture are the rest of the Carleton University contingent: Stephen, Dr. Bellerive, and Sebastien. This was after we got our equipment set up but before the particle beam was turned on for our experiment — the display is showing us detector noise, which means we hooked everything up correctly to that point. I can assure you that we looked considerably more frazzled by the end of the T-1049 test beam campaign! The equipment we installed in the test beam area was quite elaborate as can be seen in the second photo. One could use the word haphazard or nightmarish from looking at the picture, but it was actually a carefully considered setup of the only hardware of its type in existence on Earth — it had to be made to work on the spot because it had never been integrated before (the equipment arrived at Fermilab from three different research institutions and had never been connected up until then). In the third photo, Dr. Vachon from McGill University is setting up the smaller sTGC-type detector built at Carleton behind the sTGC pre-prototype (the big copper coloured thing) that was the focus of the test beam. The EUDET telescope is the aluminum/shiny thing to the side of the sTGC: three detector planes on the side we're looking at, and there were three behind it (it's the things with the yellow, red, green, and black wires coming out of them). Fyi, there were two computers behind all of this (if you follow the line of the yellow table top backwards to the wall, that's them), and that was where I worked for the most part when I had to go into the test beam area myself (cramped!). This photo was taken on the last day that we were going to be able to get the test beam. The second and third photos show how much stuff all had to work together to perform the tests we needed to do. The detectors each had to have high-current low-voltage and low-current high-voltage power, all of the electronics mounted on it to allow readings to be made, a constant flow of flammable gas (a CO2 / n-Pentane mixture) for the sTGC detectors to work properly, an isolated full local area network (that I also had to implement, along with gateways to it from the control room), the EUDET telescope detector planes and all its electronics and power and coolers and computers and cabling and photomultiplier / scintillator triggers, and all manner of other support electronics and monitoring stuff, oh and the yellow table that the sTGC was on could move up and down and side to side so different parts of it would be in the sights of the EUDET detector sensors (which are only 1cm x 2cm). It looks a mess, but it ultimately worked and allowed the technology to be tested in case changes needed to be made before the final design/prototype was built.
The main contribution I made to the test beam experiment was the electronics and software that allowed the sTGC's data acquisition electronics to interface with the EUDET Telescope data acquisition electronics (I've talked about the EUDET telescope elsewhere, it was what I've been working on for over a year now). Specifically, the electronics for the sTGC were developed to test a new integrated circuit being developed for the NSW project, and was never intended to be used in a proper detector test experiment (and thus lacked some basic features that would have been implemented otherwise). Essentially, what I developed was a set of electronics and software that acted as a "wrapper" around the sTGC electronics and allowed us to gather particle events in the sTGC and EUDET detectors synchronously (when we had an event in the EUDET telescope, we would have a matching event in the sTGC detector). The EUDET detectors are extremely precise and high resolution, and by reconstructing a particle's track through the EUDET system, we would know very precisely where it went through the sTGC, and we could then use that information to interpret the data we got out of the sTGC. Ultimately, the goal was to characterize the performance and accuracy of the sTGC to verify that the design would meet the target criteria needed for the NSW upgrade to the ATLAS detector. The interface between the two data acquisition systems was a kludge upon a barnacle upon a hack (my "wrapper"), and the computer that was at the core of it all (handling all of the sTGC data integration, and living in my lonely corner with me) was ultimately dubbed "ICE-T" ("Integrated Collection Electronics — for Testbeam") because the whole thing was a "bad (w)rapper" ;). Ahem. The next photo is of the electronics I designed to do the critical part of the synchronization work: to ensure that the trigger issued by the EUDET telescope would be sent properly to the sTGC electronics, and that no new triggers could be generated until all the sTGC readout data had been received by the ICE-T system. This monstrosity (which worked perfectly, I might add) that I had originally called the "wrapper" board was dubbed at the FTBF as "The Ugly Board"... a face that only its creator could love, heh.
The whole thing was nearly scuttled by the original idea I had of using a National Instruments PXI-based Labview system to act as the controller for The Ugly Board (we had it lying around from a previous experiment). The original idea was to use that system inside the test beam area to read out the trigger number from the EUDET's Trigger Logic Unit (through the custom interface I implemented on The Ugly Board), wait for the UDP packet data from the sTGC data acquisition cards, and then forward that on to the ICE-T system. As time went on, I pared down what I had hoped to get that system to do until all that was left was for it to send the trigger number to the ICE-T system. Even that never worked. After two weeks of killing myself, and working with the National Instruments' technical support (who I actually caught lying to me in at least one occasion in hopes it would get rid of me), I finally gave up and in desperation, went out to a Radio Shack and bought an Arduino microcontroller in the last days of the test beam time window we had. By working for 36 hours straight, I was able to completely implement the Arduino controller as a replacement for the National Instruments system and reprogram the ICE-T software I had developed to interface with it, and that worked. So, replacing an $18,000 National Instruments 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Labview DAQ system (again, it was lying around from a previous experiment, we didn't need to buy it) with a $55 16MHz Arduino Uno (plus an Ethernet adapter card included in that $55, btw) finally allowed us to take the synchronized data we had gone to Fermilab to get. Seriously not impressed with the Labview system... extremely impressed with the Arduino!
And to finish things up, here we see some of the other physics students (like me) working on data analysis and monitoring the performance of the sTGC and other systems. The graph on the wall is real-time data being taken from inside the test beam. So now you know what it looks like to go to a test beam at Fermilab to do cutting edge detector research and development. The results of all this excitement will be a better understanding of how our universe came into existence, how it has worked since then, and what it is going to do in the future. As long as I can keep that thought in mind as I slog through another year of school, I know it will be enough to keep me going.
And here is the team picture we took on the last day before we tore everything down and packed it away... I'm the guy at the back in the black CKCU t-shirt who looks like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. If you really want to see the preliminary results from the test (a PDF format poster put together by Estel Perez Codina), I think it is publicly viewable on the CERN TWiki here (let me know if you try and you can't access it).
And to finish off with an entirely unrelated music video... Reggie Watts, Lara Stone, Malcolm McDowell, and the band Hot Chip in one of the more bizarre creations I have seen (and that's saying something!). Ends with one of the best pouts I've seen (the only other entrant to the field of music video pouts that I know of is Amanda Palmer's glorious pout at the end of her video for "Leeds United"... which also contains one of the best brawl scenes in a music video too).
So... this is actually more of a photo essay than a lot of gabble from me, but I'll try to explain each image very briefly. For those of you easily disturbed by images of ultra cool physics equipment and physicists, I have put most of it behind a cut. The images are also smallish, but clicking on them (at least the ones under the cut) usually leads to a larger version of it (opened in another tab for your viewing pleasure). I will start by mentioning that Fermilab is in Illinois, and as such does see tornadoes from time to time. There were warning placards all over the place and emergency warning systems in every room and hut on the entire 27.5km2 campus. In the test beam facility (the "Fermilab Test Beam Facility" or "FTBF"), the tornado shelters were... the toilets. But, for some reason, there was a bizarre gendered component to these potentially lifesaving architectural features that left us pondering whether men and women needed separate rooms in which to prepare for doom, or whether tornadoes came in two types... the gentle reader is invited to ponder along with me.
We were experiment T-1049 and this was where we were going to be for three weeks starting May 7th (we showed up a few days early to get ready before things got going officially). The bold squares you can see on the drawing are huge concrete blocks that formed the test beam room that we were going to set up in and which acted as radiation shielding while the accelerator beam was on (we were obviously not in the room when the beam was operating). Heady times were ahead!
Most of the time, I managed to eat pretty well. I had a small "efficiency" kitchen in my room and I wasn't afraid to buy groceries and use it! It was not all drab and dire either, there were always ways to be able to smile at something :).
When you go inside the Fermilab Test Beam Facility building, you will find a building within the building, which is where the control room (office space) resides. It is pretty much a repurposed double-long construction trailer placed inside the overall building. Now stuff 30 people from all corners of the world in there for three weeks... add pizza and coffee... the pressure of a one-shot test beam and I think everyone did remarkably well, all things considered. There was only one true grumblebum (a Canadian yet), and one ultra-curmegeon (not Canadian), but sometimes it's good to have a "heads up" about who to watch out for (or at least be prepared for) in future endeavours.
To get into the beam area, you needed to follow a safety interlock procedure. In short, you had to have the radiation badge that you were issued (we had to take training at Fermilab after we got there and before we were allowed into the FTBF), you had to call the accelerator control centre and inform them you were about to perform a controlled access, when they had turned the beam off they would remotely open a magnetically-locked key door and we had to unlock a key for each person (a minimum of two) going in (that's the one person = one key instruction on the sign). Once every person had a key, two people would operate the interlock: the first person would insert and hold their key in the outside interlock (second photo), and the second person would unlock the door and then insert and hold their key in the inner interlock (third photo), then the first person would release their key and come in and lock the door behind them (there was a time limit before the interlocks "dropped", which would be a huge hassle, but it never happened accidentally while we were there), and then the second person would release their key and we would go in to the particle beam area (again, the beam was turned off at that point, of course). The reverse procedure had to be followed on the way out: one had to hold their key in the inner interlock panel, another opened the door and held their key in the outer one while everyone left. We then had to insert all our keys back into the key box and lock it before the beam could be turned on again. If any key was missing, the beam could not be turned on by the accelerator control centre: thus the strict one-key-one-person rule... if that were not adhered to, someone could potentially be in the test beam area when it was re-activated, and there would be a lot of angry (and possibly sad) people. Experiments have been kicked out and people banned for life for not following the safety rules (although, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has been irradiated that way... they just broke the rules and a radiation accident could have happened).
Yes, those are Christmas lights above the passageway amongst the concrete shielding blocks, sometimes the main lights were turned off to use the laser alignment system and it was good to be able to see going in (fyi, if you look at the diagram above, this entryway is the one shown at the top going into the room made of concrete blocks); and yes, there were two radiation sensors that we needed to use when we exited from the beam area: one to make sure we didn't pick up any radioactive dust or something on our hands/arms or shoes (mostly), and one to make sure any equipment that had been in the beam area had not become radioactive. Why? The high intensity 32GeV pion beam we were using for our test could easily blow apart atomic nuclei and wreak all manner of other havoc. The good news is that the radioactivity usually decays very quickly, so just waiting a few minutes before going in was sufficient (again, we had badges that we wore while in there, just in case... so we could find out after the fact, when they were checked after we left, that we had received too high of a dose... nobody did, fyi). The final picture is not very interesting to look at, sorry, but I feel the need to include it because it's a view that not many people get to have: it's looking into the mouth of the dragon, the aperture in the concrete walls where the accelerated particle beam enters into the test beam area room. If the beam were on and I had the same view, I would receive a lethal dose of radiation in the span of a few minutes. Game over, man. It's a humbling place to have been standing. As a note, during setup and teardown, or if we needed open access for many people during the time we were there, we could call the control centre and request that they "drop" the interlocks and the beam would be down until they sent a team to inspect the area (make sure nobody was left inside), lock the doors, and re-enable the interlocks. It was comforting to know there were procedures in place.
If you go back a little in time, I posted an enigmatic (to me at least) picture of bison grazing in front of the beamline berm with the odd curved roof of the FTBF building in the distance. Here is a close up of the FTBF building, and a view of its insides. The inside view doesn't, in my mind, do justice to the scale of the place (or its "all business" demeanor), but I don't think such a camera shot was possible with the equipment I had (a cheap digital camera). The huge stack of concrete blocks on the left (on their sides) was the shielding for the central test beam line, and the blocks standing up on the right side of the picture is the other entrance to the test beam we had our equipment in (this is the entryway shown on the diagram at the bottom of the room made with the concrete blocks). The office/trailer would be to the right of the view in that photo. Also, fyi, the big concrete structure coming out of the FTBF building (with the cars parked beside it) is the central test beam line that continues on to the more permanent experiments at Fermilab. That is the view of the FTBF building, but when you walked out of the building, the view you had was pretty much the opposite: it was beautiful and lush farmland (this was all part of the Fermilab campus, which is an active and productive farm and conservation area). Going in and out was often quite the surreal experience for me (and I presume others). The last photo in this group was a sunset one night looking over those same farm fields. No processing was applied at all to the shot, what you see is what I saw. If you look at the large version of any of my photos, this would be the one to do it with.
This last block of photos will wrap it up for my experience at the FTBF (Fermilab Test Beam Facility). I have a bunch of other photos from my last two days at Fermilab, where I managed to
This is where
The main contribution I made to the test beam experiment was the electronics and software that allowed the sTGC's data acquisition electronics to interface with the EUDET Telescope data acquisition electronics (I've talked about the EUDET telescope elsewhere, it was what I've been working on for over a year now). Specifically, the electronics for the sTGC were developed to test a new integrated circuit being developed for the NSW project, and was never intended to be used in a proper detector test experiment (and thus lacked some basic features that would have been implemented otherwise). Essentially, what I developed was a set of electronics and software that acted as a "wrapper" around the sTGC electronics and allowed us to gather particle events in the sTGC and EUDET detectors synchronously (when we had an event in the EUDET telescope, we would have a matching event in the sTGC detector). The EUDET detectors are extremely precise and high resolution, and by reconstructing a particle's track through the EUDET system, we would know very precisely where it went through the sTGC, and we could then use that information to interpret the data we got out of the sTGC. Ultimately, the goal was to characterize the performance and accuracy of the sTGC to verify that the design would meet the target criteria needed for the NSW upgrade to the ATLAS detector. The interface between the two data acquisition systems was a kludge upon a barnacle upon a hack (my "wrapper"), and the computer that was at the core of it all (handling all of the sTGC data integration, and living in my lonely corner with me) was ultimately dubbed "ICE-T" ("Integrated Collection Electronics — for Testbeam") because the whole thing was a "bad (w)rapper" ;). Ahem. The next photo is of the electronics I designed to do the critical part of the synchronization work: to ensure that the trigger issued by the EUDET telescope would be sent properly to the sTGC electronics, and that no new triggers could be generated until all the sTGC readout data had been received by the ICE-T system. This monstrosity (which worked perfectly, I might add) that I had originally called the "wrapper" board was dubbed at the FTBF as "The Ugly Board"... a face that only its creator could love, heh.
The whole thing was nearly scuttled by the original idea I had of using a National Instruments PXI-based Labview system to act as the controller for The Ugly Board (we had it lying around from a previous experiment). The original idea was to use that system inside the test beam area to read out the trigger number from the EUDET's Trigger Logic Unit (through the custom interface I implemented on The Ugly Board), wait for the UDP packet data from the sTGC data acquisition cards, and then forward that on to the ICE-T system. As time went on, I pared down what I had hoped to get that system to do until all that was left was for it to send the trigger number to the ICE-T system. Even that never worked. After two weeks of killing myself, and working with the National Instruments' technical support (who I actually caught lying to me in at least one occasion in hopes it would get rid of me), I finally gave up and in desperation, went out to a Radio Shack and bought an Arduino microcontroller in the last days of the test beam time window we had. By working for 36 hours straight, I was able to completely implement the Arduino controller as a replacement for the National Instruments system and reprogram the ICE-T software I had developed to interface with it, and that worked. So, replacing an $18,000 National Instruments 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Labview DAQ system (again, it was lying around from a previous experiment, we didn't need to buy it) with a $55 16MHz Arduino Uno (plus an Ethernet adapter card included in that $55, btw) finally allowed us to take the synchronized data we had gone to Fermilab to get. Seriously not impressed with the Labview system... extremely impressed with the Arduino!
And to finish things up, here we see some of the other physics students (like me) working on data analysis and monitoring the performance of the sTGC and other systems. The graph on the wall is real-time data being taken from inside the test beam. So now you know what it looks like to go to a test beam at Fermilab to do cutting edge detector research and development. The results of all this excitement will be a better understanding of how our universe came into existence, how it has worked since then, and what it is going to do in the future. As long as I can keep that thought in mind as I slog through another year of school, I know it will be enough to keep me going.
And here is the team picture we took on the last day before we tore everything down and packed it away... I'm the guy at the back in the black CKCU t-shirt who looks like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. If you really want to see the preliminary results from the test (a PDF format poster put together by Estel Perez Codina), I think it is publicly viewable on the CERN TWiki here (let me know if you try and you can't access it).
And to finish off with an entirely unrelated music video... Reggie Watts, Lara Stone, Malcolm McDowell, and the band Hot Chip in one of the more bizarre creations I have seen (and that's saying something!). Ends with one of the best pouts I've seen (the only other entrant to the field of music video pouts that I know of is Amanda Palmer's glorious pout at the end of her video for "Leeds United"... which also contains one of the best brawl scenes in a music video too).
no subject
Can you write up an article about implementing the Arduino? I am sure they would love an article like that, you could probably even sell it to them as a testimonial!
ttyl