I just finished my first week of intensive French language classes at the University of Geneva—a sorry excuse for not blogging, but it's true, as I recall below.
After Monday's placement exam—much to my surprise—I was placed into level B1, lower intermediate French. How did that happen?? In any case, I am absolutely loving my classes. My teachers are terrific and passionate about teaching and the classes are a small size (around 18 in my morning cours de langue class but more in the lecture-style classes).
UNIGE's approach is full immersion into the French language by any means possible, be it grammar, literature, culture, cinema, or song. The program is 3 weeks long, with the possibility of taking an additional six weeks afterward. The days are long, as I'm up by 6:30h so I can arrive by 9:00h. Classes generally wrap up around 16:00h, but touring walks of Geneva or excursions could keep one occupied until 20:00h.
A sampling of my classes at UNIGE this session: cours de langue, grammaire intermédiare, prononciation laboratoire, two different pronunciation classes (with a teacher), cours de la suisse histoire, communication orale, stylistique grammaire, and chanson francophone. Among the songs we sang today were Le Parapluie and Les Petits Papier today (below).
This particular Wednesday R and I didn't get home until 23:00h. After class we had dinner at CERN with R's friends, a very vivacious older couple who are frequent visitors to world-renown physics research center. The husband, an older gentleman most likely in his 70s, is a pretty well known professor of Physics at NYU. For work, said professor and his wife travel to CERN every year to collaborate with other leading scientists.
During dinner the couple happily recounted how R had saved them many years ago. One winter long ago, the professor was cross-country skiing in the mountains of Lelex (probably backcountry trails with not that many people around) when he fell and dislocated his collar bone. Unable to drive to the hospital himself, his wife walked down to find help, flagging down R who stopped and offered a ride back to where the professor was. Not only did R bring them to the hospital but he also stayed to translate since they do not speak much French. ♥
On Friday evening R and I dressed in orange to attend our friends' World Cup party—can you guess what orange represents? Even though we got lost and missed NL/Brazil game, we arrived just in time to hear unbelievable news—that the Netherlands had miraculously defeated Brazil 2 to 1. Our friends and their friends are really nice..and again, super international. I met a woman from South Africa who I might be going to salsa classes together some time in the future.
We spent the evening talking, drinking and finished by watching the Ghana/Uruguay game. To my utter disappointment, Ghana was robbed of their win. If you watched that game as well - what do you think? What the hell with the red card at the end? I think that should have been an automatic goal for Ghana. I was heartbroken for the player who missed the penalty kick.
Are you following the World Cup? Have you ever learned a new language before, and what is your learning style? Tomorrow, I'll write about my football experiences in my own backyard today. Literally in my own backyard with my new Japanese friend and her family.
Bonne nuit mes amis. À demain!
Showing posts with label CERN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CERN. Show all posts
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
Microcosm at CERN
On Thursday before attending a World Cup party, I visited CERN's interactive science center, the Microcosm. The Beatles' "Across the Universe" played softly in the background as I stepped into the Microcosm, CERN's interactive museum which explores the mysteries of the universe via physics.
CERN is an acronym for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire. It is home the Large Hydron Collider, or LHC and many top research institutions. CERN's other claim to fame is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who started working on the concept of the Internet while he was working at CERN. Eventually however Berners-Lee left the physics world for Boston and Cambridge, where he further nutured his idea into reality. Nowadays CERN's computing center has turned its focus on grids to help process and share the immense volumes of data collected during the experiments.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
In 1999 an large international team of engineers, physicists, and artisans started building the LHC in an already existing 27km tunnel (previously used for another big thing). In late 2008 the LHC was finished and experiments began. The LHC covers the Geneva countryside but you can't easily see it because it's 100m below ground! Measuring 27km in circumference, it is really long. So what does it do? It re-creates the conditions that were present at a millionth of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.
A huge number of smart people work at CERN on the following four main experiments. I'm probably boring most of you to death...so I won't go into too much detail.
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS)
Has 2500 scientifiques; with a team of 37 pays
CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid). Experiments that search for "dark matter" the void around the planets and galaxies that stops planets/galaxies from flying apart and into one another. We can only see 4% of the universe while the rest is made of dark matter; the CMS detector weighs more than Eiffel Tower.
Has 2500 scientists; with a team of 38 countries
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). Another experiment studying "dark matter".
Has 1000 scientists; with a team of 30 countries
LHCb (LHC beauty quarks)
Has 700 scientists; with a team of 15 countries
Other smaller experiements include TOTEM and LHCf. Totem watches over the funtioning of the LHC machine, measuring the quality of the proton beam created by the LHC. LHCf detects ultra high energy particles spraying from the LHC collisions. Other interesting things I learned. I'm not an expert here, so again, search the web to dig deeper.
Powers of Ten
On the largest scale picture ever taken (at 10 to the 26th meters), there are 9, 325 points on the picture with each point a galaxy like ours! Can you imagine this? Stephen Hawking, in a recently made documentary, is asked whether humankind should be trying to make contact with others out there. Hawking in response says it's not a matter if aliens exist in other galaxies because mathematically they must exist.
Timeline
Four Forces of Physics
CERN is an acronym for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire. It is home the Large Hydron Collider, or LHC and many top research institutions. CERN's other claim to fame is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who started working on the concept of the Internet while he was working at CERN. Eventually however Berners-Lee left the physics world for Boston and Cambridge, where he further nutured his idea into reality. Nowadays CERN's computing center has turned its focus on grids to help process and share the immense volumes of data collected during the experiments.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
In 1999 an large international team of engineers, physicists, and artisans started building the LHC in an already existing 27km tunnel (previously used for another big thing). In late 2008 the LHC was finished and experiments began. The LHC covers the Geneva countryside but you can't easily see it because it's 100m below ground! Measuring 27km in circumference, it is really long. So what does it do? It re-creates the conditions that were present at a millionth of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.
A huge number of smart people work at CERN on the following four main experiments. I'm probably boring most of you to death...so I won't go into too much detail.
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS)
Has 2500 scientifiques; with a team of 37 pays
CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid). Experiments that search for "dark matter" the void around the planets and galaxies that stops planets/galaxies from flying apart and into one another. We can only see 4% of the universe while the rest is made of dark matter; the CMS detector weighs more than Eiffel Tower.
Has 2500 scientists; with a team of 38 countries
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). Another experiment studying "dark matter".
Has 1000 scientists; with a team of 30 countries
LHCb (LHC beauty quarks)
Has 700 scientists; with a team of 15 countries
Other smaller experiements include TOTEM and LHCf. Totem watches over the funtioning of the LHC machine, measuring the quality of the proton beam created by the LHC. LHCf detects ultra high energy particles spraying from the LHC collisions. Other interesting things I learned. I'm not an expert here, so again, search the web to dig deeper.
Powers of Ten
On the largest scale picture ever taken (at 10 to the 26th meters), there are 9, 325 points on the picture with each point a galaxy like ours! Can you imagine this? Stephen Hawking, in a recently made documentary, is asked whether humankind should be trying to make contact with others out there. Hawking in response says it's not a matter if aliens exist in other galaxies because mathematically they must exist.
Timeline
- 13.7 billion years ago, the Big Bang gave birth to our universe
- 300, 000 years after the BB, the first atoms were formed
- 1 billion years after the BB, the first galaxies formed
- 4 billions ago, planet Earth was formed from debris orbiting the Sun, our nearest star
- 3 million years ago, humankind evolved and the first humanoids walked on our Earth
Four Forces of Physics
- Gravity, the weakest of the 4 forces but without it, we would float into space! Gravity pulls matter together.
- Strong force. There could be no life without the strong force. Most powerful of the 4 forces. Carbon is synthesized in stars via SF.
- Electromagnetism keeps us solid; during thunderstorms, charge builds up in clouds then runs to Earth as lightening; Aurora Borealis; mobile phones use these waves.
- Weak force—without this, the sun won't shine; WF causes beta decay, a form of radioactivity that triggers nuclear fission in the heart of the sun. There's naturally occurring radioactivity in granite rocks.
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