At The Lab

   The big finals study binge for this semester is finished, and now I'm ramping up for next semester, as well as doing real work. In this context, I've been reviewing electricity and magnetism. I suppose if I truly understood E&M, I'd be able to see where equations came from, and I wouldn't have to memorize 'em, but at this point, I haven't quite "gotten" it yet (nor am I adept enough yet with E&M units to be able to do unit analysis on the fly). It's almost embarrassing to admit that I don't have a reliable physics way to remember these things, but I trust that will come with time, and in the interim, I'll use word tricks. Here are a few of the ways I remember some E&M concepts and equations:

In my last post, I discussed the laser measurements we do to determine position. I failed to mention that in order to find the location of the target* we had to measure the target and some reference block with our laser, measure the block and the beam** axis with the lab's laser, and then mesh the two together.

The group I work for, HiRA, stands for high resolution array. Our thick silicon detectors are about 7cm x 7cm and are divided into 32 vertical strips and 32 horizontal strips. This gives us very precise position measurement, but it's only useful if we know where are detectors are in relation to the beam axis and target. We use one laser system from the lab to give us this information, and then our laser to tell us where all of the HiRA telescopes are wrt each other.

This blog will serve as an addendum to my latest effort at recruiting people to our outreach program: a letter to Education Week. You don't have to read that article first, but it couldn't hurt.
What's interesting is that I wrote that letter almost two months ago, and rereading it now inspires new thoughts:

I am, for lack of a better word, "geeked".
Just this morning, I've been invited to give a talk on NSCL research at ConFusion, a sci-fi convention held in January. The organizer was quite proud that they emphasize the science in science fiction.
This news makes me geek out because:
1) I've never been to a con, any con, though I've wanted to and made some attempts.

Written by myself with help from Dan Coupland.
Performed and recorded by the Micro Canonical Ensemble (a subset of the Physics Choir - Grand Canonical Ensemble).
Click here to have a listen 

Submitted simultaneously to Pulse of the Planet 

Physics is a lot of things to a lot of different people. It can be hard, scary, or phun. It can be the course that’s going to stain your GPA or it can be your livelihood. To me, physics is the art of problem solving.
During tours at the cyclotron, the audience is usually asked whether they like to play with legos. Zach usually says the kinds of people that like to play with legos are the kinds of people that work at the lab. “Can I make it fit?” “Can I make it better?”

   Germanium detectors are the idiot savants of the detector world. They're virtuosos at getting really good resolution, but they're sadly inefficient. Think of a baseball player all of whose actual hits are home runs, but who often goes down swinging. Still, as long as you pitch enough gamma rays at the detectors, you get a respectable number of fantastic, out-of-the-park signals.

This week's featured quirky term which I encountered in the context of physics is "radicand."
 
Why it's interesting:
Say it out loud. Rrrrradicand. Rrrrradicand. It's like a cross between "radish" and "Rabastan Lestrange." Any word that manages to sound like both a root vegetable and a fictional wizard is worthy of regard.
 
What it is:
The stuff under the radical, which is to say the stuff under a square root (or cube root, or fourth root, or whateverth root--speaking of radishes) sign, not an extremist.
 

I've been thinking a lot about how we inform the public lately. Between this blog, my PAN website, PAN poster/press release, NSCL brochure, outreach brochure, JINA brochure, nuclear grad program brochure, NSCL gift shop, and the Greensheet, I have a lot of pipelines for information, all going to different audiences and many requiring approval by committees and administration. Yeesh. I don't envy Geoff his job.