At The Lab

This morning, I checked my mailbox and found a CD in there. It turns out to be the abstract list from the Nuclear Structure 2008 conference, but I, for a moment, actually thought it was a CD of FRIB-related songs. Wouldn't that have been cool?
 

Cold pyrotechnics
Rushing liquid nitrogen
Fills SeGA dewars

The sun is setting
Even though it's summertime
I am still at school

So, Pulse of te Planet is going to air three snippets of things I recorded over a year's time. This is the one I like. It will air on August 20th.  

To all of my peers who began working here on the July start date:
Happy n-th anniversary!
(where $n \in \mathbb{Z}$ and $n > 0$)

I'm a second-year now! Where's the Chamber of Secrets?

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.)

Someone was talking in the hallway about the imminent Germany vs. Turkey soccer game, and I quote: "That's what this is for" (waving a time-off form). Apparently, some people are taking a few hours' vacation in the middle of the day today to watch the game.
I kid you not.
(I suppose this is one good thing about the current shutdown.)
 
I love this place; the people who work here have personality.

I was reading a paper today with a section on sodium, magnesium, and silicon isotopes. I came across a part that read "two-neutron binding energies S_2n" and thought this was a slight topic change to the two-neutron binding energy of sulfur. After all, sulfur is really close to the aforementioned elements in the periodic table. Another interpretation then occurred to me--"S" apparently stands for binding energy. This was, to me, a little unexpected, since just as there's no "I" in "team," there's no "S" in "energy" (admittedly, there's no "S" in "entropy," either). Where did this notation come from? Edited to add: Oh, "S" for "separation energy," a synonym. I can cope with that notation.

This week I gave two presentations to middle school kids about the lab. They didn't have permission slips for the tour as well, but they were still inquisitive about what we did and asked a lot of good questions. It's nice to see kids excited about science, even if they thought the highlight of the presentation was when I broke a penny.

A Shutdown Poem
 
Unfortunately, I can see
On each hallway display
The bar across the top remains
Unbroken shutdown gray
 
Some magnets now are warming
Though they're usually frigid
No beams means there's no need to make
The beamline tuning rigid
 
We cannot get new data,
Only process what we have
It's hard to soothe our troubled minds
With scientific salve
 
Not just the researchers bemoan
Our lack of running time
Devices in the vaults are sad
They miss the beams sublime
 
The S800 beckons
I can see it in my dreams