...just to clear my brain:
Ye gads, I've been busy! This trip to Argentina, for the most part, has been working, working, working! Which is good -- I'm here to work. We worked straight through the weekend; in fact it was an ideal time to work since we could use a couple of big rooms that would have been occupied during the week. On average, we are working about twelve hours per day -- sometimes a couple less, sometimes a couple more -- with only one break, for dinner. The payoff for all this work is that we're having a very successful week. While Lawrence and I definitely will not get all the things on our "to-do" list accomplished, a lot is happening. Right now, we're taking valuable calibration data with the steerable laser beam (which we installed the hardware for). Much had to happen to make that possible...
The central laser facility (CLF) is in the middle of nowhere. Literally! It is in a field on the pampas with nothing near it. We have to drive 25 miles from campus to get there. Herds of goats sometimes wander by while we are working. (That part is pretty cool) The facility is solar powered, except for the propane heat. In it, we have tools, big batteries, a laser (duh!), a coffee maker, optical equipment, a computer, a LAN, and a telephone -- the phone and LAN are connected via wireless link to one of our communication towers.
A lot of the work at the CLF is done outside, on the roof. That can get really cold in the winter, especially after the sun goes down. I've been wearing layers -- a shirt, a sweater, a jacket, and the so-called "dog suits" that stay at the CLF. So I was really surprised to find myself getting too hot this afternoon. I dropped layers until all I had on was a shirt and sweatpants. Still too hot. Okay, lose the shirt. That helped, but it was quite odd (in a good way) to be working outside in the middle of winter with no shirt on...
I'm learning a lot working with Lawrence on the central laser. This work is so different than what I was doing in Japan on SK. This is a great project for me, really, because it has a few critical things in common with what I was doing before (mainly areas of interest), but other than that it is quite different. Different physics, different astronomy, different detection techniques, etc., etc., etc. Sometimes, working on the laser stuff, I feel like a newbie grad student, with all that I don't know. It's odd, really, but ultimately good -- I'm learning different skills to add to my toolbox. Tonight at dinner, we talked about GUTs and SUSY and supernovae and neutrino oscillations. Despite how useful it is to learn skills by throwing myself into new situations, it was nice to sound like a PhD again instead of a grad student...
The weather cleared up two days after I got here, so no more snow. Instead, we get really nice views of the Southern sky. I still love seeing the Southern Cross and Centarus (esp. Alpha and Beta Centauri). I brought my binoculars down, but I haven't done very much night sky observing yet. It's too damn cold!
Okay, that's all for now.
Ye gads, I've been busy! This trip to Argentina, for the most part, has been working, working, working! Which is good -- I'm here to work. We worked straight through the weekend; in fact it was an ideal time to work since we could use a couple of big rooms that would have been occupied during the week. On average, we are working about twelve hours per day -- sometimes a couple less, sometimes a couple more -- with only one break, for dinner. The payoff for all this work is that we're having a very successful week. While Lawrence and I definitely will not get all the things on our "to-do" list accomplished, a lot is happening. Right now, we're taking valuable calibration data with the steerable laser beam (which we installed the hardware for). Much had to happen to make that possible...
The central laser facility (CLF) is in the middle of nowhere. Literally! It is in a field on the pampas with nothing near it. We have to drive 25 miles from campus to get there. Herds of goats sometimes wander by while we are working. (That part is pretty cool) The facility is solar powered, except for the propane heat. In it, we have tools, big batteries, a laser (duh!), a coffee maker, optical equipment, a computer, a LAN, and a telephone -- the phone and LAN are connected via wireless link to one of our communication towers.
A lot of the work at the CLF is done outside, on the roof. That can get really cold in the winter, especially after the sun goes down. I've been wearing layers -- a shirt, a sweater, a jacket, and the so-called "dog suits" that stay at the CLF. So I was really surprised to find myself getting too hot this afternoon. I dropped layers until all I had on was a shirt and sweatpants. Still too hot. Okay, lose the shirt. That helped, but it was quite odd (in a good way) to be working outside in the middle of winter with no shirt on...
I'm learning a lot working with Lawrence on the central laser. This work is so different than what I was doing in Japan on SK. This is a great project for me, really, because it has a few critical things in common with what I was doing before (mainly areas of interest), but other than that it is quite different. Different physics, different astronomy, different detection techniques, etc., etc., etc. Sometimes, working on the laser stuff, I feel like a newbie grad student, with all that I don't know. It's odd, really, but ultimately good -- I'm learning different skills to add to my toolbox. Tonight at dinner, we talked about GUTs and SUSY and supernovae and neutrino oscillations. Despite how useful it is to learn skills by throwing myself into new situations, it was nice to sound like a PhD again instead of a grad student...
The weather cleared up two days after I got here, so no more snow. Instead, we get really nice views of the Southern sky. I still love seeing the Southern Cross and Centarus (esp. Alpha and Beta Centauri). I brought my binoculars down, but I haven't done very much night sky observing yet. It's too damn cold!
Okay, that's all for now.