Entries tagged with lbl

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notes from the land of eternal hot tubbing

J: "Did you know that you have a beer in the fridge?"
T: "I do?"
J: "Yes. If I bring it to you, will you drink it?"

The way Not Without Your Daughter plays here, it's like we're all in the middle of one big happy music video. Balloons and streamers remain from Rebekah's party. Justin, Eric, Alethe, Gina, Jeff, Miguel.. they're just as cute as could be, and then in the background Josh and his brother are playing Risk, and our dear most-effortless-riotgirl Cortney is back!

Yesterday Alex was in town for-one-day-only, between Flordia and San Jose. I listened to his show on the radio and it was good stuff, and then we had West Coast Pizza.

Shannon's in town for the holidays. It was fun seeing her again and reminiscing about all our various adventures over the summer and comiserating over the trials of graduate school applications. She has some pretty fantastic photos from the summer, too. I gave her the usual eco-nerd tour of the house: "and we sort our trash N ways, and all our food comes from the Berkeley Farmers Market"; anyone who apprecaites that stuff is okay in my book. We hot-tubbed long into the night.

I applied for a Post Office Box at Sather Gate Station today. Yes, you have to "apply," and then a week later they tell you if the powers that be deam you worthy of the responsibility of looking over a 3.5"x5" cubbyhole on Durant Avenue for the next six months. In what seems like an obvious potential Catch-22, you're required to have a valid local mailing address in order to get a post office box. Go figure.

At work today we had a lab meeting where everyone reported on their various projects, and where we were briefed about how to fool the impending invasion of OSHA inspectors into believing that LBL is a safe place to work. There's an undergrad in the lab doing some really cool stuff, and everyone was pretty excited about sending him off to a 'meeting' to show off the work. I was kind of envious... but I guess I am the one being paid, even if my current project is incredibly dull. Yeah, I suppose it's probably a little too early to feel so much disdane for those upstart undergrads. (-:

Walking to the meeting with Ken, we passed some piece of photographic equipment very much resembling an enlarger, lying discarded in the hallway, marked "for salvage." Ken: "For salvage? I've lusted after one of these for years!"

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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...)

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could be fiction (or, boy meets girl, loses book)

I'm losing my mind. I just walked down to the Bioscience library to photocopy a paper from a journal and to check out a book I had on hold, and by the time I got back to Donner I had managed to lose both the copycard and the book I checked out. How does this happen? The book is still totally MIA after diligent search, and someone absconded with the copy card... I'm glad that Reality maintains State for itself, because if it were up to me, we'd live in a pretty weird place. Like when I find myself suddenly downstairs in the kitchen with no idea why I'm there, but then the empty mug in my hand clues me in that I probably intended to make some more tea. It's just like that line from Memento: ``I don't feel drunk...'' The amazon.com price for the book I lost is $2,100.95. I kid you not.

( Read more... )

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dinner seating at the mandelbrot home

home again (yet still quasi-homeless) in berkeley, after a splendid 1200 mile roadtrip with nadia up to the boreal regions of our state (hi

bom!) followed by visit to the heathen inhabitants of the terra incognita that lies beyond.. now back at lbl hacking out final revisions on our paper.. cooked up some coffee... room temperature is actually tolerable... hopefully the brethren and sisters of the ancient order of meter maids will ignore my illegally parked vehicle for a few more hours. manuscript to follow...

oh, i nearly forgot.. the subject line of this post is the caption that someone added to my drawing of a square Koch snowflake on the whiteboard here.. wanna know something freakish? you can tile the plane with two sizes of Koch snowflakes.

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LBL!

In a senseless bout of fortune, it looks like I am now (or soon to become, once the various papers are signed, oaths sworne, etc.) a "Computer Scientist (Trainee)" at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Cool title, excellent compensation... excellent.

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lbl,
science

(no subject)

I ventured up to LBL today in search of a job, and I think I was pretty successful. Then Aviva, Haley, and I enjoyed a yummy dinner at Long Life Chinese, and I discovered that I might be able to take one of my courses at Vista Community College. Now I am sitting on the floor in my new room, writing this on my computer while Jamie sleeps nearby. For some reason Jason is sleeping downstairs.

They've tightened up security at LBL a bit. I didn't show my ID as I got on the bus and the driver started yelling at me. Gosh. Luckily I still have my badge from when I worked there (as a "Guest") before. After I successfully got on the bus I immediately recognized Willy from the lab where I worked, and we had a nice chat. He seemed pretty optimistic about finding work for me. I visited CPerkins in his lab and chatted for awhile with Athena and Vanessa. It was fun to meet Vanessa and she turns out to be extremely cool. In the Smoot lab I had a long catch-up chat with Azriel about the AMANDA Project and Israel and all that, and he introduced me to the new guy who is working there on a very cool sounding astronomy project. Finally Smoot himself showed up, in good spirits as always.

This new astronomy project is quite interesting. I don't fully understand it but the gist is that it will be looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation as a means of detecting galaxies which are very far away, and thus very early in the universe's life. They will do this by measuring the spectra across the sky. "Empty" space will exhibit the characteristic blackbody spectrum of the background radiation (at four kelvins) while if there is something (eg a galaxy) in the way, the spectrum will be attenuated in some way. It's quite a cool project and the guy working on it is quite enthusiastic about it, which is a definite plus. The first incarnation (?) will be sent up on a high-altitude baloon this June, and then a year from now a ground-based instrument will be installed in the mountains of Chile. And then a while later, at the south pole. So it sounds like a fantastic project to work on. I need to send them a resume.

Re: Vista community college. I might be able to take my techncial communications (E190) class through Vista where they have "English 53: Technical Writing." It's a bit of a stretch, but who knows, maybe the COE would go for it. Vista costs $11/unit while UC Berkeley Extension is somewhere around $150/unit. They also have a beginning Spanish class that I might take, as opposed to just auditing the UCB class.