Blake loves his brothers’ clothes
Color
Our Tiger, Blake, had a blue coolatta. “My havorite color.” — Blake
Yard work
Worked today in the garden and am reminded that it can be harder than a long squash match. Everything hurts…. but I moved three huge bushes from an ugly to their new very nice locations. My hedge now is nice and dense and gained at least 10 sqmeter of valuable space for the kids to play.
Five guys
Gettong a dog at five guys … with two horns on her head.
Travel time
On my way to Lexington…. in Kentucky not in MA.
Cheetah chips
Blaki with his cheetah ‘cheetah chips’.
Ivan, What exactly is the Hix?
Ivan’s take on Hix.
It was the winter conferences of 2011/12 when there were first hints of something appearing in our (CMS) and also ATLAS data. Some even smaller and masswise less precise excess also existed from the Tevatron experiments. The preferred mass of the excess was about 125/6 GeV. The community in particular the theorists went with the excess and had a ball why the experimentalists caved in and overhauled their analysis adding more data and in a blind fashion re-optimizing the process trying to get the best out of it….
By now that is history and the new particle was announced at CERN (July 4, 2012) and simultaneously broadcast to Melbourne (ICHEP the big conference was there this year) . The media had a field day and for once High Energy Physics was making the front page headlines. I even had a little release at MIT. The Boston Globe though completely missed it. The reported called me 2 days later if I remember correctly and tried to find an angle. Her angle was: “who understands/cares about this Higgs anyway?” And I told her that many did for example my son, Ivan. She liked the idea and after talking with Ana and after seeing what she would write we let her interview Ivan….. I think the article (July 12, 2012, Beth Teitell) came out pretty well and it is the first time any of our kids was in a major newspaper.
Pine Wood Derby — 2013 Installment — Raceday
Today is raceday (Saturday, February 16, 1-3pm). Our last two cars, Gisele’s ‘Fire’ and Blake ‘Blue Racer’, the open category were registered on Wednesday. Ivan’s car was registered even earlier the week before on Thursday because it was ready and fit the requirements. The open class I did not realize until that Thursday was not set at a maximum of 5 ounces but rather at 7 ounces, so we took Gisele’s car back to get it to the precise limit, and Blake’s car was not even started at the time.
Our racers right after the race,
no trophies were yet announced.
Raceday was quite an event. We arrived around 1:05pm and the entire room was already nicely setup. Some people had brought some food and drinks and that kept most of the kids busy. They had put up the racetrack in the middle of the room and it was barred from direct access to avoid interference with the race. Spectators were sitting at the track. The setup was quite professional with laser trigger and a proper readout system, a computer to setup and record the races and determine the winners. Quite an amazing thing. After a number of years the Pine Wood Derby has been done all over the US it is of course not that surprising anymore to have such a sophisticated setup. Anyway, the kids and I dove into the crowd and got some food, checked our cars were all in their place and in good shape and watched the first race as it started. We had three cars so we had a number of different models but seeing about 100 cars of all different makes was amazing.
The Racetrack.
The Racer Field – 1.
The Racer Field – 2.
The Spectators.
Our 7 ounces Racers.
Pine Wood Derby – No 1
Blake: “My car, blue racer!!” he won number one in the open 7 oz class at the pine wood derby of the boy scouts today! He was clearly the youngest participant.
Dad made the car and used the tricks in the book to win … remember the Southpark episode on ‘Pine Wood Derby’
Home Match versus University Club
Another match coming up and it is a home match. Good for the psychy but of course after a long series of losses a lot of pressure to bring this one finally home. The grapevines say the players are all tough, beyond 4.0 rating and it was not going to be easy, but I was ready, Tuesday I had mostly hit by myself with some few drills…. so best conditions for breaking the bad streak.
I came on time and Ana gave me up to 8:30pm so I should be fine. My opponent though was 20mins late but no problem… Strother (his first name) was early enough to get the match finished. I was off to a good start and I won the first just barely and could also put away the second one. Finally in the third game I lost my concentration a little and lost…. The fourth game was a nail-biter and I had to pull myself together to finally get to a 11:9 win and my first league win in a while. The home court certainly made a difference.