Televised FRIB Meeting in the Atrium

In the atrium this morning, there was a meeting of the get-FRIB-in-Michigan committee which was televised by the university. Since it was so crowded in there, four or five of us watched it live on my computer, streamed from wmsu.org (the university's televised-event website). The recorded version will be available starting Wednesday, so I'll probably watch it again so I can see it with a faster frame rate. (I'm intrigued to see what exactly the university president did with the marble nuclei.)
 
The best part of the meeting was when, at the end, one of the advisory committee members pointed out that several of the people present would be writing articles about this, and asked Konrad, "What's a rare isotope?" (All the tour guides who were watching went, "Ouch." That's a difficult question to answer well, but I suppose Konrad gets asked that a lot.)
 
I was impressed by the range of people who are on this advisory committee--in addition to political representatives and a large number of businesspeople from myriad fields, there was a person from the AFL-CIO. Ever since I got here, I've been amazed at how non-insular the NSCL is. We've got a couple of ISO certifications, we're apparently on good terms with the major union... the NSCL doesn't just work within the academic format, which was something of a surprise to me at first. I suppose I wasn't expecting an on-campus institution to be so concerned with the non-academic world. Sometimes I forget that we're a national lab, since I both work and go to school here and it feels so familiar; then something like this happens and I realize that the lab is actually a Big Deal.
 
It's a little intimidating; when I remember what world-class actually means in practical terms, I don't know how I got to work here--I didn't do spectacularly well in my undergrad physics classes, yet here I am working beside people who went to phenomenal physics undergraduate schools. When I actually get into the lab, though, my research group seems to have confidence that I can match the caliber of the group's usual activities. This brings me to relating the coolest thing that happened to me so far this week--I actually got to pick up a SeGA detector (two, in fact) yesterday! It's kind of like being permitted to hold someone's newly-hatched kid--it's imperative not to drop what you're holding, and it takes trust and confidence on the part of the person letting you pick up the detector/offspring that you'll allow it to come to no harm. Sometimes the things I get to do while working here really make me feel capable!