| on keeping a notebook (heat-moon) |
[Dec. 25th, 2018|04:56 pm] |
"Remember what you have seen, because everything forgotten returns to the circling winds."
Navajo Wind Chant/quoted by Wm. Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways, at the end. |
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| Posted using TxtLJ |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|09:08 pm] |
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Fantastic lightning storm! |
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| success! |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|04:30 am] |
[photo to be inserted at a later time]
We took July 4 off, but otherwise this holiday weekend's been a long haul to fix the detector. After many hours in bunny suits climbing around in large vacuum equipment, we did it tonight! Possibly. Most likely. Signs point to yes.
In a few hours the operations staff will bolt the huge door back onto the vacuum enclosure and we'll begin pumping the air out again. In a day or two the vacuum should be good enough such that we can open the huge valves that expose the "vertex" area to the 4 kilometer arm tubes. Then we'll fire things up and check out the noise.
On another note, LIGO got a nice shout-out on the Cosmic Variance blog today.
We went out to Louie's (Baton Rouge's independent 24-hour diner) to celebrate but inexplicably they were CLOSED! So we settled for IHOP. |
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| dead in the water |
[Jul. 2nd, 2009|09:52 pm] |
We have so far failed in our efforts to fix the detector. The patient has refused all transplants; something is wrong with our procedure. Electrostatic damage? Microscopic bits of metal from the can-opening procedure? Some kind of strange damage in shipping? We've used up all our spare photodiodes. The Project's last two spares are being overnighted from Caltech. |
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| do not stare into laser with remaining eye |
[Jun. 30th, 2009|10:37 pm] |
Big day at work tomorrow.
On friday we blew up a photodiode, the very sensitive component of our gravitational wave detector that senses the intensity of the laser light. This particular photodiode is hard to reach and is inside the vacuum enclosure.
Coming from each arm of the LIGO interferometer there's about 200 watts of laser power. While operating, the detector keeps these two beams very close to being perfectly out of phase, so that they cancel out, leaving only ~0.1 W for the photodiodes. But when there's an earthquake or something we lose control of the instrument and the the high power beams "spill" for an instant. We have a system that's supposed to shutter the photodiodes within 2 milliseconds of this happening, but it didn't work this time. So the photodiode got burned.
Fixing this is kind of an Apollo-13 style operation. The folks in Pasadena and Hanford have overnighted us replacement parts (Okay, so I guess it's not like Apollo 13), and even made a video showing how to disassemble a particular component.
We'll fill the vacuum enclosure with clean air and open it up, then dress up in bunny suits and very carefully try to fix it.
If you were a real nerd (a real nerd with too much time on your hands), you'd already know this from reading the elog (username:reader/password:readonly).
In other LIGO news, we just got an email from an editor at Nature saying:We are delighted to accept your manuscript "An Upper Limit on the Amplitude of Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background of Cosmological Origin" in Nature. Thank you for choosing to publish your interesting work with us. I'm pretty sure I had almost nothing to do with this, but, still, it has my name on it! Along with the names of ~4×102 other people. |
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| whereas i work on a space station, |
[Jun. 30th, 2009|02:31 am] |
My housemate Emily works for the AFL-CIO campaigning for the Employee Free Choice Act. For her job she travels all over southern Louisiana and meets all kinds of colorful individuals. Last week she visited Deacon John Moore, president of the local musicians' union and took this short video:
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| hot |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|02:53 am] |
Louisiana summer ... "feels like 108°F" ... the condensation beads up and drips off our cold beers. Afternoon at at the LIGO lab picnic at White Oak Plantation. Sweating, sweating. Feet in flip flops, feet on the grass.
In the early afternoon we got a table, a table and chairs, the table transported on top of my VW Golf, ridiculously but successfully. Dining room table, evidence of civility. The oak did not buckle on its trip through the Humidity. Walking is like swimming.
Sitting on the back stoop ... 9 pm ... "feels like 100°F". I'm drinking rum and coke. Emily's smoking a cigarette. The neighbor's sprinkler is faithfully watering the asphalt. Lightning in the distance. Ten minutes of rain, raindrops the size of grapes. Raindrops the size of grapes and the neighbor's sprinkler continues to water the asphalt. Emily's smoking a cigarette. The rain subsides. I'm drinking a rum and coke. The asphalt steams. Louisiana summer. |
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| send more cold beer |
[Jun. 22nd, 2009|10:30 pm] |
Every day the local TV station text-messages me the weather report (a neat service I signed up for a year ago during the hurricane when text messaging was the only communication that worked).
It's been creeping up a degree or two every couple days.
Today: Mostly sunny, hot, humid. High 97. Heat index: 105-110. Tonight: Clear, very warm. Low 76.
Locally, air-conditioning failure is considered an emergency.
On my first trip to Carolina, I was told, "Nothing so much changed the South than integration and air conditioning." |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 21st, 2009|07:13 pm] |
Sailors (actual and armchair) should read ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) yatpi |
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