At The Lab

Hooray, the Lise Meitner lecture is today at noon (food at 11:30)! I've been waiting for this for weeks! (For more information, see this long-ago post.) This is going to be awesome.

"Clearly we have worse weather than Spain and clearly the cuisine in Italy is better than in Germany, but the best league in the world is in England and they have the worst weather and the worst cuisine," said K-H Rummenigge in a NY Times article I came across not long ago - K-H Rummenigge, if you’ve not consumed fußball (aka soccer) since you've been able to walk, is a former star of the German national team who now holds some 'top' position in the mighty Bayern Munchen club.

My code compiled after a mere 3 tries!

This week's featured quirky term which I encountered in the context of physics is "phoswich."
 
Why it's interesting:
It's fun to guess at what it means from the way it sounds. Is it a misspelling of "faux switch" (this control is just for decoration), or perhaps "foe switch" (she will flip this switch, and then I will have my revenge)? I can also picture an alien with a bottle-shaped snout hooting, "Pho, pho. Pho? Pho." A more mundane (and more plausible) guess would be that the "pho" part stands for "photo" or "phosphor."
 

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.

This past weekend, I traveled to Troy (a suburb of Detroit) to speak at a science fiction convention. ConFusion, as it is called, draws authors, artists, and musicians to present their work and views to a crowd of enthusiasts. What makes this "con" unusual is the parallel track of scientific talks. Guest scientists are treated with the same respect and excitement as other "celebrities" at the con, and I can report that their sessions are well-attended too.

This week's featured quirky term which I encountered in the context of physics is "emu."
 
Why it's interesting:
I like the thought of measuring things in units of emus. (Actually, emus per second, since an emu would be the unit of a magnetic monopole.) I may now find myself facing the recurrent mental image of a line of emus running past every second when I'm trying to think of current.

On February 1st, there's going to be a lecture on Lise Meitner!

After a hiatus...
 
This week's featured quirky term which I encountered in the context of physics is "klystron."
 
Why it's interesting:
It looks like a cross between "Klingon" and "Clytemnestra." Either way, I'm thinking B-movie weapon. ("The monster cudgeled the mad doctor with his own klystron!")
 
What it is:
I had to ask Wikipedia. I think I may ask an actual person later.
Update: Asked an actual person at the ice cream social. It's essentially a beam amplifier, I think.
 
Where I encountered it:
The list of terms-to-know for a friend's linear accelerator class