time reversal

Did I ever mention my dad is pretty awesome? Check out this article he wrote about frog fishing here.

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Last weekend I joined Ruth and Will at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. It was amazing. I’d say the most surprising standouts were M83 and The Thermals.

I’m really glad we went, and I had an awesome time. (Also I had White Castle for the first time!)

Oh way oh oh whoa ho

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I never finished posting about the rest of my trip to Zion. It has been a while, so I will just post a picture and give a brief summary. After spending a few wonderful days in Hopp Valley, Matthias and I crashed for a night in the Southwest Desert area of the park. There wasn’t much to see there, so we spent the following day doing Angel’s Landing and seeing the other touristy aspects of the park. We crashed for an evening in one of the overnight camping areas of the park and headed out the next morning for the eastern portion of the park.

We spent two very full days in this area, hiking about sixteen miles each day. The views were pretty spectacular with the best shown above in a panorama taken from Deer Trap Mountain. After that we headed to St. George, Vegas, and then back to the flattest part of the country.

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I got an e-mail a few weeks ago from a friend who is spending 9 months isolated from the real world, encouraging me to spend one night running through it. Last night, there was a street game in Oakland, which was basically a giant game of tag mixed with a running race mixed with a scavenger hunt all across the city. You start out with a map of checkpoints wearing a green ribbon. Your goal is to get to all the checkpoints without being tagged by the chasers, who are wearing orange ribbons. The first runner to the end with all the checkpoints signed wins. If you get tagged, you hand over your green ribbon and put on an orange one, and begin stalking your former allies. The chaser at the end who has collected the most green ribbons wins the chaser prize. This sounded like a lot of fun to me, so I grabbed another friend from the lab (Christain), and off we went to Oakland.

We arrived right at 7, to find at least 100 people already gathered in the small amphitheater. By the time the organizer announced that we were looking for fortune tellers at the first checkpoint, the crowd had at least doubled in size. “On your mark, get set, GO!” People took off, running in large groups, confusing motorists as we flowed across streets en masse. Soon, chasers on bicycles with orange ribbons flapping behind them began harassing us, “You better run!” one yelled as he zoomed past.

Christian and I were the first to arrive at Checkpoint 1, where we both drew the Queen of Wands card–a good omen for the night to come, according to the fortune tellers. As we prepared to leave, a staff member called in our physical descriptions to the chasers ahead. As soon as we left the park, a chaser started bearing down on us. We split, and I crashed through some bushes, only to find myself trapped in a fenced-in backyard. There was a way up in the far corner, so I ran over to it, climbed the fence, and then jumped into the parking lot on the far side. I joined up with Christian, who had also lost the Chaser, and we continued. Shortly thereafter, a confluence of 3 chasers managed to nab me, while Christian escaped. As I handed over my green ribbon in trade for an orange one, one thought burned in my mind. He was going down.

I saw Christian run off towards the third checkpoint, forgetting the second. I hid behind a large tree next to the path he was sure to travel when he realized his mistake. After 10 minutes, I saw him walking back towards the park that contained checkpoint two, completely oblivious to my presence. I jumped out from behind the tree and narrowly missed tagging him. He sprinted into the safe zone, where I could not get him. Luckily for me three other runners were startled by my jump out and started running down the path along the river, which was fenced off for at least 1/4 mile. They had nowhere to run but strait ahead, and I soon caught the slowest of them. I now had someone on my side, and we went back to stalk Christian at checkpoint 2.

He came running out of checkpoint 2 and went up some stairs into a garden. On my way after him, I tagged an unsuspecting runner, who quickly converted to my cause and helped me lay a trap. What Christian didn’t realize was that there was no way out of this garden he had run into. As he came crashing back down through the trees, I chased him towards my hiding compatriot. This new chaser jumped out, but narrowly missed tagging Christian. Christian went tumbling down a hill, taking out all the plants in his path, and then jumped up at the bottom and started running. As I was running after him he realized that his green armband had come off in the fall, and paused for a second. It was just the second that I needed, and I nailed him. He reluctantly went back, picked up his armband, and handed it over.

Now that we were allied again, we began stalking runners together. We had the best luck outside of checkpoint 4. Christian was quite a fast chaser, and whenever he started chasing a group he always caught at least one runner. With a scheme of one of us chasing runners towards another hiding in the shadows, we managed to catch 11 runners by the end of the night.

Around midnight, we walked into the final checkpoint. It had been a long night of running, and my legs hadn’t ached this much since my high school years of cross country running. I flopped down on the floor of the gazebo and split a granola bar with Christian. Finally, we walked back to his car for the ride home completely exhausted, but content.

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Almost exactly 3 months ago today I posted that I started taking apart my cryostat to refurbish it and make it bad-ass. It’s finally done, and it works really well. I can optically test 160 detectors at a time at 250mK. I presented the preliminary tests from our first optical cold run at our collaboration meeting today, and people seemed pretty excited about my new test setup. This is the first time that I’ve really built something like this from the ground up–I had to do everything from modifying electronics to wirebonding to machining to messing with control software. Making the setup really nice has paid off too. As I’m sitting here in this meeting in Chicago, I’m running experiments back in Berkeley from my laptop.

Below is a picture of the setup, and a plot of the differential detector response to my cold load (3.6 K vs. 11 K cold load temperature). The lower 1/3 of the array is dark, so we can calibrate out any changes in cold stage temperature (which is where the wedge sits). You can see that the load isn’t as big as the array, so the response is higher in the middle where the bolometer sees more of the load, and falls off as you get towards the edges. Soon, I’ll put in a filter stack and we will be able to look at things in the room, like a Fourier transform spectrometer.

This wedge was tested at pole, so we’re going to compare it to 4 new wedges that Erik made before he left to winterover to decide which of them (if any) will be good enough to put in the receiver next season on the South Pole Telescope. Wooo! My experiment works!

Tags:   berkeley · Black dewar · SPT · wedgesNo Comments.

I’m sitting in a meeting in Chicago right now, and about 5 minutes ago I got an e-mail with the subject line “Grantee Medical/Dental Checklist Email” from the United States Antarctic Program. It looks like I’m going to pole again. Almost everyone else who knows how to run the telescope camera is graduating, so I’m the obvious choice for going down to Pole as the receiver monkey for receiver upgrades. Tomorrow this meeting continues. Supposedly, at 10am the deployment schedule will be announced, and I’ll know when I’m going to Pole and for how long.

It’s a good thing I really like snow.

Tags:   Chicago · meeting · South pole · SPT1 Comment

Well, I’ve moved to a new place once again. In the last year I’ve lived in Switzerland, New York, and now Boulder. And overall, I have to say that Boulder is by far the best place to live. I’ve taken up residence in the basement of JILA working in Jun Ye’s Strontium lab. The people are really nice, and the work is totally badass. I’m still not one hundred percent sure what specific project in the strontium lab I’ll be assigned to. But if its up to me I’d like to be on Sr3…the aptly named new 3D Strontium system. I believe that this experiment is really going to explode with results in the next year and I’m really excited to measure the impossible with any luck.

In a few weeks, once I have my bearings in lab I’ll write up a post on either a) what we are doing in lab (which I think is hush-hush at the moment) or b) how an optical clock works.  For now though I want to tell you a little bit about Boulder and why it is so awesome.

Tamales. Delicious, delicious tamales every weekend at the farmer’s market. I guess I also get to spend a lot of time hanging out with cool people like Ruth and my new lab buddies.

I’m picking up a whole bunch of new things in Boulder though. First off, I bought a cross bike to commute around time, which is actually pretty fun when there are very few hills around. Secondly, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the somewhat unseemly time of 7:30 am I will be regularly going rock climbing. Thirdly, I’ve decided that I am going to be super social (see planned concerts and zombie movie nights I will be going to). And lastly, I’ve decided that I am going to learn as much as I can and be bonafide badass by the time I am done at JILA.

It’s going to take a lot to fulfill all those new commitments I am making to myself, but I have no doubt now that I will have fun trying…which wasn’t something I could always say before. I’ll keep you all posted

so let’s be married here today, these rushing waves to bear our witness

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I have an undergrad working with me, and I’ve been slowly teaching him the rules of science. So far, we have experienced the following rules in action together:

1. Nothing works on the first try.

2. Everything breaks at least once.

3. Every way it can break it will break.

And today, we learned a new one:

4. Sometimes after banging your head against something for hours your professor will walk in, touch your experiment, and it will suddenly work.

Science is mean. I wonder if he’ll decide he likes science in the end?

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Dave came to visit me in Berkeley, but due to his injured knees, we couldn’t do anything too intense. We still went to the beach and flew kites, and had picnics in various locations, but we had much more free time for liesurely activities than we usually do. Hence, we decided to take up a new (and delicious) hobby: visit a new place to acquire icecream every day. In order, we visited:

-Gellato Mirabella (I think. It was gelato something, next to the berkeley bart. Lots of crazy fruit flavors as well as chocolate-based things)

-Ben and Jerry’s (still awesome.)

- Ici (Holy crap this is good icecream. Make sure you get the hand-rolled cone too.)

-Tara’s organic Icecream (really delicious, many nifty flavors like lavender)

-John’s dollar scoops (not the best icecream I’ve had, but pretty damn good for $1.)

-Fenton’s creamery in oakland (huge sundaes. I mean <em>huge</em>. Face-sized.)

-Berkeley Thai house (thai tea icecream and fried coconut icecream)

- Ici (again, it was our favorite)

- liquid nitrogen icecream in the lab (guiness-chocolate flavored)

I think this is an excellent new hobby for Dave and I, but since he left today I don’t think I’ll eat icecream again for a few weeks. That was a lot of icecream.

Tags:   dave · ice cream1 Comment

This is the most brilliant thing nasa has come up with in a long time:

http://spaceyourface.nasa.gov/

Go Ruth go!

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