At The Lab

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.

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.

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.

Check it out: http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/article/20081211/AAAA/81211004

Here we are in early December, with six inches of snow on the ground and more every day. Now is the best time for me to start thinking about summer, but not for the reasons you'd think!

Tour activity slows way down in December, since schools are busy wrapping up before break and most people are bogged down with Christmas-related extracurricular activities. This gives me more time to start dealing with the outreach boom that will come in July/August 2009:

Whew... the outreach business can get really busy sometimes. The summer was fairly intense, between the increased tour volume and running the PAN program. September was calm, and then October turned into a circus with the "FRIB Frenzy"... check the links for more details and pics! Especially if you want to see what students who believe in nuclear science at MSU can do.