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Monday, October 18, 2004

CERN


On Saturday it was an Open Day at CERN - the European Center for Nuclear Research. It's a huge facility dedicated to physics and other science. It's a huge site, on the border of Switzerland and France, crossing both countries. It has a huge underground tunnel going for 27km, where the geeks physicists blast off tiny tiny particles against each other in hope to find even smaller particles. Don't ask me how it works, I think it's more complicated than it sounds.

So we visited this Open Day in the hope to learn more about science and what they were doing. I was just hoping for a sandwich as I was hungry as hell. Unfortunately, it was not just us who had this brilliant idea. Don't know the official number, but I guess about 50,000 people had the same idea as us. So it looked more like Disneyland than a Nuclear Research Center.

They had facilities open where the public can just walk in and look at how things are working. It's a bit frightening though, the sight of ordinary people like me who doesn't understand anything about physics let loose in the world's most advanced physics center, where if someone pushes the wrong button something like a nuclear bomb might be unleashed. But hey, the geeks physicists obviously believe that there are no evil persons among the visitors.

We walked around looking for the accelerator (don't ask me what it is, I was just following the crowd). We couldn't find it so settled on explanation of the Grid. It's bigger and more powerful than the World Wide Web and apparently in a couple of years time we will have our computers hooked up to a main server somewhere that will be using our computer to help them find ET.

Anyway, it was an interesting experience. Now I know in what environment those geeks physicists work in.

Oh, I found this interesting article on Bling-Bling written by Maxi Jazz from Faithless. I hope the likes of Jay-Z, P Diddy, Usher and Mr. T are reading it.

"I'm not King of Comedy"

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