soapbox

So, I figured I’d make another one of those “wasting time while waiting for something that’s slow” sort of posts. As it is, I’m currently in the process of topping off the dilution fridge with liquid helium so that it can run happily overnight and be rocking at its awesome new base temperature of 9.6 mK when Feng and I arrive tomorrow morning to start taking some measurements.

Anyways, transferring liquid helium is one of those processes that rewards the patient among us, since the optimum rate is a lot slower than you might think. Of course, there are other problems with ineffecient transfer if you go too slowly, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to go too fast than it is to go too slowly, assuming you’re doing everything else correctly. Tonight, for instance, I struggled a bit to get the transfer started (if the fittings on the receiver port on the fridge are not set just so, inserting the transfer tube isn’t so easy), so I lost some of the initial pressure that builds up in the liquid helium storage dewar when you initially lower the room temperature transfer tube into it. So, I hooked up the helium gas line we use to provide pressure after the initial overpressure in the dewar fades away a little earlier than I should have, resulting in a more rapid transfer rate that I probably should have used for the first few minutes.

Oh well; I’m still one of the less experienced guys when it comes to transferring helium and running the fridge, so I reckon I’m allowed a little wasted helium here and there to learn the ropes. At least I succeeded in the following three tasks:

1) Add more liquid helium to the main bath of the fridge

2) Complete Step 1 without damaging the dilution fridge or the instruments right beside it and without getting a big plug of air frozen inside the helium dewar, thus turning it into a spectacularly expensive and effective bomb.

3) Complete Steps 1 & 2 without significant injury to myself.

Let’s all take a moment to note where personal safety falls on this list.

this is some serious quality. good times.

8:58 — All right, is there a dumber sports rule than “If your knee hits the ground, the play is over … even if if you weren’t touched” in college football? That’s right up there with “You can’t just intentionally walk someone, you have to throw four balls,” “You don’t get an extra foul for overtime,” “You can call a timeout while you’re in midair” and “You aren’t allowed to punch A-Rod in the face during a game” in the pantheon of Dumb Rules That Only Make Sports Less Fun.

to celebrate having (maybe) been smart and figured stuff out, here’s my quality post of the day… random web-cam spying! This isn’t terribly hard to do since many aren’t secure/password protected, but it’s further helped by the fact that Axis netcams changed the standard /cgi-bin/ path to /axis-cgi/, meaning that you can search for Axis webcams from Google.

A couple favorites: the Marshall University legocam,
or an unknown but interesting ski-cam,
or the really boring iSeek server cam,
University of Norway-Svalbard cam “Forskningspark”,
thanks to Wired and j0hnny ihackstuff for help getting this to work.

Percy, Mira and I are all very fortunate to be alive and have all our parts intact. I hadn’t expected snow until later today (Thursday), so imagine my surprise when I noticed flakes in CT. Imagine my horror as the road began turning white in MA. Imagine the sheer terror as a fucking truck — a tanker, no less, probably carrying something flammable — ran me off the road in low visibility in VT. I was steering, at the time, by the grooves in the shoulder of the road. How he could see where the fuck he was going, I have no idea. So as he was passing at a speed that was definitely not safe for the conditions, I crossed the groove. I tried to bring it back, but I couldn’t. The front tire went off the road, and that was all she wrote. Car spun from side to side. No 360, just a 90, 180, and another 90 perhaps. Either I’m even more lucky than I thought, or I can actually instinctly steer out of a spin. It’s my second spin in as many weeks, the first being far less perilous. Both I eventually corrected, with no damage done, except to my already-overwrought nerves. I straightened out with about 10 yards to go before I would have slide, passenger-side first, right into the beginning of a guard rail. And not those nice guard rails that start from the ground and slope up. Nope, it would’ve been a hell of an impact, and probably would have seriously injured, if not killed, my poor Mira, who was in the front seat, with the seat belt hooked through her car harness. And the bitch of it is, I can’t report the son of a bitch who caused it.

they suck.

well, actually, I suck, otherwise I wouldn’t whine about them. I think I’ve figured at least some of it out, but still not quite sure about how to attack the rest of the problem. now that I’ve figured out the “rectangle function” - looks like a product symbol, functions as a fat delta function, we’ll see…

anyway, good luck to Nathaniel and Tim and anybody else working, and see y’all tomorrow.