Quest for the True North

My first Misa de Gallo

Filed under culture, personal, religion

Misa de Gallo or Simbang Gabi is a traditional evening mass in the Philippines, held at the crack of dawn from December 16 to December 24. It’s very much a part of the Christmas celebration of Filipinos that people make it a point to be there everyday for nine days. I’m not Catholic, though, so I never went to one. I only read about it in books and heard about it from friends, and to me it sounded like a fun and colorful tradition.

So when my roommate announced that she was going to the Misa de Gallo this year, I volunteered to go with her. She had a laughing fit when I said that; she thought it was a big joke because I usually wake up at past nine, the earliest. The few times that she tried to wake me up earlier than that (sometimes I ask her to–I usually don’t hear my alarm clocks), she would fail, even if waking me up sometimes becomes a physical feat for her (wrist-grabbing, pinching–those stuff).

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World’s most powerful accelerator switched on in Switzerland

Filed under religion, technology

I was very sleepy and was about to doze off when a nerdy friend, in his excitement, PMed me just to say that the Large Hadron Collider was switched on for the first time in many years.

Now, I am also a nerd. When he mentioned “physics research” and said yes, he was referring to that elite research center in Switzerland, I got excited, too!

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which made the Large Hadron Collider, has been trying for years to recreate the Big Bang in its quest to uncover the origins of the universe. The institute does this by producing small amounts of antimatter, the most powerful substance in the world, through high-energy machines called particle accelerators. The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most powerful of these.

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