Another day, more talks

I headed off to the grocery store to get some soap (and a battery for the clock, and candy for the kids). Route Pauli was blocked, with security men routing traffic away from between building 300 and 11. Street parking was roped off, and a forklift was removing cars. CERN seems to take parking enforcement seriously though perhaps only when the Princess of Thailand is coming.

The bus route was seriously munged--the pedestrian overpass and underpass are gone, and you have to walk east and north around the intersection and construction, and then detour up hill and down dale through parking lots and fences past other construction before you get to the west-bound bus stop. The Route de Meyrin is torn up through Meyrin, and the bus had to reverse course to reach one of the standard stops.

A few statistics from the CMS plenary session: The first two talks were about general status, and something like 320 people (that I could see to count) showed up. Of them 50 had laptops running. The third talk was Safety ("You are deemed to have listened to this session"). Now there were only 220 people left. By the time of the Physics talk, 100 laptops lit up the auditorium (every other listener). BTW, Virdee got a phone call partway through his talk on CMS status saying that the aforementioned princess had arrived, but he finished his talk anyway.

CERN offers a 3-day course (soon to be condensed to 3 hours) to allow you to work near electrical equipment. Since most of us work with said equipment, can tell an HV cable from an ethernet cable and know which one to stick in your ear (*), this is a fairly stupid prerequisite. I suppose this is CYA with focus on outside contractors, but it might be good to be discriminating...

Perhaps I should be fair to the folks sleeping through the talks last evening: many of them suffered jet lag (like me), and the AC in the room sounds like rain; gentle rain; peaceful rain, "those histograms all look the same" rain; "you are getting very sleepy" rain. (*)Answer: C, none of the above