night shift at the berkeley beam (nuclear physics on the hill)

I think I'm going to change my career ambition to ``hang out at LBL and work on random experiments.'' Here's the plan: I'll just start lurking about in various experiments, helping out where I can, until I'm just a fixture in the lab and everybody will just assume I belong there. Hehe. Tonight I went up the Hill with Michelle, to the 88 inch cyclotron where her group was doing an experiment. It was wonderful: control room, radioactivity, lab coats, fume hoods, geiger counters, gamma ray spectrometers, isotopes... and a neat little experiment. I took a few pictures that I'll post when I'm not about to fall asleep on my keyboard. (But just think, they're still up there, irradiating copper foil with 8 MeV helium nucleii...)