cernette

I've never tried it, being a chick myself. But I think it works pretty well for the more socially apt guys, especially when they're in the US.

The web was invented in the hallway underneath mine, which blows my mind every time I walk down that hallway on the way to lunch. These days, the big project is not data distribution, but parallelized data analysis--so when I need to run a computing-intensive job, I use processor farms all over the world to parallelize the work and make it go faster. Accelerator physics, and accompanying advances in medical physics, is also a hallmark here.

FWIW, I've heard that every dollar that goes to CERN returns threefold in research advances. CERN also holds no patents, so everything they invent here is open source.

Most of the time I'm writing code to analyze data. We get lots of numbers out of our detector, but we need to reconstruct those numbers into things like "well, it looks like we have an electron here, and its energy is 15 GeV, and if you pair it up with that electron over there then maybe you have the decay products of something interesting..." There's also lots of meetings (so many meetings!), so we spend a lot of time listening to what other people are doing, and documenting our work to present to our co-collaborators.

There's also lots of work on the machine, seeing how it's performing, calibrating it, testing parts for upgrades, that kind of thing.

There's also a lot of talking. Which sounds a little weird, but I can't think of a better word for it. There's so much expertise here, that if you want to learn about something, you just look up the resident expert and email them to see if you can buy them coffee and ask them questions. That's one of the most fun things, the random but totally fascinating conversations that you strike up chatting with people. And you make super-cool friends that way.

Definite high points are lunch and dinner. Lunch is usually a full hour, and the cafeteria is pretty good, and you get to just chill with your friends and enjoy the mountain scenery. Often at the end of the day, around 6 or 7, you meet up with your friends again for beers.

Time travel note: I sent it yesterday.

Tide comes in, tide comes out. YOU CAN'T EXPLAIN THAT.

The real question is, where's the Mountain Dew machine? Because I could really go for some.