State of Unconsciousness: Doomsday devices and Art and stuff

Woo! First post I make on this blog. Quite amazing!

Anyway, the last couple of weeks I have been at CERN, the machine that will create black holes and utter and total destruction of the world, and perhaps the universe!

Black holes and revelations

Well, at least that’s what I was told before I got here, but apparently it is a quite safe place to hang around, and I will have to get my hands on a doomsday device in some other way.

According to recent research, Mad Scientists will rule the world…eventually

So, how is it to stay at CERN? Well, it is obviously not as insane as it was last time I was here, which was during the summer. The reason is simply that during the summer you have tons of summer students wanting to have fun and party:

While during the rest of the year, people do serious research and stuff, and I don’t know anyone here! Eep! Definitly not used to knowing this few people at a place, but nevertheless, it makes being a serious student very simple, and I have finally gotten a good start on the preparations for my master thesis! So it is starting to seem more likely that I’ll get done by June, and become a Master of Science (awesome title)!

So, I’ve been staying around here for about two weeks, and most of the time I have been busy working and what to do in the spare time haven’t been much of an issue. This weekend, however, I have had all the time in the world available, as everything on the experiment seemed to go quite well, and we managed to take the data we wanted for now without much effort. This lead to me having the entire weekend off.

On Saturday I decided to take a trip to Geneva, which is not too far by bus/tram, walk around in various shops looking for a new messenger/laptop bag and perhaps a coat, and just generally stumble around and see what was happening. Geneva is a very strange city, and at some points you wonder if they suddenly have switched over to the Norwegian currency in the shops to make things simpler, but nope! The prices are actually supposed to be 5.51233 (note: todays exchange rate apparently) times higher than what the items are worth, in my eyes. Put on a fancy name and a put a suit on the guy behind the counter, and you can charge whatever you want. Guess that’s what happens when you place a ton of diplomats and bankers in a city.

On the other hand, there are of course normal shops as well, and lurking about a bit in the side-streets was apparently the way of finding them:)

After a few hours in the city, I figured it was time to head back towards CERN, but stopped at Starbucks to get some coffee, mostly because they have great chairs there and I had brought a book with me that I bought during the summer, but never got around to start reading. The book was recommended to me by a friend of mine from the internship at CERN this summer, and is called “Demian”, written by Hermann Hesse.

Demian

I haven’t finished the book yet, but so far I am liking it quite well, and it descirbes some quite interesting characters and is well written. It has a somewhat dark feeling over it and is about a boy balancing between the bright and dark sides of life, trying to find his path in life, or something like that. I will probably come back to the topic when I’ve finished reading it:) Got to save some pages for the flight back to Norway tomorrow.

He sure doesn't like snakes!

So today Sunday came about, and I needed new plans!

So I went to www.wikitravel.org to look up what is worth doing in Geneva. I found some museums and stuff, and figured that it might actually be a good idea to go to a museum! (General Health Notice: Being a bit un-social over some period of time may cause irrational behavior!). So I picked out the Museum of Art and History, and figured I would google it to see if it was any good. Initially I was quite interested in going, until I read a review (the only review I found), saying it was total and utter crap. Probably exaggerating a bit there, maybe they took the guys ice-cream on the way into the museum for all I know.

But I descided not going after all, and rather google some art instead. So, where to start off? I know very little of art, so I started with the only replica of a painting I can remember having bought, starry night by Vincent van Gogh, or something like that:

I think this might be one of my favourite paintings, and I want to live in that house! (well, closer examination shows that the thingy on the left might not be a house after all, but on my small replica it looks like a evil wizards castle/tower, especially if you look at it from a little distance).

So, we have a start! Wizards and crazy clouds and stars and stuff! Now, what more can we find…We’ll, I like fire, so I found a painting of a burning city. Now, I’m not too happy about burning things that put lives at risk and such, but I am quite certain that no one got hurt during the painting of this picture:

Smoke on the water! Fire in the sky!

I also like tigers! So, here we have a painting of a couple of tigers that chill around, like tigers should:

Tyger, tyger burning bright,

in the forests of the night,

Which immortal hand or eye

could frame thy fearful symmetry

I found out that Napoleon had style!

Rembrandt likes The Simpsons, which is clearly seen in his famous “Homer”

And to finish off this short trip to the gallery, I would like to show off a couple of my old favourites, depicting the coolest characters featured in The Lord of the Rings, namely the Nazgûl:

Lead on by their mighty leader, the Witch King, or Lord of the Nazgûl:

This picture is from the famous scene from the siege of Gondor, and I just have to post my favourite quote from LotR while we are at it:

“In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair.” When I grow up, and probably become old, grumphy and evil, that is going to be my rolemodel. They are the perfect evil creatures. Simple as that.

So, that’s it for me for this time. And in the famous words of Eric Cartman: