The Further Adventures of Dr. Science

Morning Glories

2006-08-16T22:57:00.000-04:00

(Not morning glories.)

It wasn't that long ago that I ran into my neighbor at the Walgreens. Maybe a week at most. She warned me in her rapid, mumbled way that there were rats in the yard. Her dog had killed at least one of them. Be careful, she said.

For I don't know, about a week now, I've been noticing a decidedly putrid smell wafting about the steps where I take my bike on and off the porch, next to our neighbor's lovely weed patch. There also seemed to be more flies about the house. Peering into the densest foliage on the unkempt plot, I tried to see where some dead animal was drawing these rats and flies, giving rise to this unwelcome olfactory experience which had come to mark my departures from the house and my arrivals back home. Couldn't see anything, and I feared to wade into their mockery of a garden uninvited.

This morning, taking out some recyclables, I happened to look at the morning glories that had sprouted up the side of the steps leading up to the back porch. I like morning glories. I hoped to see signs they had begun to twine around the banister and flower. In a way, they had another kind of present for me. Under the sun-drenched leaves of the climbing vine lay a dead rat, his head crowned in the jerky metallic thoraxes of a half dozen flies. "Ah-HA!" I think I said.

I said a little good-bye, scooped our flattened furry friend into a crate & barrel paper shopping bag, and stapled it shut. He is now labeled a size "C" rat. At least tonight is trash night.

The moral for me is clear: *Possibly* in my own back yard, so check there before peering over the fence suspiciously. I don't know why I've been getting so many presentations of this lesson, but it seems like I keep getting better and better chances to learn it.

-Dr. S

Do / Don't

2006-07-29T15:39:00.000-04:00

Don't laugh at him. He's training to be spy.

Don't stick your greedy little uncontrollable vine fingers breaking through the asphalt beside my house.
(I will come back at night and water your ass from a boiling kettle.)

Don't use this one.

Do unleash a plague of bubbles into the air above the ice cream shop.

Don't get in the way, Silvia!

Do find a place to store the cat when not in use.

Don't move the camera when taking pictures of the Big Dipper.

Do the bubble thing again.

o End Transmission o

Dinner at Claudio and Anna's... without the Claudio and Anna

2006-07-16T16:57:00.000-04:00

It was bound to be a beautiful party.
... if a little, um, unusual. Such are our friends.
The women in the kitchen were working so fast, they looked a little blurry.

(oh no, wait, I've got clearer shot of that tomato-chopping massacre.)
Outside and in the livingroom, hungry beachgoers worked on the beer.
Only Kaca was unable to maintain happiness while dying of terrible hunger. She had enough difficulty pretending to be the kind of person who can wear colors other than black. Forgive her.

Dan was so hungry, he started to glow an eery glow.

I no longer had the energy lift the camera away from my feet. How long have these damn bikes been here?

___________

Suddenly, from inside the house the moans of starving party-goers were replaced by muffled laughter and compliments about bruschetta.
Appetizers began to flow out of the tomato-slaughtering room.
Garlic breath and hunger assuagement (assuagence?) began to dominate the atmosphere.

__________

Meanwhile, a crack team of chefs were still preparing the Italo-Hungarian tomato sauce. These cats were so cool, they still had on sunglasses with their aprons.She looks right at home with enough chopped tomatoes to drown a rhino, doesn't she?So then, in a zoo-like atmophere, the following:
Imagine: The Italians are all yelling directions to each other (there are four of them at least, and the Hungarian guy is in there, too.)
Some crazed Uruguayan is echoing them from the doorway, shouting, "No! No! No! No!"and everyone in the room is laughing and moving around each other. Chaos.And then out of the churning, steaming moil with the clamoring cacophony of many voices,as if the very heavens and the earth itself were making passionate love, until at last their passion subsides, a miracle was born. Brimming over the pot was such a meal as to make a wise man cry.Dinner was ready.

___________

Then "Oooooooooo!" transmuted to "Mmmmmmmmmmm!" as the good little students all lined up
as if it were the most amicable cafeteria in any university anywhere.Dinner without our hosts. Though they are dearly missed, we must munch bravely onwards.When the company had climbed their pasta mountains and looked out from the summit, it was time for desert.

Scary, isn't it?

We rose to honor the PhD of the hour by singing to him off-key. Really, horribly off-key. See how he suffers?
Then we did it all over again for the birthday boy. When it started up for the Frenchman's brother who was in town for a bit, it started to get out of hand.
True to tradition and in the epicurean fashion to which we are accustomed, we set out the house selexion of alcohols, and commenced to duel with our livers. On the porch, more time with friends.
Why is Manu confrontational?Don't know, but it makes Tibor ashamed. Or he hates the flash in his eyes.

____________

About 2pm, the party really picked up. Five or size characters stuck around, anticipating. And then it happened. The Swede walked home and back. When he cast a shadow on the walk a few minutes later, he had his banjo.
After that, well, if you weren't there, there's no use trying to explain.

-Dr. Go "Explainer" Science

It's a dirty job, but they let us eat cake.

2006-07-13T00:08:00.000-04:00

Nothing convinces me of the richness of life like staying awake in the lab until 4am. I mean, there's the Charles Street T Station construction, as seen from the shuttles which bypass it when the construction precludes train traffic; there's the weird things the sun does on a hazy afternoon; and then there's the way that directional LEDs beam out into a hazy Long Island night, on a lonely, deserted stretch of access road deep within the Laboratory grounds. (Okay, I might have screwed with the exposure level a bit, but the yellow light really did beam out into the nighttime haze like this.) None of these everyday sights do more than to hint at the relish for otherworldly and silly feeling of being the last party awake in the lab.

(One more image: this slug in my backyard was impervious to the toxic effects of red Kool Aid. Something in me is ten years old, grinning from ear to ear and saying, "Gross!" But you see, I had the discretion to put only the smallest version where you would have to look at it.)

But the crazy shit that went down on yesterday's beamline shift (We're working 4pm-4am, splitting the day with another research group this week) has me riding pretty high on the joy of the night shift. No sarc, it's realio-trulio an enjoyably life.

I volunteered to run the first hour or two by myself while the two other members of the team ventured into town on a grocery run. I wrote up a list for the few things I need: two tomatoes, a large cucumber, a bunch of parsely, some pita to go with the falafel mix I found still in the lab kitchen from almost a year ago, and some grapes for snacking. They brought back everything I asked for and a carrot cake.

"Here ya go. Went a little over the $20 you gave us, but I owe you for lunch yesterday."

"Great," I say. "But what the hell is this?"

"That's a large cake. The biggest one we could find was this carrot cake."

"Cake?"

"Yeah, 'A large cake,' you wrote."

"CUKE! I wrote 'cuke,' not 'cake.'"

"Yeah, we thought it was a little odd. You never buy cake." So late that night, as the hungries started to show up, and thanks to the relaxed rules on eating while on the experimental floor, we had ourselves a little cake.

Right about that time, a nice, drenching thunderstorm came through. Booming thunder was loud enough to be heard over the warehouse-sized experiment floor packed with its pumps, motors, and beepy things. (They're called 'crickets,' but 'beepy things' sounds more serious.) I went out to bear witness to the trees and fences tossing in the wind and lashing rain. While I was on the back porch, I noticed the best label I have ever seen on a bike. It was parked on the back porch of the lab, by the loading dock. Does anyone but me and the biologists recall their high school biology? I mean, not counting the owner of the bike shop where this got started.

With four- and five-second exposure times, I almost but didn't quite catch the bright blue of lightning flashes against the sickly weird yellow glow of the loading dock's sodium vapor lamps.

I finally gave up and came back inside to find the storm had jolted our power grid enough to destabilize the synchrotron.

The control room seemed to think they could get everything up and running in an hour or so. While we waited, the groupmate I'm helping out this week (My turn to head an experiment of my own design comes soon.) watched video of surgical procedures that grossed her out.

More cake for me.

The kitchen smells terrible this morning

2006-07-03T17:09:00.000-04:00

OK, So I wrapped up Particle Accelerator Camp a week and a half ago. We didn't get a chance to carefully reoptimize the tune for maximum injection acceptance on our synchrotron. Maybe on a rainy day in the future. Since then, I've split the intervening time between people and projects, but rather than dump it all unartfully (there were good parts about slugs in the backyard, for instance), let's skip right to the recent past. This is not least because there's a girl in Germany who made the special request that she gets pictures from the last good Chinese cuisine she's gonna have for a while. I had no idea that Germany is so deprived of fried chicken feet and snowball sweet pork buns.

Yesterday was a Sunday, but it was also a day of endless food activities. Maybe I mean "and so it could be" an endless day of foodiness. But anyways, it sure as hell was. The story of Katja's Last Dim Sum, and the subsequent feast of Thai food at my place in the evening is told below--in several thousand words which have been transmuted through a digital process into maps of color and form easily interpretted by the eye.

____________

Katja's Last Dim Sum
(and then some)

Glass palace on a hill: week one

2006-06-17T13:27:00.000-04:00

For some reason, I took a picture of the hill and not the palace. It's a really good hill, though: very steep, and with a high quality covering--the result of endless maintenance. Very much like the Waltham Westin which it thrusts skyward over the surrrounding landscape of office parks and reservoir ponds.

Along with a dozen other students from my own grad program and a hundred more folks from schools all over the US, I've been a voluntary prisoner in this glass cage for the past week. I'm home today, but I'm going back for the concluding week before tomorrow ends. Science routinely isolates me from non-scientists--dissappointing, but not surprising and not without some compensation: studying in a posh lobby, along with free access to a workout room, pool, hot tub, and sauna; a government-financed stay for two weeks in a four-star hotel. Not a bad deal for ten days of intense academic labor. I think we're the only guests at this swank hotel who think nothing of taking the short way to lunch places, even if it means going through the landscaping. We're also the only ones camping out in the lobby with math and cocktails.

The daily schedule goes something like this: Hotel-provided breakfast must be finished before classes start at 9am. (After many many requests the first day, to-go coffee cups were provided. Over the course of the first few days, decaf was demoted from Giant Urn to Tiny Hand-Pumped Thermos. Diesel was promoted to Three Giant Urns grouped tightly with spouts together for rapid pouring.) Coffee in hand, we bound enthusiastically into our hotel conference room seats and attend lecture until 11am, learning fancy math tricks so we can easily (really easily) calculate the quadrupole moment of an offset sextapole. Or prove that when the flow is symplectic, only phase space filamentation can cause apparent violations of Liouville's theorem. Then comes two hours of building simulated particle accelerators and optimizing their design. Accelerator physics is more an art with lots of math than a science with a prominent sense of mysticism.

Lunch is never more than an hour, and then it's class again until 5pm.
My class (attendees have their choice of maybe ten courses of one- or two-week length) consists of thirteen students who have proven that they will do whatever our professor asks of them, even implicitly, and that they will do it unquestioningly (if not uncomplainingly). The big guy is shown here on his very knees, finishing an explanation of how the iterative application of the variation of constants yields arbitrary precision in the nonlinear corrections to the transport mapping function. I wanted to capture the easy grace of his derivations of the Twiss parameters, but it didn't offer a chance to show off the choice use of a $5,000 LCD projector: as a lamp for the whiteboard he felt was under-illuminated.
Class (I forgot I was detailing a schedule) lasts until 5pm, which leaves an hour before hotel-catered dinner to begin the homework (or hit the gym/hot tub/sauna), which consistently takes us to midnight or one am. Collapse, repeat. It's exhilirausting. I have never before had the experience of the professor personally instructing his students to stop working, that it was now almost 1 am, and that we needed sleep. Talk about feeling hard core.

Five days of this, and I'm happy to spend the weekend soaking up the weather, the city, and the company of friends. By close of Sunday, I'll be back at it. What a good life I've found!

This didn't even happen today

2006-06-09T00:26:00.000-04:00

but I dig it nonetheless. Full disclosure: Below is the unretouched version.

That searing light in the sky is the moon at about half full. I mean, half empty.

Today I found a pretty rock.

2006-06-06T11:03:00.000-04:00

See? The laboratory's lighting is unflattering, but believe me, it's very pretty.

____________

The early part of this week (we don't believe in "weekends" or "breaks"), on my way to the mountain,
I made sure to look both ways before crossing the busy street:

and avoided agitating the turkeys, who were showing their aggressive displays and being very blurry:

I made it to the lab safely, and the photon beam was still focussed on the tiny sample of material who electron band structure we're mapping.

We moved into one of the on-site apartments, which chiefly means that I can now leave my soap and shampoo in the shower and that we have a kitchen space which is our own. But I found this little guy camouflaging himself against the door, and then this stuff:

I didn't realize that lichens could bloom. Perhaps this one is having a medical problem with a mold or something. Any guesses? The other things I've snapped are less difficult to categorize, but just as nice to look at.

Good night, Mrs. Calabash, where ever you are.

Photoemission in the Forest

2006-06-03T12:20:00.000-04:00

What the hell is it? It's not spit, not from a person anyways. See how regular all the bubbles are in size? I wonder if it's a deposit of frog eggs, but it's far from any pond where the tadpoles could develop. Maybe toad spawn? Is it a clump of insect eggs? All expert guesses welcome.

__________________________________

Welcome to BNL. Bored yet?

Another synchrotron, another blog. It's the perfect way to entertain myself while I wait for the signals to assert themselves above the noise. Cutting-edge science so often involves pushing the current technology to the limit of what it can deliver. Which leaves me with long stretches during which I can't go far but also can't do much.

This time I find myself on a tropical island just south of Connecticut. Here the natives are not like they were in Sweden. They seem to be on average less entirely pleasant to look upon, even uncouth in some instances. Their choices of apparel heighten this effect rather than downplay it. I saw a lady at the King Kullen whose hair and makeup must have taken more than an hour, but the rest of her only meritted sweatpants and a sweatshirt.

Long Islanders seem to enjoy eating well, but so farI haven't find out where they do this, since none of the towns and strip malls in the area surrounding the laboratory grounds would have me eating like that. Which is about enough complaining, since many people here have been quite friendly and human, velour tracksuits notwithstanding.

Brookhaven National Laboratory has a reputation among its users as boring and crapulent. In fact, I originally planned this entry to be a photo essay of just how miserable and half-assed this place is, but as I documented it I realized just how lovely it looks. I have been trying since I first came here two years ago to emphasize the beauty of this place, both to myself and to my coworkers. It's been too easy to slip back into the dissatisfied boredom that they voice in response. Judge for yourself how it looks on film:

The National Synchrotron Light Source is just one of several research centers here at Brookhaven National Labs. To first approximation, BNL is a 5000 acre forest. (Pardon the use of local vernacular.) The smattering of roads and buildings are the most important correction to that approximation, but I found a shortcut between the dorms and the lab, so this pine-needle red carpet is my walk to work. Well, the picturesque part.

The lab grounds are more forest than research centers, and are home to more critters than scientists, such as these:

...that I surprised on the walk to the lab in the morning,

... as I cut through a parking lot,

... in the grass outside the northeast entrance,
... and even among the gravel surrounding the transformer outside the dorm.

(See? I ain't lyin'.)

I'll thrown in more shots of the wild turkeys, fat little groundhogs, racoons, and song birds if I get some worth sharing.

Buut when I'm not pretending to be a naturalist, this is the Millenium Falcon of a lab facility where I'm doing my work. Actually, it's not my own work, since the chemist who is synthesizing the material I will use is still putting the finishing touches on the samples. So for the last week or so I've actually been lending a hand to one of the other students in my research group. This gives me a chance to polish my understanding of our techniques and gives me the incidental benefit of extra experience in the lab here.

For instance, I learned not to optimize the sample position using the intensity of the valence band peak; I took excellent data for a whole day without noticing that I was using the sample holder and not the sample we're experimenting on. My head wasn't even foggy from overwork. I look forward to making more exciting mistakes in the future.

-Dr. S