Saturday, October 25, 2008

Hamburg, SAXS course on biomacromolecules, oct 18-26

"I came to hamburg and ate a few hamburgers".

The Max's version of Jule's "veni, vidi, vici" !

On our only free afternoon during the course we visited the new (old) PETRA ring (2.3km circumference) which is being converted into the most powerfull 3rd generation synchrotron. You can see me there close to the future path of the electron beam (huuuu freaking dangerous futur place to be ...uh!).



Just after we headed to the city and one of its small lake...


The submarine bird of Hamburg


In hamburg they have confusing shops!
Is this a fast food or a bank behind me on the picture?


Let's hold the finger of the statue...




Sunset from top of st Michel's church with a view of the city...


hahaaaa


Another restaurant with the band:
Or was explaining to her how "cacher" food should be obtained. Notably how you should kill animals like fishes in order to be allowed to eat it. You take the fishes and kick their head on the head, if the fish survives, you can not eat it. At this point, the best to doit to free the animal and in any case not eat it. Imagine the fish with bent neck swimming in circle in the sea....and always in the same direction!

The SAXSQuest - THE RULES OF THE GAME:

-There are 8 Levels.
-You gain 100 points when you give the good value (+/- 10% to given good value as they said but we observed less tolerance)
-You loose 30 points at every wrong answer.
-If you take too much time to answer at a level, you make less points than the 100 points credit.
-There is a red button. "are you kidding? never press" You get -100 points for missuse!!!!! A few tricks are spread around the levels.... if you are sure you are being cheated, you can press it and get the corrected value.

utch!



We discovered later that when we go up one level, we are congratulated on the web interface by SAXSMAN. otherwise, the computer laughs at you!

It has been tought but very pleasant and instructive.
We struggled a lot with some parameters like the porod volume which always seemed to be overevaluated by the program we used (primus) and without real well defined "point de repère" in the data range we analyse. porod plot: see a peak, and then a plateau and the noise- as you select more high angle data... we hardly see the plateau....

The Grenoble group (us) managed to go to very negative points... but we recovered and got to a good competition level.

Our Russian friend was n°2 and could get to the 1st position, but the server seemed to be not responding and her model file not to be available, so 5 min before the deadline of the end of the challenge, she submitted my group's model and had the highest score in time! her and her partner were honest enough to tell it to the organisers but it was fun to get the highest score in a team :)

The restaurants

Do you think it was a chinese?








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