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.