Fsssssss

I discovered this morning one great thing about sleeping on an inflatable air mattress. All I have to do to get myself to stay up when I wake up is to pull open the valve.

Now if only there were an alarm clock to do this...

Apricots

I picked one off of the tree in the yard here. It was tasty, but then an earwig fell out of it.

Diffusion

Starting a month ago or so, I started writing up some notes on diffusion (specifically, its application in simplified form to the qualifying exam). The idea was that if I didn't pass, I would have a handy reference to help with re-learning diffusion. Anyway, I did pass, but I decided to finish it somewhat and make it available. It's meant for someone already familiar with reactor physics and diffusion, but it emphasizes some points that aren't that common, and it presents a good simplified summary of the one-speed homogeneous method. The content is all correct to the best of my knowledge, but caveat emptor.

1E-9

For the past year and a half—maybe a bit more—my iPod Photo hadn't been quite working correctly. It would, on occasion, lock up in the middle of a song and restart with a frowny face icon. I discovered that when I put my ear up to it as this happened, I could hear a "click-peeew. click-peeew.click-peeew." sort of noise. And then I found that slapping it horizontally against my hand would cause it spin up properly and keep working.

During this time, it's been working for the most part, but freezing up more often (requiring sharper and even more frequent slaps in the past month or two). Finally, about a week ago, I slapped it and heard the terrible sound of the read/write head gouging the disk itself. And it didn't work again.

So I bought an iPod nano. Every time I look at it, I'm awed by how far miniaturization has come. Seven years ago, when the first iPod came out, I was amazed that they could fit 5 gigabytes of music into something the size of a deck of cards. And now I'm holding in my hand a device that's an tenth of the size, has a bigger video-playing screen, and lasts more than twice as long on a charge. It's just so tiny!

Modern research technology

My class was assigned a sort of literature review project for our nuclear fuels class. I'd been to a presentation by Argonne on fast reactors, and one of the things they mentioned was how metallic fuels would probably be superior to metal oxide fuels in a sodium-cooled reactor.

So my partner and I chose metallic fuels for our topic. Well, basically, thanks to the amazing technology that's only shown up in recent years in available consumer technology, my life and ability to communicate information was fantastically simplified.

The first step was to use Google Scholar to find some good references. So I searched for "metallic fuel" fast reactor and found a few to start with. There's an option in the preferences to show a link to import the bibliography information into BibTeX format (like so). With Michigan's library subscriptions I was able to follow the link to ScienceDirect and other sites and actually download a digital copy of the article as a PDF. [Brief aside: I just realized that PDF format is one of those redundant acronyms.] So with the copied BibTeX information, I opened up BibDesk, created a new entry that now has all of the bibliography data, and dragged in the PDF. From this, I can automatically generate a bibliography in the report and citations and so forth (which, with LaTeX using BibTeX, is a piece of cake).

In short, I was able to easily find a lot of useful references, organize them, and use them. But one of the coolest things actually made itself useful during our presentation. Someone asked a question about iodine and technetium radiotoxicity, and how fast reactors transmuted those to less harmful elements. I couldn't recall anywhere in the papers offhand, but I opened up BibDesk, entered "iodine" in the search file content field, and double-clicked on the paper that showed up. It opened the publication in Preview, and inside that it had automatically highlighted eveywhere that "iodine" appeared in the document. Then I dragged the window over to the projector screen to show the relevent plot and text. So in about 10 seconds I was able to find exactly what information he needed. Pretty sweet! And to think that 25 years ago graduate students were lucky if they didn't have to use a typewrite to write their thesis.

Typography issues

A pet peeve of mine is when a zero and the letter "O" are unintentionally interchanged in text (usually noticeable by the width and eccentricity of the glyph). The most common transgression is for people to write "H20," presumably because having a numeral nearby makes people's brains translate the "oh" sound ("O" for "Oxygen") into the number that is often read as "oh." Of course, I've seen in signs and other text where the converse has taken place.

I grant that I'm occasionally guilty of mistakenly hitting the wrong key (since "0" and "O" are adjacent on the keyboard), but I usually notice and correct it immediately...

Not very nice

I got a letter in the mail from a company I had never heard of that began,

Dear Seth Johnson,

“Congratulations, this letter constitutes our formal offer to you for a position with our company, Proto-Power Corporation.”

Yes, this could be the opening line of your offer letter after you interview and are accepted for a position with Proto-Power Corporation.

So apparently using quotation marks gives a person the license to say whatever they want, as long as he states after the fact that it was a hypothetical situation.

"Go away and never talk to me again! Also, I killed your puppy."

Yes, that could be a blog post here if I hated you, and if I killed your puppy.

Happy Aprilday

I definitely had fun with this combined with a Perl script that continually cycled it producing flashing error messages (ERROR: I am lonely, give me paper, and love) etc.

MCNP

To save me the tedium of copying and pasting energy-dependent tally data in MCNP, I wrote up a couple of Perl scripts to do practically all of the work for me. Anyone who wants to visualize data like that from MCNP output should hopefully find these scripts useful.

Evolution personified

It strikes me as ironic when people personify evolution as some sort of designer. I was reading an article in SIAM News describing the complexity and mathematical modeling of finger movements, when I stumbled across this:

But nature, for no obvious reason, took a different route. Opting to locate the muscles in the palm and forearm, at a distance from the fingers themselves, evolution tinkered its way to a quasi-two-dimensional system of interconnected tendons, more like fishing net than fishing line. This decidedly nonlinear and complex solution, anathema to "reasonable" engineering design, has paid off handsomely.

In the 19th century or even early 20th century, I could easily imagine a scientific article marveling about the incredible design of the human body in the context of a divine Creator. But to use that kind of language when talking about random processes and natural selection seems kind of silly.