Where I work?

Yesterday while browsing around I found the kid-friendly version of PSI's site. This is how they describe the SLS to kids.

Aladins besondere Wunderlampe

Die Synchrotron Lichtquelle Schweiz (SLS) des PSI ist ein gigantischer Röntgenapparat und ein riesiges Mikroskop. In der UFO-förmigen Forschungsanlage werden Elektronen stark beschleunigt und auf Slalomkurs gezwungen. Dabei senden sie Synchrotron-Licht aus.

Das spezielle Synchrotron-Licht entschlüsselt kleinste Strukturen und ermöglicht so grosse Fortschritte in den Naturwissenschaften, in Technik und Medizin – z.B. bei der Erforschung schwerer Alterskrankheiten wie Alzheimer und Knochenschwund.

Ein spannender Rundgang führt Sie durch diese Wunderlampe modernster Wissenschaft.


Roughly translated
Aladin's Special Lamp.
The Swiss Light Source of PSI is a gigantic (ginormous also acceptable) radiation device and a microscope. In the ufo-shaped research facility, electrons are accelerated quickly and swung as if going through a slalom course, thereby emitting synchrotron light.
The special synchrotron light unlocks the smallest structures and allows great progress in natural science, technology and medicine. For example exploring complicated aging diseases like alzheimers and (bone-dissapearing, haha) osteoporosis.
An exciting journey leads you through this most modern of scientific Magic-lamps

Oktoberfest

The best way I can describe this festival is sufficient and probably worthwhile. Sort of like disneyland for adults. It is expensive, it involves waiting in lots of lines, but the beer is delicious, the food is good, and a huge number of people get mindblowingly drunk.
So due to train issues and such we didnt actually make it to the festival until about 1pm on the first day. By this time every tent is completely full and the only option is to see the other sites of oktoberfest (which are plentiful). The festival itself is like a huge carnival with enormous beer tents randomly scattered throughout. The carnival places were not really that interesting and although this fest had quite a few more than winefest or brezelfest they didnt have as much diversity and felt much more commercialized, which for me takes away from the experience. Outside of each of the masstive beer tents there is a beer garden, but the real action with the bands and warmth is inside. We tried several times to get into the tents later, but it was all but impossible. They were letting in about 1-2 people/hour at best and germans seem to be much better at cutting in line than us americans. We also rode one of the rides (perhaps a bad idea), since it looked like it would be so much fun. It was nice in the sense you got a birds eye view of everything and could start to appreciate how many people were really here. The weather for this weekend was also much colder than nearly all of us (except kamila) expected and thus we spent a good deal of time shivering and in some cases drinking coffee instead of beer (we all make mistakes). The weather proceeded to get colder and by the time we had to return to our tents to sleep, we were fairly confident we would not survive the night, or if we did, we would sacrafice a few fingers in the process. I do not think any of us got an especially restful night of sleep but it was sufficient to trek out again for some sunday morning drinking.
Sunday was noticably less busy (we also arrived earlier 10-11am-ish), but still amazingly crowded for anything on a sunday. So we were able to make it inside a tent, which we soon realized was not exactly that desirable, it was incredibly smokey and nowhere to sit. Furthermore the bands that had seemed so exciting and lively the night before were now just loud and headache inducing (what an effect a day has). We found a nice place outside with some real bavarians who have come to fest every day (it is 16 days long) for the last 10 years. They are currently my heros, although at no point in time do I wish to spend 16 days in a row drinking.
As I got on my train back (sadly realizing I may never see some of these people again), everything seemed in order. The train rolled out and made it to about munich passing before it decided to take a nap. I had time at my connection in zurich so I did not worry too much. Plus I was in the eating cart and had just gotten a really fancy looking green tea. 50 minutes later when we still had not moved I was starting to worry. Eventually everything started moving but it was clear I would miss my connection in Zurich, and in all likelyhood the last bus, I was sure about, that went to PSI from Brugg. I also realized this train skitted through Austria, and thus my eurail pass required a supplement. Fortunately this supplement was only 5eu, and the conductor was really nice about the whole ordeal, so nice in fact that he never stamped my eurail pass (if only I were as skilled as rob). The train after a period of time I found comparable to forever arrived in Zurich. I hopped hopefully on the train to Brugg only to find in Brugg not only were there no busses coming until 6am the next morning but also there were no taxis or anyone around at all. Realizing I was in no condition to hike 2 hours to get to PSI, I jumped on the next and apparently last train back to zurich. In Zurich I realized the Bahnhof has a church, but not a mission like the Hannover HBF.
On a side note I was able to stay in the Hannover HBF the night before my flight back to portland at the Mission there. They gave out free coffee, and give you a place to hang out until your plane or train comes. And if you like they tell you about god, but they didnt force anything upon anyone. The place in Hannover impressed me quite a bit, and I met some great people there just drinking coffee and waiting between 12am and 5am. I assumed they were omnipresent. False
Back to Zurich, they actually closed the HBF, gates and all and when I asked one of the guys what i should do the only thing he could tell me was find a hotel. I did not want to pay for a hotel, or even a hostel, but sleeping outside again, especially without a tent was out of the picture. I found a few hotels some of which charged 170sfr/night, a few of which were completely booked. And one, not quite perfect, but certainly trying hard. That charged a still outrageous 85sfr/night, but was themed after rock stars, and designed by someone who does not like having all the stairs in the same place and likes exploring. There was no central stair case, instead there were little min-stair cases that went from one floor to the next (possibly even next .5 of a floor), and then dumped you off to wander until you found the next set of stairs. I was so frustrated with everything else in the world, that I somehow found this terribly amusing, and added it to the list of things I want to do if I ever build a house. Anyways it worked out really nicely since I was able to sleep in a bit more since my class was in downtown zurich, plus the croissant breakfast and coffee tasted quite good, and I didnt really spend thaat much at oktoberfest so perhaps this is how the world is punishing me for not drinking enough or any number of other things I have done.
Anyways it was a really enjoyable weekend, I would do it again without a doubt, but maybe do things a bit differently.

Starting my PhD

Monday : I have officially started at the PSI as a PhD student. I was pretty excited about my first day, despite still feeling a few of the aftershocks from winefest. I went for a morning run, and showed up bright and early only to discover there had been a leak in the synchrotron cavity on sunday and the beam would be down until further notice and likely until thursday (you can check the beam from home at http://sls.web.psi.ch/view.php/organization/status/realtime/index.html) (-0.1mA is definitely not good, it should be around 400). After discovering this, I went to go find my advisor and he was out of town for the day. So as far as first days go it was pretty uneventful. I got to meet some of my colleagues we had a nice lunch and coffee, and I stayed until it seemed justifiable to leave (6pm).
As for my colleagues, I think I am going to like them. I will give a short blurb about each one since they will remain the same for the next few years.

Rajmund - Postdoc/Office Partner
He is Czech, did his PhD in Grenoble at the ESRF (European sychrotron facility), and speaks about 7 languages. He sounds like a pretty outdoor-oriented person, he likes to mountain climb on skiis, and general adventuring. He also is quite a tea drinker, which I like because BASF made me much too addicted to coffee, and tea is good for you. He lives in Villigen since he likes the quiet town experience better.

Christoph - Postdoc
He is austrian, did his PhD in Graz (maybe?), and lives in Wettingen. I have certainly learned other things about him, but I cannot recall them at the moment, I will let you know when I do. He is very friendly and good in english.

Sam - Postdoc
He is british, did his PhD in Manchester, and now lives in Baden (since he likes to be able to bike to work, and still live somewhere with nightime activity). He was just at a conference this weekend in Bordeaux on Imaging of some sorts. I am hoping conference travel is common, although I have do have something to show first.

There is another beamline scientist, an engineer, and a technician, but I dont really know any of them well enough to write much.

Tues : I ran again before work, also to the ATM since the closest one is about a mile away. The path was quite nice and the Wanderweg (hiking trails) here are quite plentiful. This is a really cool country. I ended up not getting to work until later, but it didnt seem to be a problem. Not too much to do today, just continue reading, sending some emails, and we had our group meeting. I like the format of it, very open but still efficient. It also looks like just about everybody eats lunch together which is nice, since at BASF, no one I worked with ate together so I had to find people from all over to eat with. Although perhaps maybe that was better since you see these people at work anyway, who knows. I also made my first apartment phone call (all in german). It was a bit scary but I realized pretty quickly the apartment that was advertised was already gone, and the person had a really nice one for nearly $2000/month, at which point I had to explain to her, independent of niceness that is not in my range. From what i can tell now, it looks like it might be best to find a couple other students to live with, since bigger apartments are easy to find, although that does slow the swiss integration down.
After work, I went to go try and find the Laufsportgruppe-Brugg (A running club, my friend told me about). I got kind of lost trying to find the exact meeting point, but even after I found it and talked to a random runner there, who said he runs everyday and has never seen them around here, there was no one there and no signs of a group. So I explored brugg a bit more then ran back home, where I feasted.

Industry Day / Nobel Laureate

Today at the summer school was industry day, where we had presentations from quite a few different companies in the biomedical imaging field. The presentations were on a whole quite good, but a few of them seemed more like sales pitches (how they think we have money to spend, i have no idea). It was pretty interesting to see that the job possibilities in europe, switzerland, and the US for when I finish are pretty bright and there are a number of companies working on projects where I imagine my phd experience would make me quite valuable (Scanco Medical who does bone imaging and strength analysis in preclinical and a few clinical systems, and Varian who does image guided radiation oncology therapy work). The later is located in California but has a huge imaging lab near Zurich, so presumably I could live in one place and visit the other quite often, but I am getting way ahead of myself. Another of the talks was on the new Helium Ion Microscope, which normally would not have particularly interested me, but since I got to watch 2 or 3 experiments on a scanning electron microscope, I am kind of an expert in the topic, haha if only.

Tonight at the ETHZ they had a nobel prize winner, Richard Ernst (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1991/ernst-autobio.html), give a talk about Spectroscopy and Fourier Transforms. Sadly it was after nearly 8 hours of back to back lecturing, 6 cups of coffee, 2 glasses of wine, and a beer, needless to say I was a little out of sorts. He was quite amusing for an old smart guy. I was expecting it
to be dry and I-want-to-kill-myself-boring, but he wasnt. In fact he started by talking about how it always bothered him that a frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, had invented the fourier transform, so he want back and did some research and realized that Euler, surprise a swissman, had invented basically the same technique
quite a few years earlier. After that I was hooked, his talked wandered around a bit, and spent way too much time on 2 and 3d nmr for protein structure determination (ick), but it was pretty interesting to here how he thought about some things. For example he talked about the impulse response of a function being a police man knocking on the
door (input/impulse) and a women opening up and screaming (output/response), while the frequency response of a system as a man coming to the door singing a song (input) and the women answering the door (output/response) being so inspired that she sings louder
(amplitude), but a little slow so shes slightly delayed (phase shift). Had my professor for Signals and Systems used that analogy I would have gotten everything immediately.

But really the point of this whole interlude, was that when he got his first MRI, the doctors came back to him and said, yep everything normal. And he was crushed, because he really wanted his brain to be special or completely different or something along those lines.
Suprisingly or not, I had the same sort of impression when I saw my first MRI, I mean I certainly didnt want to see a brain tumor or anything, but something a little bit out-of-wack would have been appreciated, or at least a "whoa, ive never seen anything like that before". Anyways, I dont need some silly labcoat-wearing scientist to
tell me my brain is special, I know that already.

And so this is the suisse/schweiz/svvizzera

So the first real thing I did last night was go outside on the gästehaus patio and start talking to the other people there. I remember not a single name from the exchange but there were two turks, two dutch, and maybe a german (I wasnt drunk I just dont think he ever said and I just guessed). They were all quite friendly and talked about what a shithole PSI Gästehaus is (I think students/people just like to complain no matter where they are), but they did talk about bbqs that happened up to 3 times a week and apparently there are 250 phd students here and almost always a number of interns. They also apparently have bikes that can be borrowed for free, but sadly no free coffee (only 0.50sfr, but its the concept of free coffee that really gets me, not the actual cost) So perhaps a point to BASF on that issue, but dont worry PSI gets a plus infinity points real soon so a single win for basf doesnt mean too much. I probably stayed up too late chatting with them, but I will have plenty of time to sleep when I move into my own slightly desolate apartment.
The next morning we had orientation which started off deutsche bahn style (german message then english translation usually missing at least one key point from the german one) but after awhile they just gave up and did only german. So I learned about all sorts of Gefahren for nuclear reactors, nonionising radiation, and finally watched a tacky tacky 3d movie about global warming (the co2 molecules were like people, there was even a kissing scene, wtf?) We got free coffee and croissants, and had some discussion time so I could figure out the deal with cellphones, residence permits, food, living, and all that. I also met a student from Connecticut who goes to UVA, and did what initially sounded like a cool phd program where he split time between PSI (paul scherrer intitut, where I am now, I am bad at explaining things at appropriate times) and UVA. Unfortunately what he didnt realize was that an american phd stipend (22-30k) doesnt do all that much in switzerland where stipends are from 28k and up with 28k being nearly unsurvivable. So he had about a year and a half of subpoverty level funding, somehow he managed to still enjoy it here and gave me a goal for my living costs (think how much I could travel and ski if i could live on 26k or so)
After all this I got to meet with my advisor, Marco. He was as friendly as I remembered him despite the fact his recently purchased house was flooded with mud and rain last night. He showed me around, and to my office (I get an office, how sweet is that), and the few new staff members that came since I had last been there. He also explained how everyone in his group will be here for at least another year and some as many as 3 more years, which is quite nice (assuming I get along with all of them, should be easy enough) since I will have time to really get to know them and they seem pretty sporty. I share my office with a guy whose name sounds like bernard but isnt from the czech republic. He studied/worked on his PhD at ESNF in Grenoble, speaks 7 languages (apparently he likes dating exotic foreign women and thus learned languages to satiated his appetite), and likes running. I figure, given that I idolize him now, we will do just fine together. He also showed me to the beamline again and some entirely new setup they had built to do even higher resolution imaging and what not, it was pretty impressive to see. We then all went to lunch together at the cafeteria where the setup was almost exactly like basf, but the food was a little bit more diverse, and generally tasted better. Also they had beer, not that I wanted to drink any, but knowing that I could is a nice comfort.
After all this marco drove me to ETH so I could attend the second half of the Bioimaging summer school I am attending for the next two weeks. In the car on the way there while discussing rail passes and things my day was peaked. He mentioned the possibility of being able to fund me getting a general abo (unlimited riding on almost any train/bus/tram in switzerland for a year!!). Since uni-students can get them cheaply or cheaper perhaps if they are under 25 or something along those lines and I may have to make a number of trips to Lausanne. I was ecstatic about this. I dont know exactly what it is, but being able to travel anywhere in switzerland whenever I want for free, is pretty cool, really cool.
So finally when getting to the summer school in a great mood, I found the poster sessions (the afternoon activity) and talked to a number of people about there work and it was pretty interesting. I now feel like a quasi-expert on AFM so when I saw a poster there on it, I confidently went over and starting learning about a few really cool techniques TU Vienna people were doing to study drug interactions. From the posters it was pretty easy to see that a huge range of backgrounds were represented everything from straight signal processing to straight biology/biochem. I also got to see the updated practical session sheet which includes a few really exciting looking lectures on image reconstruction, structure determination from SEM (scanning electron microscope) images, and viral infection.
After all the posters there was a dinner prepared for us with predinner cocktails (open bar, wheee), a really nice salad, and a great meat selection. I ate far too much but since its the last free meal we get till next monday, I probably should get every pennys worth. The students were all really friendly and a few were interested in traveling this weekend (maybe paris?) and going out to bars this week (my kind of people). I also met a Russian from Siberia with just about no russian accent. I, first, did not realize siberia was actually inhabitited (winters as cold as -52C he said), and second would have guessed he was dutch or even canadian, his english was that good). He also spoke far too many languages and "only a little german" which meant he could converse fluently with one of the germans with slightly weaker english.
The male to female ratio wasnt awful, but it was markedly worse than BASF, and the BASF intern functions, I guess this is when reality starts to set in. Oh well, all in all a great start.