walsh's blog

I picked up a couple of pieces of paper off the ground today, and they happened to be someone's discarded fortune cookie fortunes. One of them went as follows: "Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see." My first reaction was to think this was a philosophical statement, a la Plato's idea that all, e.g., tables are shadows of the Ideal table. This cookie statement also applies to what we do at the lab, though!

We observe visual output (on a computer or oscilloscope) produced by electrical signals which are generated by the interactions with various detector materials of the actual objects which we're studying.

Appalling realization of the week: I've been in school for twenty years. I can legitimately say I've been in school for decades. Will I know how to cope when I finish with classes (two years from now)?

First off, may I just say that yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing, and this is incredible for several reasons, all of which have already been said by commentators on the day in question.

I've been spending a fair amount of time over the past couple of years on a quest for my One True Nucleus to study.

It's really cool to live this close to the start of a new century, since all these cool day/month/year patterns keep popping up. Later in the century, more cool patterns will appear using the month.day.year date-writing system (example: December 13th, 2014 will be 12.13.14) which will be impossible with day/month/year, so I suppose I'll have to switch my date-writing schema then. Nifty patterns like this make life happier.

Today is the 2000th consecutive day without a lost-time accident at the lab, according to the counter in the hallway! That's a huge number, and it's only a couple weeks shy of five-and-a-half years. I wonder if we can make it until the counter runs out of digits... of course, that'll take another twenty-something years. It'd be a neat thing to see, though.

It must be difficult to give the right level of guidance to people who ask you for help. Actually, I suppose it is like being a TA, in that giving students the answer helps nobody but is sometimes the default when you're busy. I wonder how people learn to give enough information so that people aren't lost without just giving them the answer?

I got an email from the S800 spectrograph today. Yes, yes, I know it was automatically generated from the inverse map server and not the spectrograph itself. I just have this mental image of a three-story piece of experimental equipment sitting at a terminal and politely typing me an email so that my data can be better calibrated. Somehow, though, I think that when people say that the S800 is a very nice device, they mean it's high-quality, not genteel.

Construction on the new experimental area/office expansion is proceeding apace; nearly every morning, workers brave the several inches of snow they have to slog through to get to the construction site. This morning, I noticed the brick facing on the new area; it's made up of large grayish-bluish-purplish bricks, which makes for an interesting contrast with the red brick of the rest of the building. I wonder what the completed building will look like; somehow, simulated pictures are never quite the same as the real thing.

If you're reading this, I'm sure you've heard the news that MSU has been selected as the future site of FRIB. This is fantastic, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it take shape over the next several years. All the NSCL students are thrilled; the major advantage of being a grad student at MSU/NSCL, as opposed to a university without an on-campus lab, is that one gets the opportunity to be involved in research all the time.

It's the time of year when the kshlup-thuk, kshlup-thuk of flip-flops gives way to the shhrump, shhrump of snow boots. Astronauts don't hear these noises on the various spacecraft they inhabit, but I would imagine the pervasive sound of Velcro is just as grating and far more unavoidable. It still must be awesome to be an astronaut, though. It's the ultimate operator job! (I think I would rather be an astronaut than an X-wing pilot. I don't have the reflexes for Rogue Squadron.)