A full moon in June is called a honey moon
It's finals season in Geneva. Everyone studying like it's the only thing that matters.
For some reason I always find it way harder to study for exams in the spring than in the fall.
On Wednesday, Tiziano invited us over to his house in Thoiry, France.
Tiziano is Italian. He made us pizza in his wood burning oven while we swam in the pool and played foosball.
Tiziano is a pretty remarkable dude. Most notably, he was the spokesperson for the CMS experiment at CERN, and has done other cool things as well. He's been at CERN since 1986.
We were convinced that Tiziano had access to the accelerator tunnels from his house, so Ryan came prepared with his helmet and steel toed shoes.
It was a nice break in the middle of a big work week.
They asked for this photo.
What a glorious afternoon.
Jonction
This weekend I went somewhere I hadn't been yet in Geneva.
The place is called Jonction, because it's where the Rhône and the Arve rivers come together.
You can see in the pictures that the Rhône is clear to the bottom, and that the Arve is dense with sediment.
The Arve has so much more sediment than the Rhône that when they meet, it produces some cool turbulence.
They both come from glaciers in the Mont Blanc mountain range, but the Rhône passes through lake Geneva. I think this probably gives the sediment more time to settle in the Rhône, but I'm not really sure and google hasn't been helpful.
Jonction is crazy. I was not expecting to find all of Geneva here, but I can see why I did.
Since the water is so much nicer, people only swim on the Rhône side.
Every time we watch a movie in the basement, someone shoots the bow and arrow.
If they manage to shoot it through one of the tiny holes in the chair at the end of the room, then I have to immediately jump in the lake.
This deal only applies to the first shot, and every movie night it gets closer and closer and I know one day it will go in.
I'm not sure whose idea this was or why I agreed to it in the beginning, but at this point it's tradition.
I still haven't been in the tunnels.
But it's happening soon I swear.
In between running simulations and making plots, I've been learning about measurement techniques for radio frequency structures. So far I know the most about bead pull measurements, which involve pulling a bead through the entirety of the cavity. This is to perturb the electromagnetic field inside the cavity, so you can then deduce how the field would exist normally, without the bead. You then use what you know about the field to tune the cavity to operate more efficiently.
There is a pulley setup to accurately move the bead down the cavity, and a copper wire with a current through it to simulate the beam.
I'm also going to be learning about probe measurements for later in the month/summer.
Nadal won his 12th Roland Garros title on Sunday. What a beast.
My avocado grew another inch of root this week. What a beast.
