A beginning and an end
Jose Ocariz attended the first plenary meeting of HELEN, a new program that aims to train young Latin Americans in high-energy physics. At the meeting, "about one hundred candidates were selected, and will receive a HELEN fellowship, mostly for exchanges between HEP labs in Europe and Latin America. This is great news."

Gordon Watts reports that the muon chambers his department built for the ATLAS detector at CERN are finally in place. "About a year ago we had shipped over all of the chambers to CERN; we were done here at UW. But once at CERN there was a lot of work that had to be done--leak testing, connecting & checking the electronics, etc. But, finally, the first chamber was mounted in ATLAS...There was a party afterward."

Quantum Diaries potpourri
The first results are in for Tommaso Dorigo, who recently took a standardized exam for a tenured position in Italy. "Among about 200 candidates who sent in their CV and publications, and 110 who participated in the selection, the commission accepted 25 of us [for the next round of exams]. A tight selection!"

"Design, Build, and Commission: These are good words, active words, words that say I am a bad-a**, so step off," writes Caolionn O'Connell. "It's because of those words that I took this job." But to "successfully enter the pantheon of bad-a**es," she must overcome her insecurities. Can she do it?

"I finally swallowed the fact that I have an organ called the Brain," writes Stephon Alexander. And he's decided that it's pretty remarkable. "If indeed we can come up with physical law and mathematics which make predictions about our universe during an epoch billions of years before humans existed, then whatever underlies the functioning of our Brains to generate such ‘incomprehensible’ tasks has (based on logical grounds) to be more fundamental than the theories that we create." Cool.