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.