BUS STOP

Bus Stop (bar). March 2006.

Our investigations of this hipster paradise are proceeding swimmingly. I find myself curiously enamored by some little bar called BUS STOP that is located at a bus stop and offers pints for $2.50. Tomorrow: Olympic National Park?

adventures

Looking at the map, the potential adventure to be had is just obscene. Olympic National Park! Rainforests! Hot Springs! Mt. Rainer! Mt. St. Helens! (Volcanoes!) The Cascades! The Pacific Ocean! Archipelagos! Jesus! (That is an exclamation! He is not actually here!) I wish I had a month, a tent (or a vanagon!), and, (no offense to dear old Stefanos), the girl! (Maybe in May!)

I'm thinking of looping up on 101 around Olympic NP, maybe staying in a hostel in either Forks or Aberdeen rather than trying to make it all the way down to Portland or Eugene quite yet.

mobile gravitational wave research team

Tobin and Stefanos working at a cafe. U District, Seattle. March 13, 2006.

Shockingly, I did manage to get a lot of work done yesterday, all at Trabant. Finished my grading for physics 402, put the finishing touches on some problem set solutions for that class, and implemented what we call the "diurnal" analysis of the high-frequency LIGO data.

LIGO is pretty much a big (8 kilometer!) antenna that's listening for gravitational waves rather than electromagnetic waves (the usual light, radio, microwave, etc). Like most antennas, it's more sensitive to waves coming from certain directions than for others—the plot of sensitivity versus direction is called its antenna pattern. This means that the same source of gravitational waves will appear "brighter" or "louder" at certain points in the sky than in others. The trick is that the earth is rotating, while any gravitational wave sources will be really far away and thus at "fixed" locations on the sky, like the stars. If there's a bright source of gravitational waves out there, we should see the signal here increase and decrease as the antenna pattern sweeps out the sky.

Another twist is that we would hope to see this modulation with a frequency that's a multiple of a sidereal day rather than a solar one; the latter would indicate something wrong locally at the instrument, as the sun shouldn't be a source of gravitational waves.

However, I did not find anything.

Port Angeles

Thor Town Hostel, Port Angeles, WA. March 15, 2006.

I am tired at the end of a long day, mostly a long day of driving. Spectacular driving, though! We grabbed a rental car just a block from squarkz's house, grabbed some piroshky for breakfast, and then hit the ferry out into Puget Sound. My god! The scenery here is incredible. It's like Stockholm or something. We drove and drove up around Olympic National Park and are now perched just to the north of it in a little town called Port Angeles, in an eccentric little hostel called Thor Town.

Thor Town is a little red house that looks like a barn. A couple lives here in one of the rooms with their four year old daughter. The next bedroom is a rented out as a private room and the other one is the bunk room with five bunks. Carl (the dad) and Pluma (the daughter) made a chocolate cake earlier, for her birthday. Stefanos and I cooked ourselves some mushrooms and pasta and broccoli for dinner. We're drinking Washington white wine. Right now Stefanos is explaining wave-particle duality to our enigmatic roommate.

I think it is worth visiting Seattle even only for the Piroshky. Piroshky on Broadway, specifically.

I just got a phone message from four... very garbled, but it seems to say that he's on a freight train somewhere in Virginia!!

I am looking forward to doing some hiking tomorrow in the Olympic National Park. Hot springs! Rainforest! Then I think we may high-tail it to Portland, a drive of at least six hours. Will probably arrive there quite late. I'm looking forward to seeing Jeff B from Wilde who is in law school there and with whom we will be staying.

I spent the drive here fantasizing about doing pretty much the same trip, but hitchhiking. It would be so grand. Being in such amazing territory reminds me how wide and amazing the world is. There are so many places to explore! We could spend weeks backpacking and hitchhiking through Washington state. We could thumb it up to British Columbia, down all the way through California, through Baja again, down through the heart of Mexico, over weeks or a month or a year. Spend time in one place, spend time moving. I wish the girl were here, we didn't have any time constraints, we didn't have a car. Travel is a psychologically strange thing. It's best when you can look inward and go tumbling along.