Andy’s Los Alamos Blog

Well, I’ve made it home (don’t worry, it didn’t take me a week), and after a frenzy of packing and whatnot, I’m heading back to Lehigh tomorrow afternoon. Who takes breaks, anyway?
I was hoping to write a nice post summarizing my experience in New Mexico, but there really aren’t words to do it justice. The [...]

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Sorry again; I sort of disappeared there. Between working, packing, and generally tying up loose ends, life has been pretty hectic lately. It looks like I’ll be able to keep working on the dark matter detection project once I go back to Lehigh, running simulations and doing analysis work and whatnot, and I’m pretty excited [...]

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Sorry about the recent lack of posts. The student symposium was yesterday(ish), Thursday, and I’ve been pretty busy lately with that. As I said, I presented a talk there, “Simulation and Characterization of a Dark Matter Detector,” and it seems to have been pretty well-received. I’m looking forward to presenting it elsewhere (i.e. Lehigh), just [...]

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So, I spent most of today down in the lab at work, waiting for my new resistor victim to fail, and it never did! It seems my modifications to the setup have worked, and I’m now figuring out how we’re really going to control the temperature accurately using resistive heating. Well, at least the concept [...]

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So, since my last post I’ve gotten a bit of work done. My Los Alamos Summer School paper is almost done, and my speech for the Student Symposium is coming along. I practiced it today and it was over a half hour… too bad about that fifteen minute time limit. Well, I have until Thursday [...]

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The titles are almost completely meaningless, it just looks bad without them.
Another interesting day. I got up early and biked around town hoping to avoid the afternoon storms brought daily by the “monsoon season,” enjoyed a nice little ride, then spent a whopping 63 minutes on Los Alamos’ public transportation getting to work. I mean, [...]

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Another exciting day at the lab, as always. I can’t believe that I’m only here for about another 2.5 weeks. Tempus fugit indeed.
Today, I finished up my symposium presentation, worked a little on testing our power meters, and received the part I was waiting for for the angular PMT testing. So, I should be getting [...]

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Sorry about the long delay. It turned out to be a pretty busy weekend, and quite active. Saturday we went climbing at Las Conchas, just outside of the Lab past Pajarito Ski Area, and got some great climbing in. Flickr! pictures forthcoming.
Sunday, we tried to go to Fenton Lake, about an hour from Los Alamos, [...]

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At last, someone has asked a question! Chs asks about the geology of rock climbing: do I ever think back to my Earth Science classes? How does rock formation factor into climbing?
Indeed I do think about geology. I actually took, in addition to my high school classes, and introductory earth and environmental science class my [...]

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Friday at work was pretty fun. I’m getting to the bottom of the resistor-destruction case; I hadn’t thought of it before, but when resistors get hot (which is what we want), they dissipate most of their heat by heating up the air around them. When there isn’t any air (it’s in a really strong vacuum), [...]

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