A day in Boston

Boy, oh boy, there were a lot of kids at the Science Museum in Boston. It was still pretty cool though, we saw the original (3-story!!!) van der Graaf generator and a pretty cool lightning show (some pictures are included).




Afterwards, we went to the Samuel Adams brewery for a free tour and beer tasting, which was pretty decent. Got a sample glass, too, and some quart-sized bottles of Sam Adams to take back home.

Finally, we hit up the Harpoon brewery in the Waterside District (or some such). Picked up 2 growlers (Harpoon Winter Warmer and Cider) and a case of UFO, one of my favorite beers.



For supper, I convinced my dad to go to the Cheesecake Factory (mostly because I wanted to get that 'Big Bang Theory' vibe). What a great place, a little pricey, but the portions are huge and the food is tasty.

Tomorrow, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Harvard campus (it was something like -25C here with the windchill today, which meant we weren't walking about anywhere), refilling a growler back at the Harpoon brewery and likely a local homebrew shop (I'm looking for some cheap kegs).

Anyways, off to bed, I'm going to read some more of my newest book, "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!". I'm something like 4 pages in and hooked already.

Vacation.

So, mostly spur-of-the-moment, my dad and I decided to take a trip to Boston. We're here until Thursday, at which point we'll likely drive to New York City and check out Time's Square for New Year's Eve. 

We got stuck in a blizzard on the way in, averaged 40kph for about 2 hours, saw 10 SUVs go offroad and into ditches and not a single small car, imagine that!. 

Tomorrow it's the Museum of Science, the day after the Institute of Contemporary Art, Harpoon Brewary and the Samuel Adams brewery with any luck.

More to come as things happen.

Post Everthing Update

Now that.... Everything is complete, let's talk about it.

The Galaxies and Cosmology presentation a few weeks ago went pretty well. On the subject of the Hubble Sequence and time evolution therein, it was. I got fairly good reviews (I will post the slides as soon as I can find the most up-to-date version, it's sitting silently somewhere on my netbook). 

Now, on to AstroFluids. For this, we had to choose a subject and write a paper / do a presentation. My subject was planetary migration.

For those of you who don't know, planetary migration explains how hot Jupiters can exist, for example, or how planets like Uranus and Neptune can come to be, so far from the sun. The issue lies in that the model behind planet formation has rocky planets forming close to their parent star, and gas planets farther out, past about 4AU, typically, for a Sun-like star. The planets are born from a protoplanetary disk, gas and dust orbiting the central star. Jupiter sized planets form farther out because there's more matter to accrete and form the planet from (ie, you're going in bigger circles around the star through the protoplanetary disk when you're far out, so you're going to impact more of it) and so far from the star, molecules like water and some organic compounds can condense (yielding more matter for the planet formation process) and gas is less energetic, so it can also be accreted onto the forming planet (forming the gassy envelopes of the gas giants).

This is all great, but when we look outside the solar system, most of the planets we find are super massive (Jupiter masses) and orbit their stars at distances 10 times less than that of Mercury, so they're whipping around their stars once every couple days. Not only is there not enough mass in the protoplanetary disk at this radius to form these planets, there's no way that the gas would be gravitationally bound to the planet rather than floating around diffusely due to such high temperatures so close to the star. So, the solution is the planets form far out, then move in. Why? You'll have to read my paper for that (link to be added as soon as my online storage updates itself). 

Today, I want to finish my last assignment, and perhaps brew some beer. I've also got to go buy a tree though, as unfortunately, I couldn't find any Festivus poles.

4:55 AM

It's 4:55 AM the day I need to submit my Astrofluids paper. I write this as I need a mental break from looking at accretion equations. The paper is some 19 pages long and incomplete (albeit containing a two full pages of references and a few large figure). I believe that I will be able to finish tomorrow morning before noon, if I am productive enough, and then I can prepare my talk afterwards. I will then use the train ride home to edit the paper, before finalizing and submitting it at some point before midnight.

Ambitious or rubbish? Stay tuned...

Galaxies and Cosmology presentation: done. 

Powerpoint will be uploaded when I get a chance.

Planetary Migration according to Megan

To all my followers, I'm terribly sorry about my lack of updates as of late. The end of the semester crept up on me awfully quick. 

So, I've got two presentations coming up, one for AstroFluids, the other for Galaxies and Cosmology. There is also a paper due for the former that I'm a little nervous about. Planetary Migration. If you're curious what that is, I refer you to Megan:

Megan says:
what's the subject?

Sean says:
Planet migration.

Megan says: 

well

planets get cold during winter

so they're like "fuck this we headin' south"

and they move closer to the sun

it's just like the canadian geese.

True story. 

I'll be sure to post my presentations. The one for Galaxies and Cosmology is on the Hubble Sequence.  

My FPGA project is nearly ready for testing. I need only get a serial gender changer, and I'll be ready for some preliminary low-speed tests. Unfortunately, given how busy I am over the next two weeks, I might only be able to test it right before Christmas, a bit later than I'd hoped. 

--
-=//\=-

Finally, my Astrofluids presentation will be done today, two weeks late. I'm happy to get it out of the way, it was somewhat time consuming to review for it every week, but in two hours, it'll be done. 

That aside, the DQM reports are becoming faster to do, as expected, so now it only eats up about 3 hours of time. I expect that I can get this down to two. 

Tonight, I have the night off and I think I'm going to run to Microbytes for a male-to-female RS-232 adapter for my FPGA project; Maybe tomorrow I can throw together some working code, which will be exciting. 

That aside, I've discovered that assuming all my neighbor's deck lights are off, I can observe an interesting part of the sky (Mars and Orion) from my back porch, assuming that I can align the telescope correctly. This is tricky because there's a tree in the way of Polaris, so I'm going to have to hope that I can orient the base North by eye (using the house as a reference). 

I just saw a guy go by carrying a harp.
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Last labs today.

Today is the last of the 8:30AM labs (and soon the 2:00PM labs), which is too bad. I really had a good time with the students. I'm now drinking my morning coffee and working on a weird compilation error I'm getting on my FPGA  project. It would seem as though the compiler thinks that one of my pins is a clock pin, which isn't true, and it's complaining about it. 

Once that is done, I'm ready to test the interface at low speeds. I bought a USB-Serial adapter so I can plug into the serial out port on the ML402 board. This will allow me to see what is going on as the processor I've placed on the ML402 executes its code. It'll definitely work as a proof-of-concept that all my stuff works, and then *I just need to figure out the Ethernet connection. Of course, compilation errors are rarely referred to as easy to fix.

I am always nervous when I step past a tank of liquid helium only to find that it is hissing loudly.
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Productivity is down.

So there I was, taking a glass out of the cupboard to get a drink, when the cup slipped, breaking into a thousand pieces just as my hand had grabbed it, essentially causing me to slam my hand into broken glass. After what I believe to be the loudest I've ever cursed, ever, I quickly wrapped it in a tshirt, and went to the hospital.

Silly me to get hurt at night. At that point, there was only one doctor the entire hospital, a bunch of parents waiting with their small children and a constant flux of ambulances. I waited in the ER for 9 hours to get 15 minutes worth of stitches. Typing is not nearly as fun as it used to be. I also missed two presentations for AstroFluids that i need to do next week. 

This was Wednesday, a day precceded by a day where I TA'd a lab. It went really well, no major issues (apart from perhaps a poorly phrased question), the only problem was that the other guy I TA with didn't show up for lab section, and so I had to do it alone.  Considering it was my second of the day, though, it didn't go too bad; I just did more running around than usual.

I've purchased a USB to Serial adapter so I can talk to my computer from the FPGA board, I'm currently coding up a peripheral so that I can test it up. In theory, if all goes well, I'll know right away whether or not my peripherals are working right, which means that the last issue to remedy will be the Ethernet. Things are looking good.

C'mon, we're not that bad.

...Usually.




====

On another note, the first DQM report of the season went up yesterday, no major problems there. Unfortunately, however, T4 is acting up, there's something wrong with it's positioner, which places it out of commission until further notice.

Fwd: FROM YANG

Wow, these still happen?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <fmeeberg@planet.nl>
Date: Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 7:29 PM
Subject: FROM YANG
To:

FROM YANG
Greetings, I am Ming Yang writing from Hong Kong. I am writing you because I want you to join me in a business project worth 24.5M Dollars. You will have a share of 50% after we finish.
Please write me back at my private e-mail: yangming.mingyang.yangming@gmail.com

Thanks.
Ming Yang

The rest of the Arizona pictures.

The best from my latest trip have been uploaded to a Google web album because I don't like how Blogger manages photos. 

http://picasaweb.google.ca/Captain.Griffin/ArazonaII

I'm pretty busy at the moment, I need to give a presentation about Point-in-cell simulations in my AstroFluids course. I think it's a bit of a toss up as to how interesting it's going to be. 

Update

I'm crimping power connectors for the LED flashers in the T4 trailer. (On my own), I managed to maneuver the Genie Lift close enough to the crossbeam on T4 to tie up the cables, and then I fed them through the quadrapod arm into the camera box (not an easy feat: I was literally caught elbow deep in the camera box for 15 minutes with no one around to see my epic fail after I had managed to find the other end of the cable I was snaking).

Back to crimping.

Morning of the last Day

Last night was another pretty late one. Andrew and I spent the morning identifying spare cables in the camera box and control trailers so that we could plug the LED flashers into them. We succeeded pretty early on, so then we had to go about attaching them. Unfortunately, we didn't have the tie-wraps we needed to do so, so we instead tackled T1, which already had the flasher system wired up, we just had to see if we could get it to fire using the Charge Injection system on the array. Subsequently, that worked like a dream, and we were able to produce a very pretty oscilloscope trace as can be seen in the attached image. 

Unfortunately, albeit the fact that I have some pretty nice pictures, I'm too time constrained right now to post them, as we have a meeting at 9AM at Base Camp, it's currently 8:18AM and we're 30 minutes away. 

Will try to post them during lunch.

A very long day, indeed.

Today, Andrew and I aligned every mirror facet on T4. It took most of the day, near 5:30 we were done and I drove up to the Ridge for the first time, snapping a nice sunset image. After supper, I drove back down because there are two other people around who are working with something called the Road Laser which looks at atmospheric disturbances, and given that they had the telescopes on, we (Andrew and I) had to man the control room. We wrapped that up at midnight, the day started at 9.

There wasn't much going on in the control room, we were mostly just there to turn off the array if anything went wrong. There was one Gamma-ray Burst Alert (which ordinarily we would slew to and start taking data on) but it was too low on the horizon, so instead, I went outside and took some nice telescope images with my camera. Attached below are the highlights of the day, captions to come when I'm not super sleepy.

Arrival

So this morning I was up at the crack of dawn to get to the airport. The first flight (4 hours to Denver) went well. Denver got 2 feet of snow last night, I got a few nice pictures from the air (which I cannot post at this time due to the software supplied by Canon for my camera being stupid). 

My second flight was OK, although at that point I just wanted to get the hell out of the plane. Arriving, I met up with my colleague Andrew McCann, and promptly found that my luggage had been lost somewhere between my flights. As I write this, I'm awaiting a call from United Airlines about my baggage delivery. The only catch is that I'm 40 minutes up a mountain, so timing the delivery won't be obvious if it gets done tonight. Tomorrow I'll be working at Base Camp, so delivery will be much easier. Means I gotta wear the same stuff though, not really what I was planning on doing.

I'm going to go sit down and try to figure this camera software stuff. Pictures to come as I can upload them.

Man, I didn't think there were stil places that didn't offer some sort of free wifi.
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Waiting to get through Customs now. Front row middle on the way to Denver, exit row window to Tucson.
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So busy.

I realize I've been neglecting my followers recently; I'm starting the Next Day Analysis for VERITAS soon. In a nutshell, every day I analyze some data to make sure that nothing has gone wrong with the Array. I'm trying to pull up some pretty pictures and will post them as soon as they are produced.

On another note, I leave for the Experiment Friday morning. Got my Desert Shoes last night. Need to find my hat though.

Ares 1-X Test Launch Today

Just finished TAing my first lab section of the day. Even considering the train wreck that was the lab on conservation of linear momentum, the grades were pretty good, and this lab went splendidly.

Currently the first Ares 1-X rocket is sitting on the launchpad and waiting for weather to go into the green, I'm really excited, but this might also be the energy drink I had this morning because we can't have coffee (or anything else) in the lab.

Will update as the launch continues. Current launch time is scheduled for 11:04AM (bumped back 15 minutes to the T-4:00 resume time to be 1515Z).

More on the Ares 1-X: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/ares/flighttests/aresIx/index.html

Nasa TV: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

"Don't pwn me on this."

Another gem from the most recent lab I've corrected.

This really does happen.

Correcting labs today, I came across the answer shown in the attached jpg. Made my day. 

UDP and making progress.

My VHDL guru contact at UBC has been helping me out a fair deal with getting off the ground with an Ethernet interface for the FPGA. At this point, I at least know what keywords to look for. Also, after discussing it a bit, I decided to go with UDP rather than TCP as my transfer protocol as it is worlds simpler to implement. I may have to do some reordering once the packets are read in by the PC, but given the fact that I'm working with 10G Ethernet, I've got enough bandwidth to add things like a packet counter, for example. 

According to him, on a clean network, packet loss is also less than 1%, which is fine. I'm expecting to be reading out numbers every 100ns, which gives me an order of magnitude higher temporal resolution (100ns vs 2.5 microseconds) than H.E.S.S. had when they first tired the experiment is based on, so losing one or two packets won't neccisarily degrade the signal too much.

If I understand the issue correctly, I may have a workaround for the fact that my embedded processor peripherals don't work. Essentially, it comes down to VHDL being a 'dumb' programming language. Regardless, correcting for this has created a new error (whoohoo) that simply has to do with syntax, and should be resolved shortly.

A quick update.

Last week I did some more research on the components required to build my detector. Gigabit Ethernet was deemed too slow, so I have to go with 10G. The issue is that now I'm pushing the limits of the FPGA, and so I'm going to have to be extremely careful when it comes to programming, due to the fact that the internal component timing is on the order of my data stream. 

After an absurdly large thanksgiving dinner, I'm going to hit the sack. There is simply too much turkey and stuffing inside me right now for me to go on.

Results of the Muon Asymmetry Experiment

I've finished the muon asymmetry experiment, the results can be seen here. To first order, they're all consistent. The fourth data run was taken 3 weeks later, but is still consistent to within two sigma. 

I'm going to be working on a software solution to getting some Flash ADCs to work simultaneously now.

On the FPGA route, I've decided to use 10 gigabit Ethernet, because single gigabit wasn't enough bandwidth. Which means that I'm going to have to be clever in my hardware selection and programming, but what else is new?

Going back to the Experiment

It would seem as though I am heading down to Arizona once more at the end of this month. I'm going to be leaving here the 30th of October and flying back November 3rd (in time for my class the next day, whoohooo). Going to get to see the Array at night. I'm quite excited. I'm going to be helping out a colleague work on the alignment (amongst other things). The flights work out well too, I won't end up in Montreal too late, and I'm going to show up in Tucson the Friday before noon sometime, which is great, it allows me to fit in a whole day of work rather than waste one travelling.

Now, I've got to get back to being a clever programmer in that I've got to write a script that will loop through all my data files and look for muon asymmetries.

True story.

Between my TA shifts today, I had this conversation:

Sean says:

Tummy ache.

Ate too much.

Mel... procrastination... please go away. says:

 too much what?

Sean says:

 Food.

Mel... procrastination... please go away. says:

 lol, I figured from your use of the verb to eat

Sean says:

 Yogourt, some slab pizza, a cookie and coffee.

Mel... procrastination... please go away. says:

 sounds good.... I would have had too many cookies personally... I like my sweets

 ol

 *lol

Sean says:

 Oh.

 It was a big cookie.

 Full of like

 Chocolate chips

 And asbestos.

--
-=//\=-

Neglection.

The past week was pretty busy.

I managed to clean up my correlation plots some, and generate a fit. The corrected data plot is included with this post. I'm somewhat satisfied with how the correction cleans up the distribution. In doing so, however, I omitted the effects of temperature on pressure, which will be the next task. To do so, I will generate a 'temperature corrected' pressure distribution, and then use that to correct the muon rate. I'm not sure what the outcome will be, however.

Muons aside, I got an account on an 8 CPU / 32GB memory computer in the lab downstairs so I can compile my FPGA code, which is nice, because compile times are down by an order of magnitude, which means I can get alot more work done.

Speaking of work, I spent all of last week supervising the dorms at Space Camp. Easy money, sure, but leaving at 0700 to catch the 0805 train home is mighty difficult to do every day. Subsequently, I picked up another shift over the weekend, with a school from Fredericton, NB, which I've animated for for years. It was nice to do it again, but with 'career' work during the week, I won't be doing any more camps any time soon, it's far too exhausting. The extra dough come Thursday sure will be nice, though. 

Now, I'm about to finish correcting my PHYS 101 labs as they are due to be given back tomorrow. This has been quite a learning experience. It would seem as though I'm not an easy marker; I'd probably call myself a douche for how meticulous I'm being. 

Correlation plot.

As promised, this is what the muon event rate looks like as a function of barometric pressure. Each data point corresponds to 1 hour's worth of data. As we can see, there is definitely a steady anticorrelation here. Subsequently, now that I've got the points, I've got to figure out how to fit a line to them. Apparently ROOT doesn't like fitting 1D lines to 2D histograms.

Aaah, yes, my first paycheque. Oh, and barometric pressure.

So it would seem that The Department filed my paperwork a day too late and missed the deadline for yesterday's payday. Which means I have..... 31$ to go through the next two weeks with. This includes me visiting the Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa with one of my friends on Sunday. 

Should be interesting.

As I write this, my code for comparing the barometric pressure to the muon flux rate is being run... With any luck I'll have a pretty plot shortly.

Montreal barometric pressure

It would seem as though shortly I might be able to remove some of the variation I've been seeing in my muon flux rates by removing the effect due to barometric pressure. Some scientists in Hanoi found that for high pressures the muon flux rates go down, which via my super-scientific use of the 'eyeballing' method, showed that my data followed a similar trend. So, I've fired off a few emails, and am hoping to get a response today with the data I need so I can make the plots tomorrow. These ones I'll likely post for those curious about what muon flux rates varying under barometric pressure look like.

I have responsibility?

I just got out of my first TA session. The second is at 2:05. It went pretty well, I'd think, there was one guy who had to leave early for a work meeting, but he managed to get the experiment done on time (a simple pendulum test). I now sit with a pile of 40-something lab reports to grade. w00t. I feel like such an eager beaver, I'm going to tackle it now.

Meet and Greet

I'm going to a meet and greet with Dr. Doug Osheroff, a Nobel laureate and member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, in a few minutes. I've brought in my copy of Volume 1 of the report in hopes that he'll sign it.

He gave a talk Friday titled 'Understanding the Columbia Accident' which I thoroughly enjoyed. Taught me more than a few things I didn't know about the Columbia accident, including a few things that I'll probably get around to writing about here.

Time to go.

I just got in from camping at the Yamaska National Park. I brought my telescope and got some good high-contrast views of Jupiter and the moon at roughly 1/4 illumination. Unfortunately, before I could check out any Deep Sky Objects, cloud cover rolled in, both nights.

Tomorrow I will try to compile some code I wrote Friday to interface with the switches and LEDs on the FPGA board I'm working with. Hopefully it'll work and I'll have figured out how to interface VHDL code with embedded processor C programs.

More to come as things evolve.

My first virus. Ever.

So, yesterday, a colleague of mine offers to give me some documents on cosmology he had found. Given that I'm taking a  class in cosmology this semester, I was enthused, and agreed. He passed me his USB key, I transferred the data to my netbook (a Windows box), and all was well until within the hour I received an email from McGill stating that my computer had been caught port sniffing and that my wireless access was being revoked. Turns out he'd uploaded me a copy of WORM_DOWNAD.AD.

There was then a pleasant little list of things to do to remove viruses (ie, install virus scan, scan. If !virus_remove_success() then format.) but nothing with respect as to how to get my access restored. It's not the end of end of the world; I'm pretty sure I zapped the virus (manually deleted some files from a Linux boot, thank you flash drives), but thus far I've yet to receive a response to my inquiries as to what I can do to get my netbook back online.

I'm off to the lab to clean my telescope lenses during my lunch break, then write down the Messier Catalogue coordinates, then get back to work on FPGA programming, as I've been letting that slide a bit more than I should have recently.

I just watched Space Shuttle Discovery fly overhead being tailed by the ISS. 

Muon Asymmetry Poster online

My poster on detecting the east-west muon asymmetry can be found here. The host site (http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~griffins) is my official McGill website, but is rather bare at the moment as I haven't really had the time to write HTML for a good long while. Perhaps if I get bored one day I'll link this blog directly to it, but until then, a link will have to do.

....Re-writing all the AstroFluids notes is rather time consuming...

Busy week.

So here's how it is:

"After the Earth was used up, we found a new solar system and hundreds of new Earths were terraformed and colonized. The central planets formed the Alliance and decided all the planets had to join under their rule..."

OKOK, maybe I'm suffering from a dab of Firefly withdrawl.

The real plan is simple: I need to create a data-folding script to compress long data sets (4 days or more) into 1 day. What this will do is produce a plot of detected muons vs. time, on a 24 hour scale. This should allow for me to detect the day/night muon asymmetry. If I get anything pretty I'll send it along.

Still having a hard time with the QDC/TDC timestamp discrepency, even with my fancy veto setup. I'm getting rather confused at this point, albeit as I'm writing this I had another idea as to how to try and fix the TDC.

That's this morning's plans. Now that I'm out of Quantum Theory and into Astrophysical Fluids, I need to catch up on my reading for that class, which includes some problems thus far. I've got that penciled in for this afternoon, or maybe earlier if I can write my data analysis scripts and get them working fast enough.

Tonight at 5 is a meeting of all the Physics 101 TAs. I'm rather excited.

Wednesday and Thursday are going to be long ones; both classes I'm taking this semester end at 5PM, placing my arrival-home time somewhere around 6:40. Sure, it's not terrible, but it's still a tad later than I'd like. The upside is that they're two classes that are bound to be interesting.

Then Friday there's the conference about the Columbia Accident given by someone who sat on the investigation board. I feel like I shouldn't be as excited as I am for this. But regardless.

Back to work.

Out of Quantum Theory

I switched out of Quantum Theory and into Astrophysical Fluids. After a conversation with my office mates, I realized that it's just not worth suffering through a a theory class I'll never use (given that I'm an experimentalist and I intend to take the PhD preliminary exams). 

Got some catching up to do though. AstroFluids already has alot of notes published.

Long observing stint.

Last night I decided to check out the full moon with my telescope. It's pretty neat, but I'm going to need to buy some filters or Polaroid to reduce the intensity, because it's pretty bright. I have a cap for the telescope that has a small removable cap on it which I use to observe the moon, because otherwise the light through the eyepiece is powerful enough to project the moon on my hand at a distance of 5 centimeters or so.

Once moongazing was over, I found the Pleiades star cluster (M45, pictured here) by accident. I was looking through binoculars in an attempt to star hop my way to the Andromeda Galaxy.

Star hopping is more or less what it sounds like: Starting with a known star, you make your way closer and closer to your intended target using bright, easily identifiable stars to guide you. Because most deep sky objects (galaxies, nebulae, etc) are to faint to see with the naked eye, one uses binoculars or a telescope to see them. This substantially reduces our field of view, making navigation difficult.

Near Pleiades I found the constellation Triangulum, and tried to find the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), but with no luck. I'm convinced I should be able to see them, regardless of the light pollution caused by the full moon, but alas, I had no such luck.

Poster presentation.

Yesterday was poster presentation day. There weren't very many experimentalists there. And even some of the experimentalists (who are working on ATLAS, which isn't up get) are really just theorists at this point. So I guess I was missing the flair of dazzling simulations and equations and expected value vs. measured value plots. 

I think at least one of the judges liked my experiment. As I write this, however, results came in and I unfortunately did not win a prize.

For those of you interested, I'm trying to figure out how to include my poster in this post.

Rough start to the day.

I was on time this morning for everything before I realized I had yet to send myself the documents I need for my poster presentation tomorrow. I sent it off quickly, a process that took roughly 3 minutes before realizing that I no longer had time to walk to the train, especially considering the fact I had made it outside before realizing I did not have my wallet (and therefore my train pass). 

As for the poster presentation, I've really no clue whether or not I'm going to be able to have it printed on time. I need it in less than 18 hours at this point, and apparently the on-campus guy needs 48 hours warning. There's a Bureaeu en Gros somewhere, but I'm not sure how long they take. At least the poster is in a shape suggesting it's final form. When I complete it, I'll put it online. It's fairly self explanitory.

Classes started yesterdaty. Quantum Theory with Charles Gale (the head of the department). One of the first things he said was, "For those of you who don't know, I'm a theorist. I have the utmost respect for experimentalists, though, some of my best friends... know experimentalists."

Galaxies and Cosmology starts next week, rather than this week. It's one weekly 3-hour block, which should make things interesting.

Ah, yes, the kids are back to school.

The first thing I heard this morning was some 16 year old girl saying "She wants us to call her Professor. I think that's stupid."

Five things I've seen or heard in the past 48 hours.

1- On a styrofoam container on my desk: "NO; He is supposed to call me."

2- Exchange between a customer and an employee at the Cremiere in Place Ville Marie.

Customer: "What is that?"

Employee: "It's like a Blizzard."

Customer: "Really? But I don't want that!"

3- A man shaving on the 11:30 train home.             

4- Scribbled in purple on a sheet of paper on my desk: 

"I anm

space -go

U bar"

5- My dad: "I'm on 'how to pickle garlic dot com'. Apparently it's normal for the garlic to turn blue."

Back to working on my Muon Asymmetry poster.

CRAQ Presentation yesterday, then a bar.

I really need to get this sleep schedule thing down. My presentation (Optical Transients via Cherenkov Telescopes) went over pretty well. I wasn't totally unclear, which is nice. Afterwards, we went to a brewpub (Amene a Boire). The food was so-so, but the beer was pretty good. Had a white that had some banana flavoring (which is ambitious for me). I'd go again, but only post-meal. Also, the fourth floor only has 4 kinds of beer for sale, as opposed to several others sold on lower levels.

I'm back there this morning. There'll be a few presentations on interstellar medium, if memory serves. 

Conferences aside, I've still got a timestamp discrepancy between the QDC and TDC data, which means that I can only use the TDC or QDC data sets independently, which is really starting to become troublesome. I think that one of the two DAQ cards is a little bit slower (a few tens of nanoseconds) so if two muons come in in a short time period, one of the cards is only seeing one of them because it's still busy getting data from the first one. 

Presentation t'morroe.

Tomorrow I'm going to talk about my research on optical transients in front of grad students from McGill, UdeM and Universite de Laval. My slides are more or less done, but I'm not as confident in what I know as I'd like to be. There is indeed a supper afterwards I'd like to attend (if not for the company than for all the different in-house brews, http://www.amereaboire.com/). Only trouble is that it's a bit late for my likings, 19:45, and I'd have to public transit it there and back.

Ack! TDC problem.

I just found a huge discrepency between two timestamps that should be almost the same. Gods damn.

Pure Genius.

Thank you, XKCD...

Loving the new 'scope.

I can make out cloud patterns on Jupiter and if it was oriented the right way, I'm pretty sure I could see the Great Red Spot. Still getting used to the Equatorial Mounting system (AKA GEM), though. That aside, observing conditions tonight are rather poor, and so now I am looking for other things to do. Looking up beer recipes. Trying to figure out how I'm going to get the apple chunks out of my fermenter. 

I've also got two presentations to get ready. One for the end of the week, another for sometime during the next. Plenty of work to keep me busy...

Netbook Blues

My poor netbook. It was not designed to be running FPGA development software, and yet, it tries do diligently to do so. It is all in vain, however, as simply attempting to compile the software takes on the order of an hour (at which point it fails anyway). 

Perhaps it is time for an upgrade... Something with a standard resolution at least. I must admit I'm fed up of this absurd screen resolution that keeps chopping pages and windows off halfway.

BSOD'd!

I got myself a telescope on Saturday. A 5" Newtonian on a EQ3 mount. I like the size, and I think I could computerize the mount easily enough. Ideally, I'd use an FPGA board (with onboard RAM and an LCD) running some software to trigger pulses in stepper motors connected to the RA and DEC controls. I think the only tricky part would be the memory interface (i.e., exactly what I'm working on now for my detector).

On another note, It's really warm in here and I at some point, my computer at home came out of sleep. This is scary because now it can BSOD at any time. The heat has really been getting to it. I had to open up the side panel to keep it from locking up.

I love you, Summer, but if you break the God Computer I will end you.

Sinking Ice and Meteor Showers

So, I saw GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra last night and thought I'd make a few comments.

<spoilers>
Firstly, Christopher Eccleston makes a great supervillain. And the idea that he used NATO's money to develop weapons he'd then steal was pretty clever. Not necessarily original, but today, it's almost impossible to do something that doesn't come off as cliche.

The underwater battle was pretty neat. I can't think of another movie that's done this before and it got away from doing something similar with space/airships and tanks. The last time I'd seen something original to that extent was in Swordfish when they hoist up the bus with the helicopter. The only beef I have with this scene is that when the self destruct mechanism for the enemy base goes off, not only do we see ice sinking, but one of the characters says something along the lines of "The Joes will be killed by a million tons of steel and ice". Ice floats! The writers only needed to leave out those last two words and I could have let the science go.

Accelerator suits, Mach 5 or 6 STOL aircraft piloted via neural interfaces and Celtic voice commands (also, why does the redhead know Celtic and not tie her hair up anyway?), nanomites to turn your burnt face into something metallic, and don't even get me started on the H2 chase, I could have gotten past all of this (hey, it's the future). But sinking ice? This is pretty basic. 
</spoilers>

Subsequently, after the film, the Perseid Meteor Shower was at its peak, so I tried to find a good spot to observe from (not obvious because of the trees in my backyard and the street lights every 12cm in the front, but I saw a couple events before I hit the sack, and this was the lead in to the funniest thing I've heard this week.

Having gone to bed in the wee hours of the morning, I needed a stiff drink and stopped at the Second Cup on McGill College rather than the Trottier Cafeteria (which doesn't sell Starbucks coffee anymore and "Seattle's Best' is less than awesome). When it was my turn, I asked for a large coffee and the return question was "What kind?" to which I responded "Something dark." She took one look at me and called out to the guy who was making drinks "One large battery acid to go". 

I think it was the greatest coffee of my life.

OK, back to work.

Bad PMT

It would seem as though one of my photomultiplier tubes has konked out on me.

Also, I learned today that I have a presentation to give in 17 days in
front of new grad students from 2 universities about optical
transients and FPGAs. Oh boy.

Thank you, Andrew.

Quote of the day: MIR is being attacked by PHYSICS!

I just saw an old lady smack a guy my age with her cane.
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Experiment running.

So the muon experiment is almost off the ground. At this point, I've
only got to figure out why one of my signals seems lumpy (for lack of
a better term) albeit this may simply be due to the characteristics of
the photomultiplier tube.

Mission Accomplished.

Every programmer knows that often a single character typo can make a
huge difference.

In this case, a missing '=' was what was keeping me (and presumably
anyone else using a V1718 USB bridge) from taking data. This line of code:

while ( ((long)(data_size-=4) >0) && (( read_events<
user_setting.m_num_events)|| (user_setting.m_num_events<= 0)))

is very complicated. So lets look at the important part:

while( ((long) (datasize-=4) > 0 .... )

This line subtracts 4 from the data_size value and checks to see if
the result is greater than zero. The effect is that when the data_size
variable is AT zero, the code stops executing. What this ends up doing
is cutting off the data acquisition process before the last line gets
out, and (in my experience) is a common mistake. Usually it would
read:

while( ((long) (datasize-=4) >= 0 .... )

which would execute it one last time when it has reached zero.

So I was thinking about this this morning when I received an email
from technicians in Italy:

"Hello Sean...

I did the test yesterday, finding your same problem: it is a software
bug and today we have found the solution.

Unfortunately, the person responsible for the software is traveling for work.
Then we will release the new software release (corrected) to return
from teh summer holidays at the end of August.

In the meantime, I tell you the problem.
I believe that you have not any problems to correct the source and
recompile all.

At line 485 of file maic.c you can find

>>>> while ( ((long)(data_size-=4) >0) && (( read_events< user_setting.m_num_events)|| (user_setting.m_num_events<= 0)))

You have to change it like this:

>>>> while ( ((long)(data_size-=4) >= 0) && (( read_events< user_setting.m_num_events)|| (user_setting.m_num_events<= 0)))

In the old version simply the last word transferred with the BLT was
not controlled and stored in the file. [...]"

...It would seem as though I discovered a major flaw in this companies
software, before their technicians did.

Everything is fine and dandy now. I can look at muon shapes to my
heart's content. I will be taking a data set over the weekend.

The best part is, I spent so much time waiting for them to get back to
me that I had already programmed the rest of the infrastructure. So
now all I need to do is take data. w00t.

Late for the first time.

As I boarded the train this morning, the conductor informed us that
there was a power outage at a station halfway down the track and we
were going to stop in the Waste, err, West Island and wait for
instructions. 45 minutes later (as I should have been sitting down in
my office) we were informed that there were busses on the way to take
us to the metro. 30 minutes later we boarded the metro and took it
from Cote-Vertu all the way to Bonneaventure. Then it was a quick skip
and a hop to the group meeting where I kindly interrupted the girl who
was presenting.

Luckily, my boss had received the SMS emails I had sent him over the
day and it was embarrassment more than anything. But still. Broke my
perfect record. Damn train.

There is a power outage on the train and I have a group meeting at 10 to go to. Boy, oh boy.
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A C-String-esque situation.

This is a conversation I just had with one of my friends.

kim? says:
http://dlisted.com/node/33176
hahahaha
i love it

Sean says:
Wtf, Kim, I'm in my office, lol,
You have to NSFW that shit,

kim? says:
hahahaha
hahahaha

--
-=//\=-

I got the FPGA blues.

I think at this point I may have bitten off more than I can chew, at
least for the time being. I think what I'm trying to do is build the
CN tower when all I've ever done is play with Lego. Which is a bit
uncool.

I'm missing one bit of information: I can't for the life of me figure
out how to tie the embedded processor code to the VHDL scripts I have
. The embedded processor is what will host the data (web) server, and
the VHDL actually takes the data. I know it's possible to do this, I
just can't for the life of me find a reference.

Back to work.

Whats the point in walking your dog if youre going to carry it?
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The best part about the train is when someone is happy because its early and really its just not late.
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Talk about abstract.

If you google 'ML402 Web Server', the 6th entry down as I write this
entry is actually my previous post.

Today there was more talk about going back to Arizona in August,
likely right before classes start. We've got someone going down to
align T1, and I'd really like to contribute.

I'm slowly making progress in my understanding of the Xilinx EDK (for
the FPGA stuff). In a nutshell, I'm trying to install a Linux-based
web server on this ML402 board that will allow me to read out data
from the rate counters (which also need to be designed but that's the
'easy' part). All this combined will allow me to plug into one of the
telescopes (likely starting with the Whipple 10m for debugging
purposes) and take data read out to a computer.

The ML402 board I'm using has 64MB of DDR SDRAM. Assuming 20% of that
will be taken up by the operating system, I'm hoping that the
remaining 50MB is enough space to contain the data. The idea is that
even though we'll be reading in values very quickly (microsecond
timespans) if we have a large memory buffer we can read off of
periodically at a high speed. In other words, the computer can't read
and store data on a microsecond timespan, but is able to read and
store a large amount of data every second or so, say.

A bad case of the Mondays.

It would seem as though my morning routine recently can be brought
down to pulling out 40 thousand PDFs on FPGA programming and trying
the single command that the technician at CAEN wants me to try. When
the latter fails, I try to figure out why, wonder about it for awhile,
then email back the failure with a question as to whether or not it
could be (e.g.) the firmware.

Naturally, I wont actually get an answer to the question, I'll get a
completely unrelated quote from the manual in response.

Hell hath no fury like a CAEN technician.

As I write this we are 14:52 away from the 40th anniversary of the
Apollo 11 landing. I've heard alot of conspiracy theorists asking
radio hosts if they thought it was faked, and other people complaining
about how there are a billion Chinese kids starving to death in Africa
and therefore we should go back in time and cut the NASA budget in
order to help this problem.

I think they're a bunch of morons, but that's me.

There were some interesting pictures released from the LRO (Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter) of the Apollo landing sites,
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html
.

Of course, these were photoshopped by the same guys who set the sounds
tage in Nevada to fake the landing. </sarcasm>

Today, I taught the FPGA to write to its SRAM memory. Next task is a
rate counter that will store the rate to memory.

I just watched the STS-127 crew walkout (again). Weather is still NO
GO for launch.

I also tried to test out this new FPGA module I wrote for reading /
writing memory, but no one was in the Cosmology lab downstairs so I
couldn't get my hands on the Spartan board to test it out. There's
something hokey going on in the simulation that I'm not entirely
convinced would be replicated in real life.

In the picture, you can see that the led[7:0] segment (which should
come up as a number between 0 and 255 inclusive) is coming up as 'ZZ'.
I could understand maybe the data input/output buffer doing something
weird (which it is), but the led output is purely either on or off,
and in most circumstances chooses not to be a set of letters or
shapes.

Too chilly for shorts today. cant wait to get home and change.
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Slow.

OK, so it's been a slow week (not the one that just started, I mean,
the one that started 7 days ago, the purest sense of the word 'week',
but I digress).

Worked out all my software kinks for CAEN. I just need to get the
hardware to lower its thresholds, for which I have sent an email to
the wonderful Italians that absolutely love helping me debug their
hardware.

FPGA stuff is a little slow. VHDL is a really weird programming
language. Also, albeit the fact that I found an example doing
precisely what I want to be doing now, the code is barely commented,
so it's going to be tricky to figure out what's what.

Day's over soon. The sun's come out.

Things I've just heard: 'What the hell, I'm not your scott towel!'
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With the exception of one discriminator channel, I didn't lose any
hardware today. Noticed I was making a bit of a stupid mistake with
something, but other than that, all is well.

--
-=//\=-

Mission.

Today if no more of my hardware breaks, I'll be able to start taking
data for the muon experiment, the culmination of 7 weeks of work.

Of course, this hinges entirely on the assumption that now that the
CAEN hardware works porperly, I haven't the need to keep mucking
around with it.

Back in the lab. Had another discriminator channel die today. Still no
clues as to the culprit. I've been following Brent Spiner on Twitter,
he's rather entertaining.

Currently, I'm working on some code that will allow the FPGA to take
an input and calculate its square root. Needs to be done iteratively,
which makes it a little bit tricky.

Steak for supper tonight, I'm thinking mushroom sauce.

Sucked in.

New Twitter account, username astroGriff.

Why is so much of my hardware going?

Somehow, another discriminator channel went today (that makes six or
seven) which meant that I had to track down another. This one is fully
functional on all channels, so if it starts to go, I'm going to have
to assume that maybe the NIM bin power supply is konking out on that
particular slot. but testing for that might be hairy.

I just heard a lady say in all seriousness that 5 times 4 is 14.
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First success in FPGA programming.

Hardware Issues, but this time it's not quite as much CAEN's fault.

The discriminator I was using for the experiment died at some point this morning. It just started blowing out noise on most channels, regardless of if there were inputs or not. It took a little while to diagnose, but I just swapped it out. With this, however, I need to reset my data acquisition gate because now it would seem as though alot of my muon signals are getting cut off because the gate is too late.

This afternoon I'm going back to the Cosmology lab to keep learning how to use FPGAs. I've got (almost?) all the software instialled. There remains only this one package that I should be able to get under trial, but... can't, for a lack of a better term. More to come as things happen. 

I just saw a man wall by with a fox tail hanging out of his pocket.
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Strange New World

I currently sit in a lab on the second floor where I will be learning how to work with FPGAs such that I can start doing my Master's project. The muon decay experiment is coming along. I need to modify my code such that I can access both the QDC and TDC simultaneously, which may be trickier than it seems. I've got a pretty good idea as to how to do it the lazy way. 

They've all got really pretty screens in here. I'm so jealous. 

Also, I just downloaded a 900MB file in less than 20 minutes over wifi.

More to come as things develop.

Today will be a day to remember... My main goals: set up the muon counter and not break anything.
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I swear, one day I'll prove that time passes slower on the train than it does in the rest of the word.
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Beneath me.

Considering the heat today, and how humid it is on the train, I've decided that it's no longer beneath me to sit down cross legged on the train rather than standing in the midst of flamboyant blouses and black ties.Also, my back is in contact with this big aluminium sheet which acts as a very nice heatsink. 

--
-=//\=-

It is bloody hot in the lab today.
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Wierdest Wikipedia crawl ever.

Yesterday, I was looking at the Wikipedia page about the toys coming out for the new Transformers movie (pretty decent action flik, by the way). About an hour later I realized that I had somehow made my way to the page corresponding to 'The Land Before Time V" and somewhere in the middle I had stopped to read about the Terminator franchise. How did this happen!

CAEN Documentation

An except from a documentation file I'm reading:

Writes the specified value to the specified threshold register. If
threshold_id is CVT_V792_THRESHOLD_ALL every threshold will be setted
to the same value.
Parameters:
p_data Pointer to board data
threshold_id The threshold to set. It must be a
cvt_V792_threshold_id valid id.
value The value to set : Threshold value and Kill
bit (CVT_V792_THRESHOLD_KILL_MSK) If the kill bit be isn't setted the
channel will be disabled

...

What does "If the kill bit be isn't setted the channel will be
disabled" mean? Also, how hard is it to either punctuate or not
punctuate your sentences?

I'o still smug about having gotten the TDC to work.
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SUCCESS

After 6 weeks of banging my head against the wall, I've managed to get
the TDC working. It wasn't obvious, and I had to manually write some
functions that weren't very pretty, but it works. What I think it was
is that the default configuration the CAEN TDC came with was set to
look at a range outside the TDC's capabilities, so it wouldn't take
data.

This does not, however, explain why it wouldn't acquire data until I
had loaded it into LabView. My best guess is that there was something
strange configured in the TDC itself that the standard code was
struggling with, but when LabView was loaded it reset everything to a
usable state.

Now I need to loop over all the channels and export the data to files.
Not as obvious as it seems, in fact, considering once again CAEN has
half-assed their code and defined functions which do not work.

I'm ambitious this morning.

Over the weekend I think I figured out how to get the CAEN TDC to
work. Friday, it miraculously decided to talk to the computer, but in
doing so, stopped taking data. I'm pretty sure the (only?) thing I've
to do now is set up some arbitrary data and then in theory add one or
two lines of code to a configuration file.

I'm quite curious as to what I'll tackle once all this CAEN stuff is done.

...VME....

In my final attempt to get the VME hardware working, I've downloaded a 3rd party application that CAEN has software for. It's all GUI, and what few papers I have found that use this hardware all use it. The only catch is that I once mentioned it  omy supervisor, about a month ago, and he wasn't totally enthusiastic. Even if the trial lapses, I do have the opportunity to test the TDC and see if it works at all.

I just noticed that my last phone calls made to or from my cell were over 10 days ago.


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Symmetries

It would seem as though working alone in the machine shop leads to many fewer chances of messing up a measurement or motion. It also means you can be twice as fast working with a milling machine. The rack brackets I made this time around were perfectly symmetrical and fit nicely into the racks.

While making them, however, I did somehow manage to get the sawblade to jump off it's track on the band saw, which produced a mighty scary noise, but had no other ill effects. I'm hoping that I get to spend more time in the machine shop, albeit I don't know if my supervisor has any more work for me to do there. I can think of 1001 different <i>personal</i> projects to work on, but I don't think that David would appreciate paying me while I cut custom components for my launch pad.

Today, I test out an HV power supply and try to get the last data points required to finish my PMT calibration.

Back in the Machine Shop today. I've got to make some more rack
mounts. Hopefully this time they'll come out symmetric.

This could have ended badly.

Whatever you do, do not type 'c string' into the address bad of
Firefox and hit enter when you share an office with 5 other people.

Oh, and if you do happen to do it, try not to leave it up on your main
monitor for something on the order of 10 minutes while you work on
your netbook.

For the record I was looking for programming aide. Man, the internet
sure is something.

Whatever you do, do not type 'c string' into the firefox address car and hit enter when you are at wor
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Machining Parts

I got my first taste of the machine shop today. We were making brackets for the equipment racks and it all went more or less well, except the two parts we made weren't symmetric, but it worked all the same. I don't know why, but it wrecked me pretty good. 

Tomorrow, I'm going to calibrate the PMTs I'm going to use in the muon asymmetry experiment. 

I love tech support

The entire time I've been dealing with CAEN, they've told me that I have all the proper software to get my TDC working.

Until today.

I got an email from someone I've been corresponding with only to find out that I don't have the up-to-date version of the software. This isn't because I accidently downloaded the wrong version, at the time of writing this, there was only one version available for download. Now, I have V1.01 of some software I got via a special URL whereas if you're going to their website you can only get V1.00 which doesn't have all the libraries you need to get the (supposedly) supported VME cards to work. How the hell is anyone supposed to figure out that the company supplied software, which advertises its module compatibility, <i>isn't compatible</i>. Excuuuuuuse me, CAEN for not having the magic space brain (Zero Punctuation, anyone?) required to figure out that the driver installation process requires a month of back and forth emailing with various employees.

All that said, even having the updated software doesn't get the damn TDC to work.

Almost quitting time. In 15 minutes if my supervisor isn't ready he's going to release me.

VME woes... no more!

I've managed to figure out what was broken on the CAEN QDC I was debugging. In a nutshell, it comes down to the power supply for the card being damaged. We have to send it back to CAEN where they will either repair or replace it.

Time to jump on the TDC, and figure out why I can't save any of the data I've been taking with the CAEN software. 

On another note, I just got this new 20" Dell LCD to replace my office monitor. It's so shiny and pretty.

I just say a guy give his dog a thumbs up.
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I have a presentation to do Thursday on essentially what my Master's project is going to be on in front of the research group. Also, I have to learn how to program in ROOT and get the VME crate working as well. The work is certainly starting to pile up.

Flight Home

My biggest comment about the flight back is that aisle seats are really boring if on both sides of you the windows are closed.

Oh, and even though it's 15C here, I'm still freezing. I'm currently sorting through pictures, to see which ones to post. They are, indeed, rather numerous.

Day 12: Guided tour of the Whipple Observatory

Today, Ken let Skippy and I go on the official tour of the Whipple Observatory which included a bit on VERITAS, two smallish optical telescopes and the MMT. Pictures to come, probably tomorrow by the time I land. This is because as I write this, I still need to figure out how to get home some of the stuff I've got. It turns out that a poncho, survey meter and a 2 lbs. bag of M&Ms (bought as a novelty, I swear!) take up considerable amounts of space in an already full bag.

Ideally, by the time I land I shall have chosen and formatted the pictures I'm going to post (there are some 200 to choose from from just today).

-----

In no particular order, here are three shots I uploaded from the airport while waiting to board. The first two are the MMT and the third is myself in front of the Whipple 10m telescope. If you put yourself at twice the focal length, you'll fill the dish.

On Day 11 a Mexican offered me his sister at a good price.

Today's work was pretty simple. I removed the last of the supports on the old T1 trailer such that they could move it with forklifts (an interesting sight). Afterwards, we put some conduit around some datalink cable, and at about 2 we (the Purdue guys and myself) were given the afternoon off at which point we went to Nogales, a border town.






Mexico was interesting, I bought some Coke (the drink, not the drug), which is made with sugar not corn syrup in Mexico, a poncho (which I negotiated down from 45$ to 15) and some tequila (13 bucks!). We also watched a convoy of a dozen cars, trucks and vans bellow by armed to the teeth by law enforcers (saw one carrying a G36) in quite a hurry. After that excitement, I went back to drinking my absurdly huge margarita.





Some other things that happened or that I noticed today were:

The bolt that was bleeding huge amounts of liquid:
The donkey named George Bush I got to sit on:
And a guy who threw his shirt at some girl.

I ate a fruit burrito on Day 10.

Today's mission was pretty straight foreward. I had to take down a shade... giving... structure... which was bolted down into the ground (I guess weights weren't good enough). This involved some grinding and eventually a Snorkel-Lift to take apart the roof. Subsequently, when no one was looking I took the lift high enough to use T2 as a background.

Afterwards, a bunch of us went to this restaurant that had a giant chicken in front of it. A chicken with antlers.
And I had a really strong margarita (apparently this place is known for them), and after the meal this crazy desert, called a fruit burrito. Now I am quite full and ready for bed.

Tomorrow at 3ish, Ben, Justin and I are driving to Nogales (a city straddling the US-Mexico border).

Oh, I found my pen. It somehow made its way to the car.

We're going to supper tonight, so I will upload the days activities when I get home.

Day 9(?): Back to 35 degree range

Today I got Snorkel Lift training. If you don't know, this is a Snorkel Lift:




Apart from grabbing some pretty pictures (see below), the day was mostly comprised of some heavy hauling of the last (gods, who knows at this point) of the T1 scraps.




They also moved the new T1 trailer (T1.1) to its temporary location. Inside the equipment racks are set up and tomorrow I shall most likely be installing cooling equipment and some shelves and such.

Collaboration members watching in awe.

Oh, there was, indeed, something interesting learned today: When your cocking gun explodes, you wash off your hands using a sink that gets turned on by your leg.

In what scientists are calling "pretty gay", I can't find my space pen. Had it yesterday...

Oh, something funny I heard on the radio yesterday: 

"The mark of civilization: Flush toilets."

So, biking outside when it's 32C on an empty stomach is not a super amazing idea, although it is a good motivation to go buy groceries.

Dehydrated on Day 6

So I made it a week in before I forgot I was in a desert and that I should drink water.

We went to the Titan II museum today where I got to see the last intact Titan II missile silo (complete with nuclear missile).




This is also where they filmed Star Trek: First Contact, so I got an extra kick out of that.

Oh, by the way, watch for rattlesnakes.

Afterwards, we went to Taco Bell for lunch (why aren't there more of these in Quebec?) and then headed for the PIMA Air and Space Museum, which is essentially a jillion planes parked inside and outside for my viewing pleasure. Considering I took almost 300 pictures, I'll post the highlights.




The plane in the top right is an old NASA Vomit Comet, and the one on the top left is one of 2 B52's that were modified to launch the X-15 rocket planes. The bottom one my research supervisor suggested I take.

Tomorrow I have some free time, so I may go for a bike ride (there are bikes here). My main deterrent is that I'm the youngest person around for 20 miles in every direction, and elderly drivers are scary.