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signed up to watch the persieds with a friend on friday night and didnt realise the plan also included a 35k hike but now i’ve survived it i’ve achieved inner peace ☮️

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Diatom images - Jana Vesela (compilation)

Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University

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back in Geneva, will do some posting sometime soon

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Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the first pulsar at the age of 24. Her PHD supervisor would later get the Nobel price for physics, for her discovery. Northern Ireland 1967

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Images of Saturn taken by Cassini on October 2007. Moons visible are Titan, Enceladus, Tethys, Pandora, & Epimetheus. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill

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sorry i’ve been very offline i’m back in the UK for a couple weeks for my birthday, a summer school, and a very delayed graduation. will make some catchup posts at some point, in the meantime enjoy this pic from my birthday trip to a national trust garden 🌷

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« Before World War II, when physics was primarily a European enterprise, physicists used the Greek language to name particles. Photon, electron, meson, baryon, lepton, and even hadron originated from the Greek. But later brash, irreverent, and sometimes silly Americans took over, and the names lightened up. Quark is a nonsense word from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but from that literary high point, things went downhill. The distinctions between the different quark types are referred to by the singularly inappropriate term flavor. We might have spoken of chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, pistachio, cherry, and mint chocolate chip quarks but we don’t. The six flavors of quarks are up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top. At one point, bottom and top were considered too risqué, so for a brief time they became truth and beauty. »

— Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics

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Honestly have no idea what I'm doing anymore but here are some notes plus coffee and a picture from a lovely day trip my friends and I went on the weekend before classes started (it's one of my favourite days ever)

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Stacked

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Celestial Mapping and Celestial Proportions by Tallmadge Doyle

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saturday 25th june ★ 11/100

headed back into the city centre and looked round more of the art museum then found a spot on a dead end above street level to sit and read

once the weather got cooler/stormier i went for a run for the first time in ages, and found a friendly dog in a field on my way back

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friday 24th june ★ 10/100

finally got a break from the constant 30°+ weather, and even actual rain!

tried to rerun my neural network classifier on some new samples but i way underestimated how much the new systematic uncertainties would slow it down so ended up having to kill it midway to go home at about 8 pm

met with the summer students again and did my best to explain some stats to them

sent in some comments for the institute review paper

booked my flight home for graduation

tried to rerun my neural network classifier on some new samples but i way underestimated how much the new systematic uncertainties would slow it down so ended up having to kill it midway to go home at about 8 pm

booked my flight home next week for graduation and a summer school

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thursday 23rd june ★ 9/100

tidied up my notes from the last week

looked through the draft paper my uni has been asked to review

met with one of the summer students, gave him some advice for adding interactive features to a python notebook

pictured is my third favourite thing to have happened while i’ve been at cern: someone sent an email asking for technical support to a mailing list of over 32k addresses and many dozens of very highly qualified people sent increasingly desperate reply alls for the rest of the day

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tuesday 21st june & wednesday 22nd june ★ 7&8/100

had my regular supervisor meeting, found out my fits are okay and my mislabelled backgrounds aren’t a big deal

met with one of the summer students to explain some things about neural networks

passed a teaching for higher education qualification that i retook earlier this year :)

pics of an electron microscope and a cyanotype of a mountain in the history of science museum, a lovely view near the botanical gardens, and my desk ft. expertly redacted notebook