Mitt liv som Tobin

Working again. Stringing cables from the test-beam to the control room, lifting up the big floor panels with a big suction-cup apparatus and pushing through our 6 conductors x 80 meters cable bundle, cable-tying everything into place. Gloves and ladders and climbing over the test beam equipment. On August One we get beam again.

Testing the cables with an o-scope and a pulse generator. Make a nice fast square wave, send it flying down the cable. Seven hundred seventy nanoseconds later, it comes flying back, an echo, the pulse having bounced off the unterminated cable end. Short out the cable end and the pulse still comes back, but inverted this time. Plug on a fifty ohm terminator and no pulse comes back. It's just like index of refraction but with electrical impedance; it's sonar on a wire, like waves on a rope.

Party at Pavel's house in Thoiry. ``Guest of Honor'' brings a magnificent load of pizzas, wine.. there's cheese and salad, and Liz and I bring Chocolate, Mint, and, yes, Pear ice creams, and that addictive peach iced tea. Dinner on the patio with the hot Genevan summer air -- the same air that blew over Voltaire, Shelley, Ada, Eliot... -- the hot Geneva air billowing up huge anvil clouds and the evening fades warmly into twilight.

Hiking up from Pavel's house into the Juras, heavy raindrops begin to fall through the warm air. Soon we're treated to the most spectacular lightning show this side of who-knows-where, an entire field of view full of forked cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground arcs of brilliance, us sitting in the grass in a big open field on a mountain (with full discussion of the physiology of human/lightning interaction). When the rain becomes too much (and the lightning gets too close), we walk back to Pavel's; Liz and I drive up to the abandoned restaurant, to Tiocan, to gaze out over the lightning-bathed Geneve.

Tomorrow: Excursion to Point Five, and maybe the grocery store.