kilburn's blog

Science can be beautiful in many ways.  I'm a big fan of patterns and symmetry, even if not completely symmetric.  

Below is a plot, says captain obvious. The first person to tell me what's on each axis wins... something.

My April Fool's post was inspired by a Women in Chemistry workshop I went to at the end of March. I almost didn't attend because I would like to see a professional development workshop for all graduate students, not just women. But as I sat there, I realized the need for such workshops specifically for women.

The ghost of Marie Curie has been spotted in the pit of the S3 vault, floating through the magnets and checking things out. Normally ghosts haunt the places where they lived, but Marie must have hitched a ride with one of our French colleagues.  She hasn't been to the states in almost 80 years and probably wondered how things have been progressing.  No doubt she's shocked to see our radioactive sources locked up and handled with protective equipment instead of stored in a desk drawer.  

I've realized that the bar is the most unexpected networking place. When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them nuclear physics.  70% of people say "Oh" and suddenly realize they left their keys in their car right next to their brain.  But the rest ask me about it and I start sounding like a lab brochure, explaining what we do, why it's great, and what outreach opportunities we have.

It always comes down to money when you want to do research. You need money to buy detectors, and build structures. Then you need money to go to conferences afterwards to show your results. And money to live on is usually a good thing too.

At our group meeting today, it was pointed out that my pixels (not the helpers in super paper mario) looked a bit off and it was suggested I take a look at them. Each HiRA telescope has 32 Efront strips and 32 Ebacks for 1024 'pixels'. I calculated the position of all of them, but they didn't appear to cover a big enough area. So I checked, and the width of the active area was slightly less than it should be ~.6mm. You may think half a millimeter is really small and negligible, but remember, we're trying to do precision measurements on nuclei that are very small.

My code compiled after a mere 3 tries!

The analysis of laser measurements for Exp 03045 (my thesis) are basically done now.  I have the position of the target, and most importantly, the vectors from the center of the target to all of the 32x32x17 pixels of HiRA.  Just for fun, I also found the vectors from the target to all ~200 phoswiches in the 4Pi.  Ok, it wasn't really for fun, we do need those numbers.  But it was fun walking over to the BPS with Skip and a tape measurer to confirm that a distance found in a 10 year old thesis really was the distance I was needing for calculations.