Lift 07 - Workshops

The first day of the Lift conference - the day with the workshops - is over. I was close to not attending, and boy am I glad, that I changed that decision two weeks ago.

The day started of with a visit to CERN and their building of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). It started with a superb presentation on why CERN is doing all of this research (“finding out how the universe works” seems like a great reason). The vision, dedication, passion and fire of the researchers, that are looking for the answers to questions about the start of the universe can be felt at all times. Somehow, I’m always close to tears, when I hear about works of that scale, that are truly beneficial to humanity. And the humility, those people have: “Come back in 50 or 100 years and see if anything has been made out of the research we are doing” (meaning - any practical use)

After that, we went down 100 meters and visited one of the ATLAS detectors….

Words fail to convey the size of this thing…

Bruno Giusani has a more thorough report from his visit a couple of days ago

After a delicious Pizza with David and Philippe, I went to Stowe Boyd’s Workshop on “Building Social Applications”. Stephanie Booth has some fabulous notes on a fabulous workshop that left me thinking…. I will have to digest a lot of the things Stowe brought up… More on that later.

Drinks and food, talk and laughter for the rest of the evening. What a great bunch of people you are…

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