Annecy

I crossed the Swiss-French border eight times today. If only I got a stamp for each...

Annecy. On the advise of Brano ("And I remember one thing, from Geneve we went to the french city of Annecy. it is definitely a MUST to see, it is next to the beautiful lake, it has great cafes and
restaurants and that all in the middle of some mountains") but also just about everyone else, we put it on the destination list. So when (grad student co-worker) Matt said he'd rented a car for the next couple days and wanted to check out Annecy this afternoon, Liz and I jumped at the chance.. we grabbed Pavel and hopped in the car and there were on our way.

Actually that process took four hours and involved Liz and I getting forgotten in the depths of a parking garage somewhere near the airport, but that's all irrelevant. Matt's crazy driving kept us on our toes, and the Annecy old town was all it was made out to be. It was also my first time eating fig ice cream (er, gellato), my first time eating a pizza with anchovies, my first time drinking beer mixed with lemonade at a restaurant, and my first time with a group that managed to lose the ticket they give you when you park in a pay parking lot. Good times. It's really quite a nice place and Matt's friend Gabe proved quite amusing too, especially with his detailed knowledge of German slang.

Missed the thursday cern-cine-club film, and quite more egregiously got home too late to talk to Robin. maybe tomorrow. For this weekend I have in mind the Geneva Omnibus.. Marketplace in Ferney-Voltaire in the morning, floating down the Rhone at noontime, the Hardronic Festival in the afternoon, and then maybe a daytrip out somewhere (Montraux? Mt. Blanc?) on sunday.

(no subject)

For the first time today we had a lecture with open-ended questions, with mysteries that cannot be explained away with a deft manipulation of mathematical heiroglyphics. Yesterday, on the other hand, the lecturer derrived quantum chromodynamics within the space of a lecture hour, starting just with the lorentz transform and its invarient quantities. Combine symmetries of spacetime plus quantum mechanics and out pops the Standard Model of particle physics, experimentally verified to a zillion orders of magnitude. In a way, it's boring. The moral of the story from the Standard Model lectures is, "It works."

Then there are the Engineering lectures. It's so easy to explain away the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as a big synchrotron underground with superconducting magnets. But the technical requirements are unbelievable. The beampipe and magnets need to be spaced along a 27 kilometer ring with a precision of a tenth of a millimeter at worst.