May 27, 2009 at 1:01 pm (Daily Weigh-In, Diet, Life as a grad student)
Tags: Diet, Slice of life, Weigh-In
Weight: 288.6 lbs.
Body Fat Percentage: 35.6%
Well the long stay at my parents sent my weight up, bleh, that’s what I get for deciding that I would have a two week break from the diet. It’s the first time that a weight increase has taken me into the red on physics diet. Even worse, proof that it is real, the body fat percentage went up commensurately.
Anyways as you might have guessed I went to my parents house to visit for a couple weeks. I helped out around the house and did a few things for them that they needed help for.
It was disturbing how easily I fell back into old habits of eating so much. I am quite disappointed with myself. Well here is hoping that this summer adding in exercise will accelerate the weight loss enough to make up for what I gained in the last two weeks.
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May 10, 2009 at 4:45 pm (Advanced Laboratory, Life as a grad student, Movie, Physics)
Tags: Diet, Food Diary, Movie, Physics, Slice of life, Star Trek, Weigh-In
I return! Somewhat alive. I haven’t been posting lately because finals have been dragging me down. I took what is (in grad school at least) a really heavy load and I got bitten hard by that last week. I had so much to do. I had to grade papers for the advanced lab, I had to get two general relativity homework assignments done, I had to get a general relativity final done, and I had to get the statistical thermodynamics final done. That last one was especially rough, I spent almost 30 hours on it. YUCK.
Anyways rather than trying to post a bunch of back dated articles, I will simply summarize the results here.
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April 23, 2009 at 11:50 pm (Exercise, Life as a grad student)
Tags: Exercise, Slice of life
So there is a Relay for Life tomorrow night into Saturday morning on the Notre Dame campus. The walking starts at 6pm Friday and goes until 8am Saturday.
This is where the insanity begins. I am hoping to walk the whole night. I am bringing a cooler with bowls of fruit (from the Meijer fruit frenzy bowls that I like so much), maybe some carrots and dip, diet red bull, and ice. I will step off the track grab something out of the cooler, and step back onto the track and eat / drink on the fly. I think I’ll also put some ibuprofen in there or something to use should something start aching.
Wish me luck! Or even better go to my relay for life page and click donate. Thank you muchly!
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April 22, 2009 at 8:42 pm (Advanced Laboratory, Exercise, Life as a grad student, Physics)
Tags: Advanced Lab, Exercise, Physics
So as it says at the top of my blog I am a graduate student in physics. To earn my keep until I can become a research assistant I am a teaching assistant. In my case I am the TA for the graduate lab. This is a lab that almost all first year grad students must take. It gives them experience with experimental methods and paper writing. Additionally, I figure it makes the theorists have a little more respect for us grubby experimentalists.
We use a lot of radioactive sources in the lab, the are useful for any number of experiments both those involving nuclear physics and those on things like atomic physics, condensed matter physics and basic quantum mechanical things like the statistics of spin. Anyways, we have an experiment called ACAR, short for Angular Correlation of Annihilation Radiation, I won’t get into what the experiment is about beyond this: It uses a Na-22 source which is a positron emitter. Yes I said positron. The proton rich nucleus emits anti-electrons to get rid of some of its excess positive charge. Anyways this source is quite hot. We have it shielded so that the radiation dose rates are quite low (almost lower than the increased cosmic ray dose rate that you receive in an airplane trip). But nonetheless it is quite hot.
This source is hot enough that 30 feet away we can pick up the characteristic gamma rays of the source, despite the shielding. This made us decided that the source needed yet more shielding. As it is the dose rate to students and people working on it is fairly low but the fact that we can pick it up means that it might interfere with other experiments.
“What does all this have to do with moving heavy things?” you may be asking. There is one material that physicists favor for building gamma radiation shields, lead bricks (or sometimes solid chunks of lead if need be). Unfortunately the lead bricks are stored in the Nuclear Science Lab in Neiuland Science Hall, we needed them in Jordan Hall of Science. Even worse, the bricks are stored in the room that holds the Read the rest of this entry »
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April 16, 2009 at 12:16 am (Life as a grad student, Unexpected)
Tags: Friends, Thank_you
So as I mentioned in the circuses and monkeys post I am a bit harried these days, it feels like for every thing I check off my list one or two come in to replace it. That made what happened today out of the ordinary.
My adviser Dr. Garg had an old student (Dr. Somsundar Mukhopadhyay) of his in town for a few days and wanted a couple of us to sit with him and learn a few things. This was not really at the top of my list of priories but I thought, that since Dr. Garg wanted it to be so and because Som was a friend of mine last year before he had completed his thesis defense, that I should to it. Som and I wound up spending basically all day working on several things, adapting code from an ancient Solaris machine to a Linux machine (really horrible code too more on that in another post… maybe). Also finding a number of bugs in that code that were really stupid. Still being in the presence of a friend, working on something interesting, laughing and talking, lightened my mood considerably, despite the coming crap-storm.
Then later Darshana, the friend for whom I was covering the auto-fill system, came by and presented me with a hand made cloth bound diary / sketchbook. The cloth has some nice designs and on the front cover is an engraved plate thing with Ganesha. I liked it then and now that I have read about Ganesha and what he represents in the Hindu pantheon I like it even more. Turns out that Ganesha is the remover of obstacles, Lord of Beginnings and Lord of Obstacles, patron of arts and sciences, and the Deva of intellect and wisdom. I can get behind that.
Darshana, I am 99% certain that you do not read this blog, but nevertheless, thank you very much, this means a lot to me.
It was odd, but today was one of the best days I have had in recent memory. Thanks to all who contributed to it.
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April 14, 2009 at 8:49 pm (Life as a grad student)
Tags: classes, Overwhelmed, Physics
To day has be the sort of day that reminds of this quote:
“Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town. “
-George Carlin
I think of this quote because I have managed to scrape several monkeys off my back today, and in their place, fresh from the circus cages, others climbed on.
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April 13, 2009 at 9:36 pm (Life as a grad student, Nuclear Science Laboratory, Physics)
Tags: NSL, Physics
We use many types of detectors in nuclear physics, each can do different things well and each has its own downsides. Take the germanium detector a type of detector for gamma rays that has excellent resolution in the energy spectrum (it makes very sharp peaks).
In the old days these came in a form called Ge(Li) (pronounced jelly) detector. These detectors were solid crystals of germanium (a semi conductor like silicon) with lithium atoms dispersed through the crystal. I won’t get into why the lithium was there except to say that it compensated for other impurities in the crystal. These detectors ABSOLUTELY must be kept cold (liquid nitrogen cold in fact (77 K, -196.15 C, -321.07 F)), if they are not kept cold then the lithium could move out of position and destroy the crystals usefulness as a high resolution detector of gamma rays.
In modern times we have developed a much less finicky form of germanium detector called HP-Ge of High Purity Germanium, rather than have lithium atoms scattered throughout the crystal to compensate for the other impurities they simply make the crystal so it has no impurities. Unlike Ge(Li) detectors, HP-Ge detectors can be allowed to come to room temperature when they are not being operated; however, they must be cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures while they operate (if you really want to know why, ask in the comments) and cycling them down to LN2 temperatures and then back to room temperature repeatedly is not great for them.
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