lab legends

A crew of visitors from Hanford, Caltech, and U. Florida is here to work on upgrading certain components of our laser interferometer gravitational wave detector. In the evening we went out to dinner at Albasha's, a pretty good Greek/Lebanese restaurant. One of the topics of conversation was of visitors' accomodations when visiting the Observatory.

Our visitors all stay in hotels and drive to the site in rental cars.

But Rick regaled us with the description of an alternative scheme for hosting visitors, the way things are done at another Caltech-run astronomical observatory. Apparently the Owen's Valley Radio Observatory is outfitted with a small dorm featuring simple rooms—bed, dresser, etc—and a big and wonderful communal kitchen, and, apparently, living room with fireplace and movie-viewing capacities. Not only that, I'm told that OVRO has a cook who comes to the lab every day to fix lunch and to make brown-bag dinners for staff working late into the night.

Now that's the way a lab should be!

The idea of retiring to an on-site communal living room with fireplace (hot chocolate in hand) situated amongst the remarkably beautiful eastern Sierra Nevada after a long day of fiddling with radio telescopes sounds pretty great.

katworthy, how is it really?

relics